Attorney Kim Norwood and Associate Circuit Court Judge Calea Stovall-Reid stood outside the funeral of renowned civil rights attorney Margaret Bush Wilson on Tuesday, remembering the icon’s groundbreaking work that led to Supreme Court landmark decision Shelley vs. Kraemer. The decision banned restrictive covenants that excluded black homebuyers from certain neighborhoods.
“I wish I had spent more time with her,” said Norwood, who is a law professor at Washington University. “She was an incredible inspiration to me.”
Retired Judge Susan Block came down the stairs of All Saints Episcopal Church to join them. “This is the future,” Block said, as she waved her hand from Norwood to Stovall-Reid. “We shouldn’t be sad today.”
Then Judge Gloria Reno joined the conversation. She, too, is African-American.
Wilson, who in 1943 became the second African-American woman to practice law in Missouri, paved the way for each of them. Wilson died last Tuesday, August 11. She was 90.
“She lived 90 years at 90 miles an hour,” said her son Robert E. Wilson III, an attorney and entrepreneur who lives in Rio de Janeiro.
Wilson called his childhood “unreal” because of the intellectual conversations that took place at the home where he lived with his grandparents and parents.
His grandfather James Thomas Bush was instrumental in the 1948 Shelley vs. Kraemer because he was a real estate broker who sold the Shelleys their home on Labadie Avenue, which is scheduled to be renamed in honor of Margaret Wilson by the Board of Aldermen. He also was the founder of the Real Estate Brokers’ Association of St. Louis, which spearheaded the Shelley case.
“This house was like a beehive of intellectualism,” he said. “There was always debate and verbal jousting,” Wilson said. “It was pretty fantastic.”
Margaret Wilson’s sister Ermine Byas reflected on her time with her sister. “We were just talking about it this morning,” Byas said the day after Wilson’s funeral. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. She was my rock.”
As nearly 500 people gathered to pay tribute at Wilson’s funeral and memorial service, many attendees said blacks must continue to take advantage of the strides made and further the work of Wilson’s latter years, which focused on creating wealth for the black community.
“Her first and primary battle was legal,” said her son. “But the latter years were focused on wealth creation in the black community, and that was the least accomplished and most difficult.”
Activism and a new age
Percy Green II, who went from gang member to in-your-face activist and was instrumental in the 1963 Jefferson Bank protests that marked the watershed for the Civil Rights Movement in St. Louis, said Wilson often gave legal advice regarding the fight to get more middle-class jobs for blacks.
“She understood it was for the betterment of the community,” Green said.
Lew Moye, a trade union leader, said Wilson helped get blacks hired in supervisory roles at Chrysler in the late 1960s. Wilson worked to get their concerns heard by the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, of which Frankie Freeman was a member. Freeman was the third African-American woman to practice law in Missouri and a friend of Wilson’s. The commission ruled against Chrysler and more jobs opened up.
That progress is good, said Michael Roberts, chairman and CEO of Roberts Cos. But it’s not enough.
“It’s good to able to stay in hotels,” Roberts said, “but we’ve taken it to the next level. We own 11 hotels. That means we can employ people.”
Wilson continued to help her community move forward by serving on numerous civic and corporate boards, granting scholarships to students of her alma mater, Talladega College, and persuading many blacks to become attorneys, such as attorney and former Judge Wayman Smith III.
“She has touched all of these lives and made young lawyers out of all of us,” he said.
Gov. Jay Nixon, who spoke at the celebration following the funeral, said Wilson always gave her clients her best.
“She was always honorable, unstoppable and unwavering in her representation of her clients and her causes,” Nixon said.
He met Wilson during his time as Missouri’s attorney general. “As attorney general, you meet all the defense attorneys,” Nixon joked.
But Wilson – who graduated from Sumner High School as valedictorian in 1935 and from Talladega College in 1939 with an economics major – never considered being an attorney until she received a visit from Dorothy Freeman.
Freeman was the first African-American woman to practice law in Missouri. According to a 1999 interview with Wilson for The St. Louis African American Heritage Project, Freeman had just completed her freshman year at Lincoln University Law School, which had been created to circumvent the integration of the University of Missouri–Columbia Law School. Lincoln gave Wilson a scholarship.
NAACP trailblazer
In addition to being dedicated to the law, she also was dedicated to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1958, she became president of the St. Louis NAACP chapter and in 1962, she became president of Missouri’s state branch of the NAACP. In 1975, she became the first woman of color to chair the NAACP national board of directors. She served nine terms.
“From the beginning, I made a decision to give my time and talent to the NAACP,” she said. “I wanted to give to the organization that belongs to my people.”
And Roslyn M. Brock is grateful that she did.
Brock, the first woman to be vice chair of the national board of the NAACP, traveled from Baltimore to attend Wilson’s funeral. Wilson, she said, was an inspirational figure who understood what was necessary for the betterment of the nation.
“She proved that with dedication, hard work, qualifications and perseverance, all goals can be achieved,” Brock said, adding that Wilson has inspired her to seek the board chairman position for the upcoming election.
Frankie Freeman, who was Wilson’s good friend, said upcoming leaders must work hard and never forget.
“Do your homework, learn your history and realize that each person has a responsibility to work to bring about change. We did what we had to do. But the struggle continues.”
