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After a career in business, Luther Hartwell Hodges made industrial development the hallmark of his administration and was instrumental in the establishment of the Research Triangle Park. The “Businessman Governor” was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, on March 9, 1898, to a tenant farmer. Soon after his birth the family moved the short distance across the border to Spray (present-day Eden), North Carolina, where his father took a job in a textile mill. Luther Hodges served as a second lieutenant in World War I and in 1919 graduated from the University of North Carolina. He returned to Spray to take a position as secretary to the general manager of the Marshall Field and Company mills. In 1922 he married Martha Blakeney of Union County; they would have three children. After her death in a house fire in 1969, he married Louise Finlayson in 1970.
Hodges remained with Marshall Field all of his business career, rising from personnel manager to general manager and, from 1943 until his retirement in 1950, vice-president. In 1952 Hodges, with his wide administrative and management experience, launched a successful bid for lieutenant governor. On November 7, 1954, Governor William B. Umstead died and Hodges became governor. In 1956, with only token opposition within the party, Hodges was the Democratic nominee and easily defeated Republican Kyle Hayes in the fall. Hodges served as governor for six years and two months, longer than any chief executive of North Carolina to that date.
Hodges’s greatest challenge was one he inherited. With the advice of a panel appointed by Umstead and headed by Thomas Pearsall, the governor crafted a moderate stance toward integration of the public schools. The Pearsall Plan provided for payment for private schooling of any child assigned against the parents’ wishes to an integrated public school and permitted local citizens by a majority vote to close schools. The plan lessened, but did not eliminate, public fears, and the state, unlike others in the South, moved slowly but peacefully toward integration.
Hodges’s greatest challenge was one he inherited. With the advice of a panel appointed by Umstead and headed by Thomas Pearsall, the governor crafted what was considered then to be a moderate stance toward integration of the public schools. The Pearsall Plan created avenues for disaffected Whites to avoid integration, primarily through providing private school funding for any child assigned against the parents’ wishes to an integrated public school and allowing local citizens by a majority vote to close schools. It also waived the Compulsory School Attendance Law for White children that did not want to attend integrated schools. Within a decade, a Federal court declared the plan unconstitutional.
The governor’s views on race, however, exceeded policy decisions. During an address to students on the campus of North Carolina A & T, Governor Hodges called for voluntary segregation among student populations, criticized the NAACP, and repeatedly used an offensive variation of the word “negro.” Following the lunch counter demonstrations at Woolworth’s in Greensboro in 1960, Hodges openly condemned the protestors, derided their objectives, and—though the protest was peaceful—accused them of seeking to provoke a “breakdown of law and order.”
In the wake of international outcry against the state’s incarceration of two Black children in what is known as the “Kissing Case,” Hodges mounted a public relations campaign to defend the state’s actions. It was three months before the governor relented to public pressure and ordered the boys, then ages 9 and 7, released. Their crime? A young White girl had kissed each on the cheek. Though the boys had been handcuffed and beaten during their incarceration, the governor refused to apologize, deflected blame onto the mothers, and distanced himself from the case entirely upon the boys’ release.
Hodges’s drive to recruit new industry, domestic and foreign, brought the state favorable national publicity. His greatest success was the Research Triangle, the business park founded in 1956, which he called the “heart and hope of North Carolina’s industrial future.” As governor Hodges sought to apply business management principles to state government, in part by creating the Department of Administration. He reorganized the State Highway Commission to lessen political influence and separated state prisons from that board. Shortly after Hodges’s term as governor ended, President John F. Kennedy selected him as Secretary of Commerce. He served in that post until December 1964. Thereafter his energies were directed largely to the Research Triangle Foundation, which he served as board chairman from 1965 to 1972, and Rotary International, which he served as president in 1967. Hodges retired to Chapel Hill and died on October 6, 1974. He is buried in Overlook Cemetery in Eden.
References:
Luther H. Hodges, Businessman in the Statehouse: Six Years as Governor of North Carolina (1962)
Alfred Guy Ivey, Luther H. Hodges: Practical Idealist (1968)
James W. Patton, ed., Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers of Luther Hartwell Hodges, Governor of North Carolina, 1954-1961 (3 vols., 1960-1963)
William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, III, 156—sketch by Charles Dunn
Howard E. Covington Jr. and Marion A. Ellis, eds., The North Carolina Century: Tar Heels Who Made a Difference, 1900-2000 (2002)
(Raleigh) News and Observer, October 7, 1974
Robert Sobel and John Raimo, eds., Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789-1978, III (1978)
Tanzer, Lester, ed., The Kennedy Circle (1961)
Luther Hartwell Hodges Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill: finding aid at: http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/h/Hodges,Luther_Hartwell.html
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