Julian Thomas Pierce (January 2, 1946 – March 25/26, 1988) was an American lawyer and Lumbee activist. Born in Hoke County, North Carolina, he became the first person in his family to go to college and worked for several years as a chemist at shipyards in Virginia before obtaining his law degree. Following two years of work for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he moved to Robeson County, North Carolina to direct a legal aid organization and in that capacity co-authored a petition to the federal government asking for the extension of federal recognition to the Lumbee tribe. In 1988 he resigned from his job to pursue a candidacy for a new Superior Court judgeship. Running against the local district attorney and over the objections of the county sheriff, he was found murdered in his home several weeks before the primary election. While his murder was officially determined to be the result of an interpersonal dispute, the circumstances of his death remain unclear, with his friends and family having advanced suspicions that he was assassinated for political reasons.
Early life
Julian Pierce was born in Hoke County, North Carolina on January 2, 1946, to John S. Pierce and Mary J. Pierce. The Pierces were Lumbee Indian tenant farmers who had moved to the Hoke Indian community of Hawkeye from South Carolina. Julian was one of 13 children. He attended Antioch Elementary School and then Hawkeye Elementary and High School, from which he graduated in 1962 at the age of 16. He then attended Pembroke State College in Pembroke, North Carolina, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 1966. He was the first person in his family to obtain a college degree. He married and had three children, but eventually separated from his wife.
Career
Early activities
After graduating from Pembroke State College, Pierce became a chemist for the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Newport News, Virginia. There he worked on chemical instruments, quality control testing, and decontaminating nuclear reactors. In 1969, he became a chemist in the U.S. Navy Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, where he performed similar work. In 1973, Pierce moved back to North Carolina and enrolled at the North Carolina Central University School of Law. After graduating from law school in 1976, he became an attorney for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's office of general counsel in Washington, D.C. In that capacity, he mostly compiled briefs on the commission's behalf, though he also occasionally represented it in court. While working there, Pierce attended Georgetown School of Law to earn his Master of Laws in Taxation.
Legal defense and Lumbee recognition
In 1978, Pierce moved to Robeson County to become the first director of Lumbee River Legal Services, a new legal aid organization headquartered in Pembroke and designed to serve the poor in Robeson and four surrounding counties. He worked in that capacity for ten years. In 1981, he served as counsel for residents suing the Lumberton City School Board, arguing that the system's annexations of mostly-white jurisdictions in the county in the 1960s violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina ultimately ruled that the city board had to seek clearance of its action from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Pierce also heavily studied laws concerning federal recognition of Native American tribes. The Lumbee were the largest group of resident Native Americans in the United States east of the Mississippi River. While they had been recognized by North Carolina's state government as tribal community since the 1880s, they never achieved complete federal recognition. In 1987 Pierce and three others co-authored a petition on behalf of Lumbee River Legal Services and the Lumbee Regional Development Association to request that the United States Department of the Interior grant federal recognition of the Lumbee people as a tribe. The petition was denied due to language in the Lumbee Act of 1956. The petitioners then proposed a recognition bill for Congress to adopt, but it failed due to opposition from the Department of the Interior and from other recognized tribes.