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Affiliation | Democratic |
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1977-01-01 |
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Name | J. McNeill Smith Jr. |
Address | Greensboro, North Carolina , United States |
Email | None |
Website | None |
Born |
April 09, 1918
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Died | January 15, 2011
(92 years)
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Contributor | Chronicler |
Last Modifed | David Apr 10, 2021 02:04pm |
Tags |
Widowed - Navy -
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Info | Lt Commander John McNeill Smith, Jr.
Elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives from the 26th District in 1970.
Governor Scott appointed Mr. Smith to the North Carolina Senate to fill the vacancy upon the resignation of Hargrove "Skipper" Bowles.
Elected to the North Carolina Senate from the 19th District in 1972, 1974, and 1976.
Smith was a McCarthy-era dissident who joined the United World Federalists Movement and led the N.C. Civil Rights Commission.
He helped negotiate a settlement to the Greensboro sit-ins that opened Woolworth's lunch counters to blacks.
Candidate for Democratic nomination for US Senate 1978, when he unsuccessfully sought to unseat Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.
The son of a Robeson County doctor, Smith once said he didn't realize the evils of segregation until the 1940s, when the U.S. Navy sent him to India, where he witnessed that country's caste system.
In 1985, The National Law Journal named him as one of the nation's 100 most influential lawyers. "I expect, in all candor, if it hadn't been for the sit-ins and the demonstrations of 1960 and 1963, in which Greensboro was a leader, we would still be talking about getting rid of separate bathrooms, separate toilets," Smith told a UNC Greensboro interviewer in 1987.
His most famous case may be his unsuccessful representation of Greensboro native Junius Scales, convicted twice of being a member of the Communist Party. Scales' sentence was commuted in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy.
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