Ruth Whitehead (Whaley) was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The daughter of teachers, she attended Livingstone College in Salisbury, NC. She graduated in 1919 and worked for a few years as a teacher of the deaf.
On July 3, 1920, she married Herman S. Whaley. The couple lived in Harlem, New York, where they raised their two children. Her husband encouraged her to study law. She was the first Black woman to enroll at Fordham Law School, and she graduated in 1924 at the top of her class. In 1925, she was the third Black woman admitted to New York Bar, and in 1933, she became the first Black woman admitted to the North Carolina Bar.
Whaley was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho, and she was a frequent speaker at Sigma Gamma Rho regional meetings and Boules (conventions).
Sigma Gamma Rho’s Boule took place in Birmingham, Alabama, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 1940. “Cooperation through service” was the theme of the Boule and:
in an effort to stress the educational significance of the National meeting a special program will be given….One of Sigma’s most outstanding members in the person of Soror Ruth Whitehead Whaley of Kappa Sigma of New York City will speak at the Historic 16th Street Baptist church on Sunday morning, December 29. Soror Whaley has been a practicing attorney in NYC for the past 15 years. Actively engaged in practice in all the courts of NYS including the highest court of Appeals of Albany, NY specializing in Appeals and Civil Service. She is the first Negro woman admitted to the bar of NC. First Negro to actively engage in the practice of law in New York.
When she was Industrial Commissioner of New York, she won a case against Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor.
In 1943, she attended Sigma Gamma Rho’s southeastern regional conference. Whaley also attended the Northeast Regional meeting when she served as basileus (president) of the Kappa Sigma Chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho.
In 1944, at the 16th Boule, she served as parliamentarian and was also a guest speaker at the educational session at Quinn Chapter church on August 20, a Sunday afternoon. In 1948, she was in Cleveland for the Boule and spoke at a public meeting on August 19 at St. James AME Church.
From 1951 until her retirement in 1973, she was Secretary to the New York City Board of Estimate.
Whaley spoke in Philadelphia at the 1961 Boule and was legal counsel at the 1965 Boule. In August of 1971, she spoke at the 33rd Boule in Dallas, Texas. It appears that she attended decades worth of Sigma Gamma Rho Boules and regional events and played a role in each of them.
In addition to her service to Sigma Gamma Rho, she served as first president of the Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club and a Vice President of the National Council of Negro Women.
She died on December 23, 1977 at the age of 76. Shortly after her death, Fordham University’s Black Law Students Association named their annual award the Ruth Whitehead Whaley Award. She was elected to Fordham Law School’s Hall of Fame in 2014.
