Ernest A. Finney, Jr., was born in Smithfield, Virginia on March 23, 1931. His mother died 10 days after he was born and his father was a teacher. When his father was working in Washington, D.C, Ernest was impressed with the well-dressed, articulate lawyers with whom his father worked.
While he followed his father into teaching, his sights were set on a career in law. In 1954 Finney got his juris degree from South Carolina State University, married Frances Davenport and the pair moved to Sumter, SC.
Finney was known as an outstanding defense lawyer and civil rights advocate and was elected to the S.C. House of Representatives in 1972. His appointment to the House Judiciary Committee, made him the first African American to serve on that committee.
Finney, a founder of the Legislative Black Caucus, was quick to say of his career and accomplishments, he didn’t do it alone. He cites men like Jonathan Jasper Wright, who had been the first Black to be named S.C.’s and, indeed, America’s, first Black Supreme Court Justice. It was said that he pushed Brown vs. the Board of Education as far as it could go, not just in the area of education, but also rights to both private and public accommodations. He was proud of defending the Friendship 9 and being part of the Civil Rights movement.
Daughter Nikky Finney read a poem that she wrote for her father when he became Supreme Court Justice of S.C. Entitled “He Never Had it Made,” the narrative poem described his start in life and the heights he would attain.
When asked about the success of their children, Mrs. Finney said that they read to the children every night, and they were exposed to the Civil Rights leaders and other visitors to the home.
Chief Justice Finney noted that the cause most dear was to see proper funding for all schools, to get away from Minimally Adequate Education. Many schools did not have the tax base to be able to provide the type of education that would make opportunities available to all students in S.C.
The following poem was written by Justice Finney's daughter, Professor Nikky Finney:
"He never had it made"
Just a plain brown paper sack boy from a place and people who sweet fed him everything in double doses just in case his man size pocket should ever have a hole in them. Just an ordinary brown corduroy boy from a people who never had it made but still managed to make whatever they were to be from scratch An ordinary boy whose mother never got to bathe or watch him grow or even gaze him from the farmhouse window where he loved to sit on a summertime box of Virginia cured day dreams umbrellaed by the big oak tree and in between chores and stare away at the long dirt road the only way in or out to grandpop's farm the same country road that all country boys tried to stare down in their day wondering what or who could ever be at the other end watching it for signs of life maybe somebody from the city might visit from one of those shiny ready made places who could make magic of an ordinary brown boy's country fried life.
Maybe one of those places faraway
would take him just as plain as he was and grow him up to be something legal maybe even handsome even dap debonair somebody who could easy talk for the regular folk
and then articulate smooth to all of the others when those folk needed him to be shiny as new money. Just for them. He wanted to be like one of those new Black men who came visiting from the North to the South talking pretty at the State College of South Carolina one of those kinds with the pocket chains and the shiny grey suits
with a hundred pounds of law books under their arms just like some kind of natural growth.
He figured they were country boys too,
who never had it made, but somehow had made it.
And they walked about like nobody else, stout with the law on their minds and a personal sense of justice in their hearts maybe he could be one of their kind when he grew up. He never had it made but he had a proud father and a circle of people who kept his dying mother's promise
to raise the boy up at their sides and not just anywhere with strangers. His own mother knew that she would not be there to do the raising herself.
Today is a long promise kept Mama Colleen. This one that one there, he never had it made.
He might have had it sweetened and sifted chewed up and spit out, prayed over and molded around
Made from scratch in somebody's kitchen over somebody’s fire
Beneath his grandfather’s wagon wheel, under his daddy’s stern tutelage,
But he never had made
you know the way I mean all silvery and shiny and handed down.
He might ‘a had it boiled up, explained, defined and gravied by an early rising grandmother or a significant Claflin College. He might have even fished
It out and washed it down himself in scalding water a time or two. And I'm quite sure he soda jerked it through and through
and baked his dreams in enough tears and high hopes to try and make sure it was gonna happen
but he never had it made. It was never given to him on some royal platter, never
promised at his birth. The making of this man’s life
came from saltwater tears,
Saltwater sweat from love and hard work and the graciousness of his God.
He always loved the law, how he always loved the law
and even when his impulsive and passionate daughter argued about history and what wasn't right or fair, how
the scales of justice never seemed balanced in her eyes, how he always with the calm of a sailor who knew the ocean,
like an old and traveled faithful road, he would say to her
"The law works, Girl." Believing it completely as if he had written it himself. And his wise old sayings steeped
in patience always kept the law alive. A steady drop of water will wear a hole in a rock, Daughter. Such are the vicissitudes of life, Son. If you see me and the bear, you go and help the bear, my friend. It's alright Baby girl, you win some and you lose some. Just do the best you can with what you got everybody.
Hundreds of old adages always spilling from his mouth like a black historic
Fountain.
He, to me,
is the justice man and he never had it made,
or delivered or prepaid from his waiting tables as a young lawyer to
this day, right here.
No statistic, no horrible crime, no lying, no deep disappointment, no
Nothing human or man-made,
Has ever get caused him to give up on his love. He believed then and he believed now.
He believes that is chief. Papa Daddy The Justice Man you never had it made but here you are making it and all of us cross over with you proud as peacocks. maybe that's what Pop maybe that's what Mama Colleen would say
- Nikky Finney
This program was produced by WRJA, Sumter.
