A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Jane Cleo Marshall Lucas, the first female African-American graduate of the Law School, was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan in 1920. She received a scholarship to Howard University and was part of the class entering in 1937. She graduated from Howard University in 1941. She received her M.A. in political science from the University of Michigan Rackham School of Graduates Studies in 1942 and in the fall of 1942 began at the University of Michigan Law School.
She graduated from the Law School in 1944 and passed the Michigan bar examination. After graduation, her first job was in the law office of Arthur Davis Shores, the only black lawyer in Alabama. Because of the hurdles placed in her way, she was not able to sit for the Alabama bar examination before she married and moved to Fairmont Height, Maryland.
In 1946, she became the first African-American woman to pass the Maryland bar and was invited to join the Howard University law faculty becoming the first woman to teach full-time on the law faculty. She resigned from the faculty in 1950 and moved with her husband to Staten Island, New York.
She later worked for the Women's Division of the Labor Department, the Civil Rights Commission, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C.