James E. Ferguson II, a litigator who was instrumental in persuading judges to desegregate the nation’s schools, reverse wrongful convictions in civil rights cases and spare sentenced prisoners the death penalty, died on July 21 in Charlotte, N.C. He was 82.
The cause was complications of Covid-19 and pneumonia, his son James Ferguson III said.
Even before he became a lawyer, Mr. Ferguson rallied fellow classmates in the Jim Crow South to integrate libraries, lunch counters and other public facilities in North Carolina and to engage in multiracial and interfaith dialogue.
After receiving his law degree in 1967 from Columbia University, where he said he was among fewer than 15 Black students in a class of about 300, he became a partner in what was described as Charlotte’s first racially integrated law firm, joining another Black lawyer, Julius Chambers, and Adam Stein, who was white (and the father of North Carolina’s present governor, Josh Stein).
“We weren’t practicing law in the abstract,” Mr. Ferguson was quoted as saying in Robert Samuel Smith’s book “Race, Labor & Civil Rights” (2008). “We were the legal arm of the civil rights movement in North Carolina.”
In 1971, Mr. Ferguson assisted his partners in persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold busing as a means of integrating public schools.
In that landmark case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the justices declared unanimously that busing students, without harming their health or academic achievement, was an appropriate and necessary means of implementing the integration that the court had mandated nearly two decades earlier in Brown v. Board of Education. The Swann decision became a model for busing policies across the country.
During the litigation of Swann, the modest law office that Mr. Ferguson shared with his partners was intentionally torched. No one was charged in the arson — which did not result in injuries — but Mr. Ferguson said he never forgot the helpless feeling of getting a call at 3 a.m. and then seeing the office aflame.
Mr. Ferguson later represented Black parents who challenged court decisions that limited, but did not overturn, the use of busing to achieve integration.
Beginning in 2011, Mr. Ferguson worked with Sonya Pfeiffer, whose Charlotte law firm he later joined, in litigating on behalf of four death row inmates under the state’s groundbreaking Racial Justice Act, which empowered the courts to revisit capital punishment cases. He led the legal team that succeeded in reducing the inmates’ sentences to life imprisonment.
“He endured abuses and threats but made everyone feel seen and heard — that is the civil rights movement,” Ms. Pfeiffer said in an interview.
“What he did for schools across the country was extraordinary,” she added. “Have we achieved integration and equality in any realm? The answer is no. But Fergie did what he could in the world that existed. It did make a difference.”
With Amnesty International and other lawyers, Mr. Ferguson also helped overturn the convictions of defendants known as the Wilmington 10 — eight Black male high-school students, a young Black minister and a white female social worker — who were found to have been wrongfully prosecuted on charges of firebombing a white-owned grocery store during civil rights protests in North Carolina in 1971. The protests, ignited by racial turmoil in the schools, had ended in rioting and at least two deaths.
The defendants spent almost a decade in prison. The last of them to be released, in 1979, was the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., a civil-rights leader who became executive director of the NAACP in 1993. The 10 were not pardoned until 2012, by Gov. Beverly Perdue, a Democrat.
Mr. Ferguson also represented the so-called Charlotte Three: Black civil rights activists who were convicted on the basis of flimsy evidence — two dodgy witnesses were offered cash for their testimony — in the arson of a white-owned stable in 1968; 15 horses died. Their inordinately lengthy sentences (10, 20 and 25 years) were not overturned but were commuted by Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat, in 1979.
In another high-profile case, joining with the Innocence Project, Mr. Ferguson and other lawyers introduced DNA evidence and a confession by another suspect that led to the exoneration in 2004 of Darryl Hunt, a Black man who in 1984 was wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a 25-year-old white woman and sentenced to life imprisonment. (The case became the subject of a 2006 HBO documentary in which Mr. Ferguson appeared.)
In his impassioned plea to an all-white jury, which sustained an earlier conviction, Mr. Ferguson said: “If you do justice to Darryl Hunt, you have done justice to the state, to the prosecution, to your country and yourselves.”
James Edward Ferguson II was born on Oct. 10, 1942, in Asheville, N.C., the youngest of seven children. His father, James Jr., was a railway laborer. His mother, Nina, was a housemaid. He described facing a “wall of inferiorization” throughout childhood because of segregation, including attending an all-Black junior high school, and he soon began outreach efforts to students at all-white schools.
He received a bachelor’s degree in English and history in 1964 from North Carolina College at Durham (now North Carolina Central University), where he was the student body president. He received a juris doctor’s degree from Columbia’s law school, which he attended on a scholarship, and returned to the South, he said, “to work for change.”
Mr. Ferguson was a partner in the law firm Ferguson, Stein, Chambers, Gresham and Sumter and served as its president from 1984 until he retired in 2014, when the firm was known as Ferguson, Chambers & Sumter. He was also of counsel to Pfeiffer Rudolph in Charlotte.
Mr. Ferguson trained Black lawyers in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s on trial tactics, lectured at Harvard Law School, served as a general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and was president of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers (now North Carolina Advocates for Justice).
His wife, Barbara (Turman) Ferguson, died in 2022. In addition their son James (who is known as Jay), he is survived by another son, Taj; a daughter, Kali Ferguson; a brother, William; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
“I just want to feel that I’ve done all I can do to bring about equality — for everybody,” Mr. Ferguson told The Charlotte Post, a Black-oriented newspaper, in 2016. “That’s what life is about — trying to create the society we think we want.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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