Court portrait of writer of notorious slave ruling reviewed

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — In North Carolina's Supreme Court chamber, above the seat held by the second African American chief justice, hangs a towering painting of a 19th century slave owner and jurist who authored a notorious opinion about the “absolute” rights of slaveholders over the enslaved.

Larger than any other painting in the courtroom, it's a portrait of Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin, who wrote in 1829 that “the power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect."

But Ruffin's place there is now being re-evaluated.

In October 2018, on the same day that a newspaper op-ed urged the removal of Ruffin's portrait, the state Supreme Court named a commission to review the portraits in the building that houses the court — including Ruffin's.

Two African American chief justices have sat on the bench beneath Ruffin's stare: Henry Frye who served as chief justice for about a year from 1999 to 2000 after 16 years as an associate justice; and Cheri Beasley, who was an associate justice for about seven years before she was appointed as chief justice in 2019.

Even as Beasley listened to arguments in August about a repealed law on race and capital punishment — the Racial Justice Act — Ruffin's image loomed over the courtroom.

Ruffin's cruelty was extraordinary even for the antebellum era, the October 2018 op-ed column in The News & Observer of Raleigh asserted. He caned a slave named Bridget for giving him an insolent look and then apologized — not to Bridget, but to Bridget's master for damaging his property, the column's two authors wrote.

“We needn't worry about judging with hindsight: Ruffin behaved viciously even within his context," wrote Eric Muller, a law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Sally Greene, an Orange County...