From News & Observer (North Carolina)
Rashad Hauter can remember his father shaking him awake at 2 a.m. inside their one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, prodding him from sleep to learn the alphabet as a 3-year-old.
At that early hour, his father, Ahmed, would just be getting home from an 18-hour shift at the corner store. Rather than collapse in bed, he taught English to his 3-year-old boy, who was fresh from Yemen.
“I always hated it,” Hauter jokes now. “I remember my first day at that day care when he dropped me off and I was crying. I remember him telling the instructor the only two things I knew in English were ‘Sit down’ and ‘Get up.”
Thirty years later, Hauter has just accepted Gov. Roy Cooper’s appointment to the Wake County bench, making him the only Yemeni-born judge in the United States.
Hauter graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and got his law degree from Campbell University, working as a Wake prosecutor and in private practice. But his education really started on the streets of Brooklyn, where he scarcely saw his father during the week.
On weekends, Hauter would sit on an overturned milk crate behind the counter and study his lessons while his father worked the cash register.
First in his family to go to college, he studied biology and Asian studies, taking every available Arabic class — some of them at Duke. Again, his father tutored.
But he got turned toward the law working around his father’s store, where other immigrant employees would struggle to understand a letter from the DMV, or his father would ask him to read him the mail. He knew by then he could navigate complicated circumstances and help others do the same.
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