An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 4/2/2021
(Originally slated to post during Women's History Month, ultimately
Anderson's biography appeared after the next entry, Ella Mae Brayboy)
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Today let us meet Violette Neatley Anderson, the first Black woman to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Born in 1882 England, Violette Neatley immigrated to the U.S. along with her parents, settling in Chicago and ultimately graduating from the Chicago Athenaeum and the Chicago Seminar of Sciences. Drawn to the legal profession, she graduated from Chicago Law School in 1920 and passed the bar, licensed in the U.S. Eastern District of Illinois. She later set up a private practice; the first woman --of any race-- to do so in the state of Illinois.
After a number of successful local cases as defense counsel, in 1922 Anderson was appointed to assistant prosecutor in Chicago --once again the first woman, of any race, to be appointed to such a post. Of greater significance just four years later, she was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1920 to 1926, she was also the vice-president of the Cook County Bar Association --again, the first woman to ascend to that position.
Perhaps Anderson's most important historical moment came in 1936 when she advocated for the then-controversial Bankhead-Jones Act, legislation aimed at providing sharecroppers and tenant farmers (many of them Black) with modest credit loans to buy damaged lands for rehabilitation --with an eye towards elevating poor agricultural workers to successful farm owners. The Act was eventually signed into law in 1937 by Franklin D. Roosevelt and was later ruled Constitutional by the Supreme Court. To this day the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management manage some Bankhead-Jones lands.
Anderson lived just long enough to see the Act signed into law, dying in December of 1937. She willed her home to her beloved sorority Zeta Phi Beta, which honors her work every year in the month of April on "Violette Anderson Day."
Next page - Lesson 78: Ella Mae Brayboy