Edith Sampson

Edith Spurlock was born on the thirteenth of October 1901 at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of eight children of Louis Spurlock — a Black man who worked in the cleaning, pressing, and dyeing trade — and Elizabeth McGruder Spurlock, who made buckram hat frames and false-hair switches at home. The family knew hardship, and Edith left school young to labor in a fish market before returning to complete her studies at Peabody High School.

Drawn to social work, she studied at the New York School of Social Work, where a criminology instructor, struck by the highest grade in his course, urged her toward the law. She entered the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, and in 1927 became the first woman to earn a Master of Laws from Loyola University's graduate law school. In time she built a distinguished practice and a national voice, joining the "Town Meeting of the World" tour that carried her before audiences across the globe.

In 1950 President Harry Truman named her an alternate United States delegate to the fifth session of the United Nations General Assembly — the first African American to officially represent the nation at the United Nations. She served on the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee, and later became the first African American delegate to NATO, answering Cold War critics abroad with candor about her country's promise and its unfinished work.

In 1962 she won election as a judge in Chicago, the first Black woman elected to such a bench, and went on to serve as an associate judge of the Cook County Circuit Court until her retirement in 1978. She died at Chicago on the eighth of October 1979. May the memory of Edith Sampson — who carried her people's dignity from a Pittsburgh fish market to the councils of the world — be forever honored.