Draft:Sammie Chess, Jr.

Sammie Chess, Jr. (28 March 1934 - 23 July 2022) was an attorney, civil rights activist, and judge in North Carolina. He was the first Black Superior Court justice in North Carolina history.

Chess graduated from the North Carolina College For Negroes (now North Carolina Central University), then attended law school at the same institution, graduating with his J.D. in 1958. He went into private practice in High Point, NC, and was a prominent attorney in the civil rights era, arguing thousands of cases on behalf of largely Black defendants in the course of protests and other civil disobedience actions.

On November 4, 1971, Chess was appointed to the North Carolina Superior Court by governor Robert Scott. He served a single term on the Superior Court before stepping down and returning to the private practice of law in High Point, North Carolina.

In 1991, Chess accepted an appointment as a North Carolina Administrative Law Judge, a position he held until 2007. .

Early life
Sammie Chess, Jr. was born on March 28, 1934, in the Bull Pond community near Allendale, South Carolina, to Sammie Chess, Sr. (1911-1994) and Susanna Hagood Chess (1913-2012). Chess' family farmed land that had come down to them from Chess' great-grandfather W.J. Baxter, who had bought a plot of land of at least ten acres in 1900.

In 1943, Chess' father moved the family to Harlem, NY during the Great Migration. Chess Sr. worked there as a longshoreman, hauling iron, and Chess' mother Susanna worked in a button factory. In 1946, Chess' parents separated, and Chess moved with his mother back to the South, to High Point. There, he attended William Penn High School, which at the time was all-Black. Chess dropped out of school, believing that it would confer no advantages on him, but his principal, Samuel E. Burford, persuaded him to return. Burford further urged Chess to apply to college, despite Chess' belief that college was beyond his reach. At Burford's urging, Chess applied to the North Carolina College For Negroes (now North Carolina Central University), an HBCU, in the fall of 1952.

College and Law School
Burford had persuaded Chess that it would be feasible to work his way through college. Chess held various jobs at NCCN, beginning with a position scrubbing the cafeteria floor, and ending as a campus representative for Philip Morris by his first year in law school -- a job sufficient to pay his room, board, and tuition. . Chess entered the NCCN law school in 1955, after his junior year, under the law schools' early admission program. . He completed his undergraduate work in June of 1956,, and his law degree two years later. He passed the North Carolina bar exam in August, 1958.

Military Service and Early Law Practice
After law school, Chess responded to the draft and entered the US armed forces, spending thirteen months deployed to South Korea. After his service, Chess returned to High Point, where he had lived with his mother prior to entering college, and opened his own law practice there in 1960. Albert L. Turner, Dean of the NCCN law school and the first Black law school dean in the U.S.,, had urged chess to practice law in Cleveland, Ohio, for Turner's own firm. Instead, Chess returned to High Point to practice law where he had grown up.

During a time of increasing civil rights activities, Chess often advocated for Black citizens engaged in acts of civil disobedience, such as sit-ins. In 1963, in the wake of a series of anti-segregation demonstrations in High Point, some marked by attacks on Black protesters, Chess defended seven Black demonstrators who sat on a sidewalk outside a High Point cafeteria. Initially convicted of trespassing, the protestors were acquitted on Chess' successful appeal to the Superior Court. In 1964, as a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he represented an NAACP chapter in a suit against the hospital in Thomasville, North Carolina, pressing for "full integration of all facilities." Chess later estimated he had argued some three thousand of such civil rights actions, often for little or no compensation.

Chess also met twice with Martin Luther King Jr. along with other attorneys as King worked to develop a cohort of Black attorneys who could successfully argue civil rights cases, especially at the local level.

The Fight For Integrated Schools In High Point
The struggle to integrate schools was a particular hallmark of Chess' career as a civil rights attorney. In 1954, the Supreme Court had ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education, that "separate but equal" schooling facilities were unconstitutional. In North Carolina, as elsewhere, the implementation of Brown was slow and often grudging. Individual districts were brought into compliance one legal action at a time. In 1963, Chess brought suit against the High Point school district, challenging the district's progress on desegregation. Under a new plan, Black students were afforded some rights to transfer to majority-White schools, but Chess and others needed to maintain pressure over several years.