THE LATE Justice Juanita Kidd Stout was the first African-American woman elected to a court of record in the U.S., the first to sit on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and the first appointed to the state Supreme Court.
Now City Council is on track to rename the Criminal Justice Center on Filbert Street near 13th as the “Justice Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice,” making it the first major building in Philadelphia to be named for a black woman.
Stout received her law degree from Indiana University and arrived here in the early 1950s. She worked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge William H. Hastie and in the District Attorney’s Office before winning a seat on Municipal Court in 1959.
