Juanita Kidd Stout

Juanita Kidd Stout

Juanita Kidd Stout (March 7, 1919 – August 21, 1998 in Wewoka, Oklahoma, United States) was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania from 1988–1989, and the first African-American woman elected to any judgeship in the United States and the first to serve on the Supreme Court of any state.

Her early career began as a music teacher. She might have grown up poor, but her parents were both teachers, and Judge Stout, who credited her mother with instilling her lifelong habit of hard work, learned to read at 3, entered the third grade at 6 and started college at 16, first at Lincoln University in nearby Missouri and later at the University of Iowa before returning to Oklahoma as a music teacher.^[1] Stout studied at the University of Iowa. On November 15, 1959, Justice Stout appeared on the game show What's My Line? when she was a municipal court judge. She was inducted in the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame in 1983. In 2012, a Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center was renamed the Justice Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice in her honor.^[2]

Stout was also a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

References

External links

• Juanita Kidd Stout at Find a Grave