‘True Advocate of Equality’: Nation’s First African American Probate Judge Dies at 78

Edith Jacqueline Ingram Grant, who served as Hancock County’s probate judge for 36 years and was also Georgia’s first black female judge has died at 78 years old. Heralded as a trailblazer, the nation’s first African American probate judge died quietly in her hometown of Sparta, Georgia, Friday, more than 51 years after her historic election, according to the state Council of Probate Judges. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Harold Melton saluted Grant as a “true pioneer.” 

Grant was born Jan. 16, 1942, in Sparta. After graduating from high school, she enrolled in New York City College for Nurses before returning to Georgia to attend Fort Valley State College, now known as Fort Valley State University, according to an alumni profile of her. Grant majored in education and graduated in 1963. 

In a 2006 interview with HistoryMakers, Grant said that when her father ran for public office in 1966, members of the black community were told that they could serve a poll workers. However, on Election Day, the judge barred them from doing so in racist and derogatory language. At the time, Grant said, community members promised the judge, a white woman, “that her politicking days were over.”

Two years later in 1968l Grant won the election, seven months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. But when she went to the courthouse to ask her predecessor to brief her on court operations, the judge cursed her and ordered her to get out of the office, Grant recalled. 

Grant served for the next 36 years. 

See R. Robin McDonald, ‘True Advocate of Equality’: Nation’s First African American Probate Judge Dies at 78, Law.com, June 9, 2020.