First Black Woman Elected Chief of Va. Supreme Court

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Virginia Judge Cleo Powell is used to blazing trails and will do so once again on Jan. 1 when she becomes the first Black woman to serve as Virginia’s chief justice.

Recently, fellow justices chose her to serve as the next chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia. The seven-member court selects its chief justice by majority vote.

Powell succeeds outgoing Chief Justice Bernard Goodwyn, a 1986 University of Virginia Law School graduate, who has led the court since 2022. Goodwyn described Powell as a dedicated and experienced jurist. On Jan. 1, Powell will assume her new post for a four-year term.

“She exemplifies integrity, civility, and professionalism, and I am confident she will lead the Court with wisdom and fairness,” Goodwyn said in a recent statement from the court. In a previous interview, Goodwyn described Powell as “the consummate judicial servant leader.”

Powell, who was first elected to the Supreme Court of Virginia by the General Assembly in 2011 and was reelected to a second 12-year term in 2023, is the only judge on Virginia’s Supreme Court to have served at every level of the Virginia judiciary. Before joining the Supreme Court, Powell served on the Virginia Court of Appeals and, prior to that, held judgeships in both the 12th Judicial Circuit and the Chesterfield General District Court.

She also briefly worked as corporate counsel for Dominion Energy in the early 1990s, before her appointment to the bench in Chesterfield.

A 1993 phone call from Henry Marsh, Richmond’s former mayor who had been elected to the Virginia State Senate in 1991 and needed someone to fill a judgeship on the Chesterfield County General District Court, helped to launch her judicial career.

“I’m thinking, ‘I don’t wanna judge people, that’s no fun,’” Powell said she thought to herself when Marsh phoned her in 1993. “My spirit said to me, ‘You need to do this. You need to answer this call. Forget about the money you might make at Virginia Power in stocks and bonds and whatever else, and you need to go on the bench.’”

Powell, who knew she wanted to be a lawyer when she was just 13, has moved through the ranks. In October 2011, she was appointed the 102nd justice of the Virginia Supreme Court. She became the first Black woman to hold the position and only the fifth woman ever to do so.

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She was sworn in front of her family and supporters, including her brother-in-law and former high school classmate David Harrison, who joined the Emporia Rotary Club’s meeting on Nov. 28 with his wife and Powell’s sister, Della.

“It was one of the most powerful ceremonies I’ve ever witnessed,” Harrison said. “When you see somebody achieve things, it just really hits home.”

Powell will make history once again on Jan. 1, when she assumes her new post for a four-year term, becoming the first Black woman to serve as Virginia’s chief justice.

Powell is a Brunswick County native and a University of Virginia graduate.

Powell grew up in the small community of Ante in Brunswick County. She aspired to go to either the University of Maryland or Virginia Union University.

She ended up accepting scholarships offered by the University of Virginia only after her father borrowed $35 for the application fee that paved the way for her to attend.

After Powell graduated from UVA in 1979 and immediately entered the UVA School of Law, she met John Charles Thomas, one of her mentors and a fellow UVA graduate who became the first Black lawyer at the firm Hunton & Williams. Thomas offered Powell a summer associateship with the firm, where he worked. She returned to the firm following her graduation in 1982. One year later, Thomas was appointed to the Virginia Supreme Court. He was the first Black man to hold the position.

Speaking in a Dec. 5, 2023 interview with the Independent Messenger, Powell recalled how one of her mentors mentioned the name Elizabeth Bermingham Lacy who became the Virginia Supreme Court’s first female justice in 1988. “I just knew, I just knew that I could do that,” Powell said she thought to herself at the time.

“I suggest that we all can be trailblazers because we all can leave a path for someone else to follow,” Powell told graduates when she was the 2021 commencement speaker at UVA Law in a ceremony held during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“And while I accept that others may view me as such, I suggest that we all can be trailblazers because we all can leave a path for someone else to follow. We can all, through a million little ways, make a path easier, more illuminated, less treacherous for others who will come after,” Powell said.

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