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Home › About › Communications › NCBA News › 2010 News Articles › Citizen Lawyer Profile: Henry Isaacson
Citizen Lawyer Profile: Henry Isaacson
Article Date: Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Henry H. Isaacson
Residence: Greensboro
Education: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A.), University of North Carolina School of Law (J.D.)
Firm: Isaacson Isaacson Sheridan & Fountain
Practice areas: Zoning, land use and regulation, civil litigation, general corporate law
On being a Citizen Lawyer:
“The primary benefit is to make a community I’ve lived in all my life better and make sure it goes forward, not backward.”
STORY
If you have benefited from Henry Isaacson’s work as a voice for civil rights and economic development in the greater Greensboro area, you can thank his mother. When he was a child, Isaacson said he was inspired to become an active member of his community by watching his mother serve as an official in the PTA.
“That was very impressive to me,” said Isaacson, recently honored as a Citizen Lawyer for 2010 by the N.C. Bar Association. “I think that’s where I got my appetite.”
When Isaacson left the Air Force and returned to Greensboro to practice law in 1961, he joined the Jaycees, helping to organize golf tournaments and soap box derbies. He called it a “great training ground” for the long line of civic activities he has engaged in since while still being able to maintain his civil litigation practice.
“You get involved in one organization, and then you get asked to be in another, and it’s sort of like a ladder. You just keep moving up,” Isaacson said. “You move from one position to another, and you come into contact with people, and they invite you to do other things.
“That’s the way it happens. If you say no long enough, I’m sure they’ll stop asking. I just haven’t said no.”
In recent years, Isaacson has focused on being chair of the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority, which helped to bring a FedEx sorting hub to Greensboro and is trying to lure Hondajet’s worldwide headquarters for marketing and production to the area.
The PTA Authority also is working to increase the number of flights into the community.
“The airport is centrally located between the Triad’s three major cities — Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem — and that’s the reason I think it’s so important. There’s no question that the airport is the economic engine for the whole area,” said Isaacson, who also serves on the N.C. Department of Transportation’s Aeronautics Council, which makes grants to fund airport construction and renovation throughout the state.
In addition to economic progress, Isaacson has dedicated himself to social progress. For many years, he has been involved with the National Conference for Community and Justice, formerly known as the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The organization’s driving goal is to teach young children about respecting people of all backgrounds and ethnicities, and its activities include classroom programs and a summer camp in Blowing Rock.
He also was among several individuals who helped to save the old Woolworth’s building in downtown Greensboro, where four N.C. A&T students performed a “sit-in” at a lunch counter in 1960 that sparked numerous, similar non-violent protests throughout the country.
When Woolworth’s left the area in the 1990s, the efforts of Isaacson and others kept the building from being torn down and led to it becoming the home of the new, well-received International Civil Rights Museum, which opened Feb. 1. “It moved the community forward,” Isaacson said, “and it was the right thing to do.”
About the Citizen Lawyer Award
The NCBA Citizen Lawyer Award was established in 2007 to recognize lawyers who provide exemplary public service to their communities. Honorees include elected and appointed government officials, coaches, mentors and voluntary leaders of non-profit, civic and community organizations. Since 2007, there have 64 recipients of the award.
About the N.C. Bar Association
The North Carolina Bar Association, founded in 1899, is a voluntary organization of lawyers, paralegals and law students dedicated to serving the public and the legal profession. The N.C. Bar Center in Cary serves as headquarters for the NCBA and the NCBA Foundation, Inc. Though similar, the NCBA (www.ncbar.org) and the mandatory North Carolina State Bar (www.ncbar.gov) are not affiliated.
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