By Justin Jarrett
Like it or not — and he didn’t always like it — Bernard McIntyre has been a trailblazer most of his life.
He was one of five African-American students to integrate his North Carolina junior high school in 1967, enduring daily abuse for having the audacity to attend the same school as his white peers.
He later became the first black student body president at Burgaw High School and was in one of the first classes of African-American students at the University of North Carolina, and one of the first black students at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
And when love brought McIntyre to Beaufort for good in 1982, he followed in his trailblazing brother-in-law’s footsteps.
McIntyre was in graduate school at Clark Atlanta University when he met “just a beautiful girl” named Beverly Dore, who happened to have a brother, Louis, who was a trailblazing attorney in Beaufort.
The thought of attending law school anywhere other than USC immediately washed away, and McIntyre’s lifetime of service to the Beaufort community was set in motion.
The couple married in 1981, and McIntyre moved to Beaufort in 1982 and began his law career in earnest, quickly rising to partner in his firm before starting his own firm in 1991. He became a Beaufort County Magistrate Judge in 2015 and continues in that role in addition to practicing law.
He’s also served on numerous boards, including the Beaufort Memorial Hospital Board of Trustees, the Boys & Girls Club, New Hope Christian Church, and the Beaufort County Black Chamber of Commerce, and has donated his time and expertise to several non-profit organizations.
And some think he’s responsible for the demise of the Beaufort County Scrabble Tournament.
No one can confirm it, but the once-popular Scrabble tournament was discontinued after McIntyre and Alice G. Wright won it three straight years in the
late 1990s.
“I guess nobody wanted to play us anymore,” McIntyre says with a chuckle.
The ninth of 11 children, McIntyre was able to persevere in the face of adversity and discrimination thanks to the values instilled by his mother, Hettie, who raised five girls and six boys in Rocky Point, North Carolina, a rural suburb of Wilmington.
“My mother was a very God-fearing person, and every Sunday morning she would get the 11 of us together and lead us in family prayer,” McIntyre recalls. “By the time we were adolescents, we all knew the 23rd Psalm by heart.”
The Lord was their shepherd; they shall not want.
“We grew up poor but we didn’t really know it,” he says.
As the third-youngest of the bunch, McIntyre relied on hand-me-down clothing from his elder siblings, whom he helped around the homestead while Hettie toiled at cleaning houses for about $15 a week. McIntyre and his siblings helped tend the garden and raise the hogs, which is how Hettie kept food on the table, and spent time in the fields picking blueberries, strawberries, tobacco, cotton, and cucumbers.
“Now I’m picking juries,” McIntyre often quips.
He credits his mother for his persevering nature.
“My mom was the biggest influence in my life,” he says. “She was a profile in courage and encouragement and faith. She taught us that hard work works.”
McIntyre is also grateful for the change he has seen in the world since he first walked into Long Creek Junior High School in 1967 and endured daily abuse in the form of a gang of white students who would “curse, spit, and shove me, call me the n-word, and tell me to go back to Africa.”
“Whenever I sought out administration to help, they would tell me it was just something that I had to live with and work through,” McIntyre recalls. “They didn’t want to upset those boys’ parents, upset the apple cart.”
But McIntyre got a call from one of those mean boys a few years ago, offering an apology and an invitation to visit his home in another state.
McIntyre took him up on it.
It was a heartfelt reunion that healed some old wounds and gave McIntyre hope for the future.
“I’ve been to family reunions for 40 years now, but that’s one of the greatest reunions I’ve ever had,” McIntyre says. “It was a rather tearful moment.”