UNC Board of Trustees honors Chatham native Joe Hackney

Posted Monday, November 26, 2007

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Chapel Hill, NC - The UNC Board of Trustees on Wednesday presented four alumni with the William Richardson Davie Award, the board’s highest honor.

Chancellor James Moeser and the trustees honored the following recipients at a Carolina Inn dinner: Rep. Joe Hackney of Chapel Hill; Mike Overlock of Greenwich, Conn.; Ken Thompson of Charlotte; and Patricia Timmons-Goodson of Fayetteville.

Established by UNC’s Board of Trustees in 1984, the Davie Award is named for the Revolutionary War hero who is considered the father of the university. It recognizes extraordinary service to the university or society.

A Chatham County native, Hackney is serving his 14th term in the N.C. House of Representatives. He has served as speaker pro tem, house majority leader and house Democratic leader and was elected speaker of the house in January 2007. He is consistently rated by his peers as one of the ten most effective legislators, according to the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research. He is president-elect of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Overlock earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at UNC in 1968. After serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, he earned a master’s degree in business administration at Columbia University in 1973. That year, he joined Goldman, Sachs and Co., where he became a limited partner in 1996 and a senior director in 1999. He has brought that wealth and breadth of experience to serve his alma mater as co-chairman of the Carolina First Campaign, UNC’s fundraising drive.

Thompson is chairman, president and CEO of Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest bank in the United States. He grew up in Rocky Mount and entered UNC in 1969 as a Morehead Scholar and later received master’s degree in business administration from Wake Forest University. He is a trustee of the Morehead-Cain Foundation and is a member of Carolina First’s Morehead Alumni Campaign Committee and Regional Steering Committee.

Timmons-Goodson earned her undergraduate and law degrees at UNC in 1976 and 1979. She is the first African-American woman to serve as an associate justice on the N.C. Supreme Court. In 1984, she was the first African-American woman to serve as a judge in Cumberland County. In 1998, she was the first African-American woman elected to any state appellate court. In 2002, she served on the first three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals to be made up of all African-American women.