Scope and Content Note
The papers of Juanita Kidd Stout (1919-1998) span the years 1873-1998, with the bulk of the material concentrated between 1948 and 1998. In October 1959, the governor of Pennsylvania appointed Stout a judge of the municipal court in Philadelphia County while she was a candidate for the post in the Philadelphia municipal elections. That November, she won a ten-year term on the court, thus becoming the first African-American woman appointed or elected judge of a court of record or general jurisdiction in the United States. In 1988, when she was appointed to the Pennsylvania supreme court, Stout became the first African-American female justice on a state supreme court. The papers are organized in the following series: Personal File , General Correspondence , Legal File , Subject File , Speeches and Writings File , and Oversize .
The family papers of the Personal File include material on Stout's parents, Henry M. and Mary A. Kidd, who emigrated from Missouri and Mississippi respectively to settle in Seminole County, Oklahoma, when the state was still a territory. The family file also includes material on the Kidd and Chandler families and on Charles O. Stout, a college professor and Juanita Kidd Stout's husband.
Correspondents in the General Correspondence series include Lawrence L. Boger, David L. Boren, John W. Hamilton, Gail Nelson, Henry Ponder, Richard S. Schweiker, and Arlen Specter.
Most of the Legal File documents Juanita Kidd Stout's service on the municipal court and the court of common pleas, both for Philadelphia County, and as a justice of the Pennsylvania supreme court. She developed an interest in juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and welfare while serving as an assistant district attorney for Philadelphia County during the 1950s, and once on the municipal court she was noted for her outspokenness on these issues in the local and national media, for her tough sentencing of recalcitrant juvenile offenders, and for her continuing contact with juvenile offenders she found to be redeemable.
The bulk of Stout's service was as a judge specializing in murder trials on the court of common pleas. Most of the common pleas case files relate to trials or hearings where she rendered a written opinion. These were usually either bench trials, where she sat without a jury and ruled on both the facts and the law in a case, or en banc hearings, the first stage of the appellate process in Pennsylvania, where she sat with other judges to hear post-trial motions. She also retained files about cases in which there was a great deal of media interest, such as the Ira Einhorn trial, or in which she had a special interest in the legal issues or the defendants. Some cases not found in the municipal court or court of common pleas case files are documented in newspaper clippings in the Personal File series.
Stout's tenure on the Pennsylvania supreme court was brief, 1988-1989, because she was close to the Commonwealth's mandatory retirement age when appointed. Much of the supreme court case file is taken up with actions against corrupt or otherwise troubled Pennsylvania judges. In rel. Stout relates to her unsuccessful effort to remain on the supreme court despite the mandatory retirement rule.
Other cases in which Stout was involved include Stout v. Helm, part of the Pennsylvania judicial elections file related to challenges of her nomination petitions when she ran unsuccessfully for a superior court judgeship in 1966, and Stout v. W. W. Norton & Co., in which she successfully sued journalist Linn Washington and his publisher in 1995 for allegedly defaming her in his book on African-American judges, Black Judges on Justice.
The estates grouping of the Legal File includes material related to Stout's service as executor of the estate of her close friend, lawyer, and civic and civil rights activist Sadie T. M. Alexander, one of the first African-American women awarded a doctorate degree in the United States and the first black woman to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar.
Stout tracked colleagues and African-American and female pioneers of bar and bench through an extensive biographical file that is part of the Subject File . Many lawyers and judges whose careers she followed were also correspondents, including Raymond P. Alexander, Sadie T. M.. Alexander, Anne X. Alpern, Genevieve Blatt, Jean M. Capers, Mahala A. Dickerson, William H. Hastie, Charles H. Houston, Frederica Massiah-Jackson, Robert N. C. Nix, Leah Sears-Collins, Charles Z. Smith, Arlen Spector, and Ronald A. White.