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2008 News Articles › Charles Becton Installed As President
Charles Becton Installed As President
Article Date: Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Written By: Russell Rawlings
NCBA President Charles Becton |
Charles L. Becton, a Raleigh attorney and longtime Durham resident, was installed as president of the North Carolina Bar Association on Saturday, June 21, at the 2008 NCBA Annual Meeting in Atlantic Beach.
Becton succeeds Greensboro attorney Janet Ward Black as the 114th president of the NCBA. Judge Allyson K. Duncan of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who served as president of the NCBA in 2003-04, conducted the formal swearing-in ceremony.
“I am honored beyond your imagining to be president of this great organization,” Becton stated in his installation address. “And I am equally humbled by an internal sense of gratitude to the many whose help, sacrifice, and encouragement allowed me to do a lot of different things and placed me in a position so that I could even be considered for this honor.
“So first, let me thank you for the opportunity to serve. Law is the vehicle through which I have sought to serve the public. I love the law. I love people.”
Education, service and professionalism will provide the foundation for Becton’s platform as president in 2008-09. He will call upon various sections, divisions and committees of the organization to identify and respond to issues of injustice in the coming year, with special attention devoted to equal access to justice and law-related education.
Becton will also promote expansion of the Wills for Heroes program, which provides wills for first responders, to make it available to veterans.
A 1969 graduate of the Duke University School of Law, Becton has practiced law with the firm of Becton, Slifkin & Bell since 1990. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Howard University (1966) and received an LL.M. from the University of Virginia School of Law (1986).
Becton served on the N.C. Court of Appeals from 1981-90 and was named N.C. Appellate Judge of the Year in 1985. He previously served as president of the N.C. Academy of Trial Lawyers.
He has received numerous other awards, the most recent being the ABA Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section’s Pursuit of Justice Award and the NCBA Litigation Section’s first Advocate’s Award. He has also received the Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Trial Advocacy Award, the Roscoe Pound Foundation’s Richard S. Jacobson Award and the N.C. Academy of Trial Lawyers’ Trial Advocacy Award that was named in his honor.
An esteemed author and lecturer as well, Becton has served since 1976 as the John Scott Cansler Lecturer at the UNC School of Law and since 1980 as the Senior Lecturer in Law at the Duke University School of Law. It was also in 1980 that Becton served as president of the N.C. Association of Black Lawyers.
As president-elect of the NCBA, Becton chaired the Finance Committee in 2007-08. He served as a member of the NCBA Board of Governors from 2005-07 and as an NCBA vice president in 1984-85.
Becton and his wife, Brenda, have three grown children: daughters Nicole and Michelle and a son, Kevin. Brenda Becton is retired from the practice of law and Nicole Becton practices law in Washington, D.C.
A native of Morehead City and the son of the late Edith Becton Nibbs, Becton spent his formative years in Ayden, where he graduated from South Ayden High School in 1962.
Upon completion of law school in 1969, he worked for one year with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York City. He then joined the Charlotte firm of Chambers Stein Ferguson & Lanning, which shortly thereafter opened a Chapel Hill office where Becton practiced until 1981.
Gov. Jim Hunt appointed Becton to the N.C. Court of Appeals in January 1981. He was then elected to complete the remaining two years of the unexpired term in 1982, and elected again in 1984 to a full term.