In 1947, the State Supreme Court ruled against the practice of snake handling in North Carolina, in an appeal brought by Durham preacher Colonel Hartman Bunn.
Bunn, whose given name was Colonel, was described as a “big, sturdily built man whose snake rituals at Durham’s Zion Tabernacle attracted police as well as spectators.”Bunn, and a church elder, Benjamin R. Massey, were convicted in Durham Superior Court ... of handling their snakes in defiance of a Durham ordinance. The lower court ruled that snake handling endangered public safety and fined the two $50 each and cost. ...
A ban on snake handling, Bunn held, amounts to a violation of the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.
He claimed also that snake handling has been practiced for 40 years in North Carolina without harm to anyone yet.
“On the evenings of 1 and 8 November, 1947,” the court related in its opinion, “several policemen of the City of Durham visited the Zion Tabernacle Church, situated within the corporate limits, and on each occasion found there a large gathering of men, women and children, engaged in religious services.
“During the services they saw the defendant, C. H. Bunn, while standing in the pulpit, take into his hands a poisonous snake of the copperhead or highland moccasin variety and hold it within view of the congregation. No one was harmed by the snakes on either occasion.”But when the snakes were tested later, the court noted, two healthy rats, which were placed with them in a cage, were struck and died almost immediately. ...
Chief Justice (Walter P.) Stacy wrote that the case rested on “a very simple question: which is superior, the public safety or the defendants’ religious practice?”
The court found despite Bunn’s apt argument, that the case was simply a question of snakes or people. The people won. – The News & Observer 1/8/1949
Correspondent Flo Johnston reports 
