A billboard that welcomed people to Smithfield, a town in Johnston County, stood until the 1970s, “but the efforts to keep Black Johnstonians off juries continued,” said Henderson Hill, one of the attorneys for Hasson Bacote, a Black man sentenced to death in Johnston County in 2009. (Photo: Exhibit filed by Bacote’s attorneys)
Johnston County was recently home to a historic hearing in the case of case of Hasson Bacote, a Black man who has spent 15 years on North Carolina’s death row. We now await the judge’s decision on whether Mr. Bacote will be removed from death row and resentenced to life in prison due to overwhelming evidence that racism affected his sentence — and all of North Carolina’s 136 death sentences.
I serve as president of the Johnston County Branch of the NAACP. After living and practicing as a dentist in Smithfield for more than 50 years, as well as receiving countless reports from members of my community, I can testify that racism stifles virtually every aspect of life in Johnston County, whether social, economic or political.