Labor & Employment Law Section Honors Geraldine Sumter
The NCBA Labor & Employment Law Section presented its Distinguished Practitioner and Service Award to Geraldine Sumter of Charlotte on Saturday, November 5, in Asheville.
The award was presented by John Gresham at the section’s annual meeting and 38th Annual NC/SC Labor & Employment Law Program. Gresham, Ann Anderson and Griff Morgan co-chaired the Labor Law Awards Committee.
Sumter recently commemorated 40 years of practice with Ferguson Chambers & Sumter, P.A., which she joined in 1982 and where she has served since the mid-1990s as managing partner. She has been a member of the Labor & Employment Law Section for most of her career and served as section chair in 1992-93.
“To be honest with you,” Sumter said, “when John Gresham told me that I was going to receive this award, I said, ‘No, give it to somebody else!’ Seriously, I have this philosophy that no one should get an award for doing something that I feel privileged to do. I know that seems a little bit out of order, but I do feel it has been a great privilege to be able to do the work that I do.
“I believe a lot of young lawyers go to law school with some notion of wanting to do some form of public interest work, and then life gets in the way, and they never have that opportunity. They have these exorbitant student loans and the heavy debt that they end up with that sort of dictates what they do with their lives. They have no choice, most of them, but to do big firm work or something like that, so they never get to do those kind of altruistic public interest things that may have been a part of their motivation to go to law school.”
Sumter is a 1978 graduate of Howard University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and a 1981 graduate of Duke University School of Law, where she a was member of the national champion 1980 Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition. She clerked for N.C. Court of Appeals Judge Charles Becton, a past president of the NCBA, and proceeded from there to practice the type of law she had always dreamed of practicing.
How did she do it?
“First of all, I knew what I wanted to do and I was committed to doing it,” Sumter said, “and I maintained a very spartan existence when I was in law school. I only borrowed the amount of money that I absolutely needed, and even back in the day my law school debt was low. I chose not to have a lot of law school debt and I didn’t have any undergrad debt.
“I just lived a simple life so, and I still do. I don’t have the same material needs that a lot of people have that would require them to work in bigger firms and make large amounts of money. I have a lifestyle that’s conducive to public interest work.”
Sumter readily agrees that she has also been blessed to work in a firm that has encouraged and inspired her public interest work, practicing alongside legal legends such as James E. “Fergie” Ferguson II, Adam Stein and the late Julius Chambers.
Another aspect of her career that Sumter has found rewarding is her involvement in the North Carolina Bar Association and its Labor & Employment Law Section.
“I consider that association to have been a part of my growth and development,” Sumter said. “The Labor & Employment Law Section gave me an opportunity to interact with and get to know members of the management bar or my opposing counsel, and to work with them outside of a piece of litigation. I thought that was a good and helpful thing.
“In that group we always knew that the plaintiffs would have one position and the defendants would have another position, so we had an understanding that we were going to agree to disagree. Despite that, we were able to work on issues and present issues that were beneficial, and I am glad that was part of my existence.”
Sumter, as denoted in her nomination for this award, “has specialized in employment, civil rights and other civil litigation. Like the firm, she has taken on many challenging cases not favored by others in society and in the bar.”
“Her lifelong commitment to civil rights,” the nomination continued, “is unsurpassed.”
Previous recipients of the Labor & Employment Law Section’s Distinguished Practitioner and Service Award are:
2008 Jonathan R. Harkavy
2009 John J. Doyle Jr.
2010 M. Daniel McGinn
2012 Travis Payne
2018 John W. Gresham
2019 M. Ann Anderson
Russell Rawlings is director of external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association.