NC NAACP Blasts GOP
By Cash Michaels –
Legislature Rejects Black Superior Court Pick
The president of the NC NAACP is not pleased that a joint session of the Republican-led NC legislature, before it adjourned its short session on June 29th, rejected one of Gov. Roy Cooper’s choices for a special Superior Court seat without apparent reason.
Former Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety Bryan Beatty, an African American, was the only one of three candidates put before state lawmakers for their consideration that they rejected.
The two white candidates—Chief District Court Judge J. Stanley Carmical and Chief District Court Judge Athena Brooks—were approved.
Dr. T. Anthony Spearman, president of the NC NAACP, called the rejection by GOP legislators “…quite blatant.”
“[The] measures to which these guys are going now, and the things that they’re doing, is just an extension of the extreme things that are happening, and how [Pres. Trump] is just opening up things for people to do whatever they can do,” Dr. Spearman continued. “I mean just outright in your face.”
There was little question about Beatty’s qualifications for the judicial seat. Besides serving as Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety, the Salisbury native also served as Director of the State Bureau of Investigation and as a commissioner on the North Carolina Utilities Commission.
Beatty is a graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law.
Beatty had appeared before three different legislative committees, and, sources say, was never negatively reviewed once, and never faced any opposition.
“This is yet another instance of Republicans working to inject partisan politics into our courts,” said Ford Porter, Gov. Cooper’s press spokesman, noting that GOP lawmakers had no problem confirming Republican former Gov. Pat McCrory’s staffer Andrew Heath as a Special Superior Court judge before he left office.
Though he hadn’t seen it at the time of the interview, Dr. Spearman was also outraged by a poster, apparently circulated by Republican lawmakers on the last day of the short session, titled, “When Governors Ignore the Will of the People,” which pictured 12 judges and former judges—three of them black—who were all appointed by NC Democratic governors. The three African American judges pictured were former state Supreme Court Associate Justice G. K. Butterfield (now a congressman); former NC Supreme Court Associate Justice James A. Wynn, Jr. (now a U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge); and Superior Court Judge Vince Rozier, who was appointed by Gov. Cooper in 2017.
“The code words are usually that they aren’t the ‘best judges’,” Dr. Spearman said. “And you know who the ‘best’ are!”
