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Virginia hasn’t made life easy on people who go through that system. George H. Spicer’s story is a testament to that fact. The 75-year-old journeyman preacher from the Tidewater region considers it his life work to help guide young black men—often his parishioners—who’ve been caught up in that system in their uphill battles to find jobs, to avoid recidivism, and to rejoin society and regain their rights. But, for most of his life, Spicer dealt with his own uphill battle to pursue his own dream in Virginia.

“When I was 17 years old, I got into a little trouble,” he told fellow visitors to the governor’s mansion over dinner. In 1960, still growing up in a Virginia gripped by Jim Crow laws and racial strife, Spicer, said he and his friends got in a fight with a white teenager.

“There was five of us, and I was the youngest of the group,” Spicer continued. He said that he had not thrown a punch, but had still been present when his friends jumped the boy, who sustained some unspecified injuries during the fight.

Spicer was charged along with all of his friends, but was given the choice to accept a felony assault charge—and prison time—or enlist in the Army with a misdemeanor. He accepted the latter, and wound up fighting in Vietnam, later attending seminary, and using his close brush with the law as inspiration to help other black men who’d been less lucky. But over 50 years later, that misdemeanor would come back to haunt him.

“I got to thinking about retirement, and I wanted to go to try and be a substitute teacher,” Spicer said. But when he applied, he was informed that despite his career spent in the community and a resume that would’ve otherwise been accepted, the qualification that his assault charge had been committed “with the intent to maim” could qualify as a “crime of moral turpitude.”

Although since a 2015 state supreme court ruling Virginia has been perhaps the most stringent state on teacher’s qualifications—barring all people with any felonies from working as a teacher in any district—throughout the South’s history, prohibitions against people with crimes of moral turpitude of any degree have gone hand in hand with legalistic efforts to disenfranchise black people and permanently render them second-class citizens. People in Virginia charged with such crimes, even misdemeanors, cannot work as teachers, marriage therapists, real-estate agents, or registered nurses, and may lose or be denied licensure for dozens of other jobs.

Spicer met the governor in 2013 on the campaign trail, when the preacher was the interim pastor at Bethany Baptist Church in Hampton Roads, and when McAuliffe was the Democratic candidate seeking critical support from black communities in the Tidewater. Under its late pastor Jake Manley and then Spicer, Bethany had built its own initiatives to help shepherd black men with felonies back into everyday life, and also to advocate for the restoration of their rights.