Descended from a prominent political family, he was a son of the former Thalia Allen Tharp (1843-1872) and Milton Joseph Cunningham, known as Joe Cunningham, a member of both houses of the Louisiana State Legislature and the Attorney General of Louisiana from 1884 to 1888 and again from 1892 to 1900.
Tulane University Law School.
West. T."s mother died at the age of twenty-nine when he was only a year old. Cunningham was reared in his native Natchitoches, where he attended public schools, the preparatory department of Tulane University in New Orleans, and the Louisiana State Normal School, a teacher-training institution, now Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. Foreign fourteen years, he was engaged in farming and stock raising and thereafter retained plantation interests.
He studied law at Tulane University School of Law and in 1904 was admitted to the bar before the Louisiana Supreme Court.
After a term in the state House of Representatives, during which time he continued his private law practice as well, Cunningham was elected in 1912 as a state judge of the 11th Judicial District Court, encompassing Natchitoches and Red River parishes. He helped to arrange the burial in the family plot of his boyhood family"s African American housekeeper, Mary "Mammy" Pitcher (1847-1913).
