Bri McNair

LMAO it's basically a movie that a collection of people on here have (and are, currently) inventing out of thin air. The original meme was this:

it's originally from like a year ago, but it's seen a popularity resurgence in the past few weeks (I remember seeing a post from @calidotgov about it that got a fair amount of attention, thats around when people started talking about it again). So yesterday @beelzeebub made this fake poster:

[Ruth Whitehead Whaley, circa 1950s, courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collections]

Long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Ruth Whitehead Whaley was blazing a trail for Black women in the legal profession and politics.

In 1925, the year that future civil rights leaders Robert F. Kennedy and Malcolm X were born, a year that saw 17 known lynchings of Black Americans, Ruth Whitehead Whaley became one of the first Black women admitted to practice law in New York. She was also the first Black woman to enroll at Fordham Law School, where she graduated in 1924 at the top of her class.

In 1933, Whitehead Whaley became the first Black woman to practice law in her home state of North Carolina. She also maintained a private practice in New York until 1944. She was later appointed secretary of the New York City Board of Estimate, which worked in tandem with the City Council. She served in that post from 1951 to 1973. Read more here.

Earlier this month she was honored with an historic marker located at the intersection of Ash Street at John Street, Goldsboro, North Carolina.

[Attorney Ruth Whitehead Whaley, with husband Herman S. Whaley, at home, 1941, courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collections]

She died December 23, 1977 and was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Yonkers, New York.