"Julius LeVonne Chambers"(October 6,1936)

Attorney educator,and author, was born and raised in Mt.Gilead,North Carolina, the third of four children of William, an automobile mechanic,and Matilda Chambers.Growing up in a family that placed a high value on education, the twelve-year-old Julius set his sights upon becoming a lawyer to address many of the racial inequities and injustices that he experienced coming of age in a segregated black community.Particularly formative was his experience of seeing his father unable to retain a lawyer to represent him to collect a debt owed by a white customer who had received service only to refuse to make payment.Julius traveled close to twelve miles to Troy, North Carolina, to attend Peabody High School,where he excelled in athletics, playing football and baseball, and was president of the student government association during his junior and senior years.He graduated from high school in May 1954, the very month of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling Brown v.Board of Education.In the fall of 1954 he entered North Carolina College in Durham (later North Carolina Central University).That same year he was forced off an interstate bus because he refused to move to the back of the bus and give his seat to a white passenger.He graduated summa cum laude in 1958 with a BA  in history,where he was a again president of the student body.In 1959 he received an MA in History as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the University of Michigan.He attended law as a John Hay Whitney Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,where he received the LLB degree with high honors in 1962 and was admitted to the North Carolina bar.Julius was a gifted student,rising to become the first in his class of one hundred and editor in chief of the North Carolina Law Review.He was not only the first African American to edit the law review but also was the first at any historically white school in the South. He was the first to be inducted into the Order of the Golden Fleece, the university's oldest and most prestigious honorary society.He spent the next year studying and teaching at Columbia University,where he received an LLM degree in 1963 from Columbia University Law School.Also in 1963 he was selected by Thurgood Marshall, counsel for the Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) of the NAACP and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice,to be his first legal intern.Julius worked on civil rights cases in Virginia, North Carolina,Georgia,and Alabama.In 1964 he began his private law practice in Charlotte,North Carolina, with Chambers,Stein,Ferguson, and Atkins, the first integrated law firm in North Carolina.Involved mostly in civil rights cases Julius lived under the constant threat of racially motivated violence.In January 1965 he represented forty-one black plaintiffs in a suit to integrate the Shrine Bowl,a high school all-star football game played every year in Charlotte.Five days,later,while he met with African Americans in a nearby church,his car exploded.Crowds of angry whites,sometimes demonstrated in front of his house,which arsonists later firebombed.In November 1965, after he filed the Swann v.Charlotte-Mecklenburgh Board of Education suit on behalf of ten black families whose children had been denied admission to all-white schools,his law offices were burned to the ground.But even all this did not quiet his resolve to fight for full equality for black children and all citizens.On April 22 1971 he successfully argued the Swann case before the U.S. Supreme Court,which upheld the use of busing to achieve desegregation.He also mounted successful arguments in Griggs v.Duke Power Co. and Moody v. Albemarle Paper Company.Both cases dealt were the Supreme Court's most significant Title VII employment discrimination decisions.Julius was appointed to the first board of governors of the state university system, in 1972, representing North Carolina Central University.He served from 1972 to 1977 and resigned two years before his term ended to the board's  delay in implementing integration initiatives at the universities and in improving opportunities for black students.In 1984 Julius left the law firm to become the third director-Council of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York City,following in the footsteps of Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg.At the LDF he became the field Marshall for 24 attorneys and approximately 400 cooperating attorneys around the nation.With offices in New York,Los Angeles,and Washington,D.C.,the Legal Defense Fund's Staff was the main litigator of more than one thousand cases that involved such issues as education,voting rights,capital punishment,employment,housing, and prisons.Under his leadership the LDF became the first line of defense against the political action programs that arose during the 1970s and 1980s.Julius also served as president of the Southern Regional Council,an interracial organization dedicated to improving race relations and tackling regional issues,such as those involving poverty and integration.He sat on the steering committees for the 1972,1976, and 1980 Democratic Party presidential campaigns.Julius served as adjunct professor at the University of Virginia Law School,1975 to 1978;University of Pennsylvania,1978 to 1986;Columbia University,1984 to 1992; and University of Michigan, 1985 to 1992.He was the author of numerous articles in various publications and law journals. in 1992 he accepted an urgent call from North Carolina Central to return to his alma mater and serve as chancellor.During his nine-year tenure he doubled the institution's research funding and increased the number of endowed chairs from one to fourteen,including the $1-million Charles Hamilton Houston Chair in the School of Law.Julius also persuaded the general assembly to fund a new building for the school of Education, and oversaw the creation of a biotechnology research institute for the study of diseases that affect minorities.That institute was later named in his honor.In 1994,he was recommended by a number of legal,educational,and political leaders for consideration as a justice on the Supreme Court, he withdrew his name from consideration, citing the wrangling partisan politics with North Carolina's U.S. Senate delegation. In 1995 Julius was one of three lawyers who argued Shawv.Hunt,the landmark legislative redistricting case before the Supreme Court.This case forced the court to decide the constitutionality of  two key North Carolina's congressional districts that were draw after the 1990 census to ensure equitable minority representation. In the latest ruling in this case (Hunt v. Cromatie),the Supreme Court sustained two congressional districts that enabled North Carolina to elect its first black congressional representatives since Reconstruction. The end result of this legislation was the election of Representatives Mel Watt Eva Clayton.Julius retired from his position as chancellor of North Carolina Central University on June 30 2001 and reentered private practice with the firm he started in 1967. The firm-Ferguson,Stein, Chambers,Wallas,Adkins,Gresham and Sumter,P.A. specialized in such areas as business matters, employment discrimination,education, and civil rights.In 2002 he became director of the civil rights in the University of North Carolina School of Law.He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Sigma Pi Phi,and the Prince Hall Masons.Julius was married to the former Vivian Giles,and they were he parents of two children.Upon his retirement he was retirement he was viewed as one of the nation's leading civil rights attorneys and as a dedicated educational leader.