Charlye Ola Farris
Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1929 - 2010) Public school educators James Randolph Farris, Sr. and Roberta (Bell) Farris welcomed their only daughter, Charlye Ola Farris, on June 30, 1929 in Wichita Falls. Charlye graduated as valedictorian of Booker T. Washington High School at age 15, and from Prairie View A&M College in 1948 at the age of eighteen with a degree in Political Science. After a year of teaching, Charlye pursued her interest in becoming an attorney. Farris received her law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1953. During her final year, Farris’ class worked on the landmark racial desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Charlye was sworn in on Nov. 12, 1953 as the first black woman to be licensed to practice law in Texas. Charlye started a solo practice in Wichita Falls, becoming the first black, male or female, to actively practice law in Wichita County. Charlye faced many obstacles and much discrimination in Wichita County and within the legal profession. However, in 1954, Farris was selected to serve as county judge pro-tem, making her the first black person to serve as a judge in the South since Reconstruction. Among her many awards, such as the American Bar Association’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement, one of her proudest was serving on the Board of Regents of Midwestern State University, where she was not permitted to attend earlier as a student due to her race. During her 56 years of legal practice, Charlye served her community in numerous ways. Her life is a testament to the determination and the impact one individual can have on a community, state, and nation. 175 Years of Texas Independence * 1836 - 2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born in Wichita Falls in 1929 to a family of educators, Charlye Ola Farris was a prodigy who finished high school at 15 and college at 18 before earning her law degree at Howard University, where her class helped prepare the Brown v. Board of Education case. In 1953 she became the first Black woman licensed to practice law in Texas, then opened a solo practice in a county where no Black attorney had actively practiced. A year later she served as county judge pro-tem — the first Black person to sit as a judge in the South since Reconstruction.
Why it matters
Her career opened doors in the Texas legal profession decades before the civil-rights movement crested, showing how one determined individual could break barriers of race and gender in the Jim Crow South.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Charlye Ola Farris was born in Wichita Falls in 1929, into a north Texas world governed by Jim Crow. Segregation was the law and the daily reality: separate schools, separate institutions, and a legal profession almost entirely closed to Black Americans, and to Black women doubly so. That is the backdrop against which her whole life must be measured.
Her early years fell in the Depression and the years around World War II, a period when educational opportunities for Black Texans were sharply limited yet fiercely valued. She came from a family of public school educators, and that heritage of learning propelled her forward at astonishing speed.
By the time she entered her profession in the 1950s, the nation stood on the edge of the modern civil rights era. The legal challenges to segregation were building toward their climax, and a young Black attorney stepping into a Texas courtroom was doing so at the very hinge of that history — before the marches, before the famous victories, when the barriers were still fully in place.
People & events
Charlye Ola Farris was, by any measure, a prodigy. The only daughter of two educators, she graduated as valedictorian of her high school at fifteen and finished college at eighteen with a degree in political science. After a year of teaching, she set her sights on the law and earned her degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1953.
Howard was no ordinary place to study law in those years — it was the intellectual engine room of the legal fight against segregation. During her final year there, Farris's class worked on the landmark school desegregation case that would soon reshape the nation. She was learning her profession inside the very movement that was about to change American law.
Back home, the barriers she broke came in rapid succession. In 1953 she became the first Black woman licensed to practice law in Texas, and opened a solo practice in Wichita Falls — becoming the first Black person of any gender to actively practice law in her county. The next year she was chosen to serve as county judge pro-tem, making her the first Black person to sit as a judge anywhere in the South since Reconstruction. She faced discrimination and obstacle at every turn, yet practiced for fifty-six years. Among her proudest honors was serving on the board of regents of a university she had once been barred from attending as a student because of her race.
Its place in the American story
Farris's career is a reminder that the civil rights movement was won not only in mass marches but in individual acts of quiet, relentless breakthrough. Years before the movement crested, she was integrating a Texas courtroom simply by standing in it as an attorney and, astonishingly, as a judge — the first Black jurist in the South since Reconstruction, a title that measures the sheer length of the exclusion she ended.
Her connection to the landmark school desegregation case ties her personal story to one of the defining events in American law, the ruling that declared segregated schools unconstitutional. She was, in a real sense, present at the movement's intellectual birth, part of the generation of Howard-trained lawyers who carried the fight into every corner of the country.
Her life also braids together several of the great American struggles at once — for racial equality, for women's full participation, for the simple right to practice a profession. That she later helped govern an institution that had once refused her a seat as a student is the whole arc of twentieth-century civil rights compressed into a single biography.
If you visit
This is a memorial, so come to it as a place of reflection rather than spectacle. Stand with the marker and let the sequence of "firsts" sink in — first Black woman licensed to practice law in Texas, first to practice in her county, first Black judge in the South since Reconstruction — each one a wall that a young woman in her twenties pushed through, alone, in a town that did not make it easy.
Remember that this is her hometown. She was born here, built her long practice here, and served this community for more than half a century. The marker sits in the landscape of her actual life, which gives it a particular weight; the courthouse and civic life of Wichita Falls were the very arenas she integrated.
For a traveler, this is a stop that deepens a road trip rather than decorating it — a chance to connect the sweeping national story of civil rights to one determined person and one Texas town. Give it a few unhurried minutes, and let it change how you see the ordinary courthouses you'll pass on the rest of your journey.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Charlye Ola Farris
- · James Randolph Farris, Sr.
- · Roberta Bell Farris
Related events
- · Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
Themes & tags
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