What Would Jim Hunt Say?

I can just hear the Governor thundering over the phone: “Did you hear what that #@*&^+% Trump said about North Carolina?”

Jim Hunt had a saltier tongue than he let on in public, and he would have lit into Trump’s lies and insults about our state at a rally for Michael Whatley in Gastonia this week.

Hunt spent his life battling the likes of Trump.

Hunt was 13 in 1950 when his mother, the gentle schoolteacher Elsie Brame Hunt, burst into tears on hearing that Frank Porter Graham lost Senate race to Willis Smith. Smith’s campaign slogan was “White People Wake Up!”

In 1960, Hunt organized college students for John F. Kennedy and Terry Sanford, who defeated arch-segregationist I. Beverly Lake in the Democratic primary for Governor.

When Hunt first ran for Governor in 1976, racists spread the rumor he “marched with Martin Luther King.” In fact, he had walked in a candlelight procession in Wilson the night King was assassinated.

In 1984, Hunt took on Senator Jesse Helms, who was Trump before Trump - and had a hand in the 1950 Smith campaign. Helms filibustered on the Senate floor against a national holiday for Dr. King and ran campaign ads: “I oppose the Martin Luther King Holiday. Where do you stand, Jim?”

Hunt supported the holiday - and lost the election.

Like Helms and like the Willis Smith campaign, Trump is all about dividing people and stirring up hate.

They stoke people’s fears. Hunt spoke to their hopes.

The last time I saw Governor Hunt was three years ago this month. His old friend Judge Phil Carlton and I arranged for him and Carolyn to meet Anderson Clayton, then the newly elected state Democratic Party chair, at Parkers Barbeque in Wilson.

Hunt and Clayton talked politics for over an hour. Near the end, she asked, “What advice would you give me, Governor?”

His answer had nothing to do with party matters or political mechanics.

He told her, simply, “Stand up for fairness and equal opportunity.”

I appreciate Trump coming here and reminding me that I worked for the right side and the right man all those years.

This photo by Charlie Jones is the frontispiece of my biography of Governor Hunt.

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