"Judge recalls UI's bar of blacks," November 7, 1990

Judge recalls UI's bar of blacks By Valoree Armstrong The Press-Citizen Juanita Kidd Stout remembers walking up and down Iowa City streets looking for a place to live because University of Iowa dormitories didn't allow blacks. She noticed a black baby in diapers on one front porch. So, she went to the door and asked if she could stay. That was the 1930s. Stout, now 71 and a former Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice, was welcomed back to UI Tuesday as guest speaker in the Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series. "I guess I resented it, but what could I do about it," Stout said of the treatment of black students at that time. But Stout enjoyed Iowa City, she said, largely because of the woman who took her in — Helen Lemme. Lemme, who died in 1968, was a community leader who often took black students into her home because they weren't allowed to live on campus. A native of Wewoka, Okla., Stout came to Iowa City to study piano. She earned a UI music degree in 1939 at the age of 20. She went on to earn two law degrees at Indiana University. Now a senior judge in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas, she's received many awards and 12 honorary doctorates. In 1988, Stout became the first black woman in the United States to be elected to a state supreme court. "Isn't that ridiculous?" Stout said. "I think it is disgraceful that this country waited until 1988 to put a black woman on the supreme court of a state... I appreciated it and did my very best while I was there. But this is America." In her lecture Tuesday, Stout discussed the nation's moral crisis. Examples of ethics problems, she said, include the savings and loan scandal, the fall of Wall Street wizards Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, and the corruption of judges in Philadelphia and Chicago. Those educated people were guided by greed, not character and heart, she said. Stout gave one example of a person with integrity. In 1961, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a medical officer in the Food and Drug Administration, stood by her convictions to keep a drug called thalidomide off the market. A German doctor later showed the drug had caused a European epidemic of deformed babies. "She saved America from this great tragedy partly because of her professional competence," Stout said. "But it was not her brains that mattered most but the tenacity of her character, the courage of her convictions, the imperviousness with which sh withstood abuse because of those convictions, and the priority she placed on human life and health." University of Iowa Libraries. University Archives