Retiring SC Chief Justice Don Beatty grew up in the civil rights era, urges judicial diversity

Retiring South Carolina Supreme Court Justice Don Beatty, center, holds his final court sessions June 18-19, 2024, at the new Spartanburg County Courthouse in Spartanburg, the chief justice's hometown. (Screenshot of SC Supreme Court livestream)

SPARTANBURG – Inside the gleaming, white-columned building of Spartanburg’s new county courthouse Chief Justice Don Beatty sat quietly behind the heavy wooden bench, chin resting in his hand, as he listened to the legal arguments being made before him during the final session before his retirement from the state’s highest court.

“I started my career here in the former courthouse; I thought it would be fitting to end my career here at this courthouse,” Beatty told the SC Daily Gazette at the close of court that mid-June day, a month and a half before his term officially closed.

It was an homage to the hometown that he said has shaped him, as well as his legal and political career.

Beatty grew up attending segregated schools in South Carolina’s Upstate in the 1950s and ’60s, during the Civil Rights Movement in the Jim Crow South.

In 2007, the Legislature elected him the second Black justice on the state Supreme Court since Reconstruction. He eventually rose to the pinnacle of the state’s legal system as chief justice in 2016.

Now, at 72, he has reached the mandatory retirement age for judges in the state. Wednesday is his last day after spending nearly three decades on the bench, 17 of those on the Supreme Court.

In his farewell address, published in the South Carolina Bar magazine , he wrote of peeking through the back door of the courtroom in Spartanburg County’s old courthouse hoping to catch a glimpse of his idol, former Judge Matthew Perry , arguing cases.

Perry, whose law practice was based in Spartanburg, would later become the first Black federal court judge in the state after serving as chief counsel of the South Carolina NAACP. He was on the legal team in the case that integrated Clemson University. And he helped argue South Carolina’s first civil rights case against a bus company whose driver punched a Black woman, Sarah Mae Flemming , when she refused to move to the back of a Columbia bus a year before Rosa Parks did the same in Montgomery, Alabama.

Meanwhile, Beatty was growing up in Spartanburg’s south side.

Pride of the south side

The largely working-class, Black community was home to four funeral homes, half a dozen auto shops and several grocery stores. An iron foundry owned by Draper Corp., once the largest maker of power looms for the textile industry, was the neighborhood’s largest employer.

And at the heart was Carver High School, which educated Black students until 1970 when Spartanburg schools were finally desegregated a decade and half after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled public school segregation illegal.

“If you were a Carver Tiger you spoke of excellence, you spoke of dedication,” said James Talley. “You were taught to take pride in your work, take pride in what you do.”

Talley, a math teacher at the school, lived off Young Street, a few doors down from the Beatty family. He remembers Beatty as a conscientious student, devoted to his studies and always neatly dressed.

Beatty was one of seven children. His father, a World War II veteran, worked in multiple industries — carpentry, stone and ceramics, heavy equipment operating — and was a member of a popular traveling gospel group, the Soul Lifters. His mother worked as a home health aide.

“His father and mother had a tight rein on him, his sister and brothers,” Talley recalled.

Rep. Rosalyn Henderson-Myers echoed Talley’s sentiments about the south side. The Spartanburg Democrat said the neighborhood was a protective environment where the parents looked after each other’s children and poured into their kids the expectation to do more, to be better.

“It was tough love but nurturing,” she said.

Henderson-Myers has known Beatty since she was a young girl. He played football for her father, the coach at Carver until it was closed and students were sent to Spartanburg High School.

Henderson-Myers said it was Beatty who was instrumental in her own decision to be an attorney. She was an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina while he was in law school. She hadn’t known any lawyers growing up but she recalls seeing him one day outside the Statehouse. She approached him and he encouraged her to apply to law school.

Beatty had enrolled in USC law school after he had graduated from South Carolina State University, a public, historically Black college in Orangeburg, and served as an officer in the U.S. Army for two years, including the final months of the Vietnam War. After finishing law school, he spent about two years at what was then called the Neighborhood Legal Assistance Program in Conway, providing legal help to residents unable to afford a lawyer.

Beatty then moved back to Spartanburg and started his own solo law practice. He also got into politics and was elected, first to the Spartanburg City Council in 1988 and then the Statehouse as a Democrat for two terms starting in 1991, He moved straight from the Statehouse to the bench. The Legislature elected him to a circuit court seat in 1995.

Similar to how Beatty considered Perry, Henderson-Myers called Beatty “a trailblazer.”

“He’s been a constant force, a constant gauge for many attorneys to follow,” she said.

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Henderson-Meyer’s own professional and political career has tracked Beatty’s, serving on the Spartanburg City Council and now the S.C. House in his former seat.

“How he came up and to be where he is today, I think everybody looks up to him,” said Gerod Allison, a close friend of Beatty’s for more than 30 years.

Fair and open-minded

Beatty told the SC Daily Gazette he doesn’t dwell much on what might be considered his legacy. He just hopes to be remembered as fair and open-minded.

In 2016, the last time Beatty went before the panel charged with screening judges in the state, it had been more than two decades since he’d litigated cases but certain ones still came to mind when he was asked about the most significant matters he’d handled as a lawyer: a mentally disabled man who Beatty got acquitted of accusations that he was the leader of a drug ring in Union County, a man found not guilty of armed robbery after Beatty argued the lineup he was picked out of was tainted by the lead detective, and a man who Beatty got compensation for an injury at work after his employer had persuaded him not to file a workers compensation claim until it was too late.

Beatty also has authored many opinions since 2016, but at the time he was seeking the chief justice seat, among the cases he considered most influential was a dispute over the estate of the legendary James Brown , who’s from Barnwell. Beatty wrote the majority opinion that found Attorney General Alan Wilson overstepped bounds in his involvement carrying out the settlement of heirs’ claims negotiated by his predecessor, now Gov. Henry McMaster. Beatty’s opinion went on to say the settlement went against the late singer’s wishes.

Beatty also cited a child sexual abuse case in which his opinion upheld the practice of law enforcement impersonating a child online to catch potential abusers.

“What was right. What was fair. What was honest. And then point out what’s wrong with it. I think that’s how he governed his life is making sure that it was done right,” said Talley, Beatty’s former math teacher who also served on city council alongside Beatty. “Whatever the decision, whatever the problem, whatever the discussion was, he wanted to look at all angles and to make sure that it was done right.”

In June, as the court heard arguments in Spartanburg, a man who’d been caught up in an insurance dispute begged the justices to treat him fairly.

“We treat all cases fairly,” Beatty was quick to respond.

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A push for diversity

Beatty plans to stay in Spartanburg after retirement, and though he will no longer be a judge, he says he’ll remain active in the legal community. In particular, he said he’ll continue to be a champion of diversity in the state’s legal system. While hearing cases in Spartanburg, he stepped aside and asked incoming Justice Letitia Verdin, the third woman in South Carolina’s history to be elected to the state Supreme Court, to sit in on a case.

“Diversity is what makes the world go round,” he said. “It’s sad that there’s an attack on it.”

By not having judges from a variety of backgrounds with different life experiences, views on various issues become one-sided and communities stagnate, Beatty said.

“Our citizens need to see themselves in the individuals responsible for judging them,” he wrote in his farewell. “And, to inspire our young people, they need to see themselves in our legal profession and judiciary.”