Everyone dies, and yet: I was unsure if Jim Hunt ever would. Many people in North Carolina policymaking circles knew the former governor (1977-1985; 1993-2001)—or, rather, many people felt like they knew him. That was among his best gifts, his ability to make people feel like they knew him, with his direct but warm gaze, made manifest through something as small as a handshake and a hello. You believed you had his attention, that you were tethered to his spirit. That’s the charisma that many politicians strive for, but that few possess so naturally. Ranked by the skills of a politician, Jim Hunt was easily the best of my life time.

Because I have spent so much time reading his speeches—and the two biographies about him, and sundry interviews with or about him, and memos and correspondence from his office—I sometimes feel like I know Jim Hunt. He is a major figure in my forthcoming book on North Carolina’s transition from Jim Crow to the present.

But I did not know Jim Hunt. I met him only twice that I can recall. The first time was when I was 16-years old at Boys State in Winston-Salem in the summer of 1997. We teenagers spent a few weeks jockeying among ourselves for political position, and though I can’t reconstruct my own feelings of ambition, I was pleased to have been elected to the mock state supreme court. As part of those elected at Boys State to high office by our peers, we sat on stage when the actual governor of our state came to give a speech. And of course, the governor was Jim Hunt; he had been so for half of my life. I don’t remember a word that he said. Though I was proud to have been elected to such an august position, I did not look up to politicians—in fact, I felt some measure of contempt for them. I smugly judged their speech as great gusts of nothing, their promises as hollow, and their strivings vain and egotistical. Hypocrites. And my gosh, did I hate hypocrisy when I was 16. I did not hate Jim Hunt—he seemed more benign than most politicians—but I didn’t consider him a man of great depth and substance either, and so while some of my Boys State brethren lapped up the chance to meet this man, to charm and be charmed by him, I was aloof, and probably a bit too proud of that fact.

The second time I met Hunt I was more eager to shake his hand. By my 30s, after years of reading history to understand the emergence of the newest of the New Souths, I had a greater appreciation for the tightrope act that Hunt performed as a politician defending and promoting an emerging multiracial democracy against the reaction that the New Right was coalescing into the Republican Party. I had previously found Hunt’s priorities and actions milquetoast liberalism, criticizing his shortcomings to push harder and faster for social change and environmental action. But as Republicans gained control first of the legislature in 2010 and then the governor’s office in 2012, and as I realized how even in North Carolina, segregation’s champions only narrowly failed to defeat moderates in the 1960s, I had increased appreciation for Hunt’s ability to win the governor’s mansion four times, in 1976, 1980, and then in 1992 and 1996. Hunt’s only loss was an especially bitter pill, a very narrow defeat against Jesse Helms in 1984 that reflected the long coattails of Ronald Reagan—and the size of the conservative political core of the white South, even here in seemingly moderate North Carolina. Southern Democrats able to win state-wide races were becoming increasingly rare during that period, but Hunt built a brand for the Democratic Party in North Carolina of pragmatic doers who thought that government could build: better schools, better culture, better businesses, and better lives. Democrats would win office as governor three more times straight in North Carolina—in 2000, 2004, and 2008—after Hunt was term-limited out a second time, and then the party returned with Roy Cooper in 2016 and 2020 and Josh Stein in 2024. Needless to say, that’s an unusual spate of Democratic governors for a southern state since 1980, and Hunt was probably the individual most responsible for it. As the older and wiser Democratic political strategist Thomas Mills astutely notes in his eulogy, by the 1990s, Hunt had transformed the state party in his image. It’s astounding that, as he stepped aside in 2001, the residue of that imprint continued on.

So with more perspective, about a decade ago, I made a deliberate point to seek Jim Hunt out after an event at UNC’s Global FedEx Forum building to honor William Winter, the former governor of Mississippi, one of the Great White Southern Liberals of the late 20th century. (I fear that Winter is now almost wholly forgotten, but that’s a story for another time; or you could read Charles Bolton’s great biography of the man.) There was a documentary film screening, and then Winter and Hunt talked about the past and present of education policy and politics. I would have to dredge out some notes for more detail on what was actually said, but Hunt spoke with vim and vigor that night, booming out his disappointment with the stagnation of the education system in the state and opprobrium for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, even if he spoke a beat more slowly and deliberately than during his heyday. Hunt’s shock of hair was white but still fluffed (during Hunt’s youthful years in politics, his pompadour drew considerable attention and light mockery; cartoonists loved to embellish its size and curves). He could have fooled you into believing he was still in office, or preparing to file for a fifth run as governor. After the event ended, I came up to him, and I introduced myself, and while our hands were locked, I made some overture to the extent that I’d like to talk to him for my dissertation research. That sent something cold over him, who had been to that point so in his element. I realized that it was not the time to press the point, and I let him continue his trawling for hands, faces, new constituents to meet and greet. His search for another generation that would have the feeling that they knew Jim Hunt, and that Jim Hunt knew them.

In my book, I devote considerable attention to Jim Hunt, and I try to present some of the complexities of his legacy even as I try to note his entrepreneurial attention to education policy as a strategy for economic growth. My friend and colleague, Amanda Hughett, stresses an uglier side of Hunt’s law-and-order agenda, part of his understandable effort to shore up Democratic toughness against GOP charges of weakness on crime, but also an agenda with tragic consequences, accelerating mass incarceration. Had I ever interviewed Hunt, I would have liked to have asked him about that, even as I suspect he was not a man who spent his nights chewing over regrets.

The reason that I never did interview Hunt reflected my own ambivalence about what he would tell me that would inform my understanding of his past actions. I was wary that his politician’s gifts would deflect my efforts to find the truth about why he did or did not pursue particular policies. Some myths—for instance, that he had always stressed the connection between education and economic development—clung to him and I doubted he would let them go. I was afraid he would overwhelm my judgment with his charm. And I was comforted by the wealth of other interviews with Hunt that are available and shed light on some of those choices, interviews done closer to the moment.

Seeing the news of his death, I was not washed over with regret that I did not make an interview happen. But still, I do softly reproach my aloofness; when some people who had known him offered to help me get an interview, I should have taken them up on it.

Hunt’s vigor is what kept me from believing in his mortality. He maintained that vigor in all the appearances I’ve ever seen on television or reported by others, and certainly during those two encounters I had.

Even now, I can’t shake a feeling that his spirit watches us in North Carolina, with judgement for our faults, for our failures to keep up the project of uplift through education, development, energy in service to a common purpose, but also with some glint of optimism that North Carolinians can and will rise to meet the moment.