The Derita Station Post Office in Charlotte was officially renamed Thursday the Julius L. Chambers Civil Rights Memorial Post Office in honor of the late Charlotte civil rights attorney.
Chambers was a lead attorney in the U.S. Supreme Court case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971 that paved the way for busing in Charlotte to desegregate public schools. He was also head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, following in the likes of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Congresswoman Alma Adams introduced the bill to rename the post office. She praised Chambers during the virtual ceremony for making it his life’s work to serve his community.
"Together, lawyer Chambers and his partners took the fight for our civil rights to the highest court in the land, and for their efforts they faced threats to their lives from lesser men, men whose racism would have seen their dreams for race and segregation preserved indefinitely," Adams said. "But Julius Chambers persisted. Never forgetting that the work that he and his team were doing was for the benefit of those coming after them."
The virtual ceremony also included North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, whose father worked with Chambers in the first integrated law firm in North Carolina. He says that Chambers' impact on North Carolina is hard to measure.
"Chambers had a tremendous impact. Not only on his clients but on the development of Charlotte, of North Carolina and even all of America," Stein said. "So having a federal post office here in Charlotte, in North Carolina named to honor Julius Chambers is a wonderful and wholly appropriate recognition.”
Adams said there will be an additional in-person ceremony once the pandemic is over.