John Kerr dynasty has ended

John Kerr, John Kerr, John Kerr, John Kerr, John Kerr.

The first three were congressmen. The last two were state legislators. All were members of one North Carolina family.

If you grow tobacco, own a house on Kerr Lake or visit the state art museum, you have a John Kerr to thank.

When the legislature adjourned this month, it marked the end of an era of North Carolina politics -- the last of the powerful John Kerrs. That would be state Sen. John Hosea Kerr III, 72, a Goldsboro lawyer.

For 22 years, he had been influential in the legislature, much of the time as the Senate's chief tax writer. He is a big bear of a man with halting speech and unquenchable intellectual curiosity.

"A character and a legend," is what state Sen. David Hoyle called him.

Kerr (pronounced car) was raised in Warrenton, near the Virginia border, in a family that ran Warren County politics for generations. His daddy, John Kerr Jr., was the political boss of one of North Carolina's most history-rich counties. John Kerr Jr. was first elected to the state house in 1928 and rose to become House speaker in 1943.

Kerr Jr., unlike his son, was an ardent segregationist who ran a black-majority county during the era of Jim Crow. At a legislative budget hearing in 1963, Lewis Dowdy, the chancellor of historically black N.C. A&T State University in Greensboro, had to deal with white anger over student civil rights demonstrations in Greensboro.

"Didn't students from your college take part in the sit-in strikes in Greensboro trying to do away with segregation?" asked Kerr.

"Yes," Dowdy replied.

"And you come down here begging the white folks to give more money to your school?" Kerr Jr. said.

But race relations in a small town were often more nuanced and textured than they appeared.

After the public scolding, Eva Clayton, a future congresswoman from Warrenton and an African-American, wrote to the local newspaper rebuking Kerr Jr. Despite the criticism, Kerr Jr. later wrote to the University of North Carolina law school urging it to admit Clayton. Kerr Jr. sometimes offered legal advice to Clayton's husband, T.T. Clayton, a local lawyer.

"He had his own ideas about race that he died with," T.T. Clayton once told me. "But he was not bad in every respect."

Kerr Jr. was responsible for many progressive things in North Carolina. He is often credited with pushing through a $1 million appropriation that created the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh in 1947.

"I know that I am facing a hostile audience," Kerr Jr. told the House, "but man cannot live by bread alone."

He also played a role in starting the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill to better train Tar Heel government officials and was a major backer of the N.C. School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.

His father, John Kerr Sr., served in Congress from 1923 until 1952. He was the third John Kerr in the family to serve in Congress.

Kerr Sr. was the author of the Kerr-Smith Tobacco Act of 1934, which evolved into the federal tobacco price support program, helping generations of Eastern North Carolina farmers.

He was also instrumental in the construction of the John H. Kerr Dam and Reservoir in the 1950s to control flooding along the Roanoke River. That led to the construction of Gaston Dam, providing the impetus for lakeside homes and recreation for many.

So when the last of the John Kerrs retired, it was an end of an era.