Lobbying the North Carolina General Assembly to legislate against discriminatory practices against low-income tenants
Fillette discusses the widespread lack of support for welfare rights that legal advocates faced in the mid-1970s. To illustrate his point, he describes in detail the resistance of the North Carolina General Assembly towards adopting legislation that would combat discrimination against low-income tenants. After several unsuccessful attempts to do so in the courts, Fillette describes the process by which they lobbied to introduce a bill that "implied warranty of habitability and outlaw retaliatory evacuations." Initially defeated in 1975, the bill was eventually accepted in 1977 with some creative political maneuvering on the part of Legal Aid lobbyists.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Ted Fillette, April 11, 2006. Interview U-0186. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
You're, of course,
describing considerable hostility to the notion of welfare rights across
the time you're working with this issue. Thinking broadly
about the years you worked with this issue and beyond, how would you
describe the level of popular and political support for the idea of
welfare rights and any changes in that level of support?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
Well, within North Carolina, there was just virtually never any visible
support for welfare recipients in any way that I ever saw. I mean,
welfare was just generally unpopular and poor people were generally
unpopular. I never quite realized the level of that hostility until I
became an amateur lobbyist and went to the General Assembly to try to
change all of those common law rules and negative rules about tenants
that I was describing for you.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Tell me a little bit about that experience lobbying on behalf of
low-income tenants.
- TED FILLETTE:
-
Well, I still remember my first meeting with a very progressive
Democratic representative in Mecklenburg County who had been one of the
leaders in the women's political caucus and was a political
science professor out at UNC-Charlotte. I told her about these rules,
about the common law rule that entitled tenants to no repairs and the
quick procedure for evicting people and how impossible it was to ever
have a new trial and get it in front of a judge and so forth. I told her
we wanted to try to get a bill that would give some minimum protections
for tenants' rights and she said, "They
won't vote for that." I said, "What do you
mean?" She says, "Most of the people in the
General Assembly are landlords and they're not going to tell
you why they're going to vote against it, but
that's the reason. You have no chance. You
shouldn't even bother." That was 1975.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Who was that?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
That was Louise Brennan. Well, given how bad things were in the courts
and we had tried three different times to get the court of appeals to
change the caveat emptor rule, that is amend the
common law and adopt the modern day doctrine of the implied covenant of
habitability or implied warranty of habitability, as they tend to call
it, which every other appellate court in the country had accepted in the
1970s, but North Carolina rejected it three times. After the third time,
one of the judges said, "And by the way, this is a matter for
the legislature." So finally we decided even though it might be
difficult to deal with the legislature, we weren't getting
anywhere with the courts. So, in 1975, we tried to get a bill that would
create this implied warranty of habitability and outlaw retaliatory
evictions. The bill's sponsor for us in the House was Wade
Smith, a lawyer from Raleigh. Wade Smith was a very
impressive guy. He had been a star athlete at UNC. He was very
popular and the very idea that he was willing to carry this flag
terrified the landlords' lobby for the Realtors'
Association.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
What do you think inspired Wade Smith to take up such an unpopular
issue?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
He was just a good person and the rules were so grossly unfair that I
think it just—he found it unconscionable that tenants could
be required to pay the rent and have completely unsafe and unhealthy
dwellings and not be able to do anything about it, and the one attempt
people could make to do something about it, through the city inspectors,
could be completely undercut by retaliatory evictions. So he was willing
to try that and we came very close in 1975. I think we got it passed on
the first reading and then it was defeated in the second reading, but it
was very close.
The following year, I came back again and I decided I was going to just
work full-time on it for the whole session, if it took four months. I
just moved to Raleigh and I worked on it for four days a week. Wade
Smith had dropped out of the legislature and this time we convinced
Henry Frye to be the sponsor. Now he was one of only three
African-Americans in the House out of a hundred and twenty, but the good
thing about Henry was that he was smart and he was kind and he was
fairly well-respected and he had been appointed chairman of the
judiciary committee by Carl Stewart, the Speaker of the House. I think
he realized that it was very difficult. He knew that two-thirds of the
people in the legislature were probably landlords, but he realized that
this was probably the single most important thing for African-American
families in the state that he could deal with.
At that time, there were two other really, really hot issues going on in
the General Assembly. One was the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] and
people were extremely excited about that. All the women's
groups were working hard for it and many of those groups wanted to get
the Landlord-Tenant Bill passed, because most of the tenants that were
low-income were female. So we would end up getting
a lot of support from the political caucuses at the county level. They
were already sort of activated around the ERA. The other interesting
thing that was going on was the liquor-by-the-drink legislation. Prior
to 1977, there had been no right for any restaurants or any retail
establishments to sell alcohol. The only way you could get alcohol was
to bring it to the restaurant and some of them would mix you a drink.
You could bring your own alcohol, but they wouldn't sell you
a drink for a bar, because there weren't any allowed in the
state. The chambers of commerce were very actively supporting the
legislation, and the Restaurant Association was supporting it.
Henry Frye and the two other black legislators finally realized that they
and some of their allies could make the difference on whether or not
liquor-by-the-drink would pass, because they'd have to have
about ten or twelve urban votes to pass liquor-by-the-drink. Because the
rural legislators were generally very much opposed to it and they were
also opposed to the landlord-tenant bill. So the margin of difference
for getting the landlord-tenant bill and liquor-by-the-drink was all in
the metropolitan areas. So I think Henry and some of his allies finally
figured out that they could find a way to support both if people would
agree to support both. I think that was the key to getting the bill
passed that created the implied warranty of habitability for the first
time in 1977.
We got it passed on the Senate side by another just incredible quirk of
circumstances. The lieutenant governor was Jimmy Green and he hated
these tenants' rights bills. He had been the one that stopped
it in the House side in 1975 and now he was lieutenant governor and he
had Henry Frye's bill bottled up in a committee on the Senate
side. But I found a lobbyist for the AARP [American Association of
Retired Persons], who was this little old, retired professor from Wake
Forest who was seventy-eight years old. I explained to her how important
this legislation was for elderly people. I had all
of the census data from 1970 and a vast majority of elderly people lived
in very low-income substandard housing in the state and none of them had
any protection. She went in and saw Jimmy Green by herself and in
fifteen minutes, she came out and said, "He's going
to get the bill out." I said, "How in the world is he
going to get the bill out?" She says,
"Well, I had to explain to Mr. Green that if he
didn't get the bill out, I was going to have to go on my TV
program this Sunday and explain how he didn't care about the
housing for any the elderly people in this state." The bill
came out of the committee the next day and it passed. It was truly
amazing.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
That was some skillful maneuvering on her part.
- TED FILLETTE:
-
It was brilliant on her part.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Do you remember her name?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
I think it was Dr. Elizabeth Welch, I think was her name.