No matter how honorable his life, George Rountree III might well spend the rest of his days answering for his family's role in one of the ugliest chapters of North Carolina's history. In 1898, his grandfather helped lead a white supremacist political campaign to overthrow the interracial government of Wilmington, then the state's largest city.

Racist propaganda sent gun-toting whites into the streets, where they shot down scores of African-Americans, bullied would-be voters and banished black leaders.

Two years later, the N.C. General Assembly passed an infamous Jim Crow law that deprived generations of African-Americans of their voting rights. Its author? His grandfather and namesake, George Rountree.

Much to his annoyance, modern critics keep circling back to that time, forcing him to defend the honor of the man whose name he carries, and whose old law firm he runs.

"My family and I abhor what happened in 1898," he said. "I can judge the event. But I won't judge anybody because I have not walked in their moccasins."

People need to focus on today's healing, he said, not yesterday's hurts. And he believes he has found a small way, one person at a time.

A deep history

To understand Rountree, you must understand his family's history. His roots in North Carolina go back to the Revolutionary War. He is proud of his heritage. Pictures of his father and grandfather hang on the walls of his law office.

His grandfather, the first George Rountree, was born in 1855, the son of a wealthy Pitt County plantation owner, cotton broker, banker and businessman.

When his grandfather was 5, he received, as a present, three slaves. One to look after his clothes. One to look after his horses. And one to care for his guns, when he grew old enough to carry them.

He became a prominent, Harvard-educated lawyer. In 1898, when an elite group of Wilmington businessmen moved to solidify white control over the city, they turned to him for legal advice.

Like them, he thought blacks were making progress at the expense of whites. He believed whites should be in control.

He later explained his actions in a 19-page memoir now on file at the UNC-Chapel Hill library. In it, the older Rountree didn't advocate bloodshed.

When gunshots echoed through the Wilmington streets on Nov. 10, he recalled standing with his Winchester on his shoulder, "feeling very much like a fool."

He found himself pleading for calm as he stood between a crowd of black men and a crowd of gun-toting white men. He recalled one black man looking at the armed whites and asking what blacks had done to deserve such treatment.

"I had no answer," he later wrote in a memo. "They had done nothing."

That didn't stop him, however, from continuing the push for white dominance. After the violence subsided, he won election to the state legislature and drafted a law that used literacy tests and poll taxes to deny blacks their right to vote.

The Jim Crow restrictions stood until the civil rights era.

Rountree believes his grandfather must be viewed in the context of his times. Conservative whites were upset about Reconstruction, when the federal government imposed its will on the defeated South. Whites felt that blacks and their Republican allies were dominating them.

He prefers to remember his grandfather as the man who took him to movies when he was a boy, who treated his black domestic workers with fairness and respect.

"I have never detected any feeling of inferiority felt by him about blacks or anybody else," Rountree said. "He felt the human hierarchy is a hierarchy of the brain, not color of skin."

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