This Month in Rockingham County History: January - Rockingham County's Susie Sharp named one of TIME Magazine's Women of the Year

January 1976

Susie Sharp, the first female Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, appeared on the January 5, 1976 cover of TIME magazine as one of the Women of the Year. Sharp, who grew up in Reidsville and practiced law in Rockingham County for two decades, was selected to represent changing roles and advances for women in the legal profession. Her image appeared on the magazine’s iconic cover just below that of tennis great Billie Jean King and between those of First Lady Betty Ford and Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

TIME Magazine cover from January 5, 1976 featuring twelve American Women of the Year, among them Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Susie Sharp. (MARC Collections)

​Each year, TIME recognizes persons of influence and importance and typically selects one individual whom editors deem “a living symbol of the year that was.” In considering 1975, TIME chose twelve women of consequence from a variety of walks of life to represent “American Women.” The issue celebrated the diversity of women in the United States and their changing roles in society.

​There is no doubt that Susie Sharp was a trailblazer as an attorney and judge. She was the only woman in her law class of sixty, the first woman to have a law practice in Rockingham County, the first woman appointed to a Superior Court judgeship in NC, and the first woman on the NC Supreme Court. When she was on the cover of TIME, Sharp had just been elected as the first woman in the nation to serve as Chief Justice of her state’s Supreme Court. 

Chief Justice of the NC Supreme Court, Susie Sharp, at her desk in Raleigh. (TIME, January 5, 1976, 11, MARC Collections.)

At age 68, Sharp was selected as one of the women who embodied the change the nation was undergoing in the mid-1970s, but she had made it clear that she did not support the Equal Rights Amendment debated throughout the decade. Sharp, who never married, openly expressed her more traditional view of women’s choices, telling TIME that she did not think it was possible for most women to balance both a career and a family. “The trouble comes when a woman tries to be too many things at one time,” Sharp said. “A woman has got to draw up a blueprint. She has got to budget her life.”
 
During her long career, Susie Sharp became one of the most prominent citizens of Rockingham County. Her parents met when they were both teaching at the Sharp Institute in the Intelligence community. Although she was born in 1907 in Rocky Mount, NC, a fact that made its way into the TIME profile, Sharp and her family moved back to Rockingham County only a few months after her birth. As a young child, she lived in the western part of the county and very briefly on a farm just across the state line in Virginia while her father J.M. Sharp practiced law in Stoneville and Madison. Then, the Sharps moved to Reidsville in 1914, where the family ultimately made their home on Lindsey Street. 

---

​In 1924, the future judge graduated from Reidsville High School, where she had excelled as a debater, and then attended the North Carolina College for Women, as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro was then known. Sharp returned to Reidsville and joined her father’s legal firm following her 1929 UNC Law School graduation. For the next two decades in that law practice she tried scores of cases in the Rockingham County Courthouse (now home to the MARC) and served several years as Reidsville’s city attorney. In 1949, she was appointed to a special Superior Court judgeship by Governor Kerr Scott, who made a visit to the Sharp and Sharp legal offices in the Amos Building on Gilmer Street in Reidsville to inform her of her selection.
 
In rising to the highest ranks in her profession, Sharp had to overcome many gender barriers. “Women lawyers aren’t a curiosity anymore,” she told TIME, “but I was a curiosity in my little town.” In fact, the judge who swore her in at the courthouse in Wentworth told her from the bench that she would never “make a lawyer.” “If you persist,” he said, “you will be wasting your time.” Not only were there very few female attorneys in North Carolina in the late 1920s when Sharp started her career, women were not even allowed to serve on juries in the state until 1946. By 1975, even though women were making inroads into traditionally male professions, only 7 percent of attorneys in the United States were women.
 
One of Sharp’s legacies was court reform. During her first years on the state’s highest court, she played a role in reorganizing the court system and streamlining the judicial process through the creation of the Administrative Office of the Courts. In addition, Sharp’s final election in 1974 was a catalyst for the amendment to the state constitution that requires judges in North Carolina to be licensed attorneys. Prior to 1980, there was no such standard for judicial candidates, or even for those seeking a seat on the NC Supreme Court, as Sharp had learned firsthand. Though she won with 74 percent of the vote, she had truly been worried that her challenger for the position of chief justice in 1974, a fire extinguisher salesman with no legal training, might be elected. He garnered nearly a quarter of a million votes.
 
As a jurist, Sharp became known for her steady and calm demeanor and her thorough knowledge and application of the law. During the 1960s and 70s, her name was routinely mentioned by her supporters as a possible candidate for the federal bench or the United States Supreme Court. Sharp remained in North Carolina, however, serving for seventeen years on the state’s Supreme Court. “I broke the ice,” she said at her retirement in 1979 at the mandatory age of 72. “I hope I made it a little easier for women who want to be lawyers and judges.”

A Dozen Who Made a Difference, Women of the Year cover images identified (TIME, January 5, 1976, 19, MARC Collections.)

​The 1975 issue profiling “American Women” was not the first to honor a group. The American “fighting man” was selected in 1950, U.S. scientists were lauded in 1960, and “Middle Americans” were chosen in 1969. Those recognized with a TIME cover have ranged from Charles Lindbergh on the first “Man of the Year” cover in 1927 to the 2020 selection of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

References:
Cover, “Women of the Year: Great Changes, New Chances, Tough Choices,” 6-16 and “A Dozen Who Made a Difference,” 19-21, “7% lawyers” 8; her “little town,” 19; on marriage and career, 20, TIME, January 5, 1976, MARC Collections; Miller’s Reidsville NC City Directory, 1941-1942, 12; 1948-1949, 247, Digital NC, https://lib.digitalnc.org/record/25647?ln=en; and https://lib.digitalnc.org/record/25645?ln=en; CBS News, “Every TIME Person of the Year for the Past 27 Years,” https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/time-person-of-the-year/; “Susie Marshall Sharp,” NCpedia, State Library of North Carolina, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources,  https://www.ncpedia.org/sharp-susie-marshall; Anna R. Hayes, Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 7, 12, 17, 19, 20, 22, 27, 30, 39, 50-51, 54, 89, 90, 99, 148, 155, 184, 249, 269, 299, 334, 365, 385, 389; Hayley Fowler, “On Anniversary of ‘Trail-Blazing’ NC Judge Taking Oath, Know This: She Was No Feminist,” Charlotte (NC) Observer, January 2, 2020, https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article238921978.html; TIME Magazine, “Person of the Year: A Photo History,” http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2019712_2019752_2019750,00.html; Gary D. Robertson, “Pioneer Justice Susie Sharp Dies,” Greensboro (NC) News & Record, March 1, 1996, https://greensboro.com/pioneer-justice-susie-sharp-dies/article_d489800c-6967-5cd2-9c1c-80bccee507f4.html.