An influential attorney who was the first Black woman to serve on North Carolina’s General Assembly died of natural causes Tuesday in her Winston-Salem home.
Annie Brown Kennedy was two years shy of reaching 100 years of age at the time of her passing. She was 98.
“She was a wonderful mother,” Harvey Kennedy, one of her sons, told Winston-Salem Journal. “She was a trailblazer.”
He said that in addition to being the first Black woman to serve on the General Assembly, she was the second Black female attorney in North Carolina and the second female attorney to practice law in Forsyth County.
Kennedy was born in Atlanta in 1924 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Spelman College. She would later pursue a law degree from the Howard University School of Law.
At Howard, she met her husband Harold Kennedy and moved to his hometown of Winston-Salem, where they opened a law firm at the height of the civil rights movement in 1953. One year later, she would become the first Black woman licensed to practice law in the state. The Kennedys grew a stellar reputation in the years to come, including the landmark case, Simpkins vs. City of Greensboro, which desegregated several public recreational facilities in the south.
“I remember her well,” said Gov. Jim Hunt, who appointed Kennedy to the N.C. House, District 29. “I was very proud to appoint her because I had seen the work she had done in Winston-Salem.”
He recalls her being “a real pioneer in terms of African American leadership in one of the major cities in North Carolina” and added that “she was a real scrapper when it came to getting opportunities for people. She made no bones about that. I was real proud to have an opportunity to appoint her.”
An outpouring of former colleagues and friends came out to reminisce on the public servant’s life, including U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, who said that Kennedy “was quite the mentor to me, and I cherished the opportunity to work with her. She took me aside when I first came to the state House, and was the only other Black woman there at the time.”
