It's safe to say that Susie Marshall Sharp was the first N.C. Supreme Court justice to be sworn in wearing a double strand of pearls.
She placed her left hand on the Bible that March 14, 37 years ago, raised her right hand and became the first female justice of this state's highest court.Out of a sense of decorum and civility, the event was neither photographed nor taped. Pictures marking the Reidsville woman's swearing-in by Chief Justice Emery Denny were staged after the historic moment.
Hundreds of people packed the court chambers for the ceremony, according to written accounts. At precisely 11:30 a.m., Sharp's longtime school friend Dillard Gardner, the court's marshal and librarian for nearly 27 years, announced the entrance of the justices.
Led by Gov. Terry Sanford, the six men and one woman entered the chamber and stood through the 10-minute ceremony that included the swearing-in of Denny and Sharp.
Then Sharp took her seat on the bench, the junior justice's seat at the end, to the left of Denny.
And for that moment alone, Sharp will be remembered as one of the most important and influential women of the 20th century in North Carolina.
But by that day, Sharp's list of accomplishments was already lengthy.
In the late 1920s, Sharp was the only woman in a class of 60 students in the law school at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 1929, 21-year-old Sharp became one of the youngest people ever to argue a case before the state Supreme Court. In 1937, the city of Reidsville hired Sharp as city attorney, making her the state's first-ever female city attorney. Gov. W. Kerr Scott appointed her a special judge of the Superior Court in 1949, again marking the first time a woman had held that position.
And in 1962, Sanford appointed Sharp to the state Supreme Court. Sharp would sit on that court for 17 years, writing more than 600 court opinions and eventually, in 1974, becoming the first woman in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state supreme court.
During the Nixon administration, Sharp's name was at the top of the president's list to fill a spot on the United States Supreme Court. And in 1976, Time magazine named her one of 12 ``Women of the Year.'
``We weren't surprised at anything she did,' says Sharp's younger sister, Louise, who lives in Eden. ``We were proud of (her accomplishments) for her.'
Louise Sharp says her parents, James Merritt and Annie Blackwell Sharp, encouraged all of their children to go to college and ``make a living.'
And from an early age, it was clear that Susie Sharp, the oldest child, would make her living at the law.
``It was just understood she was going to be a lawyer,' Louise Sharp says. ``She's the one that went for it.'
The quote that accompanies the picture of young Susie Sharp in the 1924 Reidsville High School yearbook reads, ``And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew/That one small head could carry all she knew.'
In the picture, her long, dark hair is pulled back into a messy ponytail and tied with a huge white ribbon. Her wide, dark eyes peek out from behind round, wire-framed glasses.
``Susie is the most brilliant girl in our class,' begins the information under the list of her high school accomplishments. ``She is a typical old maid, and her favorite authors are Darwin and Voltaire.'
Susie Sharp would never marry.
Although Sharp supported a woman's right to choose a career, almost any career, over marriage and children, Sharp was not a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, and in interviews she distanced herself from the ``women's liberation movement.'
That's not to say that Sharp wasn't dedicated to her family. Louise Sharp says it was the strength of their father that helped her sister make great strides in the law. Susie Sharp worked for 20 years in private practice with James Sharp before she accepted appointment to the Superior Court.
``She had Daddy at her right-hand side,' Louise Sharp says. ``You weren't afraid when you were with Daddy.'
The family considered Susie Sharp a relatively close second, however.
``She was most helpful to me and the rest of the family,' Louise Sharp says. ``She helped us all along the way. We turned to her for advice, and when we needed money, she would help us out.'
The Sharp family made headlines of another sort in the mid-1980s with a bizarre series of murders involving Susie Sharp's nephew, Frederick R. ``Fritz' Klenner, and niece, Susie Newsom Lynch. Klenner murdered Lynch's former mother- and sister-in-law, in Kentucky, and Lynch's mother (Susie Sharp's sister), father and paternal grandmother in Winston-Salem. In June 1985, Klenner, Lynch and her two sons were being pursued by police, when either Klenner or Lynch detonated a bomb in their vehicle on N.C. 150 that killed them both. Lynch's sons had been poisoned and shot earlier.
Susie Sharp has been dead for three years, and Louise Sharp, 82, doesn't remember being at her sister's Supreme Court swearing-in ceremony 37 years ago. She doesn't recall how her sister felt about any of it.
Alonzo Folger, a Madison attorney who practiced around the same time as Sharp, recalls her as ``a fine lady, a fine lawyer, an excellent judge,' but he won't comment on how she was different from the male lawyers and judges of their day.
``She was just a wonderful person,' Louise Sharp says. ``She helped everybody she could.'
