Robert Brodnax Glenn

45th Governor of the State of North Carolina - 1905 to 1909

Date Born: August 11, 1854

Date Died: May 16, 1920

Place Born: Rockingham County, NC

Place Buried: Winston-Salem, NC

Residence: Winston-Salem, NC

Occupation: Lawyer


Robert Brodnax Glenn (16 August 1860 – 9 June 1925) was the Democratic governor of the state of North Carolina from 1905 to 1909.

Glenn was a resident of Winston-Salem, North Carolina and a lawyer with the law firm of Glenn, Manly & Henderson, a predecessor firm to the modern-day Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice PLLC. It was precisely one century until another Winston-Salem resident was elected to statewide office (when Richard Burr was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004).

Glenn was known as the "Prohibition Governor" for his successful 1908 campaign to ban liquor statewide. Glenn was also interested in conservation, as evidenced by his remark at the National Governors Association meeting of 1908: "our forests are being denuded...the failure of the People throughout the States to protect the great forest industry of our country...is one of the chief sources if not the greatest source of all [natural resource waste]...Our People, regardless of the future, have been living only for the present, thinking of themselves and not of their children and their children's children."

In 1906, a mob in Salisbury, North Carolina lynched three black men who were accused of murdering a white family. Governor Glenn was so outraged by the lynching that he ordered three companies of state militia to the scene and went there himself. Eventually, the lynch mob leader was tried and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, the first such conviction for lynching in North Carolina history.


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