Karen (Galloway) Bethea-Shields

Our February program featured an informative, sometimes challenging and often entertaining talk by the Honorable Karen Bethea-Shields. Bethea-Shields broke a number of barriers during her career as attorney and judge. Her first case as a freshly-minted lawyer was later called “The Trial of the Century,” i.e., the Joan Little case involving the murder of an abusive jailer. Before she was 30 years old, this young lawyer (then named Galloway) became Durham’s first female judge.

Our speaker’s story tracked the issues raised and in part resolved by both the civil rights and the women’s movements. Despite the fact that Bethea-Shields was often “on trial as much as her client was,” she made a point of being engaged in civic and cultural concerns instead of seeing her career as merely a personal journey. She lives by a creed that “If you’re only in it for yourself, you’re wasting your time.” With this as her guiding principle, she has enjoyed being a lawyer and continues to practice.

We heard from our speaker some of the most difficult but enduring truths that any of us has heard in recent years. To paraphrase, she said that integration has not yet happened. Instead, one race was assimilated into the cultural practices of another. She left us with the thought that mutual respect must precede any meaningful blending of cultures and ethnicities.

— Terry Wall