Location: Ash St. at John St., Goldsboro
County: Wayne
Original Date Cast: 2021
Ruth Whitehead was born in Goldsboro in 1901. Her parents, Charles and Dora Whitehead were both schoolteachers. Ruth graduated from high school in Goldsboro and then from Livingstone College in Salisbury. Today Livingstone considers her one of their 15 most notable graduates. Ruth married Herman Whaley in 1920. Herman encouraged his wife to enroll in law school at Fordham University, the first African American woman to do so.
In 1925 Whaley passed the bar exam and became the third African American woman to practice law in New York. (Clay Smith Jr. in Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944 puts 2 other women before Whaley—Fordham makes the further distinction that Whaley was the first to actively engage in the practice of law in NY.) In 1933 Whaley returned to Goldsboro where, with the help of family friend and local attorney Hugh Dortch, she was granted a license to practice law in North Carolina, thus making her the first African American woman licensed in the state.
Whaley went on to a distinguished career in private practice in New York. She was an expert in civil service law and won several landmark cases in this area. Whaley’s work often required her to argue cases before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She regularly represented local African American government employees, including in one case, her husband. Whaley maintained her private practice in New York until 1944 when she began to get involved in politics.
In 1945, Whaley ran for a New York City Council seat as one of the first black women ever nominated by a major political party in the United States. In 1949, she wrote an essay titled “Women Lawyers Must Balk Both Color and Sex Bias,” in which she described the disadvantage that women lawyers—and particularly minority women—had in that they must outperform their male colleagues lest “the overlooked errors of a male colleague become the colossal blunders of the woman.” In the essay, Whaley also expressed concern about the continued lack of black female lawyers in the country, noting that in 1920 there were only four and that 29 years later there were fewer than 150.
From 1951 to 1973, Whaley served as secretary of the New York City Board of Estimate, assisting in municipal policy, including city budget, land-use, contracts, franchises, and water rates.
Ruth Whitehead Whaley died December 23, 1977, and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Yonkers, New York.
Sources:
Fordham Law School website: https://www.fordham.edu/info/27898/alumni_of_distinction
Clay Smith Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944, 1993; and Rebels in Law: Voices in History of Black Women Lawyers, 2000.
New York Times, Dec. 25, 1977.
Cecily Barker McDaniel, dissertation at The Ohio State University entitled “‘Fearing I Shall Not Do My Duty to My Race If I Remain Silent’: Law and Its Call to African American Women.”