Throughout the month of February, Texas Law is visiting the stories of law school history and historical figures and celebrating the impact they had on the university, on Texas, and on civic leadership in America.
Gloria Katrina Bradford, of the Class of 1954, was the first Black woman to graduate from Texas Law. She was a classmate of both Heman Sweatt and Virgil Lott and enjoyed many connections to notable civil rights figures, including Thurgood Marshall—who hired Bradford as an attorney to represent the NAACP in matters in Texas in the late 1950s—and Charlye Ola Farris, the first Black woman to be licensed to practice law in Texas.
Bradford was a pioneer in her own right, as the first Black woman to try a case in Harris County District Court, a feat she accomplished just months after graduation. She remains an important figure in the law school today, as the names of The Bradford Society, one of Texas Law’s eight societies for students.
Jasmine Wynton, a partner at Thompson Coburn is Dallas, was moved to tell Bradford’s story in a 2020 edition of the Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society. We share the first part of this profile below, and insist that you visit the Historical Society’s original version to read the full essay and its many footnotes, which provide invaluable historical context and references (and which, due to formatting restrictions, we are unable to reproduce here).
We also encourage you to read the Tarlton Law Library oral history with Gloria Bradford, conducted in 2011, two years before her death, a few weeks shy of her 83rd birthday.
Despite the challenges of the time she attended law school, Bradford was filled with good memories of the place, its people, and of the Austin she lived in at that time. When asked about her most vivid memory or law school, she said, “The camaraderie of the law students, (which) went past the segregation problem.”
Original source can be found here.