5 Reasons We're Pumped to Re-elect Justice Anita Earls to the NC Supreme Court!

1. Her values were forged by personal experiences. The daughter of a white mother and a Black father, her parents’ marriage would have been illegal in their home state of Missouri, so they moved to Seattle, Washington, where she and her brother were raised. 

2. She knows what it feels like when the system doesn’t work – and is committed to fixing it. Her brother, Aaron, an Army veteran, was murdered in 2006. His killer was never prosecuted. That injustice fueled Earls’ decision to found the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) in 2007.

3. She fights for our rights. Justice Earls spent her career fighting for clients in civil rights cases ranging from voting rights to school desegregation to employment discrimination matters. As Executive Director of the SCSJ, she led (and won) lawsuits challenging racially gerrymandered election maps and a brazen attempt by Republican lawmakers to make it harder to vote in North Carolina. 

4. She’s loyal to the law and the people – not partisan politics. As Justice Earls pointed out in our interview last year, “in our state, just looking at the cases that were decided in 2021 and 2022, when we had a 4-3 court, the Republican justices voted together almost all the time. The Democratic justices actually disagreed with each other more than they disagreed with the Republicans. … If you are an independent judge, you look at each case and you do your best job to apply your understanding of the law to the facts in that case, without any sense or need to adhere to any particular point of view from any of your colleagues.”

5. She won’t let corrupt, far-right Republicans intimidate her. When the Republican-controlled Judicial Standards Commission used its power to target Earls with an ethics investigation – for pointing out the lack of racial diversity within the state judiciary – she sued the Commission and took the complaint public, leading the commission to drop it.

““I know what it feels like when the justice system doesn’t work. I want to try to prevent that for as many people as possible.””
— Justice Anita Earls (as quoted in The Assembly)