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Durham lawyer and law professor Robinson Everett, who died Friday at age 81, had a remarkable public career.
He worked for Sen. Sam Ervin's storied Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, served in the Air Force and co-owned three TV stations. For a decade he was chief judge of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, where he once clerked as a young lawyer. He also taught at Duke University School of Law.
But Robinson, a tall man who called himself a yellow-dog Democrat, also had a profound influence on the shape of the political districts. In 1966, he challenged a congressional redistricting plan for North Carolina that he thought was an illegal gerrymander aimed at preserving the incumbency of U.S. Rep. Harold Cooley. (It didn't help Cooley; a young hamburger titan named Jim Gardner, owner of Hardee's, knocked him off in the general election that fall.) Everett's lawsuit forced the legislature to revise the districts, making them more compact and contiguous.
Everett won widespread acclaim for opening elections up with fairer districts that were color blind. But in the 1990s he again challenged redistricting plans that created a long, snaking district for North Carolina's new 12th District, which, he argued, amounted to legal segregation. He succeeded again in forcing new districts to be drawn up, but ultimately was unsuccessful in getting the courts to rule out racial considerations in drawing districts.
Robinson Everett was a social activist who did not compromise his principles when he saw legal discrimination at work. He didn't win all his battles, but he reshaped the N.C. political landscape.
