As a youngster in Alabama born in 1942, Richard Sinkfield sometimes tagged along with his mother to office buildings she’d been hired to clean at night. Twice divorced, Annie L. Sinkfield Thomas worked where she could to pay for her own education—and help through college in various ways her brother, her son, six of Richard’s cousins and her stepchildren, too, even after divorcing their father. She became the first in her family with a college degree and got a high school teaching job in Midway, Alabama, still cleaning houses to boost her income.
At 16, her son embarked on “a long undergraduate college career” at what is now Tennessee State University, established in Nashville for black students. He dropped in and out until graduating at age 26 in 1968. Sinkfield had no career plan when a history professor suggested law, and a recommendation by the history department head helped Sinkfield into the only law school where he applied—Vanderbilt. Atlanta’s Powell Goldstein Frazer & Murphy (now Bryan Cave) recruited him, and in 1971 he became its first African-American lawyer, the third at a major Atlanta firm.
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