Post by Aggie One on Jul 25, 2018 22:38:00 GMT -5
Remembering a quiet 'giant'
Fighter of racism. Mentor to many. J. Kenneth Lee 'stood at the front of the line all the time'
By Nancy McLaughlin nancy.mclaughlin@greensboro.com
GREENSBORO — He remembered me.
“Of course, I do!” retired civil rights attorney J. Kenneth Lee replied in much of a whisper that day last summer.
He appeared much frailer than the last time we talked.
A year had passed. At least.
I could have asked — “How do you know me?” — to be sure.
But it was in his smile and those eyes that danced, like when he used to tell me stories of righting wrongs and fighting barriers, of walking along downtown Greensboro in deep conversation with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., before the civil rights icon was a known name. Of once trying a case for “reckless eyeballing,” involving a black defendant and a white woman. Of sitting on his grandma’s knees and hearing stories from when she was a slave.
Before he was a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall had represented Lee as a student in the fight to integrate UNC-Chapel Hill’s Law School, which opened the door — and later the state’s public university system — to other black people. As a lawyer, Lee would go on to represent five black girls in the fight to attend the all-white Gillespie Park Elementary in 1957, making Greensboro one of the first cities in the Southeast to desegregate its all-white public schools.
Lee, who had come to Greensboro to attend N.C. A&T, tread a trail of other firsts in a life that charts the progress of civil rights in America, notably the dismantling of Jim Crow laws. Lee loved his country and felt that improving the lot for black people only strengthened what America could be.
“One of the law school’s great citizens of the 20th century,” Martin H. Brinkley, dean of UNC’s law school, said of Lee this week.
For the rest of the story: www.greensboro.com/blogs/mclaughlin_faith_matters/fighter-of-racism-mentor-to-many-j-kenneth-lee-stood/article_e60498a3-b693-5011-ab97-b888c08f8653.html
Fighter of racism. Mentor to many. J. Kenneth Lee 'stood at the front of the line all the time'
By Nancy McLaughlin nancy.mclaughlin@greensboro.com
GREENSBORO — He remembered me.
“Of course, I do!” retired civil rights attorney J. Kenneth Lee replied in much of a whisper that day last summer.
He appeared much frailer than the last time we talked.
A year had passed. At least.
I could have asked — “How do you know me?” — to be sure.
But it was in his smile and those eyes that danced, like when he used to tell me stories of righting wrongs and fighting barriers, of walking along downtown Greensboro in deep conversation with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., before the civil rights icon was a known name. Of once trying a case for “reckless eyeballing,” involving a black defendant and a white woman. Of sitting on his grandma’s knees and hearing stories from when she was a slave.
Before he was a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall had represented Lee as a student in the fight to integrate UNC-Chapel Hill’s Law School, which opened the door — and later the state’s public university system — to other black people. As a lawyer, Lee would go on to represent five black girls in the fight to attend the all-white Gillespie Park Elementary in 1957, making Greensboro one of the first cities in the Southeast to desegregate its all-white public schools.
Lee, who had come to Greensboro to attend N.C. A&T, tread a trail of other firsts in a life that charts the progress of civil rights in America, notably the dismantling of Jim Crow laws. Lee loved his country and felt that improving the lot for black people only strengthened what America could be.
“One of the law school’s great citizens of the 20th century,” Martin H. Brinkley, dean of UNC’s law school, said of Lee this week.
For the rest of the story: www.greensboro.com/blogs/mclaughlin_faith_matters/fighter-of-racism-mentor-to-many-j-kenneth-lee-stood/article_e60498a3-b693-5011-ab97-b888c08f8653.html
