By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 20, 2006

Mabel Haden, who was 97 when she died of cardiac arrest Oct. 12 at Providence Hospital, never dreamed of practicing law when she was growing up in rural Virginia in the early years of the last century. The nearby Blue Ridge Mountains might well have become molehills before a young black girl who got her early education in a one-room schoolhouse would grow up to be a lawyer.

Someone forgot to tell the precocious Ms. Haden, though. After working for years as a nanny, a teacher and a switchboard operator, she became one of the first African American female lawyers in the District. She practiced law for nearly four decades.

Throughout her career, Ms. Haden provided legal assistance to hundreds of indigent clients and tirelessly encouraged young African American women to go into law. She established and financed a scholarship fund to help young women interested in the law, and it led to the creation of the annual Red Dress Ball held by the Association of Black Women Attorneys.

"She was the real deal," said Washington lawyer Jack Oleander. "She was a great pioneer, and she did an awful lot to mentor young people. She not only helped young black students to become lawyers, she crossed racial lines to help all students."

Oleander recalled that Ms. Haden regularly collected old law books from firms around the city, using them to help build a law library for the District's now-closed Lorton prison.

Mabel Rebecca Dole Haden was born near Lynch Station, Va., on Feb. 17, 1909, or perhaps in 1904. (Census records are unclear, and she occasionally told people she was born in 1914.)

The eighth of 11 children, she recalled her mother telling her, "You are the smartest child I have." She read constantly, often taking her books and stealing away to read under beds, in closets or at an older sister's house.

She got her early education in a one-room school up the road from the family home; two older sisters were her teachers. When she was a little older, she and her sister Alice became students at the Allen Home School in Asheville, N.C., which was established for "colored girls" by white women from New England during Reconstruction. When Alice graduated, the Allen Home headmaster informed the girls' parents that the school "could not manage Mabel without Alice."

Ms. Haden, who told family members that she was "a stubborn and willful child who did not listen to anyone," transferred to the Barber-Scotia School for Girls, now a college, in Concord, N.C., then graduated in the mid-1920s from Pittsylvania County High School in Gretna, Va.

Unable to afford college, she took a teaching job in the public schools of Campbell County, Va., and later in the Danville, Va., area. She sent most of her salary home to help support the family.

Still determined to go to college, she moved to Washington, where she worked as a nanny for several years during the 1930s. At her mother's suggestion, she attended night school to prepare herself for college and received a second high school diploma. At last, in the 1940s, she enrolled at Howard University but ran out of money the semester before she was to graduate.

She took a job as a switchboard operator at a Catholic social services agency in the District. One day, a priest at the agency, the Rev. Michael J. Ready, asked her about her plans for the fall semester. Ms. Haden told him that she wanted to return to school but didn't have the money.

"Choose your school, Mabel," Ready told her, promising to pay her tuition. Instead of returning to Howard, she enrolled for her final semester at the less expensive Virginia State College, where she received her undergraduate degree in education in the early 1940s.

For the next several years, she taught at Neval Thomas Elementary School and other D.C. schools. Learning that a friend was attending Howard University law school at night, she decided she could, too. She received her law degree in 1948, graduating as president of her class.

In the early years of her practice, she was a criminal defense attorney. She acquired many of her clients while sitting on the front bench of criminal court where she eagerly waited for the judge to assign her a case. (The front seat was called "the mourners' bench," she recalled, because she and her fellow lawyers were so desperate for clients.) She eventually saved enough money to open an office and switched from criminal to civil law.

She also continued teaching into the 1950s, then devoted herself full time to law.

Although she worked seven days a week, she found time to get her master's degree in law from Georgetown University in 1956. She and a classmate were the first women to receive the degree, and Ms. Haden was the first African American woman to do so. She also got her real estate broker's license.

Sandra Robinson, her niece and protege, recalled that Ms. Haden wanted to be around people and action. When she wasn't working, she loved to dance and listen to gospel and rhythm and blues, especially the sounds of Ray Charles, Brook Benton and Wilson Pickett. She also traveled a great deal, wrote poetry and held poetry readings.

In 1987, she represented District popcorn vendors who had been prohibited from selling fresh popcorn on the streets. She won, after an hour-long popcorn summit produced a change in the ordinance.

She was a member of a number of professional, civic and political organizations and was co-founder and president of the Association of Black Women Attorneys. Among numerous awards, she received the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion of Merit from the Washington Bar Association.

Ms. Haden's husband, Russell Smith, died in 2002.

There are no immediate survivors.