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Legal Legends of Color Award Honorees

The sixth annual Legal Legends of Color Awards Celebration took place Friday, June 18. The Legal Legends of Color Awards Celebration demonstrates the NCBA’s commitment to embrace diversity and inclusion in the legal profession. The celebration is a time to recognize and honor attorneys and other legal professionals of color whose legacies represent ceilings broken for all attorneys who follow in their footsteps and whose impacts on the legal profession are undeniable.

Elreta Alexander IvesJudge Elreta Melton Alexander (posthumously)

Image courtesy UNC Greensboro Special Collections and University Archives.

After becoming the first black woman to graduate from Columbia Law School in 1945, Elreta Alexander became the first black woman to practice law in the State of North Carolina in 1947. She established her career in her hometown, Greensboro, before running for District Court Judge in 1968. Her victory made her the first black, female judge in North Carolina and the first in the country to be an elected district court judge.

Aside from her “firsts,” Alexander became known for her “Judgement Day” program, a forerunner of modern juvenile deferred sentencing programs. Her first husband was Dr. Girardeau “Tony” Alexander, a prominent Greensboro surgeon. Together they had one son, Girardeau III. In 1979 Alexander became Judge Alexander-Ralston, when she married retired IRS officer John Ralston. She stepped down from the bench in 1981 and returned to private practice until her death.

Alexander is remembered for her style, her brazen methods of combating segregation in the courtroom, and giving a voice to the underserved who lacked representation in the southern legal system.

VIEW HONOREE VIDEO FOR JUDGE ELRETA MELTON ALEXANDER >>

Karen Bethea-ShieldsAttorney Karen Bethea-Shields

Karen Bethea-Shields (formerly, Karen B. Galloway), a native of the Method Community in Wake County, earned her J.D. in 1974 from Duke University School of Law. She was one out of the first three, African-American women students to graduate from the law school. Upon graduation, she immediately began her practice in criminal law. Her first case as an attorney was State v. Joan Little, later known as “The Trial of the Century,” where she successfully defended a young African-American woman on trial for murdering an abusive jailor. Little was the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault.

In 1980, after a preeminent early career and before the age of 30, Bethea-Shields became the first woman to be elected to a judgeship in Durham County, making her the second African-American woman judge in the State of North Carolina. Since the completion of her judgeship in 1985, she has continued to practice criminal law and serve as a leader in her community. Throughout her career, Bethea-Shields received many awards including the National Conference of Black Lawyers’ Lawyer of the Year in 1975 and The Order of the Long Leaf Pine, presented by the North Carolina State Governor, in 2015.

As a woman of many firsts who remains dedicated to the practice of law and serving her community, Bethea-Shields continues to open doors for the many attorneys coming behind her.

VIEW HONOREE INTERVIEW WITH ATTORNEY KAREN BETHEA-SHIELDS >>

Judge Wanda G. Bryant

Judge Wanda G. Bryant was appointed to the North Carolina Court of Appeals in February 2001 by Governor Michael F. Easley. She was successfully elected in November 2004, re-elected in 2012, and recently retired from the bench. Judge Bryant received her B.A. degree from Duke University and her law degree from North Carolina Central University.

Prior to taking her judicial oath of office, she served as Senior Deputy Attorney General in the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office where she led the newly created Citizens’ Rights Division, which oversaw the advocacy and protection of interests of citizens in a variety of areas, including victim’s rights, child and elder abuse, hate crimes, domestic violence, open government, health care and consumer protection. Prior to that, she was an Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) in Washington, DC where she focused on the prosecution of child and adult sexual assault cases. She began her legal career serving as the first female and first African American prosecutor in the 13th Prosecutorial District in eastern North Carolina. She also was the first staff attorney for the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) in Washington DC, before becoming an AUSA.

Judge Bryant has served continuously on many boards and commissions. She has given many presentations in legal, civic, and religious communities. For her professional and community service, Judge Bryant has received numerous honors and awards, including the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. Just recently-January15, 2021- Judge Bryant received the Friend of the Court from Chief Justice Paul Newby. She resides in Durham, NC with her husband Ronald Douglas, former Assistant Dean at North Carolina Central University School of Law.

VIEW HONOREE INTERVIEW WITH JUDGE WANDA BRYANT >>

James ColemanProfessor James E. Coleman, Jr.

Jim Coleman is the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, Director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, and Co-Director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke Law School. He is a graduate of Columbia University (J.D. 1974), and Harvard University (A.B. 1970).

Jim is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina. His experience includes fifteen years in private practice in Washington, D.C., the last twelve as a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. In private practice, Jim specialized in federal court and administrative litigation; he also represented criminal defendants in capital collateral proceedings and was an active participant in his firm’s pro bono program. Jim also has had a range of government experience during the early part of his career, including stints as an assistant general counsel for the Legal Services Corporation, chief counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, and deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education.

During his career, Jim has been active in the American Bar Association, where he served as Chair of the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, and has served on various state commissions focused on wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and criminal justice generally.

Jim joined the Duke faculty full-time in 1996, where his teaching responsibilities have included criminal law, wrongful convictions, and the appellate litigation clinic, which he and Erwin Chemerinsky started. His academic work, conducted through the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, centers on the legal, political, and scientific causes of wrongful convictions and how they can be prevented. His administrative work for the University has included chairing the Lacrosse ad hoc Review Committee and the Duke Athletic Council.

VIEW HONOREE INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR JAMES E. COLEMAN, JR. >>

Julian PierceAttorney Julian Pierce (posthumously)

Julian Pierce was a Lumbee Indian born in Moore County, North Carolina on January 2, 1946 to sharecroppers John Sampson Pierce and Mary Jane Perkins Pierce. He was one of thirteen children. At sixteen, Pierce graduated as valedictorian from Hawkeye High School. He then attended the University of North Carolina at Pembroke on full scholarship and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry. His early career was spent working as a chemist in Newport News Shipbuilding and then in the Navy Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. There he developed an award-winning chemical process for decontamination of nuclear reactors. In 1973 Mr. Pierce decided to attend the North Carolina Central University School of Law. After graduation from NCCU in 1976, he was offered a position with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC. While there, Pierce attended Georgetown School of Law to earn his Master of Laws in taxation.

In 1978, he returned to his Lumbee community to become the first director of the Lumbee River Legal Services, a poverty law office in Pembroke, NC. For ten years, Mr. Pierce worked at Lumbee River Legal Services to raise the standard of legal care for the poor citizens of Robeson County. Among other things, he was instrumental in eliminating gerrymandering that led to the merging of a tri-school board system into a one-school board system in the county so that all children could receive equal educational funding. Mr. Pierce and others spent years researching and drafting a petition to submit to the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) for federal recognition with benefits long denied the Lumbee tribe. The petition was submitted and rejected in 1987 ostensibly due to language in the Lumbee Act of 1956 (DOI has since reversed its position on this language). What followed was the introduction of the first of many recognition bills in Congress, but it failed due to opposition from the DOI and from a few federally recognized tribes with competing financial interests.

In 1988, the NC General Assembly created a new Superior Court Judgeship in Robeson County. Joe Freeman Britt, the county’s district attorney, announced his candidacy. Britt was in the Guinness Book Of World Records for being “the Deadliest Prosecutor.” Most of those he helped be sentence to death row were minorities. Mr. Pierce resigned from his position as Director of Lumbee River Legal Services to campaign against him and to investigate rumors of drug trafficking involving local law enforcement.

On March 26, 1988, just a few weeks before the election, Mr. Pierce, 42, was murdered in his home. Though local law enforcement claimed they found the murderer the suspect was alleged to have committed suicide prior to arrest so the circumstances of the murder continue to be debated. In the aftermath, Britt was automatically declared the winner of the primary election. However, a count of the votes determined Mr. Pierce won the vote posthumously- 10,787 to 8,231. In the 33 years since his death Mr. Pierce’s legacy has remained a strong presence in North Carolina, with minorities in Robeson and Hoke counties rising to many positions of power and authority formerly denied them.

VIEW HONOREE VIDEO FOR ATTORNEY JULIAN PIERCE >>

Previous Legal Legends of Color Honorees

  • 2020 Honorees – Judge Yvonne Mims Evans, Attorney Anthony Fox, Attorney J. Kenneth Lee* (posthumously), Senator Dan T. Blue, Jr., Professor George R. Johnson, Jr.
  • 2019 Honorees – Professor Charles Daye, Former U.S. Attorney Janice McKenzie Cole, Former Legislator H. M. “Mickey” Michaux Jr., Judge Sammie Chess, Attorney Julius Chambers (posthumously)
  • 2018 Honorees – Judge Shirley Fulton, Judge Paul Jones, Attorney Glenn Adams, Attorney Victor Boone
  • 2017 Honorees – Judge Albert Diaz, Former Justice Patricia Timmons-Goodson, Professor Irving Joyner
  • 2016 Honorees – Chief Justice Cheri Lynn Beasley, Former Chief Justice Henry E. Frye, Attorney James E. “Fergie” Ferguson II