Talk:Jeanne Hopkins Lucas

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Obituary

Senator Jeanne Hopkins Lucas, the first Black woman elected to the North Carolina Senate, passes. Sen. Lucas had represented Durham County, North Carolina in the Senate since 1993, when local Democrats decided that she should receive a gubernatorial appointment to replace former Sen. Ralph Hunt.

She won a full term the following year, never had trouble securing re-election and rose through the ranks of the Senate's Democrats to serve as the chamber's majority whip in the 2003-04 and 2005-06 sessions of the General Assembly.

At the time of her death, the former Hillside High School foreign-language teacher was the senior chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee's education/public instruction subcommittee, and senior chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee's public instruction subcommittee. The committees help set the budget and overall policy for the state's K-12 school system.

Sen. Lucas died at 7:45 p.m. Friday at the Hospice at the Meadowlands in Hillsborough. She had fended off an earlier bout of cancer in 2003 but took sick again this winter, and had missed all of the Senate's proceedings this year.

Sen. Lucas was a native of Durham and was born here on Christmas Day in 1935. She graduated from Hillside High School and N.C. Central University, and taught at Hillside from 1957 to 1975.

From there, she became an administrator in the Durham City Schools and then in the Durham Public Schools when the city and county school systems merged in 1992. She retired as the merged system's director of school and community relations at the end of the 1992-93 school year, just before receiving her appointment to the Senate.

Sen. Lucas' political career began at the grassroots level in 1972 when, at the urging of Lavonia Allison, she went to a Democratic Party precinct meeting and got herself elected first vice chairwoman of the precinct.

Her subsequent career in party politics included a stint as the chairwoman of the Durham County Democratic Party and service as a delegate to the party's 1984 national convention in San Francisco. She went to the convention as a supporter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's first presidential bid.

Sen. Lucas also was active in the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. She tried to become the group's chairwoman in 1990 but lost the election by 16 votes. She went on to become chairwoman of group's political committee, a post she held in 1993 when she made her bid for a Senate seat.

Many of Durham's elected officials can point to the help they received from Sen. Lucas early in their careers as a turning point in their public service.

Officials at NCCU credit her with helping to make sure the school got its fair share of money from the $3.1 billion bond issue the General Assembly put before voters in 2000, and for backing more recent efforts at the school like the Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise.

Sen. Lucas also was an active member of Mount Gilead Baptist Church, where she taught Sunday school, led the children's choir and served in an assortment of other volunteer posts.

Sen. Lucas is survived by her husband; two sisters, Bertha Breese and Bernadette David-Yerumo of Durham; two sisters-in-law, Freddia Hopkins and Christine Hopkins of Durham; and two aunts, Juanita Dent Hopkins of Wake Forest and Ruth Roberts Moore of Durham.

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