Luther H. Hodges’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Luther Hartwell Hodges (March 9, 1898 – October 6, 1974) was an American politician, who served as the 64th Governor of the state of North Carolina from 1954 to 1961 and as United States Secretary of Commerce from 1961 to 1965.

Biography

Hodges was born in Cascade, Pittsylvania County, Virginia, on March 9, 1898, and moved with his family to Spray (which later merged with two other towns to become Eden, NC) when he was two years old, living much of his life there in Rockingham County, North Carolina. Hodges left for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at age 17, and moved back to Eden after college. He then went to work at Carolina Cotton and Woolen Mills in Leaksville, which was later purchased by Marshall Field. He remained with the company, working his way up from millworker to executive positions, until he retired to enter politics. In 1923, he helped form the Leaksville Rotary Club, which later became known as the Eden Rotary. In the 1940s, he was appointed to the state Board of Education and the Highway and Public Works Commission. In 1945, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and to the U.S. Army in occupied Germany.

Hodges was elected the state’s 22nd lieutenant governor in 1952 and succeeded to the position of governor in November 1954 upon the death of Governor William B. Umstead. Two years later, he was elected on his own to a four-year term as governor. Because North Carolina had a one-term limit for governors at that time, Hodges had the longest continuous tenure in the office until the state constitution was changed and Jim Hunt was elected to a second term in 1980. Research Triangle Park was established while he was governor. When he left his Washington post in 1965, he returned to Chapel Hill and was chairman of Research Triangle Park. In 1967, he served a one-year term as president of Rotary International. During his time in office, Governor Hodges promoted industrialization and education.

Civil rights

Hodges opposed implementation of the US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education(1954). In a 1955 editorial, Governor Hodges position with regard to Brown was that in order to evade the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina should adopt “voluntary segregation.” His argument was articulated by Jones,:328

In the 1959 Hodges, embarrassed by the international press and pressured by President Eisenhower, was forced to pardon two young children – in one of the most egregious incidents of the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68), the Kissing Case (1958) – who had been arrested in the racially segregated town of Monroe, North Carolina, Union County, jailed for three months in an “underground cell,” beaten, threatened with castration, charged by North Carolina Juvenile Judge Hampton Price,:118 convicted of molestation, sentenced to reform school until the age of 21. Upon learning of the case through the civil rights lawyer Conrad Lynn, Eleanor Roosevelt “led an international campaign on their behalf.” She phoned Eisenhower and “Justice Department officials, calling the case an ethical and international disgrace” and demanded that he “put a stop to this persecution.” Hodges was ordered to release the children and destroy their records.:118:118 Prior to this Hodges had refused to show any clemency to nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson, and seven-year-old David Simpson. Sissy Marcus kissed the boys out of affection as she had recognized Thompson as a friend she has played with while his mother worked for Sissy’s mother, Bernice Marcus. Bernice Marcus became enraged when Sissy told her the story, called the police and accused the boys of assault.:118 During this time, no judge from North Carolina would overrule Price.:118 The families of the children were under attack from the local Ku Klux Klan, which had a headquarters in Monroe, who burned crosses in front of the families’ houses, and some people shot at the houses. The Monroe chapter included over 7000 members even though the population of Monroe was only 12,000. In a National Public Radio (NPR) interview in 2011, they still remembered “sweep[ing] bullets off [their] front porch” and the “burning crosses.” Although he was “embarrassed by the international press coverage to eventually pardon the children, he “refused to apologize for [the State of North Carolina’s] harsh treatment of them.”

Like his counterpart in the U.S. Senate, Jesse Helms, who was from Monroe, Hodges backed various tactics to delay public school integration in North Carolina. He backed state legislation to suppress the NAACP.

Later years

He died on October 6, 1974, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and is buried at the Overlook Cemetery in Eden, North Carolina. There is a monument in his honor near a water fountain in Eden’s Freedom Park.

Legacy

Hodges’s son, Luther H. Hodges, Jr., was a prominent banking executive and United States Deputy Secretary of Commerce.