A Tribute to Helen Scheirbeck
A Remarkable Journey by Jane Moretz Edmisten
W
hen I was asked to write a short piece about my dear friend, Dr. Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, I realized I could not do it justice in the space of a one-month deadline – a month that required me to grade scores of law school papers, prepare for summer school, teach till 9:00 p.m., or later, four out of five weeknights and run my busy law practice during a month that took me out of town three times. My first reaction was to start doing research on Helen’s early days on Capitol Hill, which I soon had to abandon. I finally concluded that I must resolve to treat this little tribute as, indeed, little; it is only a small token of what needs to be said about Helen. I remember the day I met Helen. It was late in 1963, when I was taken to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, by my then new (now ex) husband, to meet his new colleagues. Helen was sitting at a desk near the only window of a room that served as a shared office for at least two other colleagues. She was very pretty, with short dark hair and a brilliant smile – that smile she kept to the end of her life. Little did I know that Helen, even then, had her hands in numerous legislative pies. She worked on issues ranging from Indian rights to wiretapping policies across the country, poverty issues, education issues and the list goes on and on. Her hallmark was her devotion to Indian rights, but her scope went far beyond. While Helen’s deepest commitment was to her people, she believed in human rights for all people and adhered to the personal ethic of human respect and compassion toward everyone she ever met. Although I was struck by Helen from the beginning and knew that she played an important role at the Subcommittee, it was much later that I came to realize what a remarkable journey her life was. Helen was born into the Lumbee Tribe of Native American Indians and she, with her family, lived in Robeson County, North Carolina, a place defined by poverty and struggle. When Helen was a child, there were four school systems in that county – one for white
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The American Indian Graduate
students, one for blacks, one for Lumbees and one for children of mixed background, called the “Smileys.” Yes, there were four school systems, each dreadfully inadequate. Helen’s father, Judge Lacy Maynor, a renowned and respected leader in the area, recognized that he had to send his bright young daughter to live with relatives in Pennsylvania, where she could obtain a more or less adequate education. That separation from her parents was difficult for everyone, but it did not separate Helen from her parents; it only expanded her definition of family to include her cousins in Pennsylvania. From Pennsylvania public schools, Helen went on to Berea College in Kentucky. A fit candidate for the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Helen, at the time, would not have been allowed to matriculate there. So, Berea it was and Berea afforded her a fine education at virtually no cost to her or her family. When Helen finished her schooling at Berea, which must have been around 1956, she did not stop learning. She attended graduate school at Columbia University and, ultimately, finished her PhD at Virginia Tech,