Sampson, Edith S. 1901–1979

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Edith S. Sampson 1901–1979

Attorney, United Nations delegate, circuit court judge

Noted for Thoughtful, Humanistic Decisions

Edith Sampson’s life was a series of personal and social milestones. The first black women to preside over a courtroom as a judge, Sampson served the state of Illinois—and the entire United States—in a variety of roles spanning five decades.

Sampson believed that actions speak louder than words. She preferred to be optimistic about the strides black Americans had made in the twentieth century rather than bitter about the inequities that remained even after the dawn of the civil rights movement. In 1968 Sampson told the Reader’s Digest that her own experiences as a lawyer, an American spokesperson, and a delegate to the United Nations proved that “the doors have not been opened, but they have been unlocked. If we press against them, they will open.”

Sampson’s death in 1979 went largely unnoticed outside of Chicago, where she had lived and worked since 1922. In the prime years of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, some radicals dismissed her accomplishments, calling her a “handkerchief head” for her remarks praising America. Sampson answered these charges in the Reader’s Digest, declaring that America is “certainly rich enough, and we should be big enough, to see that opportunity is the right of all. More understanding and more opportunity must be offered by one side. The other must realize that equal rights mean equal responsibility.”

Sampson was born Edith Spurlock on October 13, 1901, one of eight children of a cleaning shop employee who earned just $75 per week. Her hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the urban destinations for blacks leaving the South in search of better economic opportunities. Sampson described her family as law-abiding and hardworking. “I suppose we were poor, but we never knew it,” she told the Reader’s Digest. “We wore hand-me-down clothes, and we all worked. To supplement family income, my mother made hat frames. I worked in a fish market. We ate regularly, slept in clean beds, went to church.”

Public education was not compulsory in those times, and young Edith went to work full time while still a mere child. She returned to school, however, and managed to graduate with excellent grades from Pittsburgh’s Peabody High. As a student, Sampson experienced firsthand the slurs and foul treatment associated with racism, but as she advanced in her education, she learned to rise above the remarks.

At a Glance…

Born Edith Spurlock, October 13, 1901, in Pittsburgh, PA; died October 8, 1979, in Chicago, IL; daughter of Louis (a cleaning shop employee) and Elizabeth A. (McGruder) Spurlock; married Rufus Sampson (field agent for Tuskegee Institute; divorced); married Joseph E. Clayton (an attorney), November 5, 1934 (died, 1957). Education: Attended New York School of Social Work; Marshall Law School, B.S., 1925; Loyola University School of Law, LL.M., 1927.

Worked for Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and for Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society while in law school; Juvenile Court of Cook County, IL, 1925-42, began as probation officer, became referee; attorney in private practice in Chicago, IL, 1927-62; World Town Hall of the Air radio show, member speaking on behalf of black Americans at lectures in foreign countries, 1949-50, became panel president; United Nations General Assembly, alternate delegate, 1950 and 1952; Cook County Circuit Court, judge, 1962-78.

Member: Chicago Bar Association, National Bar Association, National Association of Women Lawyers, National Council of Negro Women (former chair of executive committee and committee on international relations), League of Women Voters.

Selected awards: Recipient of several honorary degrees.

A Sunday school teacher brought Edith to the attention of Associated Charities, a social work organization based in New York City. Associated Charities helped cover the cost of sending the young scholar to the New York School of Social Work for advanced study. There she earned her best grades in criminology. Her teacher, George W. Kirchwey of the Columbia University School of Law, encouraged her to give up social work and study to become a lawyer.

She continued her social work, however, and moved to Chicago in the early 1920s. As luck would have it, Dr. Kirchwey had moved to Chicago too, and their paths crossed again. This time he convinced Edith to go to law school. She enrolled in night classes at Marshall Law School and kept her daytime jobs with the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society. While still in school she married Rufus Sampson, a member of the Tuskegee Institute. Although their marriage ended in divorce, she continued to use his name for professional purposes.

Sampson’s life was further complicated during her law school days by the death of her sister, who left two children for her to raise. Nevertheless, she persevered with her studies and became the highest-ranking student among 95 in a course on jurisprudence. After earning her law degree, she felt quite confident of her acceptance to the Illinois bar. To her astonishment, she failed to pass the bar examination. She returned to school—this time to Loyola University Law School—to earn a Master of Laws degree. This she accomplished in 1927, becoming the first black woman to receive an LL.M. Then she passed the Illinois bar.

As early as 1925 Sampson began an association with the Juvenile Court of Cook County, serving as a probation officer and a referee. Two years later she opened her own law firm on the South Side of Chicago, where she specialized in criminal law and domestic relations. In 1934 one of her cases took her all the way to the United States Supreme Court. That same year she was married again, to a fellow attorney named Joseph E. Clayton. They worked as law partners for more than a decade in Chicago.

The Lawyer Goes Public

Sampson’s career came to public attention in 1949, when she was invited to participate in the World Town Hall of the Air lecture tour. A series of radio broadcasts, the World Town Hall of the Air took its members all across the globe, mainly for the purpose of countering Soviet propaganda about the United States. Sampson had to pay her own way—$5,000, a vast sum for the times—but she soon became known as one of the most eloquent and unflappable of the Town Hall speakers. At almost every stop she was confronted with difficult questions about civil rights for minorities in America.

Asked by a heckler about the plight of blacks in the United States, Sampson at one point replied: “You ask, do we get fair treatment? My answer is no. Just the same, I’d rather be a Negro in America than a citizen of any other country. In the past century we have made more progress than dark-skinned people anywhere else in the world.” That quote, as reprinted in the New York Times, became Sampson’s best-known assessment of race relations in her home country as compared with the rest of the world.

When the World Town Hall of the Air tour returned to America in 1950, the organization was made permanent. Sampson was elected as its president. During that same year, U.S. president Truman designated her an alternate delegate to the fifth regular session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Thus Sampson became the first black woman to be named an official American representative to the United Nations. She served with Eleanor Roosevelt on the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee, and she was reelected in 1952.

The United Nations provided another forum for the former Soviet Union’s derision concerning America’s treatment of blacks. At one point during her tenure with the General Assembly, Sampson curtly told delegate Andrei Vyshinsky, as quoted in the Reader’s Digest: “We Negroes aren’t interested in communism—we were slaves too long for that.”

America’s First Black Woman Judge

Sampson’s championship of democracy and the free market made her very popular in political circles with the white majority and upwardly mobile blacks. By the early 1960s she was assistant corporation counsel of Chicago, a well-known figure in the town in which she had lived for forty years. The local Democratic party nominated her in 1962 to fill an unexpired term as a circuit court judge. She won the judgeship in a landslide and was elected by an even larger vote to fill the seat for a six-year term in 1964.

Sampson was the first black woman ever to sit as a circuit court judge, but she called little attention to her achievements. The position was not glamorous—in fact, her court was one of the busiest in the nation, serving downtown Chicago and its various neighborhoods. Because she dealt primarily with poor, working people who could ill afford to stand around courtrooms indefinitely, Sampson rarely put off her judgments until another day. Sometimes she would hear as many as 100 cases in a single session, some of them lasting only a few minutes. During the 1960s Sampson is said to have heard as many as 10,000 cases each year.

Noted for Thoughtful, Humanistic Decisions

Throughout her years in the city’s municipal court system, Sampson presided over divorce courts, traffic courts, and landlord-tenant relations courts. She gained acclaim for her superior mediating powers, her heartfelt sincerity, and her humanistic approach to rendering judgments. Virtually a celebrity in Chicago, Sampson watched as times changed around her. Fringe groups of black activists soon accused her of being too moderate, of supporting the white power structure and the big-money elite. Sampson preferred to think of herself as a pragmatist who was participating in a one-step-at-a-time process of social change. She elaborated on her philosophy in the Reader’s Digest: “Don’t tear down the old homestead until you have a clear idea of what you’ll build in its place. Just because you are impatient with moving at only five miles an hour, it doesn’t follow that accelerating to 150 will solve problems.” She added: “We are beginning to move. We haven’t reached cruising speed yet; but we are moving toward a better America at an ever-increasing pace.”

Judge Sampson retired from the bench in 1978, just a year before her death. She had long been a sought-after speaker to bar associations and youth groups, and she received several honorary degrees. She died on October 8, 1979, at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital.