Marvin Horton Reflects on Life, Love, and Seven Decades of Practicing Law
“There’s an activist in each of us,” proclaims Marvin Horton, who was honored in absentia at last year’s annual meeting as a recipient of the NCBA’s Citizen Lawyer Award. “Lawyers, by nature and profession, are positioned to select causes to pursue. While I appreciate lawyers must make a living to be available to champion beliefs, the key is not hesitating when action needs to be taken – even when it means taking a cause pro bono.”
The Tarboro lawyer, who turned 95 in April 2023, was recognized in large part for leading the legal effort to prevent construction of a massive hog slaughtering operation in the predominantly Black community of Kingsboro in the 1990s. The successful public campaign is the focal point of a recent documentary, “We Can Do Better,” which is accessible here through the Joyner Library of East Carolina University. The documentary has been shown at East Carolina University, North Carolina State University and several times in Tarboro.
During his interview for the documentary, Horton holds up a copy of the poem he penned in 1996 to commemorate the victory, titled, “The Activist in Each of Us.”
“I have always been interested in preservation efforts, particularly in Eastern North Carolina, which made acting on protecting Edgecombe County from negative environmental impacts a natural cause to pursue pro bono.
“The reward? I invite you to Edgecombe County to see for yourself!”
Invitation accepted! As for the reward, see for yourself in the following excerpts from an interview with Horton and his granddaughter, Cranfill Sumner attorney Eleanor Redhage Gilroy, who participated in the NCBA Leadership Academy in 2018.
“Alexa, turn off the music,” Marvin Horton commanded his virtual assistant in deference to the interviewer. “I had gotten so proud recently of my memory, and then I realized it was because I have forgotten what I have forgotten. So, I think I’ve got 100 percent memory.”
Worry not, Horton’s memory is intact.
“What did you come down here for?” Horton adds in jest as the tape recorder is positioned between us. We connect the dots, as Eastern North Carolinians are prone to do, and he tells a story about his legal legacy, Superior Court Judge J. Loyd Horton.
Prior to becoming the youngest judge elected to the Superior Court bench in North Carolina, Uncle Loyd was dismissed from the University of North Carolina over a hazing incident. By the time he was 20, though, he had graduated from Washington and Lee and passed the bar, although he had to wait until he was 21 to get his law license. Until then, he practiced pro bono in the Mayor’s Court in Farmville.
How about you, Marvin?
“I got a head start,” said Horton, who grew up in Pitt County. “I mean, I hit everything just right. I was just a little too young to be drafted. Herbert Bonner offered me an appointment to the Naval Academy. I turned that down. I was in high school, and I was getting ready to go from the 10th grade to the 11th grade, when the Pitt County School Board decided to put in 12 grades in the high school. This was 1944.
“At Farmville High School, they promoted everybody in the 10th grade to the 12th grade, so I skipped a grade and graduated from high school. My birthday was in April, and I graduated in May – so I graduated from high school in May 1945 when I was just barely 17.”
Horton only applied to one college – the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“I hadn’t heard anything,” Horton continued, “and it was August, and school was going to start in September. I decided I better go to Chapel Hill to find out about my application. I hitchhiked to Chapel Hill. Hitchhiking through Wilson was terrible, because when you got to town you were so far from where you needed to be to get out of town. I was able to get my ride to take me across town to another good hitchhiking spot.
“I got to Chapel Hill and went to the old South administrative building. I told the people my name, and they said, ‘Oh, Mr. Horton, we were just getting ready to send you a letter that you’ve been accepted.’ And I said, ‘I wish I had known that yesterday!’ When I walked back outside to hitchhike back home, it was probably around noon, and all hell broke loose. I mean, the campus suddenly erupted.”
Appearing in the documentary “We Can Do Better,” Marvin Horton displays poem commemorating the Kingsboro victory.
The historic date was August 14, 1945, when news of the Japanese surrender ending World War II reached the United States and, of course, Chapel Hill.
“It was VJ Day,” Horton said, “so I couldn’t get out of town. There I was, I had on a pair of slacks and a shirt and probably had $3 in my pocket. I was in Chapel Hill whether I wanted to be or not. They had a lot of V-12 (Officer Training Program) and a lot of people involved in the military on campus. There were bonfires on every corner and everybody’s going crazy – I am reliving it right now.
“I knew one person in Chapel Hill. His name was L. B. Johnson. He had lost a leg in the landing at Anzio, and he was the only person I knew in Chapel Hill. I went back and found out that he was living in the Kappa Sig House, so my first night in Chapel Hill I spent in the Kappa Sig fraternity house on VJ Day, and I was barely 17. What an initiation! They took me down to The Porthole restaurant where they were celebrating, and by God I had never touched a beer – and I didn’t start! But I went back and spent the night and went home the next day.”
Before proceeding through the undergraduate and law school experience, Horton takes a step backward to set the stage.
“I spent the summer of 1944, when I was 16, as a bellhop at Virginia Beach,” Horton explains. “I did a lot of growing up, because there’s nobody lower on the totem pole than the bellhop. I met so many people from Eastern North Carolina, there was almost a whole row. The Albemarle where I worked was owned by the John Stanley Smith family from Tarboro and Farmville. Next door was The Carolinian, which was owned by Mayo and Nick Boddie’s family in Rocky Mount. And then down five or six more there was The Avamere Hotel, which we called ‘The Have-a-Beer,’ which was owned by somebody from Scotland Neck, and The Roanoke, which was also operated by some people from Eastern North Carolina.
“I went down when I got out of school in May and started working at The Albemarle for $10 a week plus tips. But it was two weeks before the guests came, and Mr. Smith found out that I had the ability to put down Linoleum roll goods and fit it around the toilets in the bathrooms. Of course, everything was rundown because of the war, but they found out I could do that, so I spent my first two weeks waiting for the hotel to open putting down Linoleum!
“I met some wonderful people that summer. I was there at the hotel when they announced the D-Day landing. The big deal as far as the hotel was concerned was this oily tar that washed up on the beach because of the tankers being sunk offshore. There were some nights for that first little while when we got there that we had blackouts at night.”
One of the people he met that summer would have an indelible impact on his journey.
“I was just barely 17 when I went to Carolina,” Horton said, “and I went to summer school one summer and one-half of a summer. But they changed from the quarter system to the semester system my freshman year, so they had two short quarters that went from September to Christmas – two quarters’ credit in a little over three months.
“I took every course I could take. I even had courses that were scheduled at the same time, and when they had the exams, I took one exam and then hurriedly was late for the second one. But by Christmas I was beginning my sophomore year at Carolina, and I graduated in May of 1948 – two years and nine months.”
Fate took a turn for Horton that summer.
“Mr. Smith wanted me to come back to Virginia Beach in the summer of 1948 as the night clerk, and I was going to start law school in the fall. So I spent that summer as the night clerk, and then my father died, and I ran out of money.
“Well, I had heard of people going to law school in Washington (D.C.) at night at George Washington, and I had met this fellow at the Beach who had a book repair firm. He had a contract repairing books in the Supreme Court Library in what we called J – the justices had their own separate library – so he gave me an introduction to the Librarian of the Supreme Court. Her name was Miss Helen Newman.”
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Horton immediately did two things upon his arrival in Washington.
“I went by and saw that I could get in law school – I could get transferred to GW at night – and I was going to work in the daytime. And I went by, cold called, and met Miss Newman. Getting a job like that would be like a dream come true. I had no idea, but I had an introduction, so I went by. I was received very warmly and cordially, but they didn’t have any vacancies. Miss Newman said to stay in touch, which was all the invitation I needed.”
Horton did land a job in the correspondence section of the Farmers Home Administration in the Department of Agriculture.
“Almost every morning as I walked to Agriculture from over near GW. I went up one side of the Washington Monument and walked around it and came down on the other side. On most pretty days I would meet President Truman on his walk. We were briefed somehow not to be too familiar, so I absolutely invariably limited my meeting to ‘Good morning, Mr. President,’ very briefly, never any hesitation or anything like that. That was how young government employees were supposed to be professional about greeting the president.
“My big regret on that, which I have regretted ever since, was that I was so locked in on that protocol, because I had an uncle who was married to my daddy’s sister, named Bill Murray. He was assistant administrator at the Veterans Administration. He was from Missouri and played poker with Truman’s crowd literally two or three times a month. And I resisted saying, ‘Mr. President, Bill Murray is my uncle.’ There’s no telling what that would have gotten me! I’ll never know.”
Even without President Truman’s help, Horton landed a job in the Supreme Court Library.
“I worked in the correspondence section of Farmers Home, and they found out I could write letters, and I could type, and I was very accurate. I wrote letters for the administrator and a few – a few – for the Secretary of Agriculture, of which I was very proud. In the meantime, I kept contact – at least once a month or every two months between the time I started in August or September and the end of that first year – I would go over and meet with whoever I could meet with at the Supreme Court library. I finally went in one day and they hired me as an assistant librarian. It was wonderful!
“There was a fellow, George Hutchinson, who was an assistant clerk who lived near GW, and if I could get to his apartment before he left, I had a ride. This was quite valuable considering how far it was, so I made sure I was there. He later became a clerk of the court and marshal of the court. We rode together from then until I transferred back to Carolina. I looked up citations and things for the justices, because that was when everything was in books. I had a library cart that you could put 50 books on, and that’s what I did. I looked up citations and marked them for the justices or for the clerks. Of course, I was absolutely in awe of them.
“There was a tunnel between the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress that was only four feet wide which I used to access the Library of Congress. While I didn’t do any legal research for the Court, I did move tons of books from the Library of Congress. Often, when the interpretation of a general statute would be an issue, the legislative history would be important to the interpretation. I would be sent into the deepest basements of the Capitol to locate session laws that involved what was considered by the Congress before enacting a law.”
Horton’s experience in Washington was truly unforgettable.
“In fact, when I left, the administrative assistant to Mr. Justice Sherman Minton indicated to me if I could make law review at Carolina, I could be considered as a clerk for Mr. Justice Minton. But when I went back to Carolina, I couldn’t make it. I had so many conflicting issues that I just couldn’t make it. But on my last day there, I went by to see Mr. Justice Minton, Mr. Justice Frankfurter and Mr. Chief Justice Vinson, because the staff had promised me signed portraits. I went by and picked up the portraits, which I still have.
“And I went by to see Miss Newman. After a pleasant visit, I asked her how did she pick me to fill that very special job, which was much sought after. And she said, ‘Marvin, you were the only one who did not have a political endorsement, so we felt like we could fire you anytime we wanted to, without any political backlash.’”
In the fall of 1950 Horton decided that he wanted to practice in North Carolina, so he transferred back home to the UNC School of Law.
“I’ll never forget it. I took my last exam at GW and caught the bus to Chapel Hill. I got there three weeks after the fall semester had started. But I hung in there and managed to graduate the following year. Lindsay Warren Jr. was a classmate, and his younger brother Charles was a classmate, and we graduated about the same time. Lindsay had been in the Army, so Charles had caught up with him.
“But I had another classmate who was also a veteran. He was a major and was in an infantry reserve unit in Durham. Well, the draft was so close on my heels, I wasn’t sure that I could finish, and I wasn’t sure that if I finished that I would be around to take the bar, so he talked me into joining the infantry reserve as a recruit that fall. Then, after I finished school, I transferred to a unit in Greenville, and I kid you not, the infantry unit I had been in in Durham was sent to Korea, and I just missed it. Can you imagine the luck of that draw? I was in the USAR from 1950 to 1960, retiring as First Lieutenant AGC of the 3015th Reception Station.”
Horton would experience even greater good fortune a few years later, but first he had to get his legal career underway.
Granddaughter (Eleanor Redhage Gilroy) and grandfather (Marvin Horton) celebrate her licensure as a North Carolina lawyer.
“I started out in Greenville in 1951,” Horton recalled. “L. H. Fountain was running for Congress in the 2nd District. I had a mentor, Dr. Paul Jones, who was in the state Senate. He was a dentist and a friend of L. H. Fountain’s older brother, V. E. Fountain. They were looking for a young lawyer, because L. H. had gotten the (Democratic Party) nomination, which back then was tantamount to winning the election, so I came over here in October of 1952 and I got all of his cases.
“Interestingly, because he had been running for office, all of his cases had been continued because of the campaign. So they had a special term of Superior Court – three weeks, the first three weeks I was there. I came to Tarboro because I didn’t feel like I was getting enough trial practice in Greenville practicing by myself. We sat there at the defense table and George Fountain, who was later judge and resident judge, was what they called a solicitor, sat at the prosecution table, and for three weeks we tried every case trying to catch up. So I got what I bargained for.”
Prodded by his granddaughter, Horton recounts his first jury trial.
“The first jury case I had – I mean I was green as a gourd – was a drunk driving case,” Horton said. “When I made my argument to the jury, all of the lawyers knew it was my first argument. I can’t recall the solicitor’s name, but I finished my argument and the solicitor started his argument to the jury.
“Well, everybody in the courtroom, maybe five or six lawyers, came over and congratulated me. It was such a distraction – I think the jury felt like I had won the case because I was getting so many congratulations. The defendant was found not guilty, so I won my first jury case not on the facts but on the show. I never forgot that.”
Nor will he ever forget meeting his future wife of 68 years. The late Sharon Lewis Horton was born on April 9, 1931, in Du Quoin, Illinois, and died in their Tarboro home on July 15, 2022. Her husband, the obituary noted, referred to her as his “Favorite Star,” and described their meeting as “a fortuitous encounter in 1954.”
“Her father was a history and English teacher in high schools and small colleges in Illinois, and he got a Ford grant-in-aid to do research for six months in Washington,” Horton said. “She and her mother went to Washington with him, and after two or three weeks of sightseeing, she decided she wanted to get a job.
“She went over to Capitol Hill – I mean there is nothing like going for the plum – and there was somebody they had met or knew in L. H. Fountain’s office. He was running for re-election, and the primary was at that time the day after Memorial Day or something like that, and none of the staff wanted to come down to Tarboro, because Tarboro was really ‘the pits.’ The other staff picked her to come to Tarboro.”
The first thing Horton noticed, he said, was that she had the most beautiful elbows in the world. Immediately smitten, he finagled a blind date with the out-of-town visitor, nudging poor old Billy Goodwyn out of the way in the process, and the rest is history.
Horton, who retired in 2015 following 64 years of active practice, is an emeritus member of the North Carolina Bar Association, which he joined in 1952. His legal legacy lives on in the work of his granddaughter.
“If you will go around the corner into that room, which is the kitchen, and look on the acrylic table, there is a picture of us together from the day she was sworn in,” Horton said. “I think that the highest form of flattery is to have somebody emulate what you’ve done. To have someone that you admire follow in your footsteps is really a compliment.”
Rest assured, Marvin Horton, your legacy is in good hands.
Russell Rawlings is director of external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association.