She was born Sarah Tilghman in Baltimore in 1896. As a youth, she was extremely intelligent and also very determined. She excelled at athletics and academics alike.
She earned a bachelor's degree from Baltimore’s Goucher College, then an all-women’s college. After graduating in 1917, she took a series of interesting jobs on her way to her law career. She taught science for two years at a small school in North Carolina before coming to Washington, DC, to attend law school at George Washington University.
In a time before women could vote nationwide or even attend some universities, she was determined to become an attorney and worked her way through law school as a police officer, taking classes at night. For a time, she even had to live in a tent on the edge of the city.
She met her future husband, George Hughes, a Texas native, in law school. The two married in 1922 and left for Dallas. While her husband quickly found success with a private firm, Sarah Hughes had a difficult time as a woman in spite of her impressive law school degree.
One law firm in Dallas hired her as a receptionist and only handed her a few cases at first. Within a short time, she earned the respect of the other attorneys.
Nevertheless, she enjoyed the law and “the thrill of a fight” as an attorney, as she told an audience in 1928.
In 1930, she was elected to the state legislature. She worked for rights for women and served on the Judiciary and Labor committees. One issue she had become passionate about was a law barring women from serving on juries. She attempted to have the law changed in her time in the legislature but failed. She continued to work for it afterward, and as a result of her work, the right for Texas women to serve on juries was secured by 1954.
In January 1935, as Hughes started her third term in the legislature, Gov. James V. Allred appointed Hughes to an open judicial, the 14th District Court in Dallas. In the process, she became the first Texas woman to serve as a district judge. She was elected to a full term in 1936 and re-elected every four years up to 1960.
When influential Dallas Congressman Hatton Sumners retired in 1946, Hughes jumped at the chance to run for the seat that comprised all of Dallas County. However, she came just short in the primary against J. Franklin Wilson, himself a former Dallas judge.
She had become a respected figure in legal circles and had generously donated to her old college in Maryland. In honor of what she had achieved, Goucher College established the Sarah T. Hughes Field Center in Politics to study Maryland politics and to encourage students to get more heavily involved in politics. She helped secure Dallas County’s first juvenile detention center in 1950. In 1952, she was surprised by being nominated for vice-president at the Democratic National Convention. She realized she did not have a chance and won only one vote while the vice-presidential nomination went to Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama with Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson heading the ticket.
Hughes ran for the State Supreme Court in 1958. In a hard-fought contest, she won 49.3% of the vote, coming up just 14,000 votes short in her race against incumbent Justice Joe Greenhill.
At 65, when most people were preparing to retire, Hughes was determined to move up the ladder. In 1961, she asked her old friends Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and Sen. Ralph Yarbrough to recommend her for a federal judgeship. Johnson, Yarbrough, and House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Bonham lobbied President John F. Kennedy for the appointment.
Several women had been appointed to the federal judiciary already, starting with Judge Kathryn Sellers in 1918, but the issue that the American Bar Association and even Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had was her age. President Kennedy nevertheless was impressed by her accomplishments and appointed her to the newly-created position of Federal Judge for the District of North Texas.
It was that fateful trip to Dallas by President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, that thrust her into the national spotlight. After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson, fearing a Soviet plot, insisted on being sworn in as president immediately and asked for Hughes.
The judge was preparing to leave for Austin to see Kennedy’s speech that night when Barefoot Sanders, a United States Attorney and future federal judge, contacted her and asked her to come to Love Field to swear in Johnson aboard Air Force One.
Hughes administered the oath to Johnson in a cramped compartment aboard the plane with the grieving aides and next to a traumatized Jackie Kennedy still in clothes covered in her husband’s blood. Only photographs from reporters and an audio recording exist as no TV cameras were present. In that horrible moment, Hughes became the only woman to swear in a president – and the only Texan.
In 1964, the Federal Bar Association presented its first Outstanding Woman Jurist Award to Hughes. She retired from her full-time status in 1975 at age 79. She spent her last years in a Dallas nursing home, where she died in April 1985 at age 88.
