Bunmi Awoniyi making history as Sacramento’s first Black presiding Superior Court judge

The future stands just blocks outside of Bunmi O. Awoniyi’s sixth-floor window: a new Sacramento County courthouse, 18 stories tall, decades in the making, a move-in date set for early next year. That future is also being charted under the roof of the court she now leads: new judges and commissioners who represent the changing face of California, with more on the way.

Awoniyi also is making history. The London-born daughter of Nigerian immigrants is the first Black jurist to serve as presiding judge of Sacramento Superior Court. Elected unanimously in September, she began her two-year term on Jan. 1. Awoniyi was previously the court’s assistant presiding judge.

“Judge Awoniyi is an exceptional jurist,” outgoing Presiding Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael G. Bowman said in September. “She is an excellent choice to lead the court forward.”

Awoniyi is keenly aware of all of it: the court’s transformation happening under her watch, the significance of her new role on the Sacramento bench and the court’s significance on the community.

“Who would have thought that an opportunity would be here for me to go into the position of presiding judge — and also being the first Black woman judge of the Sacramento unified court system to be a presiding judge,” Awoniyi said.

“Titles and positions, they go. In two years, my title will be gone. But the opportunity that was made available and that was realized, that opportunity will remain open because, now, there’s a model for somebody else to come behind. And there was a model for me to walk into it,” she continued. “Now there’s certainly an opportunity that somebody else can realize.”

But most immediately on a late January afternoon, Awoniyi was focused on an intensely busy 2024 ahead.

New judges to swear in, train and send to work. New e-filing technologies onboard to ease the workload for attorneys, court workers and the thousands of people who come to Sacramento’s courthouses each day. More court services to meet the mounting challenges of homelessness and substance abuse. Navigating court funding amid a state budget deficit now pegged at an estimated $73 billion.

“The honeymoon period is coming to an end — it lasted maybe two weeks There’s a lot ahead of us,” Awoniyi said in January. “And we also have to get ready to move into the building. It’s a lot like moving house.”

The new 18-story, 53-courtroom courthouse at Sixth and H streets will soon replace the 1960s-era Gordon D. Schaber Courthouse at 720 Ninth St.; a building bemoaned by courts and city leaders for decades as unsafe, cramped and obsolete. Awoniyi, in January, said the new courthouse is roughly “85% finished,” with electrical and other work still to be completed.

“We’ve been in this building for more than 60 years, so it’s a pivotal time in our court’s history,” Awoniyi said. “What is so exciting is that we can see the end in sight. I think it’s a monumental mark for not just for the Court, but, obviously for the constituents who we serve, that they get to see the court move to a new building.”

The new courthouse-in-waiting outside Awoniyi’s window is a ready metaphor for the changes in the Sacramento courts. Nearly two dozen new judges and commissioners have joined the Sacramento Superior Court over the last two years as many longstanding jurists have retired from the bench.

“We have more diversity. We have more women. We have people of color, of different sexual orientation, and some would say that that is a good thing and that it reflects more of the face of California. The importance to our constituents is that they see people on the bench who look like them. That’s really important for our constituents to see that.”

Awoniyi knows that from her 18 years in family law practice in Sacramento, where she arrived from Britain on a law scholarship in 1990 with two suitcases and $1,500 in cash; her 12 years as a Superior Court judge supervising the family courts, presiding over cases civil and criminal and serving as assistant presiding judge; from her years of school where she never once saw a Black professor.

“That’s historic. It’s had a number of impacts on our court. But it’s also been a tremendous opportunity to the way our court looks,” she said. “I’ll have litigants whose cases I have in court. They’ll say something like, ‘Judge, I’m so proud of you,’ as they’re walking out the door. That would always cause me to pause and wonder — I really appreciate the motivation that made me want to become a judge in the first place. That there are people who look and can be identified by the people that we say we’re serving.”

Awoniyi grew up in inner-city London. “I didn’t grow up with a white picket fence and 2.5 children. We grew up on top of each other where everybody on the street knew everybody else,” she said. “I was that inner-city girl who grew up (in a neighborhood where) the assumption was that you would not get out. I got out.”

She studied law in her native Britain, earning degrees from the University of Essex School of Law and Leicester University; and her J.D. from the Inns of Court, School of Law. She became a barrister in 1988 and soon after served as a crown prosecutor in London near the neighborhood where she grew up and where, too often, she would have to declare a conflict.

“I knew the people that were no longer so young that were still stuck doing the activities that we grew up with,” she said.

The white wig she wore as a barrister sits proudly on a shelf in her chambers next to mementos, family photos and the children she’s met over the years as a volunteer visiting schools and orphanages and providing family counseling in countries across Africa.

In 1990, Judge Awoniyi was a recipient of the Pegasus International Lawyer Scholarship, a United Kingdom exchange program that ultimately led her to become California’s first trial judge of Nigerian descent. Gov. Jerry Brown appointed her to the Sacramento Superior Court in 2012, then the latest marker in a historic through line.

Thirty years earlier, in his first stint as governor in 1982, Brown appointed LaDoris Hazzard Cordell to the Santa Clara County Municipal Court, making her the first Black female judge in Northern California. Cordell went on to serve as Santa Clara Superior Court judge from 1988 to 2001, making more history as that county’s first Black Superior Court judge.

Nearly 9% of California’s judges identify as Black or African American, according to the Judicial Council of California, as of December 2022, the last year data was available, compared to fewer than 5% in 2006.

Today, Awoniyi hopes the history she is making can inspire others to create their own.

“Parents would ask, ‘Could you just take a picture with my son or daughter or my son, please?’” she said, recalling a student essay contest honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in January.

“I noticed that these essay recipient winners had foreign-sounding names like mine, that they were maybe first-generation immigrants, and you hear the parents saying, ‘See, you can achieve anything you want to achieve. You’ve just got to believe. Look at her.’”