Hazel Mountain Walker was Cleveland’s first African-American female school principal and one of the first black women admitted to the bar. She pursued her law degree not, she said, to practice law, but to “prove that black women could earn law degrees.” She later earned a teacher’s certificate and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Western Reserve University. Her true calling was in education, especially teaching the children of non-English-speaking parents and African-American children newly arrived from the South. In 1936, she was appointed principal of the Rutherford B. Hayes School and in 1954, she was chosen to head the George Washington Carver School. Active in the Cuyahoga County Republican Party and a member of its executive committee, she was one of the first black women admitted into the Women’s City Club.