© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.
MP3 file derived from WAV preservation master, which was derived from original analog cassettes.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.
The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.
The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.
Original grammar and spelling have been preserved.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "
All em dashes are encoded as —
Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview B-0050, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Naomi Elizabeth Morris was born in 1921 in Wilson, North Carolina. Having grown up with a strong mother as a role model and with family expectations to excel in school, Morris attended Atlantic Christian College (now Barton College) from 1939 to 1943, earning her degree in English. The summer after her graduation from college, Morris lived in Washington, D.C., with several of her sorority sisters. There they worked for the war effort with the Signal Corps, coding and decoding messages. The death of her father brought Morris back to Wilson that same year. After moving in with her mother, Morris began to work as a legal secretary for William Lucas at the Lucas & Rand law firm. She excelled at her tasks there, and in 1952, Lucas recommended her for the School of Law at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Morris describes what it was like to be one of the only women attending law school at UNC during the mid-1950s. Following her graduation in 1955, Morris returned to Wilson to work for the Lucas & Rand law firm, where she quickly became a partner by 1957. In the 1960s, Morris became increasingly involved in politics, campaigning for Governor Dan Moore. In 1967, Moore nominated Morris to become one of the founding members of the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Morris describes in detail what it was like to serve on the Court of Appeals from the late 1960s into the early 1980s, and she offers her thoughts on the role of law and the judiciary in politics.
Naomi Elizabeth Morris grew up in Wilson, North Carolina, during the 1920s and 1930s. After graduating from college in the early 1940s, she worked as a legal secretary before attending the School of Law at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. One of the only women to graduate with her class in 1955, Morris practiced law for twelve years before becoming one of the original judges to serve on the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Judge Morris, the first thing that I was thinking it would be interesting to talk about, as we sit here this afternoon three weeks before your birthday, are your father and your mother. You're the daughter of Blanche Beatrix Boyce, and I thought it would be interesting if you could just think for a little while out loud about her, the kind of woman that she was. I'm interested in how old she was when she had you, what kind of a person she is, if you think that you're like her in certain ways. Tell me about her.
Mother was a schoolteacher, and she was twenty-nine years old when I was
born. She was born in Edenton, North Carolina. Her father was a farmer,
and she left Edenton in 1914, I believe it was, to go to college, and
she only returned there for visits after that. She taught in the county
for a while and then went to Spring Hope, North Carolina, to teach, and
that's where she met my father. At that time, Spring Hope had a tobacco
market, and my grandfather was in the tobacco business—he had two
tobacco warehouses in Spring Hope—and my father was in business with my
grandfather. Mother was teaching there, and they met and were married
just before my father went across the waters to fight in the First World
War. After he came back from France, the market in Spring Hope was
closed a few years thereafter, and they moved to Wilson. I was born in
1921, and they moved to Wilson when I was less than a year old, so the
market in Spring Hope was closed, apparently, in 1920 or '21. They moved
to Wilson, and my father continued with the tobacco business. He was
with Center Brick Warehouse for a while. Mother did not teach anymore
after she was married. She felt that it was necessary for her to be at
home with my sister and me, and we were very pleased that she didn't
teach. But at the time of the Depression, things were
Where would you have your lessons, at the kitchen table?
I don't remember that. In the living room, I guess. We had a big library
table; I guess it was there. At any rate, she was an excellent teacher.
Of course, I knew how to read. She had taught me to read before I was
six. But we had a grand time, and I had sort of learned along with my
sister, who was one year ahead of me in school. She taught me, and I
entered school in the first grade in January, and at the end I was up
with the class. In fact, I was a tad ahead of them, so Mother always
told me. At any rate, at the end of the year they wanted me to skip a
year, and my mother wouldn't let me, and I'm so grateful that she
didn't, because I was small and the youngest one in the class anyhow.
She felt that it would not be in my best interest to skip a grade, and
she was absolutely right. I went on in the second grade,
You spent many years with her. That has so impressed me.
Oh, yes. My father died in '43, very suddenly. He was only fifty years old. I had just finished college and had gone to Washington to work. My sister was working in Burlington. We thought that Mother was too old to stay by herself. She never, bless her heart, said a word. We conferred about which one would come home and stay with Mother, because she was getting along in years and couldn't stay by herself. She never fussed; she never chastised us for thinking that she was that old. She understood that we were young, and we thought she was old. We decided that I would come back, because my sister was getting ready to get married, and we figured it would be better for me to come on home and stay with Mother, so I did, and we had a wonderful relationship for the balance of her life.
Unusual, probably, in that it was over such a long period of time.
Possibly. I don't know. We saw things the same way.
Do you look like her?
According to her family, I look as though she spit me out, and I think I
do. When I go down to Edenton, I can walk along the street, and
somebody'll stop me and say, "You're Blanche's daughter." In New York
one time, I was down in Chinatown and went in a little shop, and I was
coming out and a lady was coming in, and she looked at me rather
strangely and then stopped me as I started out and said, "Pardon me, but
do you by any chance know anybody named Blanche Boyce?"
What did your mother think about you going into law?
She let me make the decision. She said, "If you think you'd be interested in it, if you think that's what you'd like to do, go ahead, but you have to recognize that it's a sizeable challenge. You haven't been to school for quite a while, and just be certain that that's what you want to do for the rest of your life." After I made up my mind, she was all for it, very cooperative and supportive.
Talk about your father.
My father was a young man in a large family. He was the oldest in a family of seven children. All those children were reared at a time when my grandfather was affluent, and they were all reared not to work a great deal. I expect my father was reared to work more than any of the rest of them. A very attractive bunch of people. They took my mother in as though she were a member of the family.
Where did they meet?
In Spring Hope.
How?
Oh, I don't know how. Mother was teaching. She and her best friend roomed together and had for years. They taught together. Since they'd been teaching, they'd been rooming together and teaching in the same place. Her name was Nell. Nell was dating my father, and Mother was dating Bill Edwards. After a while they switched, and Mother married Daddy, and Nell married Bill Edwards. But I don't know how they met. I have no idea, never have been told. But my grandparents sort of let the children do about what they wanted to, and most of them didn't develop much of a sense of responsibility. Most attractive people, but my father and the brother next to him and then the next sister, I think the older ones developed more responsibility than the younger ones. At any rate, all of them loved my mother, and they called her "Sister Blanche." Now everybody in my father's family was "Sister Something," the girls. The oldest sister was "Big Sister"; the youngest sister was "Little Sister"; Mother was "Sister Blanche", and for some reason they called me "Sis".
They did. I remember hearing a story that your daddy called you "Sis".
It was just the way that family did things. My father was a large man, a very handsome man, I think. He was in the tobacco business for years. He carried the clip.
What does that mean?
You don't know anything about the selling of tobacco, but in the auction
system of selling tobacco, the piles of tobacco are spread out in
straight rows in the warehouse, and they're ticketed with the owner's
name and the number of pounds of tobacco in that pile. Then the
auctioneer goes along the row and sells those piles of tobacco.
She was stricter?
Probably, although they sort of worked together. If we went to Daddy
after Mother had said no, he would always say, "What did your mother
say?" and he'd always back her up. He never spanked me; he did my sister
one time. But, as I say, he was a large man; his hands were large. He
and Mother were going to a movie one night,
And that letter was shortly before he died, evidently.
Uh-huh. When he died, I was coming home that weekend. I was crazy about watermelon. He had gone out and gotten a watermelon and had taken it out to the icehouse to get it good and cool, so it'd be there cold when I came home. I never could eat that watermelon. I just couldn't quite make myself eat it. And for oh, I guess, a month after he died, I'd still put a place at the table for him, because it was so sudden and he was so young. But he was quite a guy. Both my parents were, in my opinion, special people.
Talk a little bit about Ruth. She was the only sibling.
Mm-hm, my only sister. Well, when we were growing up, she was thirteen
months older than I, and she sort of looked after me. We'd fight like
cats and dogs, but she'd look after me. I remember one time—or she tells
me about it; I don't know that I remember it so much as her telling me
about it—I went to school without my lunch money, and she ran all the
way back home to get it for me. And I do remember this: I would go
through the line at lunchtime, and I would have ice cream and cake.
She'd be standing at the end of the line, and she'd say, "Take it right
back."
Did she also go to school at Atlantic Christian?
No, she went to work. She didn't want to go to school. She finished high school and took a job and didn't want to go to college. She could have gone if she'd wanted to, but she didn't want to.
Did she have ideas about what you were doing in school and afterwards with the law and so forth?
What do you mean by that?
In other words, as things were happening in your life with
Oh, yes. Yes, indeed, all the way.
In a certain kind of way, were you more ambitious than she?
I don't know. She was expert in her field. She did secretarial and
bookkeeping work. She was quite, quite good and always has been at
whatever she decided to do. She's very good. She now runs a little
interior decorating business in Valdosta. She's always been able to do
whatever she wanted to do. She just had different directions for her
life. I think she knew that she was going to marry, and she didn't see
any point in going to college. And it hasn't been necessary for her.
She's gotten along splendidly without it. They were married right after
the War. Her husband was drafted when he was in his second year of
college. She joined him when they were married, in California. He stayed
in the service after the War was over, because he had had only two years
of college, and by that time he had a family. He knew he could, of
course, come back and get
With her business.
With her business, and she's been president of the wives' club at most every base they've been, so she apparently has superior administrative abilities. At any rate, I think whatever she does is fine.
I'm sure she says the same about you.
Probably.
Let's talk a little bit about when you were in school. You graduated from high school in 1939, I believe. That put you going through high school during the Depression. What about that?
Well, you know, I've talked about it with some of my friends since then.
We didn't realize that we were in a poor financial situation, because
everybody was in the same boat. I remember when we were children, we
lived on the corner. The yard was very large, and all the children in
the neighborhood would come down and play on our yard after dinner.
Daddy would always give us money to go get ice cream. There was an ice
cream parlor up the street, at which you could get a lot of ice cream
for a nickel. He would always give us a quarter to go get ice cream, and
that was a sufficient amount for all of us. One night I went to him to
get the quarter to go get the ice cream, and he said, "How about a
nickel, Sis?" I said, "Well, why?" He said, "Well, there's a Depression
on," so I immediately learned that "Depression" meant when you asked for
a quarter, you got a nickel, if you were lucky. But we were all in the
same boat; everybody was in the same boat. A friend was telling me the
other day that she remembered when they had lost their house, and they
had gone to live with her grandparents in another section of town. She
had gone to bed,
Could you walk to high school?
Of course I could, and did. I got carried when it was raining. My last year in high school and at least two years in college, we lived out sort of in the suburbs at that time. I guess it was possibly a good three or four or five miles to the college, and I walked. I didn't mind walking. I got the car when I needed it, but there was no problem; I walked to school. Everybody else did. Why not? But it would be unheard of now. I guess it would be called child abuse or something of that sort.
By some. Probably not by all.
I don't think it hurt me. In fact, I know it didn't.
All the time coming through high school, did you know you wanted to go to college?
Oh, I knew I would go to college. I didn't have any choice, I think. That was it.
Why?
Because my parents would have wanted me to. It would not have occurred to me to say, "I'm not going."
But that wasn't true of Ruth.
No. Ruth has a good mind. Don't misunderstand me. She
And there were no bad feelings.
Oh, no, not at all. He just knew his children.
And you each were comfortable with yourselves.
Yes. He knew if he told me to try for better, I'd do it, but he also knew that Ruth was going to do about what she could to get by, and that was it.
Did you always know that you would go to that school?
No, I had enrolled in Woman's College.
In Greensboro?
Uh-huh. And it wasn't till about two weeks before I was supposed to leave that Mother and I were sitting down talking about it one day, and she said, "Would you have any problem about going to Atlantic Christian?" I said, "No, of course not." She said, "Well, I just don't believe we can swing it financially for you to go to Woman's College this year. How about going over to Atlantic Christian and then transfer?" I said, "Fine. It's all right with me." So I went to Atlantic Christian, and I never wanted to leave. It never occurred to me to transfer.
I don't know much about that school, but I know that you
Yes, I'm on the Board of Trustees. Yes, it's a good school. It's a small school but a very good school. It has a good faculty, and, because it's small, the faculty has been able to take a personal interest in the students. It's a good school, a very good school.
Is it a religious-affiliated school?
Yes, it's a church-related school. It's affiliated with what we used to call the Christian Church. I'm not sure I know the name of it now. I think it's called the Disciples of Christ now.
Now that we're just sort of leaving high school and entering college, when you think back to either high school or college, are there teachers that to this day you remember because they made a difference for you . . .
Oh, yes, indeed.
. . . in how you thought about yourself or what you knew you might want to do or in whatever ways? What about high school?
The teacher whom I remember most vividly from high school is Jessie Brooks. She's now Jessie Brooks Reade and lives in Vass, and I see her occasionally. She and an English teacher I had in Atlantic Christian are the two best teachers I've ever had, except for my mother. Marvelous teachers, both of them.
What did they teach?
English. I guess Jessie Brooks was the best English teacher the state's
ever had, in my opinion, for high school. At any rate, the students who
went through her English courses did not have to take freshman English
at Carolina. She had certain requirements, and if you didn't meet them,
you didn't pass. It didn't make any
Did you get to know her pretty well?
Oh, yes. You see, teachers used to visit in the homes in those days. They came to see my mother regularly.
Your high school teachers.
Yes. Of course they did. They went to see everybody's mother and told them how we were doing. So they were friends, and we got to be good friends. She had no objection to our going by and seeing her after school or anytime we wanted to. She was very friendly with the students.
Was there anything in high school that you were not good at? I remember reading at one point that singing was . . .
No, I can't sing. No, no, I can't sing.
But generally, athletics and writing and . . .
Yes, I enjoyed all of that.
And you did a lot of it.
I like to try to sing, but I can't. It doesn't come out right.
And into college, what teacher there?
Her name was Dr. Hartsock; she's dead now. She was the head of the English Department, and she was a marvelous teacher. She taught you how to think. She knew her subject matter so well, you couldn't fool her. She knew what you were capable of doing. For all of her English majors, she was the sort of teacher who could make them come pretty close to doing what they were capable of doing. And they didn't realize they were being made to do it. They did it because they had such tremendous respect for her. She was a different sort of teacher. The strange thing is, I almost lost her to the college, because when she came to town, Dr. Hilley, who was then the President. . . . I was working for him, for twenty-five cents an hour, by the way.
How did you get that job? I wondered how you happened to get to work for the President.
He asked me. When Mother went over to ask him, since it was so late,
whether there was any possibility that I could get in school that late,
he said, "Oh, yes, I'll be glad to take her." He turned around to me and
said, "Do you want to work?" and I said, "Sure." He said, "What can you
do?" I said, "Whatever you want me to do." He said, "Can you take
shorthand?" I said, "Yes." He said,
Oh, my goodness.
But she did. She came, fortunately, and if she hadn't it would have been my fault that she didn't.
Your favorite teacher.
Turned out to be my favorite teacher.
When you were in college, at that point when one starts to think about graduating from college, what at that point were you thinking you would do next?
You see, that was during the War, and I went to Washington to work to
help win the War. Several of us did, my sorority sisters, and we had an
apartment up there. They went earlier than I. I came in June; they went
up in December. We had planned that from the beginning of our senior
year. We knew we were going up there. Had
And you were in a sorority.
Oh, yes, sure.
Was that an important part of your college
Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. I loved my sorority. I still see my sorority sisters fairly regularly, some of them. One lives in California, but we correspond, and every once in a while she'll call me. We were a very close group.
What was the name of the sorority?
Delta Sigma.
That's interesting. And did you just want that sorority, or did you consider others?
You got a bid, and I got a bid to two sororities, and I chose Delta Sigma. I liked the girls in it. It had a fun group in it, and the scholastic record was good, too. The other sorority into which I was invited had a higher scholastic record, but they didn't have as good a time.
And you were living at home while you were in college.
Mm-hm. I'd stay over at the college most of the time, but I lived at
home, supposedly. I studied, when I studied, in the dining room at the
dining room table. Mother told my daddy one time
What did that mean?
That meant that I was never at home. The only way the lightbulb would do any good was to put it in my pocket and take it with me.
I think maybe what we'll do is stop with this, and what I'd like to do the next time is . . .
I'll finish my cooking.
. . . start up with Washington, D.C. You were there for how many months? Not many.
Mn-mm. From June until August, when my father died.
So basically a summer in Washington. That's where we'll pick up the next time.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Judge Morris, we're taking these first couple of sessions to talk about
those years of your life before you became a judge, and I figured out
that those were forty-six years. We ended our last time just before you
graduated from Atlantic Christian College in 1943, and we're going to
begin today with that time when you left to go to Washington, D.C. But I
realized before we leave Atlantic Christian that there are a couple of
things I was interested in about your life there. I know that you
majored in English, but I
A lot of things. I was involved in athletics. I played tennis. I belonged to a sorority, and the sorority always had something going. The boy whom I dated belonged to a fraternity, and they always had a lot of parties. I was interested in student government and was on the student council.
Did you hold an office?
Yes, I think I was vice. . . . I'm not sure.
I think you were vice-president. That's what I read.
I ran for president of the student body at one time, and there was a tie
vote, and it had to be run again. Howard Blake won that time. I spent a
lot of time at the dormitory with some friends who lived in the
dormitory. I was a
How many students were there?
When I was there, I really don't know. Possibly five or six hundred, something like that.
A fairly small school.
Yes, it was very small. It's not but 1,600 now.
Is it true that while you were in college, or was it before college, that you had thought of going into journalism?
I think that was high school. I'm not sure, but I believe
What changed your mind from journalism?
Josephus Daniels.
How?
He was Editor of the News and Observer, and I came up
here and asked him for a job. He said he didn't think I ought to go into
journalism, because he didn't think that the compensation was adequate,
and he just didn't think I ought to have any interest in it. And I
believed every word he said, so I just came home and thought, "Well, I
won't go into journalism."
Interesting. You don't regret that.
No. He was right. At that time, journalism was not really the place for a young lady.
Tell me about this plan in college to go to Washington. You said last time that you and five sorority sisters decided you wanted to do that.
Mm-hm. A lot of people did; it wasn't only our group. A good many of the
girls in the senior class went to Washington to work. The boys were
being drafted right out from college. Every week or two, three or four
boys would leave the campus. When we were graduating, most of us already
had jobs. One friend of mine went to Hampton, Virginia, to work in
something having to do with aerospace design. I went to Washington, and
five of my sorority sisters went with me. Two of them had already gone
ahead of us. They finished in December at the end of the first semester,
and they
That took a lot of training, to learn to do that?
Not a great deal. As was always true with the government, those who majored in Spanish were put not in the Spanish section but probably in the Italian section; those who majored in French were put in a section completely foreign to what they were trained to do. In fact, a French professor at the college went up there and worked, and she, I think, was in the Spanish section. I'm not sure, but anyway not the language with which she was trained. I was put in the Japanese section. Of course, I knew nothing about Japanese. I didn't need to, the way that we worked, the system that had been devised for breaking codes. We were successful. It was very interesting.
It must have been. And you were there for how long?
Just a few months. I went up there in June. My father died the last day of July. I went back up there and worked for a while and came home, I'm not sure when. It was sometime at the end of the summer when I resigned and came home, so I wans't up there but about three or four months.
Am I right that that was perhaps your first time to live away from home?
Oh, indeed it was. I'd never lived away from home before.
Do you remember that as quite an adventure, to be in Washington with your sorority sisters?
Oh, yes, I did, it was quite an adventure. None of us
What about the decision to leave Washington and go back home after your dad died?
It was a decision that my sister and I made. As I said, she was planning
to be married. Her husband-to-be was in service, and as soon as he could
get some time off, they would be married. They had planned to be married
in September, but after my father died they called it off and delayed
it. He was waiting for a time when he could get enough time away from
them to be married. My sister and I talked the situation over, and we
decided that Mother was simply too old to be left alone. She was fifty
years old, but we thought she was very old, and we decided one of us
needed to come home and stay with her for a while, at least until things
calmed down. My father died very suddenly, and so it was a very severe
shock to her, and she wouldn't be alone. Bless her heart, she never said
a word to us about how stupid we were to feel that she was incapable of
looking after herself at age fifty. We decided that I should come home,
and
And yet you stayed. It didn't occur to you that since she was all right, you might go back to Washington.
Oh, I didn't want to go back to Washington. I was perfectly happy where I was.
What was the first job you got when you got back home to Wilson?
I went with Branch Banking and Trust Company as secretary to the vice-president and then left there and went to work for a lawyer and from there to the firm with which I later became associated and later became a partner.
How did you meet Mr. Lucas?
Another thing I did while I was at Atlantic Christian, I worked a good
bit. Mr. Lucas was a leading lawyer there in Wilson, and he had a very
important anti-trust case in which he needed some secretarial help. He
called the college and asked Dr. Hilley, the President, if there was
anybody he could send up there to help him, so Dr. Hilley asked me if
I'd like to do that, and I told him I would. I went up to the law
offices and helped him at night and on weekends with that case, clerical
work, secretarial work, and became very interested in legal work. When I
came back from Washington, I went there first to see if there was
anything available, and they didn't have an opening at that time, but as
soon as they did have one they
Is Mr. Lucas still living?
No, he died the year I came on the courts. He died in December of that year. In fact, both my senior partners died that year.
What was it like to be a secretary with that firm? What were the things that you were involved with during those years?
Oh, whatever a secretary is always involved with: taking dictation, filing, running the office, making appointments for Mr. Lucas, seeing that he got where he was supposed to be and had the papers with him that he was supposed to have, seeing that his letters got out letter-perfect and that the pleadings and court papers that were filed were letter-perfect. Sort of an executive secretary.
And yet somehow from his observation of you doing those duties, it became clear to him that you should go study law yourself?
He allowed me a good bit of freedom and assigned me tasks that were probably more than an ordinary secretary did, but a good legal secretary does a lot of things that an ordinary secretary doesn't do. A lot of people think that a paralegal does things that a secretary can't do, but that isn't true; a good legal secretary does more than some paralegals can do. It depends on who's training the secretary and how much work they allow them to do on their own. I got so that I could prepare a deed without any assistance. So long as I knew the parties, it was an ordinary deed. And the same was true with a deed of trust, but they never went out of the office without his checking them very carefully. I closed loans, and things of that sort, what a good legal secretary would do.
Was it a surprise to you, and did it come up just once or many times, that he thought perhaps you ought to try and go to law school yourself?
No, it was a surprise. That's the only time he ever mentioned it.
That one time.
Mm-hm.
I know that perhaps some people who have read about you know that story, but I'd love you to tell it, about how you knew that it was in his mind.
He called me in to give me dictation one morning, and after he'd finished the usual legal work and dictation, he started a letter to Albert Coates, who was a professor at Carolina at the time. He told him that he was sending me up for an interview, that he wanted me to go to law school and that Mr. Lucas thought Mr. Coates would find me an apt student, and that he would make an appointment, and I would bring the letter when I came. I told him I just couldn't afford to go to law school, and he said, "You can't afford not to go to law school." That was in the letter. So I went to law school.
And how were you able to afford to go? Did you have to work your way through?
I borrowed money and worked during the summertime and had a scholarship
and worked on the Law Review and got paid for that.
There are lots of ways. You don't have to have money to go to school. If
you want to go to school, you can go.
That's true. I know that myself. I'm very interested in
I lived in the dormitory. I went home most every weekend. I had my own car.
What dorm was that?
Kenan.
So your mother stayed in Wilson while you came here to school.
Mm-hm.
Was it true then, as it is now, that you had no choice in your first year, you took what all the first-year students took?
I guess so. I don't really remember.
And you were the only woman in your class?
No, I started out with another woman in the class, but she dropped out. Then I think in my third year, I believe it was, Jean Owen, who had started out after I did, caught up with the class by taking heavier loads and going to summer school and so forth. I believe that she was with us for graduation. I'm not sure. She didn't start in our class, but I believe she ended with it. But the only woman who started in the class with me dropped out.
In your entering class in 1952, how many people were in there?
I don't have any idea.
You don't remember if it was a large group?
At that time it probably was, but it would not be by today's standards.
Now I just don't know how many people were in Yackety-Yack's over there; you can count
them and find out.
In 1952, when you were the only woman in your class, you were thirty-one years old, starting school with these men.
Mm-hm. I was about nine to ten years older than the rest of them, except for one man who had already retired. He was past sixty-five, Milton Loomis. He had been a dean at a school in New York. I don't know which school, but he had retired and come to law school.
Did he finish?
Oh, yes, he finished. He came to Chapel Hill because the medical school was available. He had a heart problem. But he finished law school and did very well. He didn't take the bar, but worked in a bank in the trust department.
But your memories of those three years with those classmates are happy ones.
Oh, yes, they were delightful.
In other words, as the only woman and older than so many of them, you didn't feel left out or that they had nothing to do with you?
Oh, no, they included me in everything they did, except they didn't let me play football. They put me up as playing left out when they put up a football squad. But they were very fine. I enjoyed it. Every one of them were just as nice as they could be.
The other question that comes to my mind: you did so well in law school; you graduated fourth in your class. Would you say, as you look back, that those courses and the study of law just came naturally to you, or was it a real struggle?
I worked hard. I had not had to work hard in my prior educational
experiences, not very hard. I had in some instances. At college I was
graduated summa cum laude, but in those days you were
exempt from exams if you made a certain grade, so I had never taken a
great many exams and didn't know too much about them. When I started in
law school, they gave trial exams.
They still do.
Which I think is very, very helpful, because you don't get but one grade, and that's what you get on the exam. The mid-semester trial exams were a revelation to me, because I got a C on Torts, and it was the first time I'd ever had a C in my life. So I decided I'd better go home, get back and buckle down and get to work. I did. I think probably I went to law school with the feeling that, having been in a law office for eight or nine years, I probably had a good background and wouldn't have to work too hard, but it was a different situation. Law school was teaching theory, and what I'd had was practice, so I had to get to work and did get to work and enjoyed it. I buckled down and studied harder than I'd ever studied in my life, but enjoyed it.
And at law school also, you had other activities besides your studies,
because you had the Law Review?
Mm-hm. At that time, you only wrote Law Review notes if
you were asked to write them, and you were only asked to write them if
your grade was a certain thing. I was asked to write a Law
Review note at the end of my first year, and I came back early
in the fall of my second year to work on that Law
Review note, and then became an associate editor of the Law Review, so that took up a lot of time in the third
year. There was always something going on other than law
The first woman associate editor of that Law
Review.
Probably so. I just don't know about that.
Then that, also, could not have been something that anyone made you feel odd about, or that you had to prove something.
Oh, heavens, no. I didn't even know there hadn't been another woman, if there hadn't been.
The first woman associate editor is what you are.
I didn't know that, but it didn't matter. I wasn't out trying to prove anything.
And you didn't have to feel that you had to at the time.
Oh, heavens, no. No, indeed, which may be why the men accepted me. I don't know. I never thought about it. But I wasn't trying to prove anything. I didn't have any axe to grind, no banners that I was carrying and waving wildly. I was just studying law.
You hear much more about that today, about women in the law school classes and their awareness of the men or having to do as well as they and so forth. It just seems to be more of an issue, perhaps, between the years when you were there and when I've been there.
It's sort of ridiculous, isn't it?
The way you talk about it, yes, it seems like a waste of time.
It is.
Good energy that could have gone elsewhere.
To doing what you're training yourself to do.
Yeah, exactly.
Do you remember, and are you in touch with, some of your classmates from your law school days?
Oh, yes, indeed. We get together regularly. Some of them live here. Jack Horner, for example, lives here in Raleigh, and so does Kent Burns. Lots of them live here in Raleigh. Some work with the state, and some are in private practice. Some are in Greensboro; some are in Winston; one in Florida; one in Masscchusetts. But we correspond and get together occasionally.
How about the sorority sisters?
Oh, we correspond.
The Washington, D.C. group.
We talk to each other. One's in California. We talk by telephone occasionally.
1955: graduation and back home. What was your understanding with those people in Wilson about job prospects after you graduated?
Oh, well, they told me that if I did well, I could come back to the firm, but if I didn't do well, I could go elsewhere.
So you did okay.
Mm-hm.
And went right back. So that's fall of '55 you started with them.
Right. As soon as I finished the bar exam, I went to work.
And so that was your first time to do real lawyering.
Mm-hm.
What about that? One thing that occurred to me was whether it was a
difference that you were very aware of, to go back to that firm as an
associate, having been their secretary, and if you were working with the
same people but in such a different role, or was it
I was working with the same people, but it was no problem. Not really. If there was any problem there, I wasn't aware of it.
I've heard many people tell me that I should do my best to get through law school, but that what I'm studying in my case books isn't really that. . . . In other words, I just have to do it when I get out to really understand what it's about. The relationship between what you'd studied and actually practicing law. Did you find that you . . .
It wasn't as difficult for me, because I had known about the practice of law, you see, but I know it's difficult for people who haven't had that experience. As I say, the law school teaches theory, and I got very upset about that the first semester I was there. I went home one weekend, I remember, and I told Mr. Lucas that they weren't teaching the students the practical aspects of the law. He said, "Well, they're not supposed to. The law schools are for teaching theory, and you learn the practice after you get out. You go on back up there and learn everything they teach you about the theory of law, and when you get back here I'll teach you how to practice law," which he did. But a lot of people didn't have that privilege. I knew, for example, where you went to get revenue stamps. A lot of students, after they'd been graduated and had taken the bar, had no idea where to go to buy revenue stamps to put on a deed, and it was very embarrassing to them to have to ask. Now they have a practical skills course that people take, they won't have that problem. But I think it's correct, that law schools ought to teach the theory of the law and not the practice of it.
What are your recollections about what you enjoyed most in practicing law?
I enjoyed all of it. I did not enjoy, particularly, domestic relations cases, but I had to do them. It would not be my choice. If I had my choice, I would exclude domestic relations cases, but they're there, and in a small town you do everything.
Did you have many opportunities for trial work?
Yes. Our firm did a lot of trial work.
And you enjoyed doing that.
Yes.
One story that I encountered which struck me with interest as something that I'd love to hear you talk more about was, you alluded to one experience you had in helping to do the legal background work for the founding of the first or only home for indigent blacks in Wilson.
Not indigent blacks. No, this was a nursing home for blacks. The office
had had this woman as a client for many years. She ran a restaurant at
one time. She was quite an aggressive, hardworking woman, and she came
to me and said that the director of public welfare, Mr. Monroe Fordham,
had asked her to open a nursing home for blacks. She had at that time
taken in two or three aged people in her home to take care of, under the
auspices of the welfare department, and Monroe Fordham had asked her if
she would open a nursing home for blacks. She told him that she would if
she could get the money, so she came to me to get the money. We went
many places to borrow money, including from the black insurance company
in Durham, and they would not let her have the money. Although she
Is it still there?
Oh, yes, it's still there. About five years after she borrowed the money, the Branch Bank called me and asked me if she would be interested in adding onto her home, that they would be glad to let her have the money. I always wanted to write the insurance company in Durham and say something to them, but I didn't.
That's hard to understand.
It is hard. It was very difficult for me to understand, because they always talk about looking after their own and the fact that white people don't do things they ought to for them.
What is this woman's name?
Geneva Dew.
Is she alive?
Oh, yes, she's alive and doing well. I hear from her at least twice a year. She attended my swearing-in ceremony and the party that was given afterward. I'm very fond of her. She's a very fine person.
I wanted to hear more about that story. After two years with that firm, you became a partner.
Was it two years? I'd forgotten. It wasn't long, I know.
It wasn't long. It was two years. Was that a surprise? That's a very short time.
Yes, I was elated but quite surprised. I didn't turn it down.
Good. The next thing that interests me, in talking about your years with the firm, now as a partner, is what I guess were the f