His dance card was full.

Entertaining ephemera from the North Carolina Collection.

Who was Audubon's mother?

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.

Homelessness marathon tonight

Please tune in to WCOM-FM, 103.5, Carrboro's community radio station, tonight starting at 7 p.m. for our local version of the 11th annual Homelessness Marathon, a nationwide event this year coordinated by a Nashville station. During the 8-9 p.m. hour, I'll be on with Carrboro mayor Mark Chilton to talk about the local government response through our Ten-Year Plan and otherwise. Other guests will include Lorrie Tucker and Chris Moran of the IFC as well as two IFC clients. At 10 p.m., over to Nashville and more stories of the lives and lessons of the homeless among us.

Organized by Audrey Layden, who wrote beautifully about it in Sunday's Chapel Hill News.

We welcome your phone calls. Live streaming.

Here's a video clip from the 2004 homelessness marathon in Cleveland.

Daffy.

For five years in a row now, I've documented my earliest daffodil--always in January, with last year's in December! It's a variety called "early sensation" after all, but they were starting to come insanely early.

This year, no "early sensations" on the scene yet. The first to burst open is this heirloom variety that was in the yard when we got here. Maybe it's the drought?

"To Europe"

In London a young artist said to me, "How wonderful it must be for an American traveling in Europe the first time; you can never be a part of it, so none of the pain is yours, you will never have to endure it--yes, for you there is only the beauty."

Not understanding what he meant, I resented this; but later, after some months in France and Italy, I saw that he was right: I was not a part of Europe, I never would be. Safe, I could leave when I wanted to, and for me there was only the honeyed, hallowed air of beauty. But it was not so wonderful as the young man had imagined; it was desperate to feel that one could never be part of moments so moving, that always one would be isolated from this landscape and these people; and then gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: rather, it could be a part of me. The sudden garden, opera night, wild children snatching flowers and running up a darkening street, a wreath for the dead and nuns in noon light, music from the piazza, a Paris pianola and fireworks on La Grande Nuit, the heart-shaking surprise of mountain visions and water views (lakes like green wine in the chalice of volcanoes, the Mediterranean flickering at the bottoms of cliffs), forsaken far-off towers falling in twilight and candles igniting the jeweled corpse of St. Zeno of Verona--all a part of me, elements for the making of my own perspective.

--from "To Europe" (1948), in Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (2007)

Show and no show

Last night, Paul and I had a great time at the opening night of Deep Dish Theater's timely and snappy production of "State of the Union."

Tonight, we tried to go to the ArtsCenter to see the Hidden Voices production of "Because We're Still Here (And Moving)," but we were among those turned away from the full house. Tomorrow we'll see if they're able to put on another performance.

There is an odd connection between the two. Jeri Lynn Schulke, who plays Mary Matthews (the Katharine Hepburn figure in the movie), has starred in a Hidden Voices production. In December 2006, she played Regina Walters in "Rewind," a dramatization of the true story of Walters' evolution from a junior-high cheerleader to a second-degree murderer through her reformation and spiritual healing.

A local apology

With the recent republication of John Ehle's 1965 book The Free Men, a moving chronicle of the civil rights protests that stood "liberal" Chapel Hill on its end in 1963-64, an important, yet little known, chapter in Chapel Hill's history has come to light again. This time last year, UNC's Wilson Library manuscripts division did its own part to acknowledge these events by mounting a fine documentary exhibit and hosting a series of panel discussions. I had the privilege of introducing and moderating a discussion that included Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, and Braxton Foushee, all of whom were students who participated in the demonstrations.



It was very clear to me why Tim West, who heads the manuscripts division, asked me to moderate this session. At the heart of the protest was the refusal of my predecessors on the Chapel Hill Town Council to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. Here's some of what I said at that panel back in January 2007:

I’ve been here almost 20 years. Yet it wasn’t until the NAACP presented us with a request to rename Airport Road for Martin Luther King Jr., three years ago, that I began to get any sense of what had happened here in the early 1960s. We had to learn all over again, from folks like Dan Pollitt who is here, and Joe Straley who is no longer here, that King spoke here in 1960, in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins. In the end, we celebrated the name change on May 8, 2005, the 45th anniversary of King’s visit. But getting to that point was not an easy road.When it was the will of the Council in 2004, after three public hearings on the topic, not to vote to change the name of the road but instead to set up a citizen committee to talk about it, that’s when I learned that for some with better memories, it was déjà vu all over again. This is precisely what the Board of Aldermen (as they were then called) did in January 1964, rather than pass a local public accommodations ordinance. That was the second time they had said no to the ordinance, while Franklin Street roiled with demonstrations. Elected leaders did not lead.

The successes of the 1960-61 protests by Lincoln High students and graduates, including Braxton, at Colonial Drug and other places including the bus station and the two segregated movie houses set the stage for the demonstrations of 1963 and 1964. In this period, according to Dan Pollitt, who as a law professor was very much involved, Chapel Hill “joined the ever-increasing number of southern communities to experience an effort at racial integration by tactics variously called ‘creative disorder,’ ‘scofflaw Christianity,’ and ‘insurrection and rebellion.'”

Particularly over the long months of December 1963, January, February, March, and April 1964, university administrators “shut their eyes to the problem with a position of neutrality,” and the board of aldermen, as I’ve mentioned, ducked responsibility, while the demonstrators kept the pressure up. With the exception of the Daily Tar Heel, the local press tried its best to ignore what was right in front of them, except when they condemned it, which they did in their editorials often and with great stridency. The Chapel Hill Weekly, under Orville Campbell’s leadership, started out with some sympathy to the demonstrators but quickly joined forces with the opposing business interest. So did The News of Orange County, edited by Roland Giduz, who was also on the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen; and so did the radio station, owned by the mayor, Sandy McClamroch. Then as now, people wondered how an episode like this could have happened in the “southern part of Heaven.”

Roland Giduz, to his immense credit, has apologized. "We should have led the way," wrote the Old Codger Blogger last month.

Today, the official Martin Luther King Jr. Day, set me to thinking again about the purpose of this observance. It seems to me that it is to further the elimination of racial discrimination and bring about natural racial integration.

I harken back to the 1960s in Chapel Hill when the local Board of Aldermen debated enactment of a public accommodations ordinance. That local law would have prohibited racial discrimination in local business service. After many months of deliberation the ordinance failed. The proposal brought on a lengthy trial of conscience throughout the community. As a member of the Town Board I sided with the majority that did not support this ordinance on legal grounds.

Those legal grounds were the fact that municipal governments had no authority to pass laws except those specifically authorized for them. It all became a moot question on July 4, 1964 when the national civil rights law took effect.

Although I believe such authority might yet be illegal, I would support enactment of this local law as I look back on it today. I’d do so on practical grounds, as much as for the fact that I heartily supported then and now the elimination of racial discrimination.The population of Chapel Hill back then would have generally accepted that first public accommodations law to be enacted by a town.

I believe we (the Town Board) erred in not passing that ordinance despite its questionable legality. We (the Board majority) didn’t see the forest for the trees. That is to say, we focused on trying to persuade individual businesses to drop their racial barriers, when the bigger picture was to eliminate all discrimination.

Forty-five years later, does a change of heart matter? I think it does. The very fact of a public apology for an institutional wrong shows that the terms of the debate have shifted. In a new book on the subject, The Politics of Official Apologies, Melissa Nobles argues that, at the highest levels, apologies "help change the terms and meanings of national membership." (Thanks to Al Brophy at Legal History Blog for the tip.)

Thank you, Roland.

D. J. Spooky weekend

Congratulations to Paul for getting a UNC appearance for D.J. Spooky yesterday afternoon to tag along with Spooky's Duke date this evening. I missed yesterday, but tonight we all enjoyed the performance at Duke.

Kirk Ross captured a nice video of composer T.J. Anderson's comments Friday afternoon.

New titles in African American studies

Via Legal History Blog, many great-sounding new books in African American studies.

I'm pleased to add that my entry on Meshack Roberts is one of the thousands of biographies included in the African American National Biography.

UPDATE 2/14: Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham talk about their ambitious work in creating the African American National Biography on Talk of the Nation.

Welcome life support for Graham house

A month ago, the Town of Chapel Hill condemned the house at 115 Battle Lane, capping a long, sad, frustrating saga for the house that once belonged to UNC president Edward Kidder Graham.

Tomorrow, Preservation North Carolina and the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill will announce the following:

The goal of Preservation North Carolina and the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill is to protect the state’s diverse built heritage and its natural sites. The two organizations will hold a press conference in front of the Edward Kidder Graham house in Chapel Hill on Tuesday, February 5 to discuss the details of the house being listed for sale and their efforts to find a buyer interested in rehabilitating the house. The 100 year-old house garnered its renowned status because it was built by Edward Kidder Graham, UNC-Chapel Hill’s ninth president. During his short tenure, Graham led a campaign to expand the school to all young men across North Carolina.

Preservation Society of Chapel Hill has been working for several years to preserve the house and has recently partnered with Preservation North Carolina to market the historic property to sympathetic buyers.

Speaking at the press conference will be Cathleen Turner, regional director, Preservation NC Piedmont Office and Todd Dickinson, Dickinson Restorations, Inc., Hillsborough. Dickinson will be on hand to discuss rehabilitating the house. Despite the daunting rehab work, the groups are confident there will be a great amount of interest in preserving this property.

The landscape of property law

Over at Legal History Blog, Al Brophy has been weighing in with some interesting posts on such topics as the property law implications of the behavior of art collectors in the 19th century. The story he tells here has happened more than once. It has also happened in latter times that famous works of art--works that ought to be publicly displayed for the world to appreciate--have been bought by private collectors for their own private enjoyment.

Al likes to say he is "Al from Alabama" (School of Law), but beginning in fall 2008 he'll be the less lyrical "Al from North Carolina" as he joins the UNC Law School's faculty. AL's loss is definitely our gain.

The women behind Rosa Parks

Today's Hutchins Lecture sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South, by Danielle McGuire, a fellow this year at the Center, was a fascinating study of the decade-long movement of African American women in Montgomery, Alabama who made the 1955 boycott happen. At the heart of their anger was much more than not being able to sit where they pleased on a bus: it was sexual abuse.

It was near midnight on September 3, 1944, when the Rock Hill Holiness church, in Abbeville, Alabama ended its evening service. After a night of singing and praying, Recy Taylor and her friend started towards home. Strolling along the Abbeville-Headland Highway toward town, Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old African-American mother and sharecropper, noticed the same green sedan, packed full of gawking young white men, drive by at least three times. When the car rolled to a stop just a few feet behind the black women, seven men with knives and guns got out of the car and walked toward them. Herbert Lovett pointed a gun at Taylor’s head and ordered her into the car. Lovett’s friends piled in and they sped away into the night. Ten minutes later, the car rattled down a tractor path and stopped on a vacant patch of land. Standing beneath a grove of pecan trees, Lovett demanded Taylor get out of the car, remove her clothes, or, he threatened, “I will kill you and leave you down here in the woods.” Lovett held Taylor at gunpoint while each of the white men took turns “ravishing” her. After the gang rape, Lovett blindfolded Taylor, pushed her into the car, and dropped her off in the middle of town.
When the Montgomery branch of the Alabama NAACP heard about the brutal assault a few days later, they sent an investigator. Her name was Rosa Parks.

A Montgomery minister named Martin Luther King Jr. rose to a leadership position soon after Rosa Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955, but as McGuire persuasively reminds us, the movement belonged to the women.

Thus I have to question one sentence in the Chapel Hill narrative of the 1947 "freedom riders" story: "[Bayard] Rustin's writings directly inspired Ms. Rosa Parks, in 1955, and the Freedom Riders of 1960-61, to challenge Jim Crow segregation on buses and other souther institutions."

When the case over the Montgomery boycott came to trial in a federal courtroom, the women plaintiffs were asked pointedly whether it was Dr. King who put them up to it. Said sixteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, "No, sir. We haven't changed our ideas. It has been in me ever since I was born."

(See Frank Sikora, The Judge: The Life & Opinions of Alabama's Frank M. Johnson, Jr. (1992).)

1947 "Freedom Ride" remembered

Everyone knows about the 1961 "freedom rides," but not everybody knows that they had a precedent in 1947. In 1946, the Supreme Court held that interstate Jim Crow laws on buses and trains were unconstitutional. A group of activists led by Bayard Rustin and the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, took to the road to test the opinion. When they got to Chapel Hill, they were met with violence--a sorry bit of history for our "city on the hill."

The legendary Rev. Charlie Jones took the victims to his home (pursued by cabs filled with men who got out and threw rocks at his house) and then helped them make safe passage to Greensboro.

Three men--Bayard Rustin, James Felmut, and Igal Roodenko--served time for their offenses against the state by working on a chain gang. (The high profile of this travesty at least led to a legislative investigation of North Carolina's chain gangs and ultimately their abolition.)

At last night's Council meeting, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro branch of the NAACP, together with the Community Church (the church Rev. Jones helped to found after he was expelled from the Presbyterian Church over these issues), sought a resolution from us in support of their campaign to get a North Carolina historical marker erected to commemorate this event. We passed the resolution with dispatch--and we look forward to their success in Raleigh.

Lot 5 public art preview tomorrow

At tomorrow night's Town Council meeting we'll get a look at what public artist Mikyoung Kim is working on for the Lot 5 project with Ram Corp.

She's giving the same presentation tomorrow at 5 p.m. at the public library if you'd rather catch it there.

UPDATE: Ms. Kim's presentation was fascinating. She's on her way to creating a great, inviting, beautiful, urban public space. It's going to be great for Franklin Street. Reporter Meiling Arounnarath has a video snippet of the 3-D model.

"Durham: A Self-Portrait"

Tomorrow night at 6:30 in the Stone Center on the UNC campus: "Durham: A Self-Portrait," a documentary by Steve Channing. With civil rights attorney Julius Chambers and UNC business professor Jim Johnson. I'll hope to catch it another time.

But Paul and I did see another Steve Channing production, or one in progress, tonight: a film he is working on on Elizabeth Spencer. We were among the hosts of a benefit and great celebration of this work held this afternoon at the home of Walter and Betsy Bennett.

Window into a colorful past in Wilmington

How fun to see that my friend Catherine Bishir has posted a message on H-Material-Culture, cross-posted at H-Slavery, about a wonderful celebration of the Johnkannaus this past December at Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington.

Earlier this winter, there was a reenactment of a traditional African American festival that prevailed in Wilmington, New Bern, and some other Carolina coastal towns during the 19th century at the Christmas season, at which slaves and later freed people paraded through the streets, went to homes of the wealthy for money, and performed certain dances and songs believed to trace from African and Caribbean traditions. (As you probably know, there was a slave holiday of about a week at Christmas, followed by slave hirings about January 1; Jonkonnu, or John Canoe, was the highlight in certain communities.)

A few years ago, Tryon Palace Historic Sites and Gardens began the revival of the event in New Bern, and it has become quite popular and powerful. This winter, the Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington was the site of the first such revival event in Wilmington, NC.

The scenes of people in costume descending the steps of the big house are probably pretty authentic to that of the antebellum period, as related by accounts of the time. These pictures are pretty exciting.

Slide show.

Harriet Jacobs observed the "Johnkannaus" in Edenton:

Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus. Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction. They consist of companies of slaves from the plantations, generally of the lower class. Two athletic men, in calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows' tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box. A dozen beat on this, while other strike triangles and jawbones, to which bands of dancers keep time. For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed to go round till twelve o'clock, begging for contributions. Not a door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out, but carry the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal. These Christmas donations frequently amount to twenty or thirty dollars.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ch. 22.

Recently speaking

Christine Madrid French is an architectural historian, president of the Recent Past Preservation Network, and, as far as I can tell, the person who has single-handedly kept the bulldozers away from Richard Neutra's remarkable Cyclorama building at Gettysburg National Military Park (so far). Here, she gives an interview for the Next American City Project.

Related: Berkley Square, a neighborhood in West Las Vegas built after World War II and marketed to African Americans, has recently been noted for its historic value. "The community has expressed much interest in its past, and the Historic Preservation Commission is excited about the prospect of designating this historically rich African American neighborhood."

Starbucked

An interesting review of a new book about Starbucks (admirably written by someone who doesn't drink coffee).

Starbucks is well known for its utilization of the "third place" concept, but we get to read about the focus groups where Americans first revealed that they were willing to pay more for their coffee—even if they were just getting it to go—if they were in what felt like a "public living room." We also get clued in to the thinking behind Starbucks's unique vernacular (names like "grande Valencia latte" not only lend a patina of sophistication to a product, but also build brand loyalty); we learn that Starbucks deliberately locates stores on the driver's righthand side as she heads downtown so she won't have to make a left turn across traffic; we shake our heads at the revelation that, in 2002, Starbucks introduced the vanilla and coconut Creme Frappucino in order "to capitalize on the expected popularity of the color white."

Fifty years of Reynolds Price

On Jan. 31 through Feb. 2, Duke University will celebrate the 50-year teaching career of novelist Reynolds Price. Toni Morrison and Stanley Fish will lend their voices!

On violence

Speaking (as I recently was) of Bruce Lawrence, he and his colleague Aisha Karim appeared on "The State of Things" Tuesday to talk about their essay collection, On Violence.

This anthology brings together classic perspectives on violence, putting into productive conversation the thought of well-known theorists and activists, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Osama bin Laden, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, and Pierre Bourdieu. The volume proceeds from the editors’ contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood. They argue that violence is a process rather than a discrete product. It is intrinsic to the human condition, an inescapable fact of life that can be channeled and reckoned with but never completely suppressed. Above all, they seek to illuminate the relationship between action and knowledge about violence, and to examine how one might speak about violence without replicating or perpetuating it.