Mary P. Hutchings (1915-1991) was a Cleveland, Ohio, attorney and for ten years the Chief Referee of the Cleveland Civil Service Commission. She was born in Union City, Tennessee. Her family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and she attended the Cleveland City Schools before graduating from Cleveland Heights High School. She returned to Tennessee and graduated from Lemoyne-Owen College in Memphis and later received a graduate degree from Western Reserve University School of Applied Social Science. In 1951 she joined future jurist Lillian Burke as a graduate of Cleveland Marshall Law School.
In addition to private law practice, Hutchings served as an assistant state attorney general for mental hygiene and corrections and a guidance counselor at the Cleveland Job Corps for Women. In her civic life she served on several boards and was active with the NAACP, Women's City Club, National Association of Black Women Attorneys, Americans for Democratic Action, the Glenville YWCA, the Phillis Wheatley Association, Jack & Jill of America and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Her local political activism earned her invitations to Lyndon Johnson's 1965 presidential inauguration and state of the union message to Congress. She supported Carl Stokes' 1965 and 1967 mayoral campaigns. She served as a precinct committeewoman for Wards 19 and 25.
In 1938 she married George Hutchings and had one son, Phillip.
The Mary P. Hutchings Papers, 1931-1991 and undated, consist of agendas, cards, certificates, correspondence, invitations, memos, newsletters, newspaper clippings, postcards, proclamations, programs, reports, a resume, speeches, subpoenas, telegrams, and a yearbook.
The collection is of value to researchers seeking biographical information on Mary P. Hutchings, as well as information on African American women and women lawyers, in general and in particular from Cleveland, Ohio. Those investigating Lemoyne-Owen College, the mayoral campaigns of Carl Stokes, the presidential campaign and election of Lyndon Johnson, political invitations, civil rights, and Democratic politics of the 1960s and 1970s, will find information of value in this collection.
The collection is arranged alphabetically by document type and then chronologically.
Processed by Thelma Pierce and Samuel W. Black in 2001.
None.
[Container ___, Folder ___ ] MS 4851 Mary P. Hutchings Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio
Phillip L. Hutchings, 1996.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.