Gabrielle Kirk McDonald facts for kids

Gabrielle Anne Kirk McDonald (née Kirk; born April 12, 1942) is an American lawyer and jurist who, until her retirement in October 2013, served as an American arbitrator on the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal seated in The Hague.

She is a former United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas and a former judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). McDonald was one of the first eleven judges elected by the United Nations to serve on the Yugoslav Tribunal and went on to become its president between 1997 and 1999, the only woman to occupy the position since its founding in 1994.

As the presiding judge in Trial Chamber II, she issued the tribunal's verdict against Duško Tadić, the first international war crimes trial since the Nuremberg Trials and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. .....

Early life and education

McDonald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on April 12, 1942 to Frances Retta (née English) and James G. Kirk Jr.

In her September 1998 interview with St. Paul Magazine, McDonald remembered her mother as an ambitious woman with dreams of pursuing a career in acting and writing. Her father was a World War II veteran and like his father, worked as a dining car waiter for the Northern Pacific Railway. Her parents divorced in 1944, shortly after McDonald's brother, James G. Kirk III was born.

Frances English Kirk soon thereafter moved to New York with her two children. Living in East Harlem, Frances Kirk worked as a secretary for various newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. When Gabrielle was eight years old, she and her mother moved to Riverdale, New York.

McDonald has spoken about her mother's refusal to accept prejudice and discrimination, which include her confrontation with a racist landlord who wanted to evict Frances from her apartment when he learned her children were African-Americans. Frances Kirk refused to budge. Born of a Swedish mother and an African-American father, Frances was fair-skinned, and many believed she was Caucasian.

At the 2004 Horatio Alger Award short biographical film, McDonald also spoke about an incident where a taxi driver apologized to her mother for the unpleasant smell in his car because a previous passenger had been an African-American. Seeing her mother challenge these incidents taught McDonald early in her life that "you just don't sit back quietly . . . you say something."

The family eventually moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, where McDonald graduated from Teaneck High School in 1959. Tall and athletic, she played field hockey and was president of the girls' leadership club. Her yearbook states that she is one of the "nicest" and "most liked girls" in the class in which there was only one other African-American student. She attended Boston University (1959–61) and Hunter College (1961–63) for her undergraduate education.

In 1963, determined to become a civil rights lawyer, McDonald enrolled at Howard University School of Law. At Howard Law, she worked as a research assistant in her first year and in her second, earned a scholarship from the Ford Foundation.

She went on to serve as secretary of the student bar association and Notes Editor for the Howard Law Journal. She graduated cum laude and first in her class with a Bachelor of Laws.

At the time, there were only 142 African-American women lawyers in the country.

Career

NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and private practice

After graduating from Howard Law, McDonald accepted a staff attorney position with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York.

For the next three years, McDonald canvassed Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia to assist local residents and lawyers with issues involving school desegregation, equal employment, housing, and voting rights. She worked on some of the first plaintiff employment discrimination cases asserting violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1967, she served as the lead LDF staff attorney in a successful action against a major company for its discriminatory seniority system, which was the first significant plaintiff victory under Title VII since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act.

In 1969, she joined her then-husband attorney Mark T. McDonald in solo practice in Houston, Texas. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had paved the way for lawsuits based on racial discrimination, and together, the McDonalds built a reputation for pursuing plaintiff discrimination cases against major corporations and unions with significant operations in Texas. The firm's largest success came in 1976 when the McDonalds won a case against a multinational company and its union on behalf of 400 black workers for $1.2 million in back wages. As Chris Dixie, a union-side lawyer in Houston who often opposed McDonald told The Houston Post in 1978, "She must be the best in the South, if not better." She was one of the few African-American lawyers who appeared regularly in federal courts in Texas in the early 1970s.

Academia

In 1970, while maintaining her private practice, McDonald began pursuing what would become a lifelong passion: teaching law. Her first venture into academia was running the Legal Aid Clinic and teaching Trusts at Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University. As assistant professor of law, she went on to teach several courses at Texas Southern concurrent with her practice, including Federal Civil Procedure, Evidence, and Employment Discrimination Law. She served as a lecturer at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, Texas, and as a professor of law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas.

McDonald returned to academia after she left the federal judiciary in 1988; she taught Civil Procedure, and Race, Racism & American Law at St. Mary's University School of Law. After she returned to Houston in 1993, she taught several courses at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law, including Legal Methods, Federal Courts, and a seminar on the jurisprudence of Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Federal judicial service and private practice

McDonald was nominated by President Jimmy Carter on February 27, 1979, to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, to a new seat created by 92 Stat. 1629. She was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 10, 1979, and received her commission on May 11, 1979, when she was 37 years of age. She was the first African-American appointed to the federal bench in Texas and only the third African-American woman to be appointed to be a federal judge in the United States. Her service was terminated on August 14, 1988, due to resignation.

During her tenure on the bench, McDonald ruled on a number of high-profile cases. One of these cases involved Vietnamese shrimpers and the Ku Klux Klan. In that case, the Grand Dragon of the Klan attempted to disqualify her from the case, arguing that her race would prevent her from being impartial. She refused to recuse herself, stating in 1984, that "... if my race is enough to disqualify me from hearing this case, then I must disqualify myself as well from a substantial portion of cases on my docket ... an action that would cripple my efforts to fulfill my oath as a federal judge." She told the defendant, during the highly publicized hearing in a courtroom that included robed Klansmen, "You are not entitled to a judge of your choosing but one who will be fair. And I will do that." At the time, Daniel Hedges, United States attorney for the Southern District of Texas, praised her for "not permitting her civil rights background to cloud her judgment as a federal judge. She was always evenhanded."

After resigning from the bench in 1988, McDonald joined the law firm of Matthes & Granscomb and in 1992, became counsel to Walker & Satterhwaite. She served as special counsel to the chairman on human rights for Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, Inc.

Iran-United States Claims Tribunal

In 2001, McDonald was called to serve another historic tribunal, the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, as one of three American Arbitrators. The International Claims Tribunal, also based in The Hague, was established by agreement between the United States and Iran in 1981, and has, since then, adjudicated claims by United States nationals for compensation for assets nationalized by the Iranian government, and claims by the governments against each other. McDonald is the only woman among the panel of nine arbitrators.

Awards

McDonald has received numerous awards and honors, including the National Bar Association's first Equal Justice and Ronald Brown International Law Awards; the American Society of International Law's Goler T. Butcher Award for Human Rights; the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession's Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award; the Open Society Institute's first Women Groundbreakers in International Justice Award (2007); and the 2008 Dorothy Height Lifetime Achievement Award.

She has received the Doctor of Law Honoris Causa from various institutions – the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Notre Dame, Howard University, the Stetson College of Law and Amherst College. In a 1999 ceremony at the United States Supreme Court hosted by former Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, McDonald received the Leadership Award from the Central Eastern European Law Initiative, now consolidated under the ABA Rule of Law Initiative.

See also

• List of African-American federal judges
• List of African-American jurists
• List of first women lawyers and judges in Texas

Sources

• Gabrielle Anne Kirk McDonald at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.