Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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DECEMBER 14-20, 2016 UCW 21 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM JOHN HOOD, President of the John Locke Foundation. Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly. com. Our Most Important Lawyer by D.G. MARTIN Our most important lawyer The most important lawyer in modern North Carolina history finally has a biography. This week UNC Press is releasing Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights by Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier. If you do not agree with my assertion about the importance of Chambers, read the book, and then we will talk. When Chambers died in 2013, I wrote, "Simply put, Chambers's work and the work of others he inspired are directly responsible for North Carolina casting off a culture of segregation and repression and replacing it with one of inclusion and opportunity." In their new book Rosen and Mosnier show in great detail how Chambers and his colleagues did it. Beginning in 1964 when Chambers opened his law practice in Charlotte, he initiated a whirlwind of legal actions that attacked and often overturned traditional discriminatory practices in education, employment, and government. The authors explain carefully and clearly the major legal cases and how the victories and defeats for Chambers came about. But, as the book's introduction explains, while his legal victories were his most notable achievements, his story "is of necessity as much about the times as about the person." When Chambers was born in Montgomery County in 1936, depression times were bleak, especially for rural blacks. However, during these times, his father built a successful auto repair business, which provided enough income to send Chambers's older brother and sister to Laurinburg Institute, a nearby private high school for college preparation. Plans for Chambers to attend the school were dashed when a white customer walked away from a $2,000 bill. His father was unable to persuade any white lawyer to represent him. Chambers lost the chance to attend Laurinburg. "Years later," the authors write, "he would locate his choice to practice law in this moment." I remember the day in 1962 when I first heard the Chambers name in a radio report that a Negro law student at the University of North Carolina School of Law had been appointed editor of the Law Review and had the highest grades in his class. Rosen and Mosnier describe how Chambers overcame an inadequate high school experience. "I didn't know how to write an essay and could hardly spell," Chambers said. But he succeeded at North Carolina Central and in graduate school at the University of Michigan, so much so, that he was admitted to the UNC's law school even though his LSAT scores were rock bottom. Although he established himself near the top of his class during his first year, there was no warm welcome at the law school. Chambers's and his wife Vivian's "feelings of isolation were compounded by their exclusion from any place in the life of the law school, and they could not help but resent the dismissive and demeaning treatment they encountered on campus." The combination of great success and demeaning treatment would follow Chambers throughout his early professional career. In 1968, when Chambers began an oral argument before the state's supreme court, Chief Justice R. Hunt Parker "stood up and left the courtroom; the chief justice returning only after Chambers concluded his presentation." Ironically, last month in Raleigh, the N.C. Literary and Historical Association awarded its R. Hunt Parker Award for Literary Achievement to Gerald Barrax, an African-American poet who taught writing at N.C. State University. Barrax's powerful poetry draws on the struggles of people like Chambers and his parents. Thanks to the changes that Chambers's advocacy and his example forced on us and to the more welcoming attitudes that has accompanied them, I can imagine that had Chambers and Parker been alive to see Barrax receive the Parker award last month, the three of them would have happily smiled and posed for pictures together. Cooper Faces Pivotal Choice by JOHN HOOD In what direction will North Carolina go under a Democratic governor-elect, Roy Cooper, and a Republican General Assembly? There are three possibilities. The least likely scenario — but the one that progressives in North Carolina desperately hope to engineer — is a U-turn. They want to see Cooper wage years of unremitting ideological warfare. They want constant protests, lawsuits, vetoes, and personal attacks on GOP politicians and conservative leaders. They believe these tactics destroyed Pat McCrory and hounded him out of office. They now believe more of the same will destroy their other enemies and hound them out of office, so the Left can reverse the conservative policies enacted over the past six years. I think these progressives are about to be disappointed. Cooper and his team can read election results and polls just as well as the rest of us. They recognize that his edge over McCrory was just two-tenths of a percent. They can see that in the same election cycle, Republicans won the presidential and Senate races, got the most votes for legislature (not just more seats because of district maps), and won their first modern majority on the Council of State. They know, in other words, that the sweeping public repudiation of conservative governance the Left hoped for did not happen. Another scenario, widely expected among North Carolina politicos, is that state government is about to enter a period of stalemate and stasis. While Cooper will control state agencies and departments and use other powers to exercise policy influence on the margin, his budgets and major initiatives will be dead-on-arrival at the General Assembly. For their part, Republican lawmakers will be able to protect their past gains but will struggle to enact new ones. North Carolina won't reverse course, in this view, but neither will it continue its course of reform. This is a more realistic scenario than Progressive Paradise, I admit. Still, I think it ignores the personalities involved. Cooper is a longtime politician with significant experience in the legislature, including instances in which Democrats and Republicans cooperated to elect leaders or enact legislation. As attorney general, he did not join many of the left-wing crusades his Democratic counterparts in other states concocted, although of course his decisions didn't please conservatives, either. In short, left-wing rabble-rouser is not a role that would come easy to Cooper. Senate leader Phil Berger, House Speaker Tim Moore, and other legislative leaders also have significant experience. While firmly committed to their conservative accomplishments to date, and hardly intimidated by Cooper's narrow win, they will not assume that every interaction with the new governor needs to be a confrontation. When an opportunity presents itself to enact legislation of mutual interest, they will seize it. That leads me to my final — and more hopeful — scenario. It assumes that while the two sides will lock horns on a variety of fiscal and policy matters, they will cooperate on some issues. For example, there appears to be bipartisan interest in building on North Carolina's initial round of criminal-justice reforms, which have saved the taxpayers lots of money without endangering the public. Lawmakers from both parties have also indicated concern about the inequities of our current school-financing system and the excesses of occupational licensing, which keeps some North Carolina workers from changing jobs or starting their own businesses. A harder slog would be to reform the way the state regulates medical services. According to a new study by George Mason University's Mercatus Center, North Carolina ranks in the bottom 10 states in health care openness and access. We overly restrict competition among hospitals and innovation in service delivery. Virginia (#13) might be a good model to emulate here, although special-interest groups will fight such reforms tooth-and-nail. Roy Cooper's election gave Democrats around the country a rare piece of good news during an otherwise dismal showing. But it doesn't signal a leftward lurch in public policy or the North Carolina electorate. If Cooper assumes otherwise, he'll get himself in trouble very quickly. N.C. Governor-elect Roy Cooper D.G. MARTIN, Host of UNC's Book Watch. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly. com. 910.484.6200