Sarah T. Hughes
Encyclopedia
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
and federal judge
United States federal judge
In the United States, the title of federal judge usually means a judge appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate in accordance with Article II of the United States Constitution....
who swore in Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson , often referred to as LBJ, was the 36th President of the United States after his service as the 37th Vice President of the United States...
as President of the United States
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
on Air Force One
Air Force One
Air Force One is the official air traffic control call sign of any United States Air Force aircraft carrying the President of the United States. In common parlance the term refers to those Air Force aircraft whose primary mission is to transport the president; however, any U.S. Air Force aircraft...
after the Kennedy assassination
John F. Kennedy assassination
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas...
. She is the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States President, a task usually executed by the Chief Justice of the United States
Chief Justice of the United States
The Chief Justice of the United States is the head of the United States federal court system and the chief judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Chief Justice is one of nine Supreme Court justices; the other eight are the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States...
.
The photo of her administering the oath of office to Johnson remains the most famous photo ever taken aboard Air Force One, as Kenneth T. Walsh, White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report
U.S. News & World Report
U.S. News & World Report is an American news magazine published from Washington, D.C. Along with Time and Newsweek it was for many years a leading news weekly, focusing more than its counterparts on political, economic, health and education stories...
, said in Air Force One: A History of the Presidents and Their Planes.
Birth, education and early career
Born Sarah Tilghman in Baltimore, Maryland, she was the daughter of James and Elizabeth Haughton Tilghman. After high school at the girls-only Western High School in Baltimore, she attended Goucher CollegeGoucher College
Goucher College is a private, co-educational, liberal arts college located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, on a 287 acre campus. The school has approximately 1,475 undergraduate students studying in 31 majors and six interdisciplinary...
. After graduation she taught science at Salem Academy
Salem Academy
Salem Academy is a boarding and day school for high school girls in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It is formally known as Salem Academy and College where it shares its campus with Salem College, located near historic Old Salem...
in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
for several years. She then returned to school to the study of law. In 1919 she moved to Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and attended The George Washington University Law School
The George Washington University Law School
The George Washington University Law School, commonly referred to as GW Law, is the law school of The George Washington University. It was founded in 1825 and is the oldest law school in Washington, D.C. The school is accredited by the American Bar Association and is a charter member of the...
. She attended classes at night and during the day worked as a police officer
Police officer
A police officer is a warranted employee of a police force...
. At that time she lived in a tent home near the Potomac River
Potomac River
The Potomac River flows into the Chesapeake Bay, located along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. The river is approximately long, with a drainage area of about 14,700 square miles...
and commuted to the campus by canoe each evening.
She moved to Dallas, Texas
Dallas, Texas
Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...
in 1922 with her husband, George Hughes, whom she had met in law school. She practiced law for eight years in Dallas before becoming involved in politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
, first being elected in 1930 to three terms in the Texas House of Representatives
Texas House of Representatives
The Texas House of Representatives is the lower house of the Texas Legislature. The House is composed of 150 members elected from single-member districts across the state. The average district has about 150,000 people. Representatives are elected to two-year terms with no term limits...
.
Service as a judge
In 1935, she accepted an appointment as a state judge from Governor James Allred for the Fourteenth District Court in Dallas, becoming the state's first woman district judge. In 1936 she was elected to the same post. She was re-elected six more times and remained in that post until 1960.In 1961, President John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
appointed her to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas
United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas
The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas is a United States district court. Its first judge, Andrew Phelps McCormick, was appointed to the court on April 10, 1879. The court convenes in Dallas, Texas with divisions in Fort Worth, Amarillo, Abilene, Lubbock, San Angelo...
. She was the first woman to serve as a federal district judge in Texas.
Administering the oath of office
Two years into her tenure as a federal district judge, on November 22, 1963, she was called upon to administer the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson after the assassination of President Kennedy.According to an interview with Barefoot Sanders, who was United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas at the time:
Later life
Hughes was a member of the three-judge panel that first heard the case of Roe v. WadeRoe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade, , was a controversial landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion,...
; the panel's decision was subsequently affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
. She retired from the active federal bench in 1975, though she continued to work as a judge with senior status
Senior status
Senior status is a form of semi-retirement for United States federal judges, and judges in some state court systems. After federal judges have reached a certain combination of age and years of service on the federal courts, they are allowed to assume senior status...
until 1982.
A close friend of Lyndon Johnson and his family, Hughes participated in his inauguration in 1965, took part in the book-signing of Lady Bird Johnson
Lady Bird Johnson
Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor Johnson was First Lady of the United States from 1963 to 1969 during the presidency of her husband Lyndon B. Johnson. Throughout her life, she was an advocate for beautification of the nation's cities and highways and conservation of natural resources and made that...
's White House memoirs, and participated in the dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum is one of 13 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. The library houses 45 million pages of historical documents, including the papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson and those of his close associates and others...
.
She is buried in Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas, Texas.
External links
- The Sarah T. Hughes Center for Field Politics at Goucher CollegeGoucher CollegeGoucher College is a private, co-educational, liberal arts college located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, on a 287 acre campus. The school has approximately 1,475 undergraduate students studying in 31 majors and six interdisciplinary...
- Sarah T. Hughes Archive at University of North Texas
- Indomitable Sarah: The Life of Judge Sarah T. Hughes by Darwin Payne (Texas A&M University Press)
- Oral History Interview with Sarah T. Hughes, from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library