Obamarama Hits D.C. Courthouse
It's Black History Month, and down at the D.C. Superior Court's small-claims branch, photographs of nine notable African-Americans grace the records-room wall:
- Macon B. Allen, first licensed black lawyer (1845)
- Charlotte Ray, first black female lawyer, and first woman admitted to the D.C. Bar (1872)
- Bass Reeves, first black U.S. deputy marshal west of the Mississippi (1875)
- Samuel J. Battle, first black patrolman in New York (1911)
- Charles Hamilton Houston, first black editor on the Harvard Law Review (1922)
- Jane Matilda Bolin, first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School (1931) and receive a judicial appointment (1939)
- William Henry Hastie, first black federal magistrate (1937)
- Thurgood Marshall, first black Supreme Court justice (1967), and...
- Barack Obama, first black president of the Harvard Law Review (1990)
4:36 pm
Wow. This is great.
The DC Superior Court is named after the first black chief judge and not the first actual chief judge which is standard across the country when naming courthouses.
3:46 pm
I have never heard, nor have found any evidence, of a 'standard across the country' of naming courthouses after the first chief judge. In fact, it seems that most often they are named after prominent statesmen and women or local attorneys, such as the newly named Rush Limbaugh Sr courthouse in Missouri.