When she died in 2019, Wilhelmenia Reuben-Cooke’s family members noted that she lived a life devoted to family, spiritual growth, community service, mentorship and the promotion of educational opportunities.
Those qualities must have been apparent when classmates literally crowned Reuben-Cooke, one of the first five African American undergraduate students admitted to Duke with the class of 1963. During Reuben-Cooke’s senior year, Duke’s overwhelmingly white student body selected her as the campus’s first Black May Queen. The news was controversial at the time and picked up by the Associated Press.
Reuben-Cooke went on to become a leading attorney and civil rights activist and is the first Black woman to have a building on Duke’s campus named after her.
A descendant of a long line of educators and missionaries, Reuben-Cooke was born in Georgetown, South Carolina, on December 13, 1946. She was active in the civil rights movement as an undergraduate at Duke, at one point signing an open letter protesting the memberships of key Duke administrators and faculty members at the then all-white Hope Valley Country Club in West Durham.
After graduating with honors in 1967, Reuben-Cooke earned a law degree from the University of Michigan School of Law in 1973, becoming an attorney and professor of law. She held leadership positions at several law schools, including the Georgetown University Law Center for Public Representation, where she engaged in and supervised litigation before the Federal Communications Commission, federal courts and the Supreme Court.
During her career she remained connected to Duke, serving two terms on the Board of Trustees. In 2011, Reuben-Cooke received the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2013, the university established a $1 million scholarship fund to honor her and the four other first Black undergraduates at Duke.
Reuben-Cooke died at the age of 72. In 2021, the Sociology-Psychology Building on West Campus was renamed for her.
