Macon B. Allen
Allen is the first African-American acknowledged to have gained admission to a state bar when he passed the examination for the Maine bar in 1844. Allen learned the law as almost all aspiring lawyers did in this period: he read it in the office of a beneficent private attorney while working as this attorney's clerk. A year later, Allen would later gain admission to the Massachusetts bar. Three years after Allen entered the Maine bar, the Governor of Massachusetts appointed him a justice of the peace, making Allen the first African-American to serve in any judicial capacity

Robert Morris
Morris became the second African-American lawyer in the country, and, in 1852, he became the second African-American judge when the Governor of Massachusetts appointed him to a county magistrate position, a more formal judicial position than justice of the peace.

John Swett Rock
In 1865, Rock, a former physician, of Massachusettes became the first African-American lawyer admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Rock had abandoned his medical practice to study law in 1861. He also became the first African-American to be invited to the floor of Congress.8 In 1865,

Jonathan Jasper Wright
Wright became the first African-American lawyer in Pennsylvania, and five years later, he became the first African-American to sit on any state supreme court when he served on the South Carolina Supreme Court until 1877.

John A. Moss
In 1873, Moss became the first African-American judicial officer in the District of Columbia when he was appointed as justice of the peace by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Although justices of the peace are generally subordinate judicial positions in a municipality or a county, the District of Columbia is a federal district under the supervision of Congress, and thus Moss may have been the first African-American judicial officer employed by Congress. Moss, a graduate of Howard University Law School, was subsequently reappointed by Presidents James A. Garfield and Grover Cleveland.

Robert H. Terrell
Terrell became the first African-American appointed to any full judgeship position under the authority of the U.S. government when the District of Columbia courts were reorganized and Terrell became a judge on the newly formed Municipal Court of the District of Columbia in 1909. He served on that court until his death in 1925.

James S. Watson
In 1931, Watson was name a justice of the New York City Municipal Court, becoming the states first African-American Judge. He remained on the bench until 1950. African-American Firsts by Joan Potter

William H. Lewis
Lewis became the first African-American Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice

William H. Hastie
In 1937, Hastie was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the District Court for the U.S. Virgin Islands. He became the first African-American to serve on any U.S. District Court; however, at the time, this position was not established under Article III of the U.S. Constitution and did not carry lifetime tenure. Hastie resigned from this position in 1939 and his immediate successor, Herman Moore, became the second African-American to serve on any U.S. District Court.

In 1950, Judge Hastie returned to the judiciary when President Truman appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; Hastie had initially served as a recess appointee to this court in 1949. He became the first African-American judge to serve on any U.S. Court of Appeals.

Jane Bolin
Bolin appointment as a family court judge by NYC Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1939 made her the first black woman in the United States to become a judge, Bolin was also the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to work in the office of the New York City corporation counsel, the city’s legal department.

Irvin C. Mollison
In 1945, President Truman appointed Mollison to the U.S. Customs Court. Judge Mollison earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago and was a member of the Illinois bar. In 1980, Congress enacted a statute that converted the U.S. Customs Court to the U.S. Court of International Trade and granted its judges with life tenure under Article III of the Constitution. Although this statutory shift in the court's structure occured after Mollison left the bench, he is widely regarded as the first African-American to hold a judgeship of life-tenure stature.

Harold Stevens
In 1955, Stevens was appointed Justice of the State Supreme Court by Gov. W. Averell Harriman. First African-American in Judicial Posts. In 1958, he was named Associate Justice of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. In 1969, he was appointed Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division's First Department. Stevens was named to the highest court, the State Court of Appeals, in 1974 as an interim appointment. The next year he was redesignated Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. He was the first African-American to hold each of these positions.

Constance Baker Motley
In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Motley to the District Court for the Southern District of New York, she became the first African-American woman on the federal bench. In 1982, she becaame the first African-American woman to serve as chief judge. Motley assumed senior judge status in 1986, and in 2001, Motley was also the first African-American woman elected to the New York state senate (1964) and to the Manhattan borough presidency (1965).

Thurgood Marshall
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Marshall was the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Prior to becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education.

Unless otherwise noted facts provided by
Just the Beginning Foundation (http://www.jtbf.org/)