Margaret Bush Wilson (January 30, 1919 – August 11, 2009) was an American lawyer and activist. Wilson broke many barriers as an African-American woman throughout her professional career. Biography Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she successfully managed the St. Louis law firm for more than 40 years. Wilson completed her undergraduate degree at Talladega College. She graduated with honors in 1940, after studying in India for six months, as a recipient of the Juliette Derricotte Memorial Fund for Undergraduate Study in India, which had been established by Sue Bailey Thurman. Wilson was one of two women in the second class of the Lincoln University of Missouri School of Law. She was the second African-American woman that passed the bar and licensed to practice in Missouri in 1943. In 1946, Wilson's father, James T. Bush, a real estate broker, was instrumental in helping the J. D. Shelley family buy a home. The family was later ordered out of the home when the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the racial restrictive covenant governing the property was enforceable. Mrs. Wilson was counsel for the Real Estate Brokers Association, which was formed at her father's initiative to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that such covenants were unenforceable in the courts. In 1948 Wilson became the first black woman in Missouri to run for Congress, running on the Progressive Party ticket. She lost the race and later joined the Democratic Party. In 1954, Wilson celebrated with colleagues and friends when the Brown vs. Board of Education decision was handed down. The next year, her five-year-old son started kindergarten at one of the city's newly integrated schools. Wilson's professional experience included serving as United States Attorney for the Rural Electrification Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Assistant Attorney General of Missouri. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Wilson rose through the presidencies of the St. Louis and Missouri chapters of the NAACP, when activists began demonstrating in front of the Jefferson Bank & Trust and eventually forced St. Louis businesses to begin hiring blacks for previously all-white jobs. She was elected to the national board of the NAACP in 1963 and became the first woman to chair of the organization's National Board of Directors in 1975. After serving nine terms in that office, Wilson was involved in a dispute with