GreeneSpace

Thank you, Chapel Hill.

2011-07-05T07:14:00.018-04:00

After two terms of office on the Chapel Hill Town Council, I have decided not to seek reelection. I extend a heartfelt thanks to all of you who have supported my candidacies of 2003 and 2007 and who during the intervening years have voiced your support for the work I’ve committed myself to doing on the Council. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to work with you and to be part of a council that has accomplished so many worthy goals.

One of my campaign pledges was to convene a community conversation about homelessness. The outcome of our conversation was the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness, a collaboration of the town with Carrboro, Hillsborough, and Orange County to harness available resources, identify needs, and seek new ways to serve our homeless population.

Another goal was to broaden and strengthen our affordable housing requirements while also making them more predictable for developers. In 2010, the Council passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance that achieves this goal.

Consistently I have worked to support neighborhood, environmental, and historic preservation. Since 2004, the Council has created seven neighborhood conservation districts. We have placed 92 acres of open space under permanent conservation easement.

All of this, and much more that we have accomplished since 2003, is the product of tremendous collaborative work by citizens and residents of our community who believe in working together through government for the common good. It has been an absolute honor to be part of this important work.

I’m particularly proud to have served under Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt’s first term, and I support his reelection campaign wholeheartedly. Of the announced candidates for Council, I plan to support my colleague Donna Bell and planning board member Jason Baker. I wish the next Council much success as it confronts the challenges of creating a new comprehensive plan and in other ways managing the town’s growth. Even during challenging times, Chapel Hill remains a wonderful place to call home—as I look forward to doing for many years to come.

Rebecca Clark Gazebo

2010-04-25T20:40:00.011-04:00

Yesterday many members of the community gathered to remember Rebecca Clark and to dedicate the gazebo in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery to her memory. Speakers included former Town Council member Jim Merritt, Mayor Pro Tem Jim Ward, and me. I was asked to speak in my role as chair of the Council naming committee--to talk a little about that process. Here are my remarks.

The Town Council does indeed have a process for naming public structures and facilities after people. To have something named after you by the town is a great honor; it’s not something we do lightly. The first requirement is that the person be no longer living. There are good reasons for that policy, but there’s also a downside: Rebecca Clark is not here with us today to see this honor bestowed upon her.

I think of that old song by the Carter Family,

Give me the roses while I live
Trying to cheer me on.
Useless are flowers that you give
After the soul is gone.

It’s a chilling song, and there's truth in the lyrics. So I’m sorry Ms. Clark is not here to see this day. But I hope I’m not wrong to think that she was appreciated, especially in later years, like on her great community 90th birthday. And I hope I’m not wrong to think that she did recognize that the work she had done for so long, especially in the arena of political organizing and getting people to the polls, did really make a difference.

And certainly her presence is still felt and will be felt for a long time to come, through the memory established here with this gazebo but also in the hearts and minds of so many of us who can still remember vividly long phone conversations with her, in which she had something important to explain, something complicated with deep roots, going way back, are you with me? She wanted to be sure you know how some seemingly intractable problem had gotten to be that way in the first place, are you with me? Something was going on, going wrong, and it needed to be fixed.

We’re still trying to fix it all, Ms. Clark. We’re with you—and we’re grateful that you were with us and that you stuck with us and worked with us for so long.

HOPE Gardens

2010-04-25T19:50:00.007-04:00

Yesterday it was my pleasure to speak at the dedication of the HOPE Gardens, a community garden on town-owned land sponsored by the Homeless Outreach Poverty Education arm of the UNC Campus Y. The bountiful garden serves as a transitional employment center for homeless people. At the dedication event were workshops on sustainable agriculture, a garden art project, tours and lunch with salad fresh from the garden. Here are my remarks.

Greetings on behalf of the Chapel Hill Town Council, and thanks to everyone involved, including Butch Kisiah and his Parks and Recreation staff, as well as our partners at Active Living By Design, who worked closely with the HOPE group to make this happen. Congratulations to David Baron and the whole HOPE team.

I also bring thanks and greetings from the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness, for which I serve on the executive team. HOPE is one of our most important and active partners. We are grateful for all the work they do, including their publication of Talking Sidewalks, which puts a face on homelessness in our community, and the Community Empowerment Fund, which makes the crucial connection between the economic realities of the homeless and the importance of community support.

And then this fabulous community garden. As a council member and a community member I could not be more pleased.

The state of being homeless is such an unsettling, unnerving state that we don't even have a consistent word for it. “Homelessness,” the word we now use, describes a lack—it’s a description for something you don’t have. Generations ago, it was called other things: vagabond, gypsy, tramp, hobo. Sometimes it was just said that you had been put “outdoors.” A character in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, Cholly Breedlove, does that to his whole family: he throws them out of the house, puts them “outdoors.” On this unhappy state Morrison reflects,

Outdoors . . . was the real terror of life. . . . If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. . . .

Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition. [The difference between being put out and being put outdoors was] like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead. Death doesn’t change, and outdoors is here to stay.

So for me at least the very thought of even this beautiful outdoor garden space is tinged by the knowledge that for a few of those among us, the outdoors is all that is, all that is theirs.

But thankfully there are other ways to think about gardens and the outdoors and bodies in need. Wendell Berry has perhaps said it best:

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

In an essay called “The Body and the Earth,” he observes that “no matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it. . . . While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of those other living creatures.”

What Berry beautifully describes is the connectedness of body and earth: The word “health” itself, he notes, is related to the words heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, and holy. “And so it is possible to give a definition to health that is positive and far more elaborate than that given to it by most medical doctors.”

And he links health and community: “Persons cannot be whole alone. . . . Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing.” Connection, too, is healing: “Connection is health.”

“In gardening, “ Berry continues, “one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight.”

And so this cycle of work and exercise, community and conviviality, wholeness and health and happy eating—the nourishment of the body and the earth—this is what HOPE Gardens is all about. Please join with me in thanking everyone involved in this great project and wishing them lasting success, season after season.

Why I am enthusiastically supporting Mark Kleinschmidt for mayor

2009-11-01T17:53:00.006-05:00

It has been my pleasure to serve on the Town Council for six years with Mark Kleinschmidt, and now I want to add my voice to those urging you to vote for him for mayor. Mark has been in leadership positions on important initiatives, helping to create the conditions that have led Chapel Hill—just this year—to being named both America’s Most Livable City and Best Place in the Country to Start a Business. Such honors are regularly earned by Chapel Hill, in large part because of progressive policy decisions that have led to our phenomenally successful fare-free transit system (7 million rides a year), the purchase and maintenance of open space and parklands, and other environmentally important initiatives including a strong stormwater management program and land use ordinances that protect the natural environment. With Mark’s leadership, we have achieved these goals and more, all the while maintaining a AAA bond rating (a rarity for small cities).

As chair of the Council’s economic development committee, Mark oversaw the town’s hiring of its first economic development officer, and he continues to take a leadership position in working to bring new business to town. Mark is also a strong advocate for the Downtown Partnership, which has been working to improve the life of the downtown through creating open wireless network; revitalizing the street life by hiring musicians to perform on the sidewalks; championing a new lighting system; and more.

In our successful negotiations with UNC over the development agreement for Carolina North, I witnessed Mark’s persuasive leadership on important issues such as fiscal equity and the permanent conservation of open space.

In the current climate—when many of us are faced with at least a double hit, from the recession generally and last year’s property reevaluations in particular—the economy, and taxes, are important issues. Mark is committed to maintaining a lean, efficient town government. But I am proud of him for what he hasn’t said: he has not uttered the words “No new taxes.” Why not? Because one Council member alone—even if he is the mayor—does not have the power to make that decision. And further, because such a pledge is bad policy. It puts too much at risk—including the planned expansion of the public library that the voters have overwhelmingly supported in a bond referendum.

As a community we have worked diligently and prudently to establish several long-range community goals. In recent years we've established a debt management fund that makes it less likely that we will have to raise taxes in order to achieve these goals, but adopting the mantra of no new taxes promises only to replicate the failed fiscal policies that endangered public services for our nation in the early 90s and for our state earlier this decade. We knew what a great town Chapel Hill was even before the National Conference of Mayors named us the Most Livable City in America, but in order to continue to live up to that recognition we need to remain true to the community process and the priorities we have set for ourselves. We must not give in to feel-good rhetoric that has the potential to put even basic services on the chopping block. Mark trusts our community to work through issues carefully, through broad and open public deliberations, as the best way of deciding what we value enough to fund and what we can live without.

Mark is a leader, a listener, and a proven team-builder. I’ve seen these qualities demonstrated consistently for my six years on the Council. He will be a great mayor. I urge you to join me in casting your vote for him on Tuesday.

Peace and protest, justice and injustice: marking Chapel Hill's sacred space

2009-09-18T10:30:00.001-04:00

A little-known fact: grass used to grow around the flag pole in front of the old post office on Franklin Street. That's why those red brick pavers are there--as filler. It was only in latter times, probably since 1979 when the town purchased the property from the federal government, that the space was paved over.

Luckily for these four young men, it was grass during Holy Week in 1964 when they decided to fasten themselves to this place 24 hours a day, fasting in protest of the Town of Chapel Hill's refusal to pass a public accommodations ordinance.

Pat Cusick, LaVert Taylor, John Dunne, James Foushee (in the photo) and countless other activists will be remembered this Sunday at 3 p.m. as we unveil and formally dedicate the Peace and Justice tribute marker at the site we've named Peace and Justice Plaza.

Please join us for the celebration. Opening remarks by Mayor Kevin Foy, Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, and local NAACP chapter president Michelle Laws will be followed by brief tributes to the people honored on the marker. We will also recognize Yonni Chapman, historian, for his tireless work to ensure that past struggles for civil rights in Chapel Hill are remembered. Dan Pollitt, emeritus professor in the UNC School of Law, will conclude with some personal recollections of his own experiences on the front lines of local battles for civil rights and social justice.

The marker bears the names of nine people who devoted much of their lives to working for causes of peace and social justice in our community: Charlotte Adams, Hank Anderson, James Brittian, Joe Herzenberg, Mildred Ringwalt, Hubert Robinson, Joe Straley, Lucy Straley, and Gloria Williams.

At the top of the marker is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

True peace is not simply the absence of some negative force; it is the presence of justice.

The marker is a flat granite paver, flush to the ground, directly in front of the flag pole. It is designed so that other names can be added in the future.

What's been most remarkable lately, as town employees have worked to remove one section of the brick pavers and ready the space for the installation, has been an archaeological discovery. On the concrete base that was poured to stabilize the brick pavers when they were laid, someone etched a swastika. (Click on the photo for an enlarged view; it's in the lower corner.) Emily Cameron, landscape architect for the town, puts it beautifully in perspective: "We thought it was worth noting that we have removed an historic symbol of hate and racial prejudice that had been hidden at the foot of our nation’s flag to replace it with a marker to commemorate the struggle for equality, justice, and peace."

New prospects

2009-09-14T11:48:00.008-04:00

I've become an urban commuter. Without having to drive any farther than the new Durham Amtrak station, I'm able to sit down, read a book, enjoy the view, and, an hour later, set foot on Washington Street in downtown Greensboro. I wheel my spiffy rolling brief case up Elm Street, past the old Woolworth's that's being made (finally) into a civil rights museum, past the elegant old Jefferson Pilot building, to the law school. I do this two days a week. It thrills me every time I walk in the door of Elon University School of Law, a mid-century modern treasure designed by Edward Loewenstein to house the Greensboro Public Library. The $6 million transformation, completed in 2006, was beautifully and lovingly carried out.

As a total newcomer, I'm intrigued by downtown Greensboro. There isn't much of it--of the compact high-density old/new Greensboro, that is--but what's there is pretty interesting. I hoped David Wharton would have had something to say about it, and so he has, in a great photo essay. The issue currently, it appears, is whether to enact design guidelines for the downtown. It'll be interesting to see how that discussion plays out. From my perspective as an elected official charged with overseeing the vitality of Chapel Hill's downtown, I hope some version of the proposed standards is implemented.

What a nice surprise to see that my favorite architecture critic, Chicago's Blair Kamin, has already weighed in on Greensboro. Speaking there two years ago, he brought stories from Chicago but emphasized that each city has its own DNA. Rightly, he praised Elm Street for its walkability and charm, while noting that "the downtown still has far too many streets that seem like miniature expressways—more corridors for cars than places for people."

The jewel of downtown Greensboro--luckily, one block from the law school--is the new Center City Park (completed in December 2006). What a happy place to spend a lunch hour! Its designers smartly engaged the Project for Public Spaces early on in the planning, and it shows. The park is beautiful, functional, walkable, sittable (in shade or sun), easily programmable (music at noon every Wednesday), and just plain inviting. David Wharton goes point by point through the Project for Public Spaces' 10 principles for good parks, finding happily that it measures up.

Which way will Greensboro go? Will the process of revitalizing the downtown into a lively, livable/walkable/workable place continue? or is there cause for concern that even Elm Street is in danger?

I'm only an urban commuter here, but I'm pulling for this downtown, voting with my feet every time I glide up Elm Street. Meanwhile, Center City Park reminds me that someday--before too much longer, I hope--we'll see our own beautiful and well-designed downtown park--the one designed by Mikyoung Kim for the 140 West project, also according to those tried and true principles set forth by the Project for Public Spaces.

Tomatoes

2009-07-25T13:57:00.004-04:00

Today is Tomato Day at the Carrboro Farmers Market. This essay was published in the "Tomato" issue of the Carrboro Free Press on July 8, 2009.

Overheard at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market, mother to silent daughter: “The ugliest tomatoes are actually the ones that taste the best.” I wondered if this one-way conversation would take the obvious metaphorical turn, but it stayed straight on message. “Mommy is very picky about her tomatoes,” she continued as she examined a promising German Johnson.

Except for recognizing the inherent superiority of the home-grown varieties, I can’t claim to have ever been that picky about my tomatoes. Since I grew up in rural East Texas, my husband, bred in Charlotte, finds this to be curious.

Trips to the farmer’s market with Paul in high summer are quests for the ugliest, tastiest tomatoes. In reaction to the acidy Burpee’s Big Boys that he remembers from his father’s backyard garden, he’s after sweetness, with enough texture to stand up to the heat of the stovetop. Pink Girls, Cherokee Purples, all manner of lyrical names will join the reliable German Johnsons in soups and gumbos and biryanis and jamablayas of his own invention.

Assembling the tomatoes with other seasonal picks from the market, he’ll jump from cookbook to internet recipe to suggestions from his “tweeple” till he finds the magical combination of ingredients. He’ll put our son Tucker to work at the chopping board, encouraging all kinds of proper habits, not to mention the love of a good meal carefully prepared.

At 16, Tucker is ripe for embarrassment, though that’s not my aim in sharing the story behind one of his best works of art. Preschool age being the high point of abstract expressionism for so many, the daycare years brought out a talent in Tucker that he has since let languish.

On construction paper washed in pink he painted a fury of reds and greens, with a red center of gravity, random spokes of the red and green contributing energy and intensity. This creation of our young Jackson Pollock ended up on the coffee table next to a New York Times Sunday Magazine. The magazine happened to have a picture of a tomato splattered on its otherwise stark white cover. Tucker looked at the two, pointed to his own, and proclaimed, “Tomato!”

The topic of the cover story was politics: the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, symbolized by an iconic image of the tomato as hand grenade. Out of the mouths of babes, though. With that pleasurable cry of discovery—Tomato!—political symbol was reduced to its literal essence, while the abstract was translated into a piercing reality, a bright red tomato so juicy it could not be contained. Home grown, to be sure.

A blog deferred

2008-12-20T15:36:00.002-05:00

As I think about it, I wonder how I kept it up at such a full tilt for so long--more than four years. Lately I've had a lot of help from my friend and colleague Al Brophy. Many thanks, Al! And thanks to all of you GreeneSpace readers. I've made new friends, learned a lot, and all in all had a great little run.

But after going on three months of silence, I had better admit the obvious.

A blog deferred does not explode.
It sighs and folds.

Paul Jones in the News Again

2008-12-08T18:24:00.005-05:00

Some time ago I wrote about Paul Jones the art collector (not Sally's Paul Jones (a.k.a. "The Real Paul Jones")). I wrote about him because many, many years after he was denied admission to the University of Alabama's law school, for no better reason than his race, the University of Alabama gave him an honorary degree. The degree was not so much to make amends but in honor of his accomplishments as an art collector.

Dr. Jones has a long history with Alabama--while an official in President Nixon's education department, he awarded a multi-million dollar grant for extension education to the University of Alabama; and more recently he has donated a significant part of his art collection to the University. This is yet more evidence of the ways that, over the course of a lifetime, things change. It reminds me of a story Dr. Jones told me of his childhood growing up in Bessemer, Alabama. He sometimes went with his parents to the Bright Star--a legendary restaurant that's still in operation in Bessemer. I highly recommend it next time you're in Birmingham. Because those were the days of Jim Crow, Jones' family could not go in the front door--but the proprietor would set up a table in the back and the Jones came in the back door. That was a courageous position for the restaurant in those days, I am reliably informed.

Some years ago I asked Dr. Jones whether he'd been back. And he said "yes. It's still a great restaurant. [Pause] And this time I went in the front door!" Ah, what changes he's witnessed over his lifetime--and what changes he's been a part of, and contributed to as well. It's an important lesson of foregiveness and of moving forward. As we say in the historical memory business, we are far too often burdened by memory.

So you can imagine my surprise when a reader of Greenespace wrote me recently to tell me about another recent story in which Paul Jones figured. During the 1972 presidential election, Dr. Jones was in charge of President Nixon's campaign to get out the black vote. In that capacity he approached Sammy Davis, Jr. Amidst the recent talk of the release of Nixon tapes, there's a story about a letter that Paul Jones wrote about his meeting with Davis. The Orange County Recorder reports:

Campaign workers talked to Davis about supporting Nixon in January 1972. "The entertainer's reaction was that he has not chosen sides and is 'hanging loose,'" said a memo sent that month by campaign staffer Paul Jones to the re-election committee. "He indicated wanting to see 'what is in it' – which was spelled out to mean something 'for the people' – not for himself."

Another example of the unexpected outdoing itself in its power to surprise, as Ralph Ellison said!

Bill Thorpe

2008-09-30T07:25:00.005-04:00

My Town Council colleague Bill Thorpe died on Saturday. We will miss him very much. I came to know him first in early 2004, when he was involved with the NAACP in asking the Council to change the name of Airport Road to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Seeing Chapel Hill's long history through his eyes helped me to understand why this gesture--which some dismissed as merely symbolic--was so important. More than that, after his election to the Council in 2005 he continued to remind all of us of the need to go beyond symbolism to action in addressing issues of social justice in our community.

He also taught me a lot about collegiality in public service--that is, about working together as colleagues. And he never ceased to remind all of us us--usefully, no doubt--that we are public servants, that our actions and decisions must always be for the good of the whole community. As anybody who knew him can tell you, he had a powerful deadpan--he could shock you momentarily into thinking you'd committed some mighty offense! only to let you know it was all right, everything was going to be all right. He really had one of the sweetest dispositions of any man I've ever known (and surely it is OK, in the 21st century, to call a man sweet). When I think of him, I will always see him smiling.

A public viewing will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, at University Baptist Church, and services will be held at 1 p.m.

What's your support system?

2008-09-26T15:15:00.006-04:00

This is a question I was asked at yesterday's second annual Project Homeless Connect. It's a good question. There's probably a time when I would have responded, What are you talking about? I don't need a support system! I was independent, gainfully employed, healthy, reasonably happy. I still am all of those things, but no longer so naive as to think I'm any of them without a lot of support from many directions: especially family. Everybody needs a support system. Most of us have one.

A couple of years ago at one of our conversations on homelessness, I met a woman living in the Homestart shelter. Her salary at a fast food restaurant allowed her to pay rent and buy gas, but little else. When her car broke down, she had to choose between fixing it and making rent. She chose the car--because she had to get to work. Couldn't your family help? I asked. Her family was sympathetic but no, they were in no position to help.

Poverty begets poverty.

Calvin Harris' story is worse. His parents abandoned him; he was raised by cousins who didn't do very well by him either. He grew up learning New Jersey street smarts. In and out of trouble, in and out of prison for 28 of his 48 years, he lives in Person County now where he has been sober since 2006. Now, he's looking for work--a hard proposition for somebody with a felony record.

What's your support system?

Photos from Project Homeless Connect.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools at 100

2008-09-08T17:56:00.006-04:00

In honor of 100 years of public schools in Chapel Hill, a history of the school system in four short videos.

The Beginning.

The Rise of African-American Schools.

Desegregation.

Unprecedented Growth.

Somewhat related:

Sumner Elementary School, a National Historic Landmark that helped launch the nation's Civil Rights Movement as one of the schools at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court's (1954) ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, presently sits in a deteriorated and threatened state. Vacant since 1996, the school suffers from deferred maintenance and has sustained significant damage from water infiltration, neglect and vandalism. As current problems remain unaddressed and damage worsens, this national icon is being allowed to deteriorate even further and resources have not been allocated to stem this tide.

The school is on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of 11 most endangered properties for 2008.

Remembering Katrina

2008-08-29T12:18:00.007-04:00

On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, some recommended reading: the special Katrina issue of Southern Cultures, cover to cover. Amazing stories, including a riveting first-person account, from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, of taking the high ground in an elegant, "safe" old inn, being engulfed in water up to the second floor, floating out into open sea, holding on for dear life to the limbs of a live oak tree, and more.

An update to their story: the live oak tree has since died, and it's been refashioned into angels standing watch where the old inn used to be.

WCOM documentary

2008-08-25T13:17:00.005-04:00

Via Orange Politics, a wonderful little documentary produced by some students at Elon University on Carrboro's community radio station, WCOM. (Low power to be sure, but if you're reading about it here, you can stream it from anywhere!)

I'm proud that Tucker was one of the founding DJs of "Teen Spirit" (Sunday afternoons, 1-3) and has gone on to create and co-host a new show, "Pirate Radio" (Saturday afternoons, 1-3). I enjoyed being interviewed about homelessness on Audrey Leyden's show. And I really love the Sunday jazz programming: great music from 3 p.m. to midnight.

Long live community radio!

"Traces of the Trade" in Hillsborough Sept. 6

2008-08-22T13:35:00.015-04:00

A couple of months ago, Al blogged about "Traces of the Trade," a documentary made by a descendant of the DeWolf family of Rhode Island, "the largest slave trading family in U.S. history" according to the film. The documentary follows the steps of the filmmaker Katrina Browne and a handful of other descendants as they retrace the paths over which this trading took place: from Bristol, Rhode Island to Ghana to the Caribbean.

The film premiered at Sundance and has been shown on PBS (see trailer). And because the family included a good number of Episcopal priests, it has been taken up by the Episcopal Church nationally as part of the church's ongoing work of reconciliation with its complicity with slavery and racism.

On Sept. 6, as part of a conversation sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina at St. Matthew's church in Hillsborough, the film will be shown. After the film, I'll be part of a panel discussion--in which I'll be bringing our own Thomas Ruffin to the table.

Greening up the Garden

2008-08-19T20:04:00.015-04:00

Frank Harmon's beautiful design for the North Carolina Botanical Garden's new visitor education center, slated to be the first Platinum LEED building in the southeast, is coming to life! Director Peter White took Tucker and me, along with Laura Moore (a neighbor and member of the Community Design Commission), on a fascinating hard hat tour today. This generously proportioned, green, and welcoming facility will have a transformative impact on the way the Garden is experienced.

More construction photos.

Asheville Before School Starts

2008-08-18T18:17:00.009-04:00

I made a very quick trip out to Asheville before school starts--been hearing a bunch about the place and, of course, it was everything I'd heard and more. Reminds me of Burlington, Vermont, Northampton, MA, and Portland, OR--the combination of restaurants and grunge and people with money, too. I'm looking forward to spending some more time out there in another year. But right now I want to talk about four things in particular.

As I was driving up Patton Street, towards (what I understand to be) the center of town, I saw an obelisk. And I said, ah, that must be a monument to the Confederacy; I'm guessing it was put up in the early twentieth century. So, after parking the car in a nearby lot (complete with spray-painted "Tourists Go Home"--gotta love the local flavor!) and a walk back there, I see that I was pretty much on the mark. It's a monument put up in the late 1930s to Zebulon Vance--governor of our state during the Civil War. And, of course, it was put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. So I was pretty close; and what to my wondering eyes did appear in front of it, but a smaller granite monument put up in the 1924, also by the UDC, marking Dixie Highway and commemorating Robert E. Lee. So far, so good. Actually, calling this stuff is like shooting fish in a barrel--every southern town needs its confederate monument and they're almost all from the early twentieth century. So you can impress your friends and family by making these kinds of predictions. Let's see, big monument; southern town; ... "well, [affecting voice of authority], I bet that's an early twentieth century monument to the confederacy." And almost all the time you'll be right!

So a walk down towards the enormous courthouse and what do I see: a bunch of hippies surrounding a magnolia tree. As close readers of Greenespace will recall, I love magnolia trees--and so does pretty much everyone else, which is part of the reason why the moonlight and magnolia school was so popular. They were camping out, protesting the impending destruction of the tree to create ... a condominium, right next to the park they're building! They crux of this seems to be a decision by the local authorities to sell land left to the city by George Pack. One recent report talks about it in this way: "The park land was willed to the people forever by two deeds of the late and benevolent George Pack. The deeds and land now in question are said by many to have been improperly, if not illegally, sold by Buncombe County Commissioners in November 2006." Hmm, I'd want to see the deeds (or will, I take it in this case)--sounds like a gift in fee simple absolute, but perhaps there was a restriction on use or sale?!

Now, I part company with hippies on some issues--like property rights. However, I'm always happy to see people exercising their constitutional rights in order to encourage the rest of us to spare trees from the ax--particularly the ancient, beautiful, and slow-growing magnolia. Sounds like a new piece of what I might call hippie jurisprudence. There's something about trees, which appeals to my sense of vested rights. The old ones are venerable in part because they are old; they've survived the test of time, so that alone is a reason to preserve them, it seems to me. (Not to mention that trees as a stand-in in southern literature for families.)

Anyway, after a short time at the protest, I spotted yet another monument to the side of the courthouse. And this time as I approached it, I guessed--based on the stones--that it was from the 1880s or 1890s. Bingo! 1893 monument to soldiers at Chickamauga in 1863. Ah, gotta love monuments and monument law--and what a day when you see them all combined.

And now I'm ready for school to start, because this has been just the perfect summer.

Intern opportunity: Triangle Modernist Houses

2008-08-18T08:10:00.004-04:00

George Smart's Triangle Modernist Houses continues to amaze. As he proudly reports,

With information from public records, published reports, and our readers, TMH provides extensive detail of over 110 architects with over 1800 photographs of rarely seen homes. Since its debut in October 2007, TMH has been featured by Preservation North Carolina and will be part of an upcoming article in Wallpaper magazine. In May, TMH won an Award of Merit from the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.

Right now, he's looking for an intern to help out. This would be an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in pursuing a career in architecture or design.

Are you a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright and Indiana Jones? TMH seeks a Research Intern for 8 weeks, 5 hours a week, to help with our overflowing research queue. Help us match architects to local modernist houses and expand the TMH photo library. Get free entry to events and a chance to see some of the area’s best modernist architecture. To apply, please e-mail a resume and letter of interest.

Spread the word! You can write him at george at trianglemodernisthouses.com.

For Ashley

2008-08-17T21:28:00.008-04:00

Earlier this week came the hard news that Ashley Osment's cancer has returned. The rare form of ovarian cancer that struck her last year, which had seemed to respond to treatment, was only hiding out. It has returned in the bottom of both of her lungs. She has gone through one round of carboplatin/taxol and avastin chemotherapy through her blood stream, and on August 25 she'll undergo a second round.

Her friend Maria Palmer has thoughtfully created a web site where she is posting her daily prayers and meditations--a lovely way to be present for Ashley without being intrusive at a time when it's hard to know how to help. Our love goes out to Ashley and her family.

Too many Joneses!

2008-08-10T18:08:00.010-04:00

Cute post, Al, but it's obvious I'm no Obama. I'd love to take his courses. Or teach some pale semblance of one of them again someday. But first I have to get this obsession with State v. Mann behind me--which I may soon do if I'm lucky.

On Saturday my goal in the archives was to bear down on Thomas Jones of Chowan County, the Thomas Jones who died in 1822 and was father of Elizabeth Jones and owner of a slave named Lydia. (Lydia subsequently became the property of Elizabeth and was kept hired out until Elizabeth entered her majority at age 18.) Whose family did he come from? Was it true--as it seemed likely, at least, on the surface--that he was the son of the Thomas Jones of Chowan who helped to draft North Carolina's constitution of 1776? That Thomas Jones sounds like quite a fellow. According to Samuel Ashe's Biographical History of North Carolina, he

was bred to the law, was one of the very finest men of the province in genius and learning. About the time of the arrival of James Iredell at Edenton, Mr. Jones was clerk of the court. He was not a man of large means, but was esteemed one of the principal men of his community. He was married and had an interesting household that was on terms of intimacy with the Johnstons and others of that social circle. In 1771 Iredell mentions him as "one of the best as well as most agreeable men in the world."

He died in 1797, leaving a will that named three sons, Zachariah, Levi, and Thomas.

Now, the Thomas Jones who was the father of Elizabeth died in 1822, possessed of over 600 acres. He was a justice of the peace and was evidently well respected. Given the frequency with which these people named their children after themselves, it seemed likely to me that there was a direct line here. And how interesting to re-discover this founding North Carolinian who had been lost to history and to connect him to this important case.

Except, not so fast. It turns out that in the archival file of estate records titled "Thomas Jones, 1754-1798 (more than one estate)" (not even the state archivists can tell these Joneses a part), there's a document dated 1795 that says, "Thomas Jones, son of the late Thomas Jones esquire attorney of law deceased late of Edenton in Chowan County is dead," having died without leaving a will, and thus that Francis Jones, son of this Thomas Jones, is appointed his executor. More confusion ensues, because the will of the Thomas Jones who seems to be the father here, the lawyer and clerk, is dated 1797!

There must be a story here, but unfortunately not a clear enough line to determine that Elizabeth Jones was the grand-daughter, or even great-granddaughter, of Thomas Jones the forgotten old patriot, a man who had his moment but then, according to Ashe, disappeared from public life 20 years before his death.

What Do Sally and Senator Obama Have in Common?

2008-08-09T14:37:00.004-04:00

They both are interested in Justice Thomas Ruffin's 1830 opinion in State v. Mann! Sally writes about it and Obama taught it in his seminar on current issues in racism and the law at the University of Chicago back in 1994. How do we know this? The syllabus for the course is up on the New York Times' website. Pretty interesting set of readings!

I have some more thoughts on the syllabus--and why it's not getting more attention--over at the faculty lounge.

"The South Part of Virginia" c. 1657

2008-08-05T06:58:00.009-04:00

To follow up on the post below on the contested North Carolina/Virginia line, here's a great old map.

Nicholas Comberford’s 1657 map, The South Part of Virginia Now the North Part of Carolina. The east coast of North Carolina is drawn along the bottom edge of the map. The map extends south as far as Cape Fear and north as far as what appears to be the Virginia border. The western part of the map (on the top edge) is marked as Tuscarora Indian territory. Between the Pamlico Sound and Albemarle Sound (labeled the Roanoake Sound), the map is labeled “This is a swampy wilderness;” the land north of Albemarle Sound is labeled the same.

The original is in the New York Public Library.

Here's another version of Comberford's map, a nice color image--but the heading isn't quite the same! This one is in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.

Far out!

2008-08-04T22:21:00.009-04:00

When Paul and I visited the Internet Archive on July 18, we heard about their partnership with NASA to host a vast collection of its images. It wasn't public information yet--but now it is! How cool to find out about it via the Paleo-Future blog. From the Internet Archive's release,

Through a competitive process, NASA selected Internet Archive to manage the NASA Images Web site under a non-exclusive Space Act agreement, signed in July 2007. The five-year project is at no cost to the taxpayer and the images are free to the public.

"NASA's media is an incredibly important and valuable national asset. It is a tremendous honor for the Internet Archive to be NASA's partner in this project," says Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive. "We are excited to mark this first step in a long-term collaboration to create a rich and growing public resource."

Quakers with slaves

2008-08-03T10:46:00.020-04:00

At right is the cover of the Chowan County grand jury indictment, in spring 1829, of John Mann for the assault and battery of the slave Lydia. (From the North Carolina Office of Archives and History.) The charge was presented by a man named Josiah Small. Yet the slave's owner, as Ruffin's opinion in State v. Mann tells us, was named Elizabeth Jones, who for all this time has eluded historians. Who was Josiah Small and what concern was Jones' slave to him? This document was my first clue in a long journey to find the answer.

Elizabeth Jones was Small's ward. Married to her older sister Matilda, Small assumed guardianship of Elizabeth and two of her brothers after the death of their father Thomas Jones, in 1822. To that household Elizabeth brought the slave she had inherited, Lydia. By 1829, Elizabeth was still a minor (barely, at 17), and Lydia was 23.

What's most interesting to me about the Small household is that Josiah Small was from an old Quaker family. He was a descendant of John Small (c.1639-1700), a Virginia Quaker whose family was among the waves of Quakers who scurried down to North Carolina to escape the wrath of Virginia's governor William Berkeley. A faithful servant of Charles I, "a King's man to his autocratic fingertips" as one historian writes, Berkeley suppressed all dissent from the Church of England, even after Cromwell came to power. By 1660, he'd succeeded in getting the Virginia legislature to pass a law requiring the imprisonment of all Quakers until they left the colony. He stayed in office until his death in 1677.

This was happening during the same period when the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia was up for grabs. The North Carolina charter of 1663 was at apparent odds with the one of 1665; in conflict was a swath of territory about 30 miles deep from where the line currently is to the middle of the Albemarle Sound. The dispute wasn't settled until William Byrd's survey of 1728--which means that for some 60 years, it was an open question.

The dispute had to do with differences of opinion on the location of Weyanoke Creek, which was supposed to be the boundary. The creek couldn't be found any more. Virginia claimed it was the same as Wiccon Creek, a tributary of the Chowan. North Carolina said it was the Nottoway River. But as William Boyd points out in an introduction to William Byrd's work, major questions of tobacco and trade routes were involved.

As early as 1679 Virginia had prohibited the importation of North Carolina tobacco, a condition which greatly retarded the economic development of the northeastern part of the province, where the soil was well adapted to tobacco culture. If the boundary ran through Nottoway River, North Carolina tobacco could be shipped down that and other streams to Albemarle Sound and thence to points without the colony.

As the debate lingered on, in 1714, Governor Spotswood of Virginia, "claiming that North Carolina continued to grant lands in the disputed region and that 'loose and disorderly people daily flock there,' proposed that Virginia survey a line through the Nottoway River and North Carolina one through Wiccon Creek, and that all settlers between those lines be removed." !! That didn't happen. When Charles Eden became governor of North Carolina, he managed to reach a compromise on the boundary. The line he proposed is the one that eventually, in 1728, was surveyed by a company including William Byrd II.

It's a more complicated story than that, but let me return to the Quaker Smalls. Because of this confusion, it appears that some of Josiah Small's ancestors may have "moved" to North Carolina simply by staying put. At any rate, by the late 1700s his father Benjamin was well established in Chowan County. On his death he left an estate of more than 500 acres and some 18 slaves. Josiah inherited about half of this, plus he had other holdings. By the time of the 1830 census, Josiah had 17 slaves.

Quakers were certainly better off in North Carolina. Under the Carolina Charter of 1663 (written largely by John Locke), "No person . . . shall be in any ways molested, punished, disquieted, or called into question for any differences in opinion or practice in matters of religious concernment, but every person shall have and enjoy his conscience in matters of religion throughout the province."

Quakers had many inconvenient practices and beliefs. They would not swear an oath in court. They considered everybody equal, rich or poor; all were brothers and sisters. Whether you were a lord or a servant, to them you were "thee." They would not fight. And of course, they thought slavery was wrong.

When did the Small family decide to become slaveholders, and why? We know that certain Quakers in Chowan County were considered dangerously abolitionist at least through 1795, when Josiah's father Benjamin, who did own slaves, would have been around 50. In December 1795, some Quakers in Chowan County were accused of actively promoting emancipation. Responding to a perceived "situation of great peril and danger" brought on by "the society of people called Quakers,"--by their "insatiated enthusiasm . . . as to partial and general emancipation"--a grand jury resolved that "speedy and resolute measures ought to be adopted by the good sense & spirit of the people" to combat their pernicious influence." This document links the Quaker agitation to "the miserable havoc & malfeasance which have lately taken place in the West Indies," which must have been a reference to the 1791 revolution in Haiti. Historians have finally understood how terrifying that event was to slaveowners throughout the South--an event too explosive to even talk about. But in my research into the first three decades of the 1800s in Chowan County, I haven't yet found any evidence of Quakers standing on principle against slavery. Perhaps it was there, but the Smalls and many of their relatives by then were well assimilated into the slaveowner class.

A reasonable explanation for this phenomenon of slaveholding Quakers comes from Seth B. Hinshaw's history of Quakers in North Carolina: "The religious conviction that slavery was morally wrong developed quite slowly," he writes. By the time it took hold, Quakers in eastern North Carolina had been owning slaves for many years, handing them down (as we see in the Small family) from generation to generation. It's not a great answer, but it's the best I can do.

Some of this information will turn up in the law review essay I'm writing as a follow-up to my talk on State v. Mann at the Ruffin symposium last fall. I want to acknowledge how helpful the web is for a project like this--rather, how handy the web is for connecting historical researchers with genealogists. A lot of what I know about the Small family comes from genealogical sources, especially Janice Eileen Wallace, with whom I had a fascinating email correspondence. The same is true for Elizabeth Jones and her descendants, for which Sally's Family Place and Sally herself have been very helpful.

Atomic Age Architecture in Chapel Hill

2008-07-31T21:59:00.007-04:00

On Saturday morning, the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill is hosting a symposium on Chapel Hill's modernist architecture of the 1950s-1970s. Speakers include Dail Dixon of Dixon Weinstein Architects, George Smart of Triangle Modernist Houses, and Cathleen Turner of Preservation North Carolina. Tickets are $15. Call 942-7818 to reserve yours!

How we spent our summer vacation.

2008-07-26T23:30:00.002-04:00

Some fairly random pictures from our recent travels.

Where are the Neo-Confederates When You Need Them?

2008-07-23T20:19:00.006-04:00

This evening I want to read Jefferson Davis' July 1852 address to the Phi Sigma and Hermean Societies of the University of Mississippi. But you know what? I can't find it on the internet. It's moments like these that I conclude the neo-confederates really are insignificant. If you can't scan in all the works of your leader and stick them up on the net somewhere, the question just has to be asked: what are you doing? And the answer has to be not much.

Mountaintop experience with Rheingold

2008-07-23T14:17:00.011-04:00

On Monday afternoon we visited Howard Rheingold at his Marin County home, a cottage nestled into a lush California garden. On good days, which I suppose most are (Sunday was), his "office" is a wooden chair under a plum tree. His sunflowers are 10-12 feet tall. That would have been special enough, but there's more.

He drove us up to Mt. Tamalpais State Park where we hiked among redwoods, sometimes straight up it seemed, to a gorgeous peak with spectacular view of the Bay.

A few more pics are posted on Paul's flickr page. (Clearly I need a flickr account myself!)

From there we headed to Half Moon Bay, where Paul is among the Brainstorm Techies here at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton. He's twittering up a storm. At this moment he's going crazy over Neil Young.

We'll be heading home tomorrow. Only regret on this great trip is not having packed enough sweaters. But if you're one of GreeneSpace's Chapel Hill readers, I realize you might find it hard to sympathize.

Colorful San Francisco

2008-07-21T11:23:00.015-04:00

David Silver, his wife Sarah Washburn, and their friends James Jacobs and ShinJohng Yeo spent the day yesterday showing us their San Francisco: the Mission, Castro, Richmond, etc.

Here's a portion of the fabulous murals on the Women's Building.

One of many murals lining both sides of Clarion Alley.

Schubert's Bakery, on Clement St. Viennese opera cakes and other European delights served up by friendly Asians. We shared a slice of Swedish Princess cake. For more photos of this and our later Vietnamese dinner at La Vie, see David's flickr.

Bay Area bits & bytes

2008-07-20T11:38:00.023-04:00

View from Grizzly Peak, Berkeley, near the home of our hosts, Lee Douglas and Betsy Strode.

Alma Kunanbaeva of the Silk Road House Cultural & Educational Center, Berkeley. Alma and her husband, Izaly Zemtsovsky, are friends of our friends David and Mary Alice Lowenthal, but we found out that we have another friend in common: Kazakhstan scholar Paula Michaels.

A stopped dog tells no time: amusement on the way to breakfast on Sutter St., San Francisco.

Plastic dinosaur (made in China), part of "Half-Life of a Dream," exhibit of contemporary Chinese art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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Keith Haring sculpture, near SF MOMA. Earlier, we saw his tryptich at the AIDS Chapel in Grace Cathedral.

Internet Archive visit

2008-07-19T11:49:00.006-04:00

Safe inside the Presidio, around the corner from the barracks of the legendary U.S. 30th Infantry Regiment (now being transformed into the Walt Disney Family Museum), is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, where we were greeted warmly by Brewster Kahle. We arrived just in time yesterday for the Friday lunch, a weekly event where everybody gathers around delicious food and talks about what they've been doing for the past week. A half-dozen of the folks were interns from Creative Commons. Paul was in his element; me, happy to be there.

San Bruno to Berkeley

2008-07-17T09:46:00.016-04:00

YouTube's headquarters is in San Bruno in a beautiful green building designed originally for Gap, Inc. by William McDonough. We got there just in time for lunch with Obie Greenberg, a YouTuber whom Paul had met recently on the UNC campus. A healthy buffet lunch is free for employees (and their guests). There's obvious payback to YouTube from this model, keeping workers working while munching their Mediterranean salads and their watermelon sorbet. (I understand this is the Google model as well.) But it looks like it does the trick! Seems like a fun place to work.

Up in Berkeley, it was a great day to walk around the University of California Botanical Garden. Just our luck to be there the day of a rare blooming of the Corpse Flower (Titan Arum; amorphophallus titanum). Said to have a terrible smell at times, we couldn't smell it (at least I couldn't), but we could admire it's awesome beauty. (The Italian arum in our yard is a puny relative.)

Out west

2008-07-16T09:30:00.019-04:00

On vacation. What a lark, what a plunge! Arrived in San Francisco yesterday, spent some time in OCLC's Research Libraries Group office in San Mateo, where I got to hear my lovely and talented spouse talk informally for about an hour and a half about ibiblio and how it started and what makes it work.

Had a delightful dinner with Dan Gillmor and Noriko Takiguchi at Roti, a great Indian restaurant in the upscale town of Burlingame.

Then for the night at the Inn at Oyster Point. Today, on to Berkeley.

The view from Oyster Point toward Gertrude Stein's Oakland.

A Book I Love + book.google=An Antebellum Math Problem

2008-07-13T19:09:00.009-04:00

Ok--so I'm sitting here reading John McCardell's fantastic Idea of a Southern Nation. He references an algebra book published in the 1840s by a Davidson prof, D.H. Hill, (also later a Confederate general) that makes fun of yankees.

So I surf over to book.google--what a fabulous research tool this is. And though a librarian was just yesterday criticizing me for my research method (and for also not spending enough time in the archives), I have to say: it sure is convenient to be able to pull up the text on my desktop. So check out this problem from Professor Hill's book:

A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, which cost him 1/4 cent apiece, with a quantity of real nutmegs, worth 4 cents apiece, and sells the whole assortment for $44; and gains $3.75 by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there?

Fun in math class, eh? (Am I right in thinking that 4x-1/4x=375?)

In honor of Sally's terrific work on State v. Mann, how about this problem involving the hiring of a slave:

A planter hired a negro-man at the rate of $100 per annum, and his clothing. At the end of 8 months the master of the slave took him home, and received $75 in cash, and no clothing. What was the clothing valued at?

Also, on the issue of emancipation and the generosity of North and South, this:

A gentleman in Richmond expressed a willingness to liberate his slave, valued at $1000, upon the receipt of that sum from charitable persons. He received contributions from 24 persons; and of these there were 14/19ths fewer from the North than from the South, and the average donation of the former was 4/5ths smaller than that of the latter. What was the entire amount given by the latter?

Mighty interesting stuff to see what's on the minds of antebellum textbook authors, eh?

(By the way, just so this is clear--the book I love is McCardell's Idea of a Southern Nation.)

Barbeque Church

2008-07-13T08:50:00.004-04:00

I've lived in North Carolina long enough to know that barbeque is religion, but I didn't know till lately that there's actually a Barbeque Church.

Related: Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbeque, by John Shelton and Dale Reed, comes out from UNC Press this fall.

Two things I love

2008-07-11T15:39:00.002-04:00

Well, it's a Friday afternoon in July and so it's time for a little break from University, Court, and Slave. Time to talk about two things I love.

First, University Microform's Digital Dissertations. I'm able to sit here in my office in Chapel Hill and read Colin Bradley Burke's fantastic quantitative study of colleges in the antebellum period. Second, quantitative studies of history. Reading Burke's study I'm reminded that it wasn't so long ago that scholars wrote their own programs to do data analysis. (He talks about a FORTRAN program he wrote to compute coefficients.) Heck, even I did my own programming for my first quantitative study back in the mid-1980s. (That's because I didn't have an account on my school's IBM 370, so I used a desktop.) Ah, the good old days....

Wingfield, Chowan County

2008-07-10T21:51:00.007-04:00

While Al has been keeping GreeneSpace alive, for which I'm very grateful, I've been back at work on my essay on Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann as a follow-up to last fall's symposium. Lately that project has taken me back to the archives. As anyone who has done this sort of thing knows, it's easy to get lost in the archives, to go down trails you never intended just because they are interesting.

One of the jurors who heard John Mann's case in Chowan County in the fall of 1829 was Thomas I. Brownrigg. He was from a wealthy Irish Protestant family that established the first commercial fishing operation in provincial North Carolina, on the Chowan River just above Edenton. By his day, the estate that his grandfather Richard Brownrigg had established consisted of some 1,400 acres. Thomas' half-sister Priscilla Brownrigg was married to the solicitor (the prosecutor) bringing the case against Mann, John L. Bailey. (So much for conflict of interest.)

In double-checking some of these facts, I found this paragraph written in 1873 by Thomas Brownrigg Bailey to his mother Priscilla Brownrigg Bailey:

I rode over to Wingfield . . . The dear old place, my ancestors' home, around which cluster all the fond and proud associations of my family, is as much altered from the paradise it once was as a skeleton is different from the full and rounded form of youth and health and beauty. I rode down to the rear of the garden and took a long and wistful view of the most beautiful river I have ever seen; its glittering waters looked just as they did forty years ago. And the cypress trees with their broad bases stood out in the water, isolated, only awaiting their time to fall prostrate like others on the strand . . . the waves beating their solemn cadence on the lonely shore and the sighing of the wind through the cedars made symphony with my troubled heart. I felt humbled as in the presence of the dead; I tried to conjure up the long ago, when gay and festive and merrie throng gathered on the lawn, or made the house echo with song and dance and music's voluptuous swell. I tried to imagine where Father poured into your willing ear the words of love and plighted faith, but it would not do. In spite of me I was depressed beyond measure, and there the scarred and ruined house stared me in the face like an ugly demon. I bade silent farewell to the place and rode away.

Accompanying this paragraph was a note saying the house had been occupied in 1863 by the Buffaloes, "a band of traitorous Southerners."

What happened? It appears that during the Civil War there were two Union infantry regiments organized in eastern North Carolina out of white North Carolinians. According to Professor Donald E. Collins, they had their reasons:

Why did 1,300 men from the counties of Eastern North Carolina go against their native state and join the Union army? The answer is complex and is not simply loyalty to the United States and/or opposition to slavery. The nucleus of the First and Second North Carolina regiments, those who entered in the first enthusiastic burst of recruiting, were anti-slavery men who opposed secession. That, however, is even too simple an explanation. As pointed out by historian Wayne K. Durrill in his book A War of Another Kind, in describing the war in Washington County [See: Tidbits], it was a form of class warfare of haves versus have-nots -- the poor whites and small yeoman farmers who opposed and acted against their wealthy slave holding planter neighbors. Such men rushed to join a Union army that would help them punish the secessionist planter class.

Further,

The earliest North Carolina Union soldiers were "carried away with the idea that when they became soldiers they would be licensed to shoot down indiscriminately every disloyal citizen to the government they could find, and appropriate all of the property belonging to such persons to their own comfort, or to the benefit of the Government. " These Unionists were less anti-slavery than pro-white labor. They wished to end slavery as the first step toward deporting Blacks from the country -- to the benefit of the white working man.

These soldiers were called Home Guards. Their role was not to involve leaving the state. Rather, they were to cooperate with northern soldiers, perhaps serving as scouts or doing reconnaissance. "Perhaps the most hazardous duty involved recruiting forays into the no-man's land of the Albemarle Sound and Roanoke/Chowan rivers region where they were regularly harassed by small bands of Confederate guerilas."

But the company that took over Wingfield was no credit to the Union. According to William Mallison in The Civil War on the Outer Banks, after being turned into a post of the Union army, Wingfield went from bad to worse.

It became a center of “fugitive negroes, lawless white men, traitors and deserters from the Confederate army. Their leader, Captain Jack Fairless, a deserter, and his men “pillaged, plundered, burned, and decoyed off slaves in their forays into Chowan . . . Bertie, Perquimans, Hertford, and Gates Counties.”

Capt. Fairless was fatally shot by one of his own drunken men. A fierce battle then took place between the remaining Union men and some Confederates, the Union side "armed with an antique cannon stolen from Edenton." The Confederates eventually prevailed, but Wingfield was destroyed.

More Books I Love that I Haven't Read in a While

2008-07-09T05:29:00.001-04:00

Recently, as I was re-reading Robert Bonner's fantastic essay on Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order, I was reminded that his first book was a history of the southern identity between the two world wars, The Idea of the American South, 1920-41--and about UNC's contribution through the university's sociologists. In previous readings of The Idea of the South I've focused on the conservative thought (much of is about the agrarians), but Bonner's gentle reminder sent me over to my book shelf to pull down The Idea of the American South, to learn about my new home.

One thing about O'Brien's work--I always have the sense that he's smarter than everyone he's writing about (and he's sure smarter than I am). It's strange to read a book where the author sees connections that I don't think the subjects under study saw--or to deal with ideas that the subjects under study didn't understand as well as the author. But then maybe that's maybe one of the central goals of intellectual history--to see people's ideas in context and perhaps put them in a stream of thought, which they themselves perhaps only dimly perceived.

One of these days I want to talk about legal thought in his Conjectures of Order.

New Urbanism: A Participant Observation Study

2008-07-07T16:33:00.001-04:00

I returned from Philadelphia with a copy of the new urbanist bible, Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities in tow. I'm going to be talking a little bit about my experience living in a new urbanist community for a while--but perhaps I should begin with my experience with Jane Jacobs first. I read it in an urban history class that I took way back in the spring of 1985 (in some ways its hard for me to say way back, because my college years still seem so fresh--but, ah, a lot of water's gone under the bridge since then). And now I realize that my choice of a place for law school (New York) may have been heavily influenced by that book and its obvious love for New York.

Anyway, I filed it away in the memory banks, thought about it now and then. I graduated from law school and headed south, to Richmond, where I clerked for a judge on the fourth circuit (the beloved John Butzner, a most humane and kind man). And I chose an unusual apartment--in a renovated tobacco warehouse--again, perhaps, influenced by Jacobs. Judge Butzner joked a little bit about me as his scrappy, resourceful New York clerk and, in fact, his love for things and people of New York may have been why he hired me. Over the course of the year I learned that his brother-in-law was an architect in New York and that his sister was the author of a legal history book--Constitutional Chafe (about discarded constitutional provisions). That book was published by Jane Butnzer.

It wasn't until near the end of my clerkship that I was interviewing with a New York firm and one of the partners said, "oh, I know Judge Butzner's sister--you may know her too." All of which must have caused me to have a puzzled look on my face. And then he said, "Jane Jacobs." To which I responded something like, "oh, Death and Life of Great American Cities?! She's Judge Butzner's sister?" What a supremely modest man who didn't bother to mention who his sister was. ...

I think there's a great article to be written about Butzner's jurisprudence. If you're interested in what Jacobs' method looks like in the legal system, Butzer is the person to study--it's a jurisprudence that looks to the common law method. He took a very direct approach to precedent and followed it rigorously, though he also saw the considerations of humanity at stake in his decisions. And there was, every now and then, a small appearance of the moral indignation that so characterizes Jacobs' work when she identifies the bureaucracy's treading on the rights and humanity of people in a city.

But, to return to the subject of my post. I'm most interested by this new urbanist community I now live in. And so I've been taking notes as I wander around southern village and as I sit in the Weaver Street Market munching my lunches. Got a lot to say about this place, mostly about what works with it. A small preview: this is a really gendered space.

Independence Day in Hillsborough

2008-07-06T10:47:00.005-04:00

What could be better for someone who studies history and cemeteries than an Independence Day visit to the grave of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence?! Not much, I imagine. Hence, I set off on Friday morning to visit Hillsborough. Hillsborough, of course, is where Thomas Ruffin lived and where several of the "Regulators" were hanged after their rebellion was put down in 1771.

In the church yard of the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, Thomas Hooper--a signer of the Declaration--was buried in 1790. Was buried is the operative term--he was exhumed and reburied in Greensboro in 1894 (as part of the creation of a park to commemorate a Revolutionary War battle fought there). I'm not a huge fan of reburials to create a new park--seems like the attempt to "manufacture" gravitas--and it's done at the expense of a dead person, who obviously can't object. But then if the relevant family members are ok with it, that's all that's required by law.

Anyway, the church yard is lovely and I saw the place where Hooper had been buried. (He's a pretty interesting guy, btw--born in Boston and educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard, then trained in law with James Otis and relocated to North Carolina in the 1760s. Hooper was initially closely tied to the colonial government, then slowly came over the Revolutionary cause, and after the war was a Federalist.)

(This is cross-posted from propertyprof.)

Traces of the Trade, on P.O.V. This Tuesday

2008-06-21T17:06:00.010-04:00

I've been buried in work on University, Court, and Slave (though you couldn't tell it from how little progress I made last week), so I'm a little behind the curve on this most exciting news. The much-discussed documentary Traces of the Trade will be broadcast on television for the first time this Tuesday, June 24, on the PBS show P.O.V. (In Chapel Hill, POV's broadcast of the film will be on Friday the 27th.) Traces of the Trade is about James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island (one of our country's wealthiest men and a leading figure in the slave trade in the eighteenth century) and a journey that DeWolf's descendants made recently as they retraced the paths of his trade routes and property holdings. They began in Bristol, then went to Ghana and the Caribbean.

I saw a director's cut of this back in 2005 at a conference at Brown University. It was fantastic--absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to see the final version. You need to see this. Trust me on this one.

This evening's Bill Moyer's Journal has a short preview, which you can watch here. Also, Sally tells me that the director, Katrina Browne, will be speaking in Chapel Hill on September 6. You may also be interested in c-span's broadcast with Thomas DeWolf, who's the author of a book on this subject, Inheriting the Trade.

Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments

2008-06-20T14:07:00.004-04:00

Well, it's a Friday afternoon in June and though my favorite librarian recently told me I should be relaxing now that I'm moved into Chapel Hill, I'm sweating out a paper for a colloquium next week. It's going to be about University, Court, and Slave. I'm trying to get the introduction written so I can distribute it on Monday. But instead of doing that, I'm blogging about a piece of it....

One of the chapters is on Thomas Ruffin, so I thought I'd post a note about an article that I forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review (thanks to Sally and Eric Muller's kindness) on Mr. Justice Ruffin. The article was part of Sally and Eric's conference last fall on The Perils of Public Homage. Chapel Hill residents may find this of particular interest because there's a dormitory on campus named (in part) after him. (It's Ruffin Hall and it's also named for his son.) Anyway, the paper is about two things. First, it's about Ruffin's jurisprudence; second, it's about what we make of the fact that there's a building named after him. The payoff on the later point is that I'm not at all sure the building was named for him because he was a proslavery jurist--in fact, I think that by the early twentieth century that piece of his jurisprudence may have been largely forgotten. And so now, somewhat oddly, the building serves as an occasion to talk about the era of slavery and what that meant to our state and our university.

Here's the abstract:

"Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments" returns to Justice Thomas Ruffins opinions, particularly on slavery, to excavate his jurisprudence and to try to assess what Ruffins legacy means for us today. It begins with an exploration of Ruffins 1830 opinion in State v. Mann, where he self-consciously separated his feelings from his legal opinion to release a man who abused a slave from criminal liability. Anti-slavery activists frequently wrote about Mann, because of its brutal honesty about the harsh nature of slavery. After discussing Harriet Beecher Stowes fictional account of Ruffin and Mann in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which further developed the theme of separation of law and morals, the paper turns to some of Ruffins other opinions. It looks to slavery opinions including Heathcock v. Pennington (which released a renter of a slave from liability for his death in a coal mine) and Green v. Lane (which dealt with a trust to give quasi-freedom to slaves), as well as non-slavery cases like Scroggins v. Scroggins (which argued against granting judicial divorces because that would encourage more of them).

Ruffins jurisprudence took the world as it was, or as he phrased it, looked to the nature of things. His judicial opinionsthe monuments he left to usillustrate a world of proslavery moral philosophy. That thought separated humanity from law and then decided cases based on precedent and considerations of utility to society. Ruffin was a great expositor of the system of slavery, as well as a great wielder of what Stowe called cold legal logic.

What should we make of this legacy today? Perhaps Ruffin aided the cause of antislavery through his honesty in State v. Mann. And, thus, perhaps we should honor him for that. Moreover, perhaps the honor he received in the early twentieth century (when a dormitory was named in part for him on the UNC campus) derives from his facility with legal reasoning outside of the slavery context. However, honoring him also runs the risk of honoring proslavery values. Conversely, removing his name from a building now runs the risk of concealing the prevalence of proslavery thought in the nineteenth century. That is, removing a name might facilitate a process of forgetting when universities should be trying to provide a proper context for viewing our past.

The paper's available on the social science research network.

UNC Press Blog

2008-06-20T13:59:00.002-04:00

The UNC Press has started a blog; I'm very much looking forward to reading it, to keep up with the latest from our friends at the UNC Press.

2008-06-19T09:08:00.005-04:00

I'm cross-posting this from propertyprof (I'm guessing there isn't a lot of overlap between Greenespace readers and propertyprofs).

This morning's New York Times brings a story about the governance of Gramercy Park--which is so strict that few people use it. What would Thomas Jefferson have to say about this exclusion of most people from the park?

Rolling Stone Quotations

2008-06-17T11:16:00.005-04:00

My Rolling Stone subscription has made it to Chapel Hill. (I subscribed a few years ago because I thought it would be a good way to stay in touch with students; I guess that just shows how absolutely out of touch I am with the students--none of them read it. And when I mention it in class every now and then, they look at my like I'm some artifact from the 1960s.)

I've mentioned Rolling Stone before when I was talking about hippie jurisprudence. But I also wrote about it as part of a ranking method for faculty. So, as I was reading Claire Hoffman's article on facebook ("The Battle for Facebook") in RS yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see Duke's James Boyle quoted! Always good to know that law and popular culture are connected.

A Charming Chapel Hill Story

2008-06-16T09:18:00.009-04:00

So I'm back from Philadelphia, where I went to see my dad for father's day. What a pleasure being within driving distance of Philly--this is the first time since I was in practice, lo' those many years ago, that I've been able to get home for the weekend. I hope to make a habit of this. On the way up there on Friday I had lunch in my old stomping ground of Richmond; drove a little around downtown and I hardly recognized it. There are new, tall buildings where there used to be parking lots. Last time I was in Richmond (in 2000) I enjoyed the restored Tredegar iron works. They're done a great job with it. My, things change over the course of nearly 20 years.

Anyway, as I was returning my rental car this morning, I asked the folks at Enterprise to give me a lift up to school--and a nice man next to me said, actually, I'm driving up Franklin Street. So I accepted his offer and to my good fortune it turned out that the man offering the lift is John Shelton Reed--whose works I've been reading for a while. What an unexpected pleasure! I didn't ask him what he thought of Dreamland Barbeque--but I will.

One good thing about moving

2008-06-09T16:48:00.002-04:00

... is coming across books that I haven't handled in a really long time and enjoying them again. There are the books I love that I return to time and again, like Rhys Isaac's Transformation of Virginia and David Davis' Problem of Slavery in Western Culture; and I carried with me two books that I particularly love--Angela Miller's Empire of the Eye and Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order. But then there are the books that I haven't opened in a while, which really repay reading again--like Mark Steiner's An Honest Calling: Lincoln as Lawyer and Edmund Morgan's American Slavery--American Freedom and Stamp Act Crisis (what a beautifully, beautifully written book).

And while I'm talking about beautifully written and important books: when I arrived in my office on Wednesday I was pleasantly surprised to see the advance sheets of Mary Dudziak's Exporting American Dreams : Thurgood Marshall's African Journey. Now, I'm really partial to books with Dream in the title--particularly if they're about race. Mary's book has a great first paragraph (I'm partial to first lines and here):

It was January 1960, but it was summer. An American lawyer arrived in a new land, but he called it his home.

The whole book reads like a novel. It's a fabulous history of civil rights in the United States that runs parallel to Marshall's work to create a constitution for Kenya. I absolutely love it.

The (Not) Silent Slave

2008-06-07T16:16:00.001-04:00

Been absurdly busy getting settled in lovely Chapel Hill. This week I had the pleasure of riding a bus home from work (and it's free, no less!); haven't been able to do that since I left Honolulu a few years ago. And I'm getting used to this most friendly town--what an unexpected pleasure to run into an old friend and now colleague at the Weaver Street Market at lunch the other day. And once I get a little more settled I hope to talk some about my "new urbanist" experience. But right now I have something else to talk about--silence and slaves....

So I understand that Silent Sam's a key monument on the UNC campus. I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time around his statue and elsewhere on the campus. However, these days I'm interested in other antebellum (or maybe in the case of Mr. Sam, bellum) characters who are often silent, though perhaps not quite so silent as Sam: slaves in southern literature. One piece of University, Court, and Slave looks to the ways that slaves are silenced in court--they're rarely permitted to testify. I'm interested in this because it seems such an obvious corruption of seeking truth--but there's a larger purpose that's served by the silence.

But what about slaves who speak in southern literature? We hear a lot from Uncle Tom. And in some of the southern responses we hear from slaves as well--like Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis' Cabin. But what about Beverly Tucker's obscure novel George Balcombe? The last line of the novel comes from a slave, who testifies to the love of Mr. Balcombe: "We been all mighty willing, sir, to have Mass' George for master." Wow--putting words of testimony to Mr. Balcombe into the mouths of the enslaved. Mighty interesting stuff--monuments and slaves who speak intermittently.

87 Years Ago Today... The Tulsa Riot

2008-05-31T16:29:00.003-04:00

Well, it was 87 years ago today that the Tulsa Tribune story hit the streets and ignited the Tulsa riot of 1921. The story--called by the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch "the false story that set Tulsa ablaze"--said that "Diamond" Dick Rowland, a young black man, had tried to assault a young white woman in an elevator the day before. After that, white people gathered at the courthouse, where Rowland was being held. They'd come to see a lynching and maybe participate in one.

Meanwhile, over in Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa, veterans of the world war met in a back room of the "Dreamland Theater" with a newspaper editor to plan how to stop the lync hing. Their trip to the courthouse to stop the lynching later that evening resulted in a struggle. Immediately it turned into the riot that led to the destruction of the black community. Along Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa this evening the ghosts of 1921 may be walking again, reliving that tragedy....

More on this story here. This is cross-posted from thefacultylounge.

Resurfacing in Chapel Hill

2008-05-31T11:23:00.005-04:00

Well, it was a long trip from Tuscaloosa to Chapel Hill.

I'm sitting here in my pet friendly hotel in Chapel Hill listening to the Democratic Rules Committee debate; riveting stuff, for sure. And because Chapel Hill is a new beginning for me, I thought that I'd post Thomas Cole's Falls of the Kaaterskill, which is about nature and the new. It's also a connection to my past, however, because it's home is the fabulous Westervelt Warner Museum in Tuscaloosa.

I have new found respect for folks like movers. I also have new found respect for the antebellum southerners I study. The amount of energy it took to settle the south and the physical difficulties were extraordinary. But what the move--packing my books and files, even with the help of movers--as well as the drive impressed upon me how difficult is was to sustain and propagate intellectual culture. The library at the antebellum University of Alabama had something like 5000 volumes; it was one of the largest libraries in the country at the time. Yet it must have been extraordinarily expensive and difficult to assemble those book. Moreover, it's testimony to the extraordinary commitment to the community of ideas that people in the old south, in places that were so difficult to get to, read and wrote about ideas of religion, politics, and moral philosophy. They sustained a culture in the face of adversity. Now, that may also tell us something about why that culture was so thoroughly conservative. (Although in the eighteenth century the hurdles were even greater and that was not so nearly conservative an intellectual culture.)

A song for Al

2008-05-29T16:38:00.005-04:00

My excellent guest-blogger Al Brophy is in transit today and tomorrow, moving from Tuscaloosa to Chapel Hill. This little song, via twittering Paul, goes out to him and Barb.

History from the Jim Crow Era

2008-05-29T07:42:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite works of history is W. Sherman Savage’s The Controversy Over the Distribution of Abolitionist Literature, 1830-1860 (1938), by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Why has it won this place in my heart? In part because of the conditions under which Dr. Savage (who was a professor of history at Lincoln University) wrote and published it–in the dark days of Jim Crow. It’s newsprint paper testifies to the difficult economic conditions of its publication. Yet, despite the hardships of being an African American scholar of extremely modest background and means, Dr. Savage persevered.

I first fell in love with this volume when, as a third year law student (now many, many years ago) I was working on the response to abolitionist literature that was mailed through the United States mail to southern slaveholders and free blacks alike. The abolitionists’ campaign was a shrewd one–to use that great engine of commerce, the mails, to get their ideas into the hands of people where they might have an impact. The response testifies to the power of ideas to liberate us as a people.

Savage’s volume collected a lot of wisdom and presented it in simple and therefore elegant prose. And as I wondered about why such an important work was printed on such, well, inexpensive paper it dawned on me that this was the case because this was likely all the publisher could afford. Ah, further testimony to how ideas can find expression and an audience, even when they are not clothed in the trappings of wealth and majesty.

It’s further testimony to the perseverance of people who sought to tell the truth in those dark days–and were able to help our country remake itself.

Savage’s book is also a reminder that the mainstream academy does not always address issues of importance to African Americans. As Christopher Metzler’s been talking about here of late, we need to be careful to produce scholarship of importance to the African American community–and to our country as a whole. Similarly, we ought to be very suspicious of our colleagues who tell us that issues of race aren’t important or that we’ve already learned what we’re going to from research on race.

Alfred Brophy

Yale's Hidden, Then Disappearing Portrait

2008-05-28T09:32:00.000-04:00

This repeats a post from a few years back over at moneylaw, where I used to post now and then.

Yale recently took down a picture of Elihu Yale, the university's namesake, which depicts a young enslaved male (who is wearing a metal collar) waiting on him. I had never heard of the picture before the story broke. Yet, now that I see it, I think it's an important depiction of the connections between that great university and the institution of slavery. I've posted the picture, from the Hartford Courant website at right.

The article reports that the painting hung in a room where the trustees met, though the room apparently was not generally open to the public. It is going to replace the offending portrait with another one, which does not have a slave in it.

Yale has other portraits of its benefactor, with less historical baggage. A painting of roughly the same size - of Yale standing alone by a table, a seascape behind him - will soon be dusted off and pulled from a storeroom at the Yale University Art Gallery to replace the one up now.

The African slave trade was brought to America by European settlers, desperate for bodies to work the sugar and cotton plantations, to supply their trading empires with goods. In paintings of the time, images of blacks in metal collars, marking them as slaves, were not uncommon, said John Marciari, a curator of early European art at Yale.

"It's a simple but lamentable fact of history," he said.

I think it's important to talk about the past and so I am grateful for the discussion of the Yale portrait. But I also worry when I see an effort to erase history, which may be one effect of moving the portrait. Lots to talk about here, of course. This will be a piece of University, Court, and Slave, of course.

Thanks to the fabulous Jim Campbell of Brown University for alerting me to this story.

A Memorial of Samuel Townsend

2008-05-26T01:31:00.001-04:00

In honor of memorial day, I thought that I'd post on a most interesting will--that of Samuel Townsend of Madison County, Alabama. (Thanks to the fabulous Merrily Harris of the University of Alabama's Hoole Library for bringing this to my attention.) Mr. Townsend's 1856 will freed a number of people (Joel Williamson speculates that at least some of them were family members). The will is important evidence of the ways that testators, lawyers, and executors negotiated around the system of slavery--and on this I will be talking more later this summer.

However, you know what the very first substantive request was? To be buried on his plantation and for a memorial to be erected over his remains! ("I wish my body to be interred in the grave yard on the plantation where I now reside, a marble monument worth from five to seven hundred dollars erected upon my grave, and enclosed by a durable stone wall.") Pretty cool to look to wills to see how people thought about memorials, isn't it?

An Honorary Degree for Paul Jones

2008-05-24T09:39:00.001-04:00

The blogosphere is lighting up with discussion of Washington University’s award of an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly. Sometimes those decisions are controversial; at other times, they are something that everyone agrees on.

All of this reminds me of one of my university’s excellent decisions on an honorary degree, which it awarded back in 2006 to art collector and benefactor Paul Jones. (Not Sally's Paul Jones, a.k.a. "The Real Paul Jones"!) The University of Delaware houses much of his collection of African American Art.

But first a step back in time to the 1930s Alabama. It was one of Jones’ childhood aspirations to play football for the Crimson Tide. Alas, that was not to be. Instead, he played for Alabama State. In the 1940s, when Jones was a student at Howard University, he applied to the University of Alabama’s law school and was denied admission because of his race. That didn’t stop him, however; he went on to a successful career as a businessman in Atlanta, then to work in the Nixon administration, and even a run for Congress in 1982 (as a Republican). At one point in the 1970s, Dr. Jones was in the federal government’s education department and approved a large grant to the University of Alabama for adult education. He never mentioned his history with the university at that point–he just did something that was forward-looking and positive. Though that did not mean that he had forgotten his history with the university; in fact, he saved the law school’s letter to him.

In 2004 the University of Alabama and Dr. Jones began a partnership that involved a show of some of his art collection in Tuscaloosa; that was followed by a generous gift by friends of the university for a scholarship for needy students in his name. And this culminated in his giving a commencement address in August 2006, along with an honorary degree. Even there, Dr. Jones did not talk about the past; he chose instead to talk about the graduates, their families, and the future. It was a moment of a gesture to make amends for the past and to build something better for the future.

This repeats a post I put up recently over at diverse education's group blog, The Academy Speaks.

Alfred Brophy

University, Court, and Slave

2008-05-23T09:25:00.001-04:00

I thought that I'd talk a little about my current project. I'm pretty excited about it, in part because it's something I've been working on (in one way or another) since beginning graduate school. I've had a bunch of detours, through colonial American history (particularly Quaker legal thought), through violence in the early twentieth century and contemporary discussion of reparations. But I'm now back and working on intellectual thought in the old South.

Alas, I'm one of those people who study dead, white men--and Christians and slaveholders at that. Every now and then a white woman wanders across my pages, too. And sometimes enslaved people speak--though as I'll talk about next month, I more often study ways that the slaveholders try to prevent them from speaking.

My current project is a monograph, tentatively called "University, Court, and Slave." It's about jurisprudence in the south in the years leading into Civil War. And the way I try to get at that complex set of ideas is by looking to the writings of academics, who were often more expressive about the matrix of ideas about economy (utility), history, and precedent than were judges faced with deciding cases in front of them.

In the years leading into Civil War, orators at Harvard and Yale spoke in support of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. William and Mary’s President Thomas Roderick Dew and University of Virginia Professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe were among the leading American proslavery writers. Randolph Macon College President William Smith wrote a proslavery college textbook, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery. Smith's book, like many other southern texts, are available on the UNC website. I 'm glad such books are available, so they can be studied.

These days I’m studying the intellectual defense of slavery in American colleges in the years leading into Civil War. The same language of moral philosophy that’s employed in colleges also appears in public debate (like the debate over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in Congress) and in judicial opinions. The concern for considerations of utility rather than individual humanity to slaves and their references to historical “knowledge” about the ubiquity and need for slavery appear in college classrooms, in public oratory, and in judicial opinions. Sometimes people write about the role of moral philosophy in judicial opinions. What interests me is how there is a common language. I don’t suggest that lessons Justice Thomas Ruffin learned while a student at Princeton in the first decade of the nineteenth century controlled him when he was a judge on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1829 through the 1850s. Rather, the language of utility and history that was common to college classrooms and to judicial opinions suggests some of the connections. The professors and jurists (and politicians, too) are drawing upon a common understanding of how to address moral problems.

Those sometimes hidden connections can help us answer some important questions about the reasoning process of antebellum jurists–-and so are important to legal historians. Once we focus on the ubiquitious considerations of utility, I think we understand why people as different in outlook as Morton Horwitz and Richard Posner both see economic considerations as central to jurisprudence in the 19th century.

Even more important than what they say about 19th century jurisprudence, these connections illustrate how powerful the proslavery forces were. They demonstrate that when we think about investigating universities’ connections to slavery, we should pay close attention to the ways that they loaned their intellectual capital to the project of continuing nearly four million people–-indeed our whole country–-in bondage. Those proslavery college professors were engaged scholars; they used their talents and their positions of influence to teach the next generation.

There are also stories about a few places where college professors opposed slavery. Judge William Gaston of the North Carolina Supreme Court spoke against slavery in an address at the University of North Carolina in 1835. After the mid-1830s, Southern schools–like the South more generally–were consistently and forcefully in favor of slavery.

President Francis Wayland of Brown University is one of those who opposed slavery; in 1845 he debated through a series of letters a proslavery minister from South Carolina, Richard Fuller. But those who opposed slavery were relatively few. More told their students and whoever else would listen that slavery was right; was ordained of God; was necessary for the continuation of American society; and that emancipation would cause greater harm (for slaves, as well as others) than would continuation of slavery. Such as some of the lessons we learn from rigorous investigations of our past, such as Brown University undertook. And for that knowledge, as for some many other things, we owe Brown's President Ruth Simmons and the Steering Committee’s leader, History Professor James Campbell, a huge debt.

Alfred Brophy

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: The Law and Politics Volume

2008-05-22T07:05:00.002-04:00

Following up on a brief mention over at my home (thefacultylounge.org), I want to mention a very exciting new book: volume 10 in the UNC Press' New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Jim Ely and Bradley Bonds edited it. These sorts of volumes are absurdly difficult to conceptualize: how can you capture something so sprawling as southern law--to say nothing of politics--in a few hundred pages. So they're necessarily selective. But that's the fun it is, isn't it? Seeing what you can put together--what cast of a few dozen characters can be made to speak for a region and many centuries? Reminds me of Richard Wightman Fox and James Kloppenberg's fantastic Companion of American Thought. Back in the day, it was a great present for almost all occasions.

Here is the press' description of the volume:

Volume 10 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture combines two of the sections from the original edition, adding extensive updates and 53 entirely new articles. In the law section of this volume, 16 longer essays address broad concepts ranging from law schools to family law, from labor relations to school prayer. The 43 topical entries focus on specific legal cases and individuals, including historical legal professionals, parties from landmark cases, and even the fictional character Atticus Finch, highlighting the roles these individuals have played in shaping the identity of the region.

The politics section includes 34 essays on matters such as Reconstruction, social class and politics, and immigration policy. New essays reflect the changing nature of southern politics, away from the one-party system long known as the "solid South" to the lively two-party politics now in play in the region. Seventy shorter topical entries cover individual politicians, political thinkers, and activists who have made significant contributions to the shaping of southern politics.

Of course, it invites comparison with the law section of the Encyclopedia of New England, published a few years back by Yale University Press (of which I was a co-editor).

Sally's the master of things southern and legal, so I'll be interested in her thoughts on this important volume. There is a synthetic essay by Maxwell Bloomfield and Jim Ely and there are both topical essays (like southern law schools, convict lease system...) and biographical entries. One thing that I'm interested in is how the editors present the system of southern law? How do ideas appear in the story? How does the southern legal system relate to the national system? How do little people and legal mandarins fit into the story? Where does violence fit in and civil rights, too? What about the dissenters. Ah, there's just so much work to be done on southern legal history.

Edward Durell Stone's Crimson Carpets!

2008-05-21T07:34:00.002-04:00

The New York Times' coverage of the death of A&P heir Huntington Hartford includes a video of his art museum on Columbus Circle, which was designed by Edward Durell Stone. You know what other building was designed by Edward Durell Stone? The one I've worked in the last seven years--the University of Alabama Law School! It's a pretty cool building--has a couple of spiral staircases and is reminiscent of the "dog trot" style popular in early Alabama homes. It also has crimson carpet--and that's what caught my attention, because the video refers to the crimson carpet in the Columbus Circle building!

The wills prof in me loves this vignette from the Times' obituary (which is a great read, btw):

he even floated the idea of his mother’s adopting his first wife, Mary Lee Epling, so that he might keep her as a sister after their divorce in 1939. Instead, Mary Lee made a successful new marriage, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

I love the closing lines:

"I have tried to use my millions creatively,” Mr. Hartford wrote in one of the early issues of his magazine Show. But, he added, “The golden bird, coming to life, has sometimes wriggled out of my hand and flown away.”

Alas, we've lost another person with personality.

This is why they call it the moonlight and magnolia school

2008-05-20T07:02:00.003-04:00

I've got my internet connection back up, so....

On Sunday I came home, on the late side from a colleague's house--they live next to the famous Tuscaloosa Country Club (famous because it's the subject of an important vignette in Carl Carmer's Stars Fell on Alabama).

The magnolia tree in the front smelled oh so sweet and the moon cast such beautiful shadows. No wonder there's a whole genre built around them. (The so-called "moonlight and magnolia school" that flourished from the wake of Civil War through the early twentieth century, which focused on the beauty of the old south.) Of course, focus on that can cause us to lose sight of a lot else, which we should be paying attention to.

By the way, trees are great stand-ins in southern thought for the critical southern values of inheritance and family. So when I was looking for a question for my remedies exam, I thought one based on a case from Jacksonville about some homeowners who sought an injunction to prevent the Alabama Power Company from cutting down their trees was the makin's of a great question.

The Poland/DeFeo House: A moving preservation story

2008-05-18T20:25:00.013-04:00

Congratulations to George Smart of Triangle Modernist Houses for organizing a terrific modern home tour in Durham Saturday! We enjoyed the three houses on the tour in Hope Valley--Brian Shawcroft's 1963 Bruce and Nancy Wardropper house, Robert "Judge" Carr's 1958 Miriam and Henry Nicholson house, and the new "Three Pavilions" by Bill Waddell for Monica Hunter.

Also available on open house was the wonderful house designed by George Matsumoto for George Poland, a professor of foreign languages and literature at NCSU, in 1954. The house, designed like Matsumoto's own house only on smaller scale, was beautifully sited above Crabtree Valley in Raleigh, but development crowded upon it and threatened to consume it. Poland's heirs worked with Preservation North Carolina in 2001 to find a seller willing to re-situate the house and give it the love it deserved.

Don DeFeo did just that, working with architect Ellen Cassilly to coordinate the move to a new pastoral setting in Durham County, to design modest renovations, and to design a new downstairs.

Now he is selling the house through the Modern Home Network and Preservation North Carolina. What a delight to be able to experience this special jewel box of a house.

To hear a mockingbird

2008-05-18T10:18:00.002-04:00

DURHAM - On a sweltering summer day in 2001, Vernon Tyson turned up the heat as he and his son Tim strolled through New Orleans' Garden District.
"What do you want to do?" the father asked.
The men had come to the Deep South as part of an innovative history class Tim was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The father, a United Methodist minister, often cut to the human heart of matters, so his son knew this question wasn't about where they should eat.
"At first I thought it was strange," Tim Tyson recalled. A 42-year-old father of two, professor of Afro-American Studies and author of the prizewinning biography "Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power," he was not exactly adrift. But his father rightly suspected that his son had broader aspirations.
Before he could answer, something even stranger happened. A huge mockingbird -- "twice as big as any you've ever seen" -- swooped down three feet in front of them. It started singing, loud as could be, in music Tyson could only describe as jazz. They stood there, astonished.
"That's what I want to do," Tim declared.

Peder Zane on Tim Tyson.

Ruffin Field Trip: Part II

2008-05-18T00:57:00.001-04:00

Here are two of Sally's other pictures from the Ruffin Field trip. At left is one of the slaves' houses from the historic Stagville, a plantation owned by the Beehan and Cameron families. About 900 enslaved people lived on the plantation around 1860. And below is the front of one of the houses. As I recall, there were four compartments--two on the entry floor and two on the second floor. Pretty sparse accommodations---no surprise there. And I think it's great that these structures have been preserved; they help convey a sense of what life was like. One of the things that surprised me (though it obviously shouldn't have) was how the houses are lined up in a row. It seemed very much like the industrial-era villages I've seen up north.

A new prospect for Raleigh's monumental landscape

2008-05-17T21:25:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to the folks with the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project for securing Gov. Easley's support in their work to establish a monument to the African-American experience in the state on Union Square in Raleigh, the grounds of the Capitol. Initiated in 2002 by the Paul Green Foundation, this project has benefited from the dedicated work of many people, especially our friends Marsha Warren and Reg Hildebrand.

A couple of years ago, I said to Reg that I hoped the monument could be located within sight of the statue to Thomas Ruffin, author of the infamous State v. Mann, which handed to masters almost unlimited power to suborn their slaves through physical "correction." At that time, it was not clear where the monument would be sited.

Symbolically, there could be no better location than Union Square, home of so many of what Catherine Bishir has called the state's "landmarks of power" that by 1915, when the Ruffin statue was erected, some had already said the square was too crowded. Ruffin ended up in an alcove at the entrance to what was then the Supreme Court building, now the Court of Appeals; the spot considered ideal, on Union Square across from the court building, had just been taken by the 1914 monument to the Women of the Confederacy.

Some other monuments on the square include the 1892 Confederate Monument, unveiled by Stonewall Jackson's granddaughter precisely 34 years after North Carolina seceded from the Union; a statue of Henry Lawson Wyatt, the first Confederate soldier to die in battle; and elaborate monuments to Charles Aycock, the "education governor" more recently known for his participation in the Wilmington coup of 1898, and Zebulon Vance, North Carolina's governor during the Civil War and again after the war as federal troops left the state. These monuments were all erected during the great period of the solidification of conservative Democratic power and the institutionalization of Jim Crow. As Bishir writes,

As the southern elite took control of the political process during the decades spanning the turn of the century, it also codified a view of history that fortified its position in the present and its vision of the future.

Throughout America in the decades just before and after 1900, political and cultural elites drew on the imagery of past golden ages to shape public memory in ways that supported their authority. By commissioning monumental sculpture that depicted American heroes and virtues in classical terms, and by reviving architectural themes from Colonial American, classical Roman, and Renaissance sources, cultural leaders affirmed the virtues of stability, harmony, and patriotism. The principal shapers of public memory and patrons of public sculpture and architecture in Raleigh and Wilmington, centers of political and cultural activity in the state, were members of an established elite. They were akin to aristocrats throughout the nation and they were well acquainted with national cultural trends. They also shared certain backgrounds, experiences, and values. All were Democrats, and, with a few notable exceptions, they were members of families of long-established social and economic prominence.

The Freedom Monument Project's supporters have pointed out that "except for an anonymous, wounded black soldier in the N.C. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, blacks are not represented on the State Capitol grounds." This monument proposes to correct that oversight. It holds the promise of inspiring whole new interpretations of the existing landmarks on and around Union Square--including the imposing statue of Judge Ruffin.

After a bill introduced into the Legislature in 1911 by Gen. Julian Carr of Durham County to appropriate funds for a memorial to the women of the Confederacy failed to pass, Col. Ashley Horne put $10,000 of his own money toward the design and construction of the monument.

Photo courtesy of N.C. Office of Archives and History

Thomas Ruffin's steady gaze still meets visitors to the North Carolina Court of Appeals. The statue was funded by the North Carolina Bar Association and Ruffin's family.

The Ruffin Field Trip

2008-05-17T08:28:00.000-04:00

Last fall I had the pleasure of visiting Chapel Hill for a conference on Thomas Ruffin that Sally and Eric Muller put together. They also put together a terrific field trip, which included a trip to see Ruffin's office over in Hillsborough and then some slave quarters. Sally took a bunch of great pictures, but she didn't post them. I thought you'd enjoy Ruffin's office.

Durham modern home tour tomorrow!

2008-05-16T10:34:00.003-04:00

There are a few tickets remaining for the Modernist Mini-Tour in Durham tomorrow afternoon, organized by George Smart of Triangle Modernist Houses.

Hope to see you there!

A Going Away Present

2008-05-16T08:32:00.002-04:00

On Monday the folks at the University of Alabama Law School were kind enough to have a going away lunch for me and George Geis, who's moving to the University of Virginia. It was a real treat to be able to say bye to my colleagues of seven years; Tuscaloosa was a place where I learned a lot--about friendship and legal analysis and where I did some maturing as a scholar, too. I came to Alabama with a bunch of years of teaching experience already, so my experience here was different from the usual entry-level person. In a lot of ways that made it possible for me to focus on learning to appreciate the community and to work on projects that a new faculty member who's still learning how to teach just wouldn't have time for.

Sometimes I worry that my work isn't as interesting as it was before I arrived here. The project that's been most meaningful for me as a scholar was working on Reconstructing the Dreamland. I still think my two favorite pieces of scholarship are an article about a German lawyer who came to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century and wrote the first legal treatise in British North America and one on Harriet Beecher Stowe's critique of legal thought in her obscure but revealing novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. All three of those were completed before I arrived here. It's sort of sobering to think that my best work (or at least favorite work) may be behind me. Even my current project, University, Court, and Slave, about which I am very excited, traces its origins to my dissertation--although I refined and expanded it greatly in Tuscaloosa. (You'll be hearing a bunch more about University, Court, and Slave in the near future; it's a project about which I am excited, in part because it's letting me get back to my core area of interest: intellectual history of the old South.)

So why do I like my earlier work--or why haven't I produced some more good ideas of late? Hard to say. I found working on Reparations Pro and Con (written entirely in Tuscaloosa) very rewarding but also frustrating. Quite simply, it's hard to get a grip on our nation's long history with race. And I fear that few people want to have a conversation about race. So trying to write a book that does justice to each side and takes account of the important perspectives coming from each vantage is, well, tough.

But maybe there's something about the career paths of scholars in general that accounts for this. Partly I've been taken away from writing articles in recent years by committee work for the University (always illuminating to serve on university committees--you learn a ton, even if it impedes scholarship) and partly because I've been editing book reviews over at Law and History Review, which I love. Maybe it has to do with how we learn to ask questions, too. The issue I find most interesting in legal history--how legal doctrine relates to culture--is an issue that invites even a novice scholar to ask lots of questions. So by the time I started teaching and certainly by the time I'd been teaching a bunch of years, I'd identified a lot of datasets (from cases to literary addresses to black newspapers to literature to landscape art) to examine. So that even when I'm doing "new" work, it's looking at older questions and at data that I've known about for a long time. Boy, it's a real thrill to realize that you're looking at something entirely new to the scholarly community--like the manuscript of the first legal treatise in British North America or the transcript of a trial in the aftermath of the Tulsa riot that took place nearly eighty years ago and that no one had used in decades. I've been getting that thrill again with University, Court, and Slave because I've been reading cases, treatises, and literary addresses that are often ignored.

But the project that's going to get me back to the sense of complete novelty (I hope) is still mostly in the future--it's about the idea of equality in early twentieth-century black thought. And it's tentatively called "Reading the Great Constitutional Dream Book." I've presented an early version a few times. But it's only been an outline so far; the vast majority of the work lies ahead. And therein lies the story about the wonderfully thoughtful going away present my colleagues gave me. My working title comes from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. When the elderly couple are being evicted, IM asks what are they being evicted from? They have (almost) nothing--all they had was the "great constitutional dream book." And so my project looks to what those ideas were--and then (and this is the really hard part to levitate) how those ideas relate to the civil rights revolution. Ellison first learned about those ideas of the constitutional dream while he was growing up in Oklahoma City and he wrote about that experience a couple of times--including in three essays published in the Carlton Miscellany in 1980 (Carlton College's literary magazine). Somehow (and I'm sure this cost a fortune in effort and money both) they found an autographed copy of that issue (which also contains terrific articles on Ellison by such Ellison luminaries as Robert Steptoe and John Callihan)! Opening that present at the lunch was just another example (as Ellison said) of the unexpected outdoing itself in its power to surprise! While of course I'd read those essays (several were talks given at Brown University) before, it's a real treasure to have them in their original form.

A Prison Library: Literature and Black Identity

2008-05-15T09:22:00.000-04:00

The recent news that the FBI asked for information from the internet archive is further evidence that books are both important ways of transmitting ideas and important signifiers of which ideas readers find important.

It is not just law enforcement that is interested in reading habits, however. We are hearing a great deal about the project of “the history of the Book” these days. It aims to understand the role of books as vehicles of change: how do books contribute to changes in society, how do they help to create and sustain identity.

Sometimes historians look at books, to measure a culture. What does Invisible Man say about the culture of the United States on the eve of Brown? What do Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk say about Jim Crow?

At other times, historians draw inferences about people from their libraries. This post talks about a list of about 120 books on the "black experience" that Judge Don Young ordered to be placed into the Marion, Ohio prison library back in 1972, Taylor v. Perini, 413 F.Supp. 189, 215-19 (D.C. Ohio 1976). What interests me about the list is its potential for mapping the sources of identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What, then, are the books that the judge ordered added? More below the fold.

The Harlem renaissance and its leaders are well-represented: W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk; Richard Wright’s Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children; James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) along with some other Renaissance-era literature, like Rudolph Fisher’s Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Harlem (1932) and Walls of Jericho (1928)). Situated between the renaissance and the 1960s is Invisible Man.

There is the early 1960s literature that captured the possibilities of the Civil Rights movement: Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land; Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); King’s Where Do We Go From Here, The Trumpet of Conscience, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), and Why We Can’t Wait; Alan Westin’s Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America (1964); and Howard Zinn’s SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1968). I might also put John Killen’s And then We Heard Thunder (1964), James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968); John Alfred Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) in that category–they are situated in a place between the optimism of the Civil Rights era and the later separatism. They ask, with King, what now?

Then there’s the literature that represents the transition to black power, as well as disillusionment with the Civil Rights movement or western society more generally, such as Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) and White Skin, Black Mask (1952); Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark; Benjamin Muse, American Negro Revolution: From Non-Violence to Black Power, 1963-1967 (1968); Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America (1970); Harold Cruce, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967); Louise Meriwether’s My Daddy was a Numbers Runner (1969)). Along those lines, is literature that provides a popular, sociological critique of 1960s society, like Charles Silverman, Crisis in Black and White (1963). And there’s the literature that continued in the late 1960s and early 1970s to seek an answer in more traditional or different places, like Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1967).

As you would expect, there are many on black power: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice; Autobiography of Malcom X; Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays (1966); H. Rap Brown, Die N–r Die! A Political Autobiography; Lester Julius’ Look Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gon Get Your Mama; Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Maybe I’d put Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning (1971) into this category. And I guess Cecil Brown, Lives and Loves of Mr. Jive-Ass N–r, too. Prison literature, like George L. Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, is surprisingly rare in this collection.

There are a lot of histories: DuBois’ Black Reconstruction; John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom and Reconstruction, Emancipation Proclamation, and Reconstruction; Franklin Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States (1968); Edward Cronon, Black Moses: Marcus Garvey (1960); David Levering Lewis’ King: A Critical Biography; Benjamin Quarrels’ Black Abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln and the Negroes; and The Negro in the Civil War; Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956); C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955); Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In (1966); Herbert Aptheker’s Negro Slave Revolts (1943). Along with the histories are other scholarly work that describe and analyze black culture, such as E.U. Essien-Udom’s Black Nationalism (1970); C. Eric Lincoln’s Black Muslims in America (1961); Henry A. Ploski’s Afro USA (1971); Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (1970); Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America; and Joseph R. Washington, Black Religion (1964); and other work that collects culture, such as Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slave Song (1953); Arna Wendell Bontemps, American Negro Poetry (1963).

DuBois’ Black Reconstruction reminds us that there are books on Reconstruction by and for white people and books on Reconstruction by and for black people. Talk about segregation of memory! Jim Crow separated people intellectually, as well as physically and socially.

Of course the classification scheme that I’ve imposed above says a lot about how I view the world of the 1960s and early 1970s, from the vantage of the early twenty-first century. I’m continuing to think about how to classify the books. And as the classifications grow, I find that I want to put books into several categories. It’ll be interesting to see what readers think about the classifications.

There’s a lot more to say about this; prison officials responded that they already had a lot of literature on the black experience in America in their collection. Might be worth comparing the two lists. For example, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery appears on the prison’s list. But nothing like it is to be found on the court’s list of books to be added. One other quick observation: it’s surprising what isn’t in that list. For instance, I would have expected more James Baldwin.

The special master, Vincent Nathan (who used to teach at the University of Toledo Law School), was kind enough to correspond with me about how the list of books was assembled. He remembers that it came from a group of law librarians. The list may, thus, say more about the intellectual interests of librarians than about the needs or attitudes of the plaintiff class. But even then I think it's informative of what people thought ought to be included on a list of the "black experience." Much left to talk about here.

(This post is a repeat of one over at blackprof a couple of years ago.)

Looking forward to the Visit

2008-05-14T08:52:00.006-04:00

Thanks Sally for that very, very kind introduction and for inviting me to walk into Greenespace and chat for a while. It makes me very happy and optimistic about the future to know that someone as thoughtful as Sally is an elected official. And I'm looking forward to being Sally's neighbor and colleague in a couple of weeks. It's a dream come true to be on a faculty as terrific as UNC's.

I share Sally's interest in things antebellum and in how we remember the past. And because I'm giving a talk on landscape art and property law on Thursday I thought that I'd talk some about that now, because I'm still rearranging my note cards and trying how best to present this material.

The talk, "Property and Progress" (cute play on Henry George, eh?) is on the relationship between landscape art and property law in the years leading into Civil War at one of my favorite--and one of our country's finest--art museums, the Westervelt Warner Museum. The talk centers around my favorite work of American art, Asher B. Durand's Progress (1853), which just so happens to be owned by the museum. This will be a huge treat for me, to have the chance to talk about that most magical of paintings at its home. And, in fact, this talk is part of welcoming it home from travels to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and then out to San Diego for a major exhibit on Durand.

I join two themes here--first, the centrality of property and particularly the hand of humans on the land, in antebellum landscape art; second, the ways that antebellum property law reflected and amplified those values. The correlation between them is not perfect. A substantial part of landscape art reveals concern over increasing human intrusions on nature. For instance, Thomas Cole's landscapes frequently disclose an ambivalence about the market. What Cole and a lot of other people celebrate--including Frederick Church's Above the Clouds at Sunrise--is nature freed from humans.

The romantics of the antebellum era worried that someone tried to own the landscape. So when Natural Bridge in western Virginia was offered for sale, John Thompson protested it in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. Thomas Jefferson thought that the Natural Bridge, which he had once owned, should be treated as a public trust. (Frederick Church's image of the Natural Bridge, which is owned by the University of Virginia, is at right).

Landscape painters also captured farms and parcels of land, such as Thomas Cole's Ox Bow in the Connecticut River (right). It shows the landscape around Mount Holyoke. Look from left to right and see the increasing civilization. On the left is wild nature, twisted trees; over towards the right are fields, orchards, roads. Ox Bow was completed in 1836, the same year that Emerson completed Nature. You may recall that Emerson said of landscape that:

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Thomas Cole painted a number of such scenes. Sometimes I've used Cole's 1847 "Home in the Woods," which is in the Reynolda House Museum.

The idea here is to show the ways that humans put their imprint on nature--and how artists celebrated that imprint. George Inness' Lackawanna Valley (below) is a classic example. Look at the machine going through the the fields of cut-stumps; the railroad roundhouse in the background; the smoke stack even further off; what a strange juxaposition (it seems at first) of humans and nature. While it seems strange at first, my point is that landscape art is part of the celebration of human's use of land. The boy sitting in the foreground reminds one of Thoreau who talks in Walden of setting his watch to the railroad whistle. Where the image of Walden is of a secluded place, that solitude was often disturbed by the train whistle and then the sounds of the engine.

There’re some neat connections here between property law’s reverence for private property (and its preference for use of land) and the kind of art that Americans produced. It's fun cultural history, I think. And every now and then there are some unexpected connections between judges and landscape art. For instance, in a lecture in 1844 at Dartmouth, United States Supreme Court Justice Levi Woodbury referred to Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire to illustrate how nations evolved–“starting first in the rudeness of nature; then maturing to high refinement and grandeur-till, amid the ravages of luxury, time and war, sinking into utter desolation.” The series of five paintings depict the same landscape (look for the mountain in the background), as the country goes from a state of nature, to civilization, consummation, destruction, and then desolation. Sort of sobering, but in keeping with many nineteenth-century Americans’ belief in the cycle of nations.

Others, including Justice Woodbury, saw an unbroken chain of upward progress, often facilitated by the increasing respect for private property. And so there's an odd contrast between Cole, who was ambivalent about humans' imposition on nature and Woodbury and a lot of other jurists, who were enamored of the market. And you know what Woodbury's talk is called? How could it be anything other than "Progress"?!

Yup, colleges in the antebellum era were deeply interested in progress-- technological, economic, and moral (though what that meant was unclear). And so it should not surprise anyone that Jasper Cropsey painted the University of Michigan in 1855 (right). It has everything--the school buildings and church (at right), the fields, the roads, a horse drawn wagon, domesticated animals. The college in the garden, to paraphrase Leo Marx' brilliant book The Machine in the Garden. And another important source for this talk is Angela Miller's fantastic book The Empire of the Eye.

What, then, of the centerpiece of the talk: Durand's Progress? It’s a great canvass for seeing all sorts of images of what "progress" meant-–the shift from the native Americans over on the left (the state of nature), then moving across the canvass to the right, the telegraph wires, the steam boats, the canal, the peddler, the boy bringing the cattle to market, the church, the railroad roundhouse....

The talk is particularly meaningful for me, too, because it's the last lecture I'm giving in Tuscaloosa. So it'll be fun, but sad, too, because I'll be saying goodbye to a painting I love and a lot of friends, too.

Alfred Brophy

You can call him Al, and call yourself lucky.

2008-05-13T21:11:00.008-04:00

It's a pleasure to lend some Greene space to Al Brophy, professor of law at the University of Alabama, soon to be of the University of North Carolina. Can't wait to welcome him and Barb in person as they settle in to their new Southern Village home. Meanwhile, he's agreed to sit a spell here and test out a few ideas.

I first became aware of the prodigious Alfred L. Brophy's work seven or eight years ago when I started seriously researching the life and career of Judge Thomas Ruffin. Already by then, he had a long list of law review articles out there, a J.D. with a Ph.D. in history. He seemed larger than life! How refreshing to find out, years later, when we had him up here for our symposium on Ruffin and State v. Mann, that he isn't very tall. Al is quite down to earth, smart and funny and full of interesting ideas.

Please join me in welcoming Al to GreeneSpace and to Chapel Hill.

Magical mystery tour

2008-05-13T19:15:00.014-04:00

We went to the mountains this weekend. I knew we were going to the mountains, presumably the North Carolina mountains, but more than that, I did not know. It was an anniversary and Mother's Day weekend surprise. (When you get married in Chapel Hill on Mother's Day and graduation weekend, you are setting yourself up for festive anniversaries.)

We went so far out I-40 that I thought we might end up in Asheville, but instead we hung a right and climbed up N.C. 226A to Little Switzerland. Which was magical. Dark and rainy when we got to the Little Switzerland Inn, but the next day was perfect. Started out with good coffee in Spruce Pine at DT's Blue Ridge Java. On to Emerald Village to pan for gemstones and a tour of the historic Bon Ami mine. (The Bon Ami Company mined here for feldspar from 1924 to 1959.) A late lunch at the Little Switzerland Cafe. Then a lovely hike on the Blue Ridge on the Crabtree Meadows trail. After that, some of us were up for shuffleboard. Dinner in Spruce Pine at Downtown Danny's. What a lovely day.

Waves of mayapple, punctuated by trillium. The mayapple here is as tall as it gets, about 18 inches. I'd never seen it more than half that tall.

Crabtree falls.

Shuffleboard, Little Switzerland Inn.

Sunday, a drive home in the rain, capped by another late lunch at the Fiesta Grill.

New Orange County homelessness plan web site

2008-05-02T09:33:00.003-04:00

Carson Dean, our new coordinator for Orange County's Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, has hit the ground running. I got a chance to see him in action on Wednesday afternoon, when he met with two rising UNC seniors who will be planning their senior class project, which they want to focus on homelessness. Earlier on Wednesday he had met with students from Hunger and Homelessness Outreach Project (HOPE) of the Campus Y together with other student groups interested in working on homelessness issues.

To the rising seniors, he made a couple of suggestions including one that would give support to homeless people as they enter the work force for perhaps the first time in many years, or ever. Increasing employment is one of the key goals of the plan, and Carson has been holding meetings already with key players to talk about that.

And meanwhile, he has dramatically improved the web site for the plan, upfitting it with lots of useful and current information.

Carson's official title is "coordinator" of our 10-year plan--which is exactly right. Within Orange County already there are lots of resources for addressing the needs of the homeless and those most at risk. The success of the plan depends on putting those resources to the most efficient use--coordinating these multiple efforts--as much as it does on getting new resources in place. Looks like he's off to a great start.

Check out the web pages and see how you can get involved.

Attacking the canvas

2008-04-29T20:42:00.004-04:00

Lynn Boggess is a great painter and a pretty good carpenter too. Blogging about our visit to his opening at Tyndall Galleries on Saturday night, Paul talks about his use of the trowel as his instrument of choice, as well as his amazing homemade easel (one of several). Folded up, it looks like a shallow wooden crate. With a few turns of a power screw in reverse, it transforms into a three-legged construction capable of accommodating a canvas in rugged terrains.

The paint on Boggess' works is so thick it takes about ten years to dry out fully, he speculates.

You don't have to know all that to appreciate his art, but it really does make you appreciate the work that goes into it.

When is organic worth the premium?

2008-04-22T11:51:00.004-04:00

With prices of organic foods high and higher, it's hard to know when they are worth the money. Pesticides are toxic, but does that mean that all foods treated with pesticides are equally bad?

Here's a chart that sorts it out. Doesn't it seem that strawberries with all their squishy little pores would be the worst? They're not.

Roman holiday

2008-04-17T21:53:00.003-04:00

By Lisa Scheer, who has been on a roll lately. (That would have been a pun, pre-digital.)

Foundational study

2008-04-16T07:25:00.003-04:00

Blue Gal has a revealing comparative analysis of the foundations managed by Theresa Heinz Kerry and Cindy McCain.

Life against the overgrown

2008-04-14T09:35:00.011-04:00

Public Art 360, the regional/national symposium that Janet Kagan & co. successfully pulled off this weekend in Chapel Hill, looks to have been a great success! Wish I could have attended more than just the one session on landscape architecture--but that one was pretty amazing.

Walter Hood, who grew up in Charlotte, is an artist, an architect, and a landscape architect; he's been called "one of the nation's rising stars of landscape architecture." His work is worthy of all those titles, and his mission is to show that the lines of separation are artificial. Given the character of some of his "interventions," I'd say he's a bit of a social worker and an activist as well. According to Metropolis magazine (July 2005),

At 46, Hood is now one of landscape architecture's leading public intellectuals: former chair of the department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Berkeley, Pentagon memorial competition juror, and constant lecturer. As an African American in a profession with seemingly none and an urbanist in a discipline just barely breaking free of the pastoral, he's something of a phenomenon. His faculty position has given Hood the ability to pick and choose projects, a luxury he has exercised carefully and often polemically, working nearly exclusively in the public realm, and often in the inner city.

I was particularly taken by his work in the Phillips community near Charleston, South Carolina, where he helped the residents defeat a proposal to widen a road. The project would have cut the community in two. This achievement was won through the concept of "the overgrown." Imagine a well-manicured suburban back yard at the edge of an undeveloped tract: you are peering across civilization into the overgrown. The overgrown can be used as shield or sword. You can clear your landscape to enjoy using it and perhaps to enjoy the proximity to your neighbor; or, say, you aren't that friendly with your neighbor: you might "let the overgrown take care of it."

Through an aggressive use of the concept of the overgrown--including actual use of plant material to expand the vegetation in key corridors--Hood helped the community persuade the relevant officials that the widening of the road would be an assault upon the community.

In some back yards, the line between civilization and the overgrown is under constant negotiation.

The very long civil rights movement

2008-04-13T18:46:00.012-04:00

Ken Zogry already had a fine career established in public history by 1998: he had completed two books, both of which would end up winning awards, The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1850 (The Bennington Museum: 1995), and The University’s Living Room: A History of the Carolina Inn (UNC: 1999). Then, something happened that changed his life. He was asked to take a look at an endangered house in downtown Raleigh, a house built in 1901 by Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope. Dr. Pope, a graduate of the medical school at Shaw University, was the first licensed African American doctor in North Carolina. His daughters lived in the house until into the 1990s.

In 1998, Zogry prepared a National Register nomination for the house, which by then was surrounded by parking lots. He ended up involved in a 10-year struggle to save the house and to turn it into the first house museum of an African American family in North Carolina. It's not yet open to the public, but there are great plans, and Zogry is the executive director of the Pope House Museum Foundation.

About 1,800 of the documents Zogry found in the house at the outset are now in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. What especially piqued his interest was a 1906 voter registration card issued to Dr. Pope. "Everything I had learned said this should not exist," he said as he began his talk on Saturday morning at a conference on New Perspectives in African American History and Culture. The discovery launched him on an investigation into a fascinating and little-known story about black male political resistance to white supremacy in the first two decades of the twentieth century--in Raleigh. The result is his UNC dissertation, which he has just recently defended.

What Zogry has discovered is that Dr. Pope's action in registering to vote was part of a concerted voter registration effort that went on around 1906; then it stopped, to pick up again in 1916. Many questions remain unanswered, including why the 10-year hiatus, but it is clear that there was a strong movement among African Americans to participate in politics even as Jim Crow laws were tightening and the conservative Democrats were shoring up their power after retaking the government in 1898.

In 1919, Dr. Pope actually ran for mayor of Raleigh. He was joined on the ballot by African American candidates for commissioner of safety and commissioner of public works. With no hope of a chance, these men were making a statement: "the strongest possible public action that black leaders could take against disenfranchisement," according to Zogry.

The election was lost, but all was not lost. A student named Ella Baker was attending Shaw in 1918. According to Zogry, the election of 1919 was "a formative experience" for her. After graduation she moved to Harlem and began her life's work--which included becoming "a guiding force" behind both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In fact, said Zogry, it was no accident that SNCC was formed at Shaw: Baker could have taken it to any major black school, but Shaw provided "a strong connection to history."

Commenting on Zogry's paper, Fitz Brundgage called Dr. Pope's mayoral election campaign significant because of its threat to the "appearance of hegemony." It was significant "because it underscores the persistence of a commitment to black political action that extends far back," back before the 1950s, back before the 1930s (which is sometimes what we think of as the outer edge of the civil rights movement), back to within the very height of the Jim Crow period. And Brundage would even take it farther back. Rather than read Dr. Pope's story as a predecessor to what was to come later in the twentieth century, he "would read it backward and talk about a continuous black struggle for equality, with varying tactics, but a continuity of struggle," one that has never let up: These various episodes of civil rights activities should not be seen as separate events that just happened, but rather as a long steady march, by actors conscious of their own history from one generation to the next.

Denis Cosgrove

2008-04-11T07:55:00.002-04:00

My friend David Lowenthal has written a beautiful obituary in The Independent of London about a friend of his, Denis Cosgrove, who died too young, at 57. It surely would have been a pleasure to have known Professor Cosgrove.

Prizing geography's traditional mélange of nature and culture, Cosgrove had little affinity with either the abstract positivism of spatial science or the radical activism of post-colonial social critique. Happy in 16th-century Italy, he recalled that at home and at his Jesuit school, Rome had always been more important than London. Like Renaissance humanists, he saw the fulfilled life as a balance between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa; for himself he chose contemplation, self-reflection, thoughtful critical converse. His vocation was less about changing the world than changing oneself. Whereas policy-driven social science was blind to the liberating and consoling power of beauty, dismissing it as veneer and distraction, Cosgrove's aesthetic concern reflected his conviction that beauty was inseparable from goodness and truth. In common with Stoics and Jesuits, he told an interviewer, he valued education as "something that feeds the soul and the mind and the body together, posing questions like 'Who are we in relation to the world? How should we live our lives in a way that is fulfilling and morally proper?' "
In that quest, he was eminently successful. His warmth, humour, kindness, delight in children, theirs in him, and intellectual challenge, charmed and dazzled all who knew him.

Bill Ferris-fest, and much more this weekend

2008-04-10T17:37:00.012-04:00

There's too much going on in Chapel Hill this week for one person to possibly take in. Last night, Bill Ferris presented some of his rare and wonderful documentary films of Mississippi blues artists that he started making in the late 1960s. Today, this Renaissance southern scholar was on The State of Things on another subject: the 100th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wright, which is being celebrated at UNC this weekend in a big way. That conference begins on Saturday night with a staged reading of Paul Green's dramatic adaptation of Native Son. It culminates Sunday night in an event in Memorial Hall featuring Wright's daughter Julia Wright.

Meanwhile on Friday and Saturday, you could go to the conference on New Perspectives in African American History and Culture, sponsored by UNC's African American History Working Group.

Also on Friday and Saturday, you could experience Public Art 360: Symposium from Seven Perspectives. Kudos to Janet Kagan for working so hard to bring this conference together--it will gather public art professionals and interested folks from across the Southeast.

On Saturday and Sunday, you could delight yourself on the Chapel Hill Spring Garden Tour, visiting gardens in the Oaks and Meadowmont, including the gardens of the historic DuBose home.

On Sunday and Monday, you could go Beyond the Sunbelt: Southern Economic Development in a Global Context.

Don't know how many of these riches I can absorb. I'll start tomorrow with a summit on affordable housing in Chatham County, where I'm a panelist. Good to see they are thinking in this direction.

Good question: Why don't we celebrate April 9?

2008-04-09T12:10:00.012-04:00

On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered. The nightmare of the civil war was officially ended; the Union would be one again. Why, then, asks Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory, is this day not celebrated?

Kevin is being cagey here. As he knows better than most, whole books have been written to explain that after the war, what happened was a massive "reconciliation." The Confederacy was not treated like a defeated nation: President Andrew Johnson would not honor the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves. Eventually even ex-Confederate soldiers and their widows received pensions from the United States government. Our men died, your men died, it was awful: let's get over it and get on with things--so went the rhetoric of reconciliation as cities and towns on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line ushered in Jim Crow. It's kind of as if the war didn't happen, or at least that it was all a big mistake. President Wilson spoke at the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg--where Union and Confederate veterans gallantly shook hands--without once mentioning emancipation. So it's little wonder that this day of the great achievement of the Union victory goes unnoticed.

At a Civil War symposium on the UNC campus a couple of weeks ago, Gary Gallagher gave an interesting interpretation of the various ways in which the war was conceived and remembered. Talking from his new book, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (UNC Press), he outlined four dominant narrative traditions that have shaped our understanding of the war.

Gallagher argues that popular understandings of the war have been shaped by four traditions that arose in the nineteenth century and continue to the present: the Lost Cause, in which Confederates are seen as having waged an admirable struggle against hopeless odds; the Union Cause, which frames the war as an effort to maintain a viable republic in the face of secessionist actions; the Emancipation Cause, in which the war is viewed as a struggle to liberate 4 million slaves and eliminate a cancerous influence on American society; and the Reconciliation Cause, which represents attempts by northern and southern whites to extol "American" virtues and mute the role of African Americans.

A celebration of Grant's victory over Lee on April 9, 1865 would fit within the "Union Cause" narrative. And yet, as Gallagher persuasively argues at least as to the way the Civil War has been presented in movies since the movie "Glory" in 1989, the "Union Cause" narrative in our own time is supremely unpopular. In movie after movie--fourteen or so that he discussed--Union soldiers are depicted as ugly, violent, dishonest characters. There is no celebration of the United States as a great nation worthy of victory and respect. Yet as Gallagher further detailed, the goal of preserving the Union for the sake of its own preservation was a dominant narrative just before and during the Civil War itself. How would it look to European countries if this fragile experiment in democracy could not survive even 100 years?

What happened to the positive narrative of saving the Union for its own sake--the cause that Lincoln, among so many others, so fervently believed in? Even slaveholding southerners, at least those of a certain class, were reluctant to let the idea of one nation go for the sake of the rebel cause. Said North Carolina Judge Thomas Ruffin at a peace conference held in Washington in 1861, "I was born before the Constitution was adopted. May God grant that I not outlive it."

The more powerful narrative of reconciliation overcame it, in part; the narrative of the Lost Cause held on for a long time and survives in some quarters; the narrative of emancipation has reemerged since the civil rights movement, coming to fruition in movies like "Glory." But even when emancipation is celebrated, the Union soldiers come off as complete jerks. Why is that?

Gallagher's theory is that Hollywood is speaking to our time, as it always does speak to its own time, always in the interest of box office returns. And that in our time, whether you are on the left or the right, the federal government is not the good guy.

Modern Durham

2008-04-09T08:11:00.004-04:00

George Smart, creator and curator of the fabulous web site Triangle Modern Houses, has organized a tour of three great modern houses in Durham. It'll take place on Saturday, May 17. The architects of each will be on hand to talk about their work. Two of them are for sale!

Get your tickets soon, because there's a limited number and George expects that they'll go quickly. Yes I definitely plan to be there.

MLK anniversary resources

2008-04-04T22:28:00.005-04:00

Legal History Blog has a nice roundup of remembrances on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, including a link to the remarkable speech by Robert Kennedy Jr.

Law and Humanities Blog takes the opportunity to compile a list of movies featuring minority characters and civil rights themes.

North Carolina Miscellany documents a peaceful march in Burlington, North Carolina on April 8, 1968.

Events in Raleigh were less than peaceful.

Combating sex trafficking: UNC conference

2008-04-03T21:16:00.009-04:00

Today I've been in another world. I've been to central southern Nigeria, a region so poor, where the future is so bleak, that families send their daughters into sexual slavery. Many of them end up in Italy, where they are sold to madams, Nigerian women who too have done their time in enforced prostitution. In elaborate juju ceremonies they are sworn never to reveal the identities of their traffickers: "If they betray this, they and their family are going to suffer some kind of unidentified horrid thing," said Esohe Aghatise, a lawyer and activist working to support these women.

Through Dorchen Liedholdt I've gotten acquainted with Sigma Huda, a Bangladeshi lawyer and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, whose work is so threatening that her government has put her in detention.

I've met Jeanette, a 13-year-old runaway at a bus station in Boston, and watched her become seduced by Billy, an "entrepreneur" who cons her into joining his "family" of working girls.

All of these stories and much more are being told at an international conference taking place at the Friday Center, sponsored by the Carolina Women's Center at UNC: "Combating Sex Trafficking: Prevention and Intervention in North Carolina and Worldwide." Tomorrow I'm on as moderator of a panel on legal advocacy.

Introducing Carson Dean

2008-04-02T21:33:00.005-04:00

Tonight at the monthly meeting of the executive team for the Partnership to End Homelessness in Orange County, we welcomed Carson Dean into the staff position of coordinator for the plan. He comes to us from Raleigh, where he has been executive director of the South Wilmington Street shelter, Wake County's largest emergency and transitional shelter for homeless men. He has a wealth of experience relevant to the work of our ten-year plan. He helped to create an draft Wake County's ten-year plan. He was planning committee co-chair of Wake County's 2007 Project Homeless Connect.

During his time at South Wilmington Street he implemented a housing first program. Additionally, he secured a grant from Triangle United Way to start a program to find employment for chronically homeless men.

Earlier, Dean was a program director at Haven House Services, a nonprofit in Wake County that serves young people: runaways, homeless and trouble youth. There he implemented an innovative street outreach program.

We are very fortunate to have him in the position of coordinating our efforts! I look forward to working with him.

Help Hamburger Helper help Chapel Hill

2008-03-25T21:37:00.003-04:00

There's less than a week to go in the Chapel Hill Dowtown Partnership's campaign to win a $12,000 grant from Hamburger Helper to fund the restoration of Michael Brown's murals in downtown Chapel Hill.

Lend your voice to the cause!

Poverty Awareness Week at UNC

2008-03-25T18:30:00.004-04:00

Lots of good programming going on this week on campus during Poverty Awareness Week sponsored by the Campus Y. Sorry I'll have to miss tonight's screening of "Change Comes Knocking: The Story of the NC Fund," a progressive anti-poverty initiative that Gov. Terry Sanford started in 1963.

The Fund sought to align federal, state and local government, foundations and the state's civic and business leadership to break the entangled bonds of racism and poverty in North Carolina.
This trailblazing program used integrated teams of college students to assist and strengthen poor communities throughout the state. The NC Fund, which grew to embrace the radical notion that poor people should be empowered to act on their own behalf, was both controversial and transformative, leaving a legacy that continues today.

Produced by Durham documentary filmmaker Steve Channing.

Other events to be aware of.

Eyes on public-sector blogging

2008-03-20T08:33:00.005-04:00

Municipalist is a blog that focuses on blogging by public officials--legislators, school board members, town council members and such. This week it profiled GreeneSpace. My thanks to Craig Colgan for the kind attention.

Oh, there's lots of other interesting stuff on Municipalist too. Check it out.

The Speech

2008-03-19T08:41:00.006-04:00

Barack Obama's speech yesterday was a remarkable performance. Some politicians would have "denounced" the inflamatory words of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright and got on with other things as quickly as possible. That would have been hard for Obama, given his longstanding ties to this man. But he managed to reject the explicit remarks Rev. Wright made, while putting them in the context of the rhetoric of black liberation theology--not denying the legitimacy of the minister's argument, but marking his own distance from what he called the "static" view of race in America that the minister's remarks reflected:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Obama distinguishes his own generation from the generation in which Rev. Wright grew up, and in the process works to weave together the complicated stories of being black and white in America:

They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

As the New York Times editorial this morning states, Obama "put Mr. Wright, his beliefs and the reaction to them into the larger context of race relations with an honestly seldom heard in public life."

In a culture of sound bites there's a real danger that this speech will not undo the damage that has been done to Obama's campaign, that the inflammatory words of the minister will be all it takes to drive some voters away. But that would be a shame. In this speech, Obama faced perhaps the toughest challenge yet to his campaign. As the Times said, "It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better."

Delivered in the shadow of Independence Hall, it was a speech for the ages. Read (or watch) the whole thing.

UPDATE: Jonathan Tilove's insightful coverage of the speech:

Barack Obama's speech on race was entitled "A More Perfect Union.'' But it might have been called "Waking From the Dream.''

With it, Obama dashed the fancy that 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., America, in an act of timely wish-fulfillment, might elect a black man president while skipping lightly over questions of race.

But more than that, Obama was both true to himself — ending a self-imposed silence on matters central to who he is — and true to the deeper meaning of King.

Come the April 4 anniversary of King's death, it will now be far harder to be satisfied with platitudes. Very much in the spirit of King's 1963 "I Have a Dream'' speech — and unlike the 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that made the Illinois senator's reputation — Obama's words this week were less an idealized paean to America's aspirations and more a gritty accounting of its real history, its present quagmire, and the long slog ahead.

. . . more.

A real great story

2008-03-14T10:50:00.006-04:00

From Meg McGurk of the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership. At yesterday's meeting of the work group for the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness, she had a great story to tell about the "Real Change from Spare Change" program. A man went into The Bookshop on West Franklin Street and asked if they were participating in the program. Yes, they are: he was shown the collection can on the counter. He plopped down a large container of change. He said he'd been picking up loose change on Franklin Street for years, knowing that there ought to be some good use for it, and now he was grateful to have the chance to give it back. It came to $27 (and change).

We remember Eve

2008-03-10T23:10:00.005-04:00

Mayor Kevin Foy's statement tonight at the beginning of our Town Council meeting:

We begin this evening's meeting by acknowledging the grief and pain that we are suffering at the loss of our colleague and friend, Eve Carson.

Eve was the president of Carolina's student body, which is how many of us came to know her. But the more we got to know her, the more we understood what an extraordinary person she was, and how broadly and deeply she touched the lives of people in Chapel Hill and beyond.

Eve's death represents for us a terrible, incomprehensible loss. She was a person who embodied what is beautiful in this world, and it was a joy to know her. Her having been taken from us rips from us our greatest hopes and our greatest dreams and our greatest aspirations for what the world might become someday.

We are diminished by the loss of Eve, and we know it.

We mourn this day, but we will carry on. We will soldier on. We have Eve's memory and spirit to help us carry on. But we will always remember Eve; we will always cherish Eve; and Eve will always be with us in Chapel Hill, to challenge us with her beauty and grace, her intelligence and charm, her compassion and idealism.

Eve's spirit will challenge us to be a place where youth can flourish and hope can endure and evil will be forever banished. And although we cannot replace Eve, we do know that she was a person who mattered in this world by the work she did, and she was destined to do great things. Rather than have those things remain undone, each of us can look to pick up a piece of the work that Eve did, and to do the work she would have done, the way she would have done it.

My colleagues on the council and I have been a part of the sorrow of our community, and we have reached out to Eve's family and to our colleagues on campus and beyond. We have extended to Chancellor Moeser our deepest sympathy to the campus community, and we have sought to comfort everyone in our town. Each of us has suffered, individually and collectively, a harm that is deep and piercing.

Yesterday, my wife Nancy and I attended Eve's memorial service at her hometown in Athens, Georgia. We had the opportunity to meet Eve's mother, Teresa, her father, Bob, and her brother, Andrew. We told them how much Chapel Hill valued Eve and how heartsick all of us are.

Eve's family was very gracious, and even under the burden of such surpassing grief thanked us, and all of you for your thoughts and your support.

Athens and Chapel Hill are now forever bound. We are bound by the thread of the life of a lovely young woman who touched us as she graced this world.

Please join me in a moment of silence to remember Eve; but I hope that this moment will resonate around the world, and that our moment will awaken this world with our cry of grief at this senseless death.

I would also like to call attention this evening to the assistance that is available to everyone in our community who is coping with this tragedy and who needs assistance. Our town has a crisis unit, housed in our police department, that is ready to help, and I ask you please to call them to seek that help if you need it. Contact information is available on the town website or by calling Town Hall.

In addition, the university has counseling available and people ready to assist members of the campus community during this difficult time.

A lesson from Eve: Don't curb your enthusiasm

2008-03-09T16:53:00.005-04:00

Long ago I trained myself out of using exclamation points--no place for them in polished writing, I learned and dutifully practiced: words themselves are powerful enough, if you know how to use them. Even today I find myself editing exclamation points out of my email messages.

Not Eve Carson. Here's a message I had from her on Feb. 11 (at around 3 a.m.), in response to my request to learn more about a survey the student government association had done (under Chris Belhorn's leadership) on student attitudes toward panhandling:

Dear Sally,

I am so sorry that I haven't gotten back to you before now! Somehow, I managed to miss this email and it remained unopened in my mailbox until right now! So, the date for the Feb 6 meeting with the Downtown Partnership has come and gone and again, I apologize for not seeing this before-- I so wish I had read this before... I can assure you though, that we would love to participate in these meetings in the future! I know a number of students who I think would serve as excellent representatives for this committee.

I hope you are doing well and I really thank you for reaching out to me. It was so kind of you to write in the first place! Would you mind if I passed this message along to Chris Belhorn? I think it is such a compliment to him (and he is totally deserving of all praise!) that you would be interested in having a student serve in this group!

Thank you Sally. I'll look forward to talking with you again soon!
Eve

For more of her infectious spirit, see this moving tribute by her friend Ben Lundin. As for me, in Eve's honor and memory I'm renewing my own pledge to serving others--with new and uncensored enthusiasm.

International Women's Day

2008-03-08T19:48:00.005-05:00

Today is International Women's Day. I spent part of it speaking to the Orange County chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma, an honor society of women educators. Also on the agenda was the presentation of scholarships to one young woman from each of the senior classes of the four Orange County high schools who planned to major in education. (This year, there was no candidate from East Chapel Hill.) I appreciate Betty Eidenier for asking me and Kathy Harris for introducing me.

They wanted to hear my "stories" about being on the Town Council, but I started earlier than that. I told them how I'd written my dissertation on a national fellowship from the American Association of University Women. And about how eventually I met one of the women who was on the award committee. She told me that one of the things that impressed her the most about my application was the fact that I had a brand new baby. This was kind of disappointing: I had hoped she was going to say it was strength of my ideas about Virginia Woolf! But it was true that juggling a dissertation and a newborn child was quite a challenge, and the time off from teaching that the fellowship allowed made my life much easier.

Women helping women: may it ever be so.

Real dollars for real change

2008-03-08T09:26:00.003-05:00

Many thanks to the Daily Tar Heel for its generous $10,000 contributionto the "Real Change from Spare Change" program.

Unfathomable

2008-03-07T15:53:00.006-05:00

Two communities are shaken to the core by the senseless murder of Eve Carson. Here's what they're saying in her home town of Athens, Ga.

Eve Carson was brilliant, without arrogance.

She was beautiful, without vanity.

She was generous, without self-importance.

She was, as her Clarke Central High School teachers remembered her Thursday, the woman you hope your daughter will become.

"This was a girl who was going to cure cancer, who was going to make Academy Award-winning movies, who was ... going to do something big," said school counselor Sam Hicks.

My connections with Eve were few but meaningful. I was looking forward to seeing her at the next meeting of our Downtown Partnership outreach committee. My brief impressions of her were like everybody else's: this was someone who loved and embraced life, had enormous amounts of energy and talent to give, and was already at work to be the change she wanted to see in the world. There is no making sense of it.

Sustain this.

2008-03-05T23:05:00.004-05:00

Smack in the middle of Abu Dhabi, a city that ranks among the world's largest producers of oil, arises Masdar City, planned as the world's first zero-emissions city.

The video is amazing. But there's something wrong with this picture. Something's missing: like reality. It's too reminiscent of future cities we've seen before.

Shutterbug gymnastics

2008-03-01T17:55:00.001-05:00

I really admire Michael Czeiszperger's photography--but even by the standards he sets, this one bowled me over. I invited him to write this guest post about taking this stunning picture. Thanks, Michael!

This shot is of senior Sarrie Ruben's floor routine from the 2/10/2008 UNC women's gymnastics home meet. She blew her knee out warming up for the last home game of the season shortly afterward, and so there are no more chances of getting a picture of her in action the rest of the season. If you've never been to a college-level gymnastics meet before, I highly recommend it. What they do is actually more difficult than what you see at the olympics, and is absolutely astonishing to watch in person.

Lots of people bring cameras to indoor sporting events, and gymnastics has got to be one of the most difficult to capture. First, indoor arenas in general are too dark for point and shoot consumer cameras. Even if they did allow flash, which they prohibit so as to not distract the competitors, the flash wouldn't reach from the stands to the floor anyway.

Even if that hurdle was overcome, the metering on even the most expensive cameras is relatively dumb, and has to be adjusted constantly for the conditions. Its not that the technology doesn't exist, but rather there's no way for technology to decide what is a correct exposure to realize a particular photographer's vision. The only way to get a picture like this with the right exposure is to use manual mode, and since the routine is so fast, the best professional cameras have physical controls so the exposure can be quickly adjusted on the fly.

Next comes the lenses, which is the most important part of the camera. Many people pick a digital camera based on the zoom range, 5x zoom, 10x zoom, etc. What they don't realize is the longer the zoom range the worse the image quality in general, and the worse the low light performance. This particular picture was taken with a "feet zoom" lens specifically designed for low light, which means to zoom in you move closer, and to zoom out, you move back. I prefer these types of lenses because people with zooms tend to just stand in one spot and fiddle with the zoom instead of moving around to get the best angle on a subject.

Civil rights and the body

2008-02-29T10:42:00.002-05:00

Where I am today and tomorrow. Should be fascinating.

His dance card was full.

2008-02-28T22:21:00.002-05:00

Entertaining ephemera from the North Carolina Collection.

Who was Audubon's mother?

2008-02-26T19:43:00.004-05:00

Not a bird-brain question. From a fascinating article about the annual bird count, the Carolina parakeet, and more:

On the very first page of his memoir, Audubon describes the death of a parrot as if it were a murder. It is an extraordinarily strange but meaningful story. According to Audubon, his mother, a highborn Louisiana lady living in St. Domingue, kept a number of parrots as well as several pet monkeys. One morning, one of the parrots asked for breakfast, and a monkey, offended for some reason, stood up and killed the bird. Little Audubon was so traumatized by this primal scene that he recalled it, he writes, thousands of times, noting that it was responsible for his lifelong love of birds.

One of the things that makes the story disturbing is that Audubon was creating a sort of racial parable with his tale -- his mother, he later tells the reader, was killed by blacks in the slave revolt that turned St. Domingue into Haiti; his story, therefore, feels like a weird racial parable in which his mother is somehow the delicate bird and the black slaves are the killer primates. But Audubon was lying -- his mother wasn't killed in St. Domingue; she died in childbirth and was a chambermaid. Audubon was fabricating a story to hide his illegitimacy. Which is something I believe many of us do in relationship to nature -- hide our origins. Darwin, after all, has made monkeys of us all. Racism is merely the crudest attempt to force a single group to bear the burden of our shared animal natures.

As it turns out, nobody really knows who his mother was--or his father.

Local celebrations

2008-02-24T21:22:00.004-05:00

Morning: A lovely dedication ceremony of the new sanctuary building, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Chapel Hill.

Afternoon: Dorothy Johnson and Frances Jones, longtime activists in the Fairview community of Hillsborough, honored with the 2007 Pauli Murray Award by the Orange County Human Relations Commission. They were nominated by my own St. Matthew's Episcopal Church.

Evening: The third anniversary of Melva's Musing on Jazz, Sunday nights 7-9 on WCOM-FM.