A civil rights giant passes: Rosanell Eaton, 1921 - 2018

In September I had the great honor of photographing a Sunday visit by one of our generation’s North Carolina civil rights heroes, Anita Earls (left), with ‘Miss Rosanell’ Eaton (right) at her Louisburg NC home. What an honor it was to witness this passing of the torch between two such formidable women of color and civil rights icons.

It has not yet been reported in the media to my knowledge, but I have it from family friends that Rosanell Eaton of Louisburg, North Carolina, passed on yesterday, at the age of 97.

In a state haunted by both a legacy and a currency of brutal voting rights suppression, Ms. Eaton stood unbowed, rebellious, and always triumphant, for almost a century.

The granddaughter of a slave, at the age of 21 Ms. Eaton famously defied North Carolina’s Jim Crow-era bars to voting by people of color.

In 1942, the 21-year-old Eaton took a two-hour mule ride to the Franklin County courthouse in eastern North Carolina to register to vote. The three white male registrars told her to stand up straight, with her arms at her side, look straight ahead and recite the preamble to the Constitution from memory. After she did that word for word, they gave her a written literacy test, which she also passed. Eaton was one of the few blacks to pass a literacy test and make it onto the voting rolls in the Jim Crow era.

“Well little lady, you did it,” Rosanell often quoted the consternated registrars grudgingly admitting — the Jim Crow era equivalent of “nevertheless, she persisted.”

Ms. Eaton went on to become a life-long voting rights activist, personally registering thousands of people of color to vote in her corner of the state (she lost count somewhere around 4,000). And she never once missed voting in an election. Those accomplishments alone would have made for a noteworthy life, but Rosanell was only just getting started….

In 2015, having no birth certificate, Rosanell ran afoul of North Carolina’s brand new voter ID law.

Eaton undertook a herculean effort to match her various documents and comply with the law. Over the course of a month, she made 11 trips to different state agencies—four trips to the DMV, four trips to two different Social Security offices, and three trips to different banks—totaling more than 200 miles and 20 hours. “It was really stressful and difficult, [a] headache and expensive, everything you could name,” she said.

Unable to establish her identity to the satisfaction of the state Board of Elections, Ms. Eaton faced the prospect of being denied her right to vote yet again, after 73 years of defending and exercising it. So she joined a lawsuit against the state, becoming the lead individual plaintiff in NC-NAACP v. McCrory, in which the little lady “did it” yet again, convincing the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the state’s voter ID law, finding that it “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

As both a recent friend and a long-time admirer of ‘Miss Rosanell,’ I have any number of anecdotes I might add here. But my favorite, by far, was the one related to us by her daughter, Armenta, when NC Supreme Court candidate (and plaintiffs’ attorney in NC-NAACP v. McCrory) Anita Earls visited Rosanell in her Franklin County home this September, while I tagged along photographing the visit as the campaign’s digital director. In 2010, Armenta told us, Barack Obama invited Rosanell to visit him in the White House. Rosanell respectfully declined, explaining “Obama’s in the White House and he’s doing a fine job. He doesn’t need me bothering him.” When her family pressed her to reconsider she said, “We have an election coming down here. I have to get folks to the polls!”

Finally, Rosanell agreed to make the long trip to the White House to visit with America’s first black president — but only after the election, when she could finally spare the time.

Receiving the news last night of Rosanell’s death, it occurred to me that she had died as she had lived: she made even Death wait until after the election to receive her with honor. And in so doing she had lived long enough to see her friend, Anita Earls, elected the 100th Associate Justice of the NC Supreme Court last month, one of the very few African American women ever to serve on that court.

It was a victory made possible in no small measure by the state’s increasingly potent African American vote, to which ‘Miss Rosanell’ gave birth, and then nurtured for nearly a century.