by Sam Seliger
Guilford Gazette Student Intern
On March 18, 2019, Howard County native Cynthia Y Cobbs, with her husband Austin, announced her candidacy for Justice on the Illinois State Supreme Court. If elected, Cobbs would become the first African-American woman to hold the position.
Cobbs, currently a justice on the Illinois Appellate Court, was born and raised in Howard County, and graduated from Atholton High School in its inaugural class. Her parents, Rev. Samuel and Beaula Moore, were active members of the Guilford community and involved with the Harriet Tubman School, which Howard County’s African-American high school until desegregation in 1965. Her mother, now 96, still lives in the area.
After earning degrees from Morgan State University and University of Maryland, Cobbs worked as a social worker helping abused and neglected children in Maryland for several years. She then earned a law degree from IIT-Chicago-Kent College of Law, and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1988. Since then, she has been breaking racial boundaries.
Early in her career, she became the first African-American senior judicial law clerk on the Illinois Supreme Court, as a clerk for Chief Justice Charles E Freeman, who was the Court’s first African-American judge. In 2002, after serving as its Chief Legal Counsel, Cobbs was named the Director of the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, becoming both the first woman and first African-American to hold the position.
As Director, she oversaw the entire judicial branch of the state government, setting the administrative agenda and managing the budget of the Supreme Court, developing judicial education programs for all state judges, and developing and implementing policies for electronic filing of documents in trial court. She also organized Illinois’ first statewide welfare summit, bringing together judges, lawyers, and welfare practitioners to work on strategies to help children in the child welfare system.
She was appointed a Circuit Court judge in 2011 by a unanimous vote of the Illinois Supreme Court, and appointed to the Appellate Court in 2015, on which she has served since. The election for Supreme Court will occur in 2020, and if elected, Cobbs will serve on the Court for 10 years.
On her campaign website, Cobbs says that her upbringing taught her the importance of generosity and hard work in order to achieve success. She added that judges are citizens, role models and public servants; in order to be a good judge, one must not only be fair and accessible, they must also be accountable to their community. In her campaign platform, Cobbs touts her “rich and diverse” professional career, and her 30 years of experience in the Illinois Judicial System.
In addition to a fundraiser in Chicago, Cobbs held an event locally, at Martin’s West in Baltimore, on Friday, July 26 to promote her campaign. The fundraiser featured special guest, fellow Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings, the US Congressman representing Maryland’s 7th District, which includes most of Howard County, as well as large parts of Baltimore County and Baltimore City. More information about the event, and her campaign, can be found on her website, www.justicecobbs.org.