TBJ Coverage of Women and Minorities

We’re celebrating the Tennessee Bar Journal’s first 40 years all year! In each issue we will look back at an area of life in the law to see how the TBJcovered it. This month we examine coverage of women and minorities.

The Journal has come a long way, baby, since its first issue in 1965 that included photos of 42 men and not one woman. White men, of course. But don’t blame the Journal; it was a reflection of the association and legal profession at that time. Women and minorities started filtering into these pages in the following decades, first just as vacationing spouses on CLE cruises but eventually there were feature stories about their appointments to the bench and other majar accomplishments.

In our most recent issue, March 2005, there were seven women and 14 men pictured (excluding ads). An ad featuring the TBA YLD’s State High School Mock Trial Competition shows five females and one male in the courtroom playing lawyers, judges and witnesses. The articles in that issue were authored by two women and two men.

Here Comes the Judge … Ma’am

Coverage of women and minorities started heating up in 1988. In the March/April 1988 issue, the story “Workshop Teaches Women How to Run for Judge: Gearing up for 1990” was an early clue that women lawyers were not going to stay quiet much longer. The workshop drew a crowd of nearly 60 and turned out to foster the beginning of the Tennessee Lawyers’ Association for Women (TLAW).

Later that year the Journal reported on the organizational meeting of TLAW, which was held during the Tennessee Bar Association’s convention in Memphis. The speaker was Barbara Mendel Mayden of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, who told the startling findings of the commission.

“Our first surprise,” Mayden said, “was to find out that although, clearly, women have made great strides, the barriers that still exist aren’t only subtle ones, but the types of overt problems that most of us thought were history.”

Also in 1988, the Journal reported that, according to an ABA Journal survey, “female lawyers had a median personal income of $40,190, while male lawyers had a median income of $71,710.”

The May/June 1988 cover of the Journal, illustrating a story about the State Mock Trial Competition, featured lawyer Ellen Hobbs Lyle as a judge, at a time when there weren’t many women judges in Tennessee. Lyle, who was not a judge at that time, later became a chancellor in the 20th Judicial District.

The following spring, the Journal reported that in a nationwide survey, the percentage of law school enrollment for women and minorities had increased. “Women now represent 42 percent of all law students,” it said. First-year minority enrollment increased a whopping 9 percent that year, bringing their numbers to 11.6 percent of all students in J.D. programs.

Quality of Life Issues Emerge

By early 1990, the Journal cited a National Law Journal/West Publishing survey that said “60 percent of the respondents said they had experienced unwanted sexual attention, but rarely reported it.” It also reported that 42 percent of women said they delayed having children to pursue their careers, and 24 percent said they opted for slower career advancement to have time for their personal lives. It was 1992 before the Journal published a special issue about parental leave policies — acknowledging that lawyers might have lives outside of the race for the billable hour. Barbara Moss outlined what a firm would need to include in its policy, plus assured readers that “if you think having children and taking parental leave is professional suicide, think again.” She cautioned that the firm’s attitude is key. “It’s important for managing partners to tell parents [women and men] that the firm expects them to take time off.”

Trailblazers Get Ink

In 1990 the Journal featured a tribute to women “trailblazers,” with personal interviews with Erma G. Greenwood, Selma Cash Paty, Anne H. Schneider, Rebecca Thomas, Osta Underwood and Cissy Daughtrey.

Nearly all of these women have since died, but the Journal captured priceless experiences of the first women who practiced law in Tennessee.

When Osta Underwood was licensed in 1936 and began practicing law in Nashville she recalled that “when the women lawyers wanted to meet we reserved a table for six at the Old Chamber of Commerce dining room on Union Street.”

“No woman in her right mind would want to be a lawyer in 1947,” Paty said in that interview. “It wasn’t a profession that a woman would consider.”

The cover story for September/October 1995 was “The Final Battle: Tennessee’s Vote for Women Decided the Nation” about the 75th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. The article features pictures of women picketing the White House in 1917, as well as these words:

‘Women have suffered an agony of soul that you can never comprehend that you and your daughters might inherit politcal freedom,’ said Carrie Chapman Catt, who followed Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. ‘That vote has been costly. Prize it!’

For the state’s 200th birthday in 1996, the Journal chronicled landmarks of Tennessee law in an article by Nashville lawyer Lewis L. Laska. Among many entries it tells of

• Ida B. Wells, a black woman who in 1884 challenged “Jim Crow” railroad seating;
• Marion S. Griffin, the first woman allowed to take the written bar exam in Tennessee, in 1907. (In 1982, a chapter of the Lawyers’ Association for Women was formed in Nashville and named for her.)
• Nashville lawyer Z. Alexander Looby, who along with Thurgood Marshall, gained acquittal of most blacks accused of rioting in Columbia. “The famous ‘Mink Slide’ riot had drawn national attention,” Laska wrote, “and the verdict was widely seen as a triumph of law and capable lawyers over southern lawlessness.”
• Roy B.J. Campbelle Jr., the first African-American to graduate from the University of Tennessee law school, in 1955; in 1987, a black woman, Marilyn Yarborough, becomes its dean.
• Black civil rights attorney Avon N. Williams, who achieved victory when the mostly white University of Tennessee at Nashville was ordered in federal court to merge into the mostly black Tennessee State University. “This is the first time any court has ordered a white-into-black merger in higher education,” Laska wrote.
• George H. Brown Jr., who in 1980 was the first African-American man on the Tennessee Supreme Court, followed by A.A. Birch in 1993.
• Julia Smith Gibbons, who was the first female federal district court judge in Memphis at the time of her appointment in 1983 — at 32 she was the youngest person on the federal bench.

In 1996 Monica Allie was the first — and so far only — woman to receive the Joe Henry Award for Outstanding Legal Writing, an annual award given by the Journal since 1985.

Martha Craig “Cissy” Daughtrey, the First Lady of Firsts, was featured on the August 2003 cover — among many other firsts, she was the first woman on the Tennessee Supreme Court (1990) and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (1993).

In 1994, Memphis lawyer Prince Chambliss became the first African-American officer of the TBA when he was appointed secretary. That same year, Frederick H.L. McClure, an African-American lawyer from Chattanooga, was president-elect of the Young Lawyers Divison, which holds a seat on the TBA board. UT law professor Dwight Aarons wrote a feature for the Journal in 1999 about many early African-American and women lawyers in Tennessee — the same year the TBA was lead by its first woman president, Pamela L. Reeves. She was followed by Katie Edge two years later. In 2004, Memphis lawyer Cecilia Barnes was appointed secretary of the TBA, the first African-American woman to fill an officer’s position in the association. In 2005, Marcia Eason was elected vice president and will become the TBA’s third woman president, in 2007.

In one of her monthly president’s columns in 2000, Reeves wrote:

It is very easy for those of us who have been able to follow the footsteps of these trailblazers to forget that times have not always been good for women in our profession. I will use my experience to try to help young lawyers appreciate the leadership and examples of the women who led the way.

A long way, baby? You be the judge.

—Suzanne Craig Robertson