It was 1967 and she was in seventh grade in Caroline County. She was flipping through a Scholastic Weekly Reader in social studies class when she saw a picture of Patricia Harris, a black female attorney who had just been appointed ambassador to Luxembourg by President Lyndon Johnson.

That made Harris the first African-American woman to serve as an envoy of the American government.

“Seeing her picture and reading the article had a huge impact on me,” Roberts, 63, said. “It’s so important for young people to see people who look like them in positions of authority.”

From that time on, Roberts knew she wanted to be a lawyer and she never deviated from that goal.

In 1990, she made history herself when she became the first black woman to serve as a judge in Virginia. She was elected by the General Assembly to the Richmond Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court and served for 26 years, retiring in 2016.

In February, Roberts was honored by the Library of Virginia and Dominion Energy as one of seven “Strong Men and Women in Virginia History.” The program, now in its sixth year, recognizes black Virginians both past and present who have made significant contributions to the state.

“I was very excited and proud,” she said. “I’ve attended the program in the past and just sat in the back in awe of the other nominees.”

Roberts said she had a happy childhood growing up in Bowling Green. Her father, Edgar Edwards, owned a cab company and her mother, Annie, was a stay-at-home mom.

“The neighborhood was like a village—everyone looked out for everyone else’s kids,” she said.

Things got a little tougher after Roberts’s father died of cancer when she was 14. Her mother had to work outside the home for the first time. She first found a job in a school cafeteria and then at a home for delinquent girls in Hanover.

Though Roberts has largely positive memories of her childhood, she does remember that it was segregated community. Blacks and whites had completely separate social lives.

“I remember I never went to the movies in Bowling Green because blacks had to sit in the balcony and my parents refused to do that,” she said.

Schools were still segregated when she started kindergarten in 1960. They were integrated in 1968, when Roberts was in high school.

“But growing up, I never felt like I got an inferior education at all,” she said. “Caroline had built identical elementary schools, so [the black and white schools] were exactly alike. I got an excellent, nurturing education and was easily able to compete when we did integrate. It was a smooth transition.”

Roberts’s mother and much of her extended family still live in Bowling Green. She said Caroline was and still is a community where blacks are actively involved in local life and politics.

After high school, she studied political science at Virginia Tech and then attended law school at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. She returned to Virginia to work as a prosecutor.

In 1990, Roberts said, there were many people who thought it was “beyond time” for Virginia to have a black female judge.

“They fought hard for my election,” she said. “I knew I would be the first, and when I was initially approached I thought, ‘Oh, I’m not the one.’”

She had a two-year-old son, Anthony, and thought she needed more experience. But politicians and colleagues convinced her, “and I’m very glad I listened to them,” she said.

Support from her husband and extended family helped her juggle work and motherhood.

“There’s no way I would have been able to do it without that partnership,” she said.

Serving on the Juvenile and Domestic Court bench involved difficult decisions and coming face-to-face with the “cruel things adults can do to children,” Roberts said.

“I always had a strong reaction when we had to commit a young person to the state or recommend a young person be tried as an adult,” she said. “I felt like the court had failed—could we have done more?”

On the other hand, she got to play a part in reuniting families and creating new families through adoption.

In 2002, she established a National Adoption Day celebration in Richmond, based on an idea that she joked she got from the television show “Judging Amy.”

In what has become an annual event, families come together at the court house one Saturday in November to have their adoptions finalized and celebrate all those that took place that year.

“It also helps us to publicize the need for foster care homes,” Roberts said.

She decided to retire from the bench in 2016 to spend more time with her husband, Roscoe Roberts, who is general counsel to the University of Virginia, and her two sons Anthony, 30, an MBA student at the Darden School of Business, and Justin, 25, a Navy pilot. She continues to serve as a substitute judge and is active with her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta; volunteer organization The Links; and on the board of the YMCA of Greater Richmond.

In her speech at the Strong Men and Women of Virginia awards program in Richmond Feb. 7, Roberts challenged Virginians to “stay woke,” or socially aware of issues, in today’s often-tense political and racial climate.

“I’m extremely concerned with policies and attitudes that don’t seem to understand current truths about racial relations,” she said in an interview. “Fears and prejudices today are more controlling than relationships and conversation.”

She said that overcoming these prejudices requires society to establish places where “people can interact with those who are different from themselves.”

“Education will always be the best method for attacking ignorance,” she said in her speech, addressing Virginia’s youth. “Know in your heart that what some people mean for evil, God can use for good.”