[R-G] Thought [New Hampshire]

[Hunter Gray]

This is simply a postscript to my "Couple of Thoughts" of very early this morning:

There is a good deal of back and forth on the tube today about whether or not "race" played a negative role in the New Hampshire primary.  Of course it did and I appreciated Chris Matthews pushing that point on his Hardball program this afternoon -- pointing out that the exit polls had indicated that Obama would win by a respectable margin.

It all carried me back to the spring of '65 in a Federal District courtroom at New Bern, Craven County, North Carolina.  In the swirling midst of our hard-fought and ultimately successful Northeastern North Carolina Black-Belt project, a key local Black leader in Klan-infested Halifax County was fired from her teaching job at a high school [Black] at Enfield. The official reason given was frivolous.  Willa Cofield [Johnson] was a top teacher who had won numerous awards.  She was a committed Movement activist as were her husband and her father and her uncle.  Her's was one of the cases we pursued in the context of the Federal court system.  At New Bern, our attorneys, Bill Kunstler and Phil Hirschkop among them, questioned every school board member and every member of the school's district committee -- asking if Willa's participation [and that of her family members] had, in any way, influenced their decision to fire her.  Each denied it, poker-faced -- as did Joe Branch, attorney for the school board and a powerful politician in the state.  We lost at the District level, appealed to the Fourth Circuit at Richmond.  The resultant decision by the Fourth was almost unanimously in favor of Willa.  

This is a slightly rough paraphrase of a small part of the decision. "To deny as judges what we know as men would not be proper.  We cannot ignore the emotions and racial atmosphere in a small Eastern North Carolina town, caught up in the throes of the civil rights movement."

With supportive briefs filed by every Southern state attorney general, North Carolina went to the US Supreme Court.  And that denied cert -- leaving stand the Fourth Circuit decision.  It was a key victory for every Black teacher.

[The papers from that and quite a few other cases are in my Collected Papers in Wisconsin and Mississippi.]

I should add that that the basics of that multi-county saga accompanies my bio on Civil Rights Movement Veterans -- as "Black Belt Thunder"
http://www.crmvet.org/    And it's on our website at:

http://hunterbear.org/NORTH%20CAROLINA_OUR%20SUCCESSFUL%20BLACK%20BELT%20MOVEMENT.htm

And racism was involved in the events at New Hampshire.

Yours, H

HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR]   Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
 and Ohkwari'
 
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