Cora T. Walker

1922-2006

Attorney, community activist

When Cora T. Walker became a lawyer in 1947, she was one of the first female African-American attorneys in the state of New York. The longtime resident of Harlem was a dedicated networker, organizer, and activist who spent several decades working to eradicate bias in the legal system—and within the legal community itself, too. Her community work focused on her own neighborhood, Harlem, and she fought for improvements at a time when large, predominantly black urban areas were viewed as past the point of saving.

Walker was born in 1922, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and grew up with eight siblings. Her parents, William and Benetta, moved their brood to New York City, settling in the Bronx, but Walker's father left the family and her mother was forced to apply for public assistance. She graduated from James Monroe High School in the Soundview section of the Bronx and used the occasion to notify the local welfare office that she would now serve as the financial provider for her family and that the benefit payments were no longer needed. While taking courses at St. John's University, she worked as a night shift teletype operator with Western Union and sold Christmas cards on the side.

St. John's offered a six-year program in which students earned both an undergraduate degree and a law degree. There were few African-American attorneys in the 1940s, and even fewer women lawyers of any color. Walker recalled to E. R. Shipp of the New York Times that the law school dean looked out at her and the other four female students on their first day of class and said, "There are five seats being wasted and my objective is to get those five seats." She explained that even her own mother tried to discourage her, saying, "You're going to be another poor, hungry Negro lawyer." At the time, there were few black lawyers of any notable wealth or prominence. The handful of licensed African-American legal professionals in New York City, as elsewhere in the United States, handled small cases and boilerplate legal work such as wills and divorces because of an unspoken rule that barred black lawyers from taking on high-profile cases in the major courts.

Walker graduated with her dual degrees in 1946, passed the New York State bar exam the following year, and sought a job with one of the city's hundreds of law firms. None would hire her, but she so impressed an interviewer that the attorney offered her a job as a secretary. Shipp noted that even the handful of black-owned firms shunned her; an attorney with one of them—who later became a judge—told her that his "firm does not have a client that we think so little of as to send them to court with a woman." Undaunted, Walker read self-help books and took their advice to establish her own network of professional contacts by joining clubs and community organizations. This led to her first client, a funeral home, who hired her as a collection agent.

Some favorable local press also helped boost Walker's client list, but had an unexpected result. When the New York Amsterdam News, the city's leading black newspaper, featured a story on her, her father reappeared and asked her to represent him in a lawsuit over injuries he received after being struck by a car. These were the types of civil suits involving insurance companies that black lawyers were not supposed to take, but Walker agreed and won a sizable amount despite forceful opposition. Shipp wrote, "When the settlement talks fell apart, the judge ordered the parties to trial. Ms. Walker went out to telephone a witness and when she returned 10 minutes later, the judge cited her for criminal contempt for keeping him waiting." She was actually convicted on the charge, but the decision was reversed on appeal.

In 1948 Walker married the attorney Lawrence R. Bailey, with whom she had two sons, but the marriage had ended a decade later when she became a partner in the firm of the newly renamed Doles & Walker after four years as an associate there. Twice she ran for a seat in the New York State Senate as a Republican candidate from Harlem, but lost to heavily favored Democrats. She was also active in the National Bar Association, the professional organization for African-American lawyers that formed in the 1920s at a time when the better-known American Bar Association prohibited blacks from its membership ranks. She founded its Corporate Counsel Conference, an annual gathering that helped young minority law-school graduates find lucrative jobs in the corporate-law sector. Active in the Harlem Lawyers Association, she became the first woman to serve as president of the organization when she was elected to the office in the 1960s.

Both Walker's law offices and home were in Harlem, and she was a well-known community activist who used her legal training to improve the quality of life for the neighborhood. She was a key figure in the founding of the Harlem River Consumers Cooperative, a food cooperative at Seventh Avenue and 147th Street. Food co-ops were organized by selling shares—in this case $5 per household—to buyers who then became shareholders and received a discount at the cash register. The co-op negotiated with food suppliers to keep costs low and hired and trained its own staff. At the time, grocery stores in Harlem were notorious for their high prices and the abysmal quality of their perishable food items. "This is Harlem's gift to Harlem, where housewives have been overcharged for inferior food for too long," Walker told Edith Evans Asbury when the New York Times ran a story on the co-op in 1967.

With annual sales of $2 million reached by the end of the decade, the food co-op made plans to open other branches in Harlem, but an eighteen-month picket protest by members of a grocery-store workers' union nearly put it out of business. Finally, a federal investigation uncovered that union officials had violated the law when they accepted money from a public-relations firm whose partners owned competing grocery stores in Harlem. Walker played a crucial role in the ensuing trial as general counsel for the co-op, a post that she held until 1976. That same year, her son Lawrence Randolph Jr. joined her in a new firm called Walker & Bailey, also located in Harlem. Even as late as the 1980s, her firm was still just one of a handful of black law firms in New York City.

Walker died of cancer on July 13, 2006, in New York at the age of eighty-four. Her funeral was held at Harlem's most famous church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and George Bundy Smith, a prominent New York State judge, was one of the speakers who eulogized Walker's lifetime of achievement. According to E. R. Shipp of the New York Daily News, Smith said, "The goal of equality is still far off. The goal of diversity is still far off. But she did her part."

At a Glance …

Born Cora Thomasina Walker on June 20, 1922, in Charlotte, NC; died of cancer, July 13, 2006, in New York, NY; daughter of William H. Walker and Benetta (Jones) Walker; married Lawrence R. Bailey Sr. (an attorney), 1948 (divorced); children: Lawrence Randolph Jr. and Bruce Elliott. Politics: Republican. Education: St. John's University, BS, 1945, JD, 1946.

Career: Western Union, teletype operator, early 1940s; received certification of New York State Bar, 1947; attorney in private practice, 1947-54, 1960-76; Doles, Sandifer & Walker, associate, 1954-58; Doles & Walker, partner, 1958-60; Harlem River Consumers Cooperative, general counsel, 1969-76; Walker & Bailey, senior partner, 1976-99.

Memberships: American Bar Association; National Bar Association (member, board of governors); National Political Congress of Black Women; New York State Bar Association (member, House of Delegates); Harlem Lawyers Association (president, 1960s).