Evolution of Clocky

When the Clocky prototype was announced, in April 2005, it looked like a small furry animal. The MIT Media Lab graduate student who designed this traveling alarm clock was inspired by the kittens who nibbled her toes to wake her.

The version ready for prime time is plastic. But it looks like it'd get the job done. They say the furry one will be rolling out soon.

The lure of the local

In praise of local blogs, by Ed Cone, who gives appropriate shout-outs to Orange Politics and Blue N.C.

Death Penalty in NC: conflict of laws

Mark Kleinschmidt, head of the Fair Trial Initiative, which trains young lawyers to represent capital defendants (also my Council colleague), has the go-to blog for the amazing story unfolding within the courts and the halls of state about the North Carolina death penalty. For a capsule summary, this morning's N&O tells the story up to press time. As of this morning, the Council of State was about to meet, per Judge Stephens' order, to reconsider the protocol for executions. The N.C. Medical Board had recently announced an ethics policy saying that doctors cannot assist in an execution in any way, not even by monitoring medical devices attached to the defendant's body. To the state's argument before Judge Stephens that the equipment would be monitored by nurses and EMTs, he responded that that would constitute a change in the protocol. Citing a statute that neither side had raised, he ruled that the change in protocol had not been approved by the Council of State, as was required. (The monitoring equipment was required in response to a federal court opinion demanding more certainty in the administration of lethal drugs.) Effectively this opinion put all executions on hold, making North Carolina the eleventh state to halt lethal injections.

What did the Council of State do this morning? They affirmed a problematic protocol requiring a doctor's participation, in effect returning the issue to the courts. Mark has more:

During this morning's Council of State meeting, NC's state-wide elected officials approved on what appeared to be a 6-3 vote, a protocol for executions that requires the participation of a doctor. The Council's decision, in the words of Sec. of State Elaine Marshall just "shoves this back to the Medical Society." Two weeks ago, the NC Medical Board voted unanimously to declare it a violation of professional ethics to participate in executions.

Counsel for the Council and the Attorney General promise to take this decision back to Wake Co. Superior Ct. Judge Stephens and to work with the Medical Board.

Voting against the protocol were School Superintendent June Atkinson, Sec. of State Elaine Marshall and Insurance Commissioner Jim Long. A motion was unanimously approved -- made by Marshall and seconded by State Treasurer Richard Moore -- to refer this matter to the General Assembly for further consideration.

Marshall and Long both fought hard to kill approval. Marshall referenced the "off-label" use of the BIS monitor that was added just last year to the protocol. The BIS monitor monitors the vital signs of the death row inmate. Ostensibly to make sure the inmate is completely unconscious before the final poisons are injected. Manufacturers of the machine have protested the use of the monitor for this purpose and have made it clear in court papers that they would never have sold the machine to NC if they knew it would be used for this purpose.

Meanwhile as the N&O reports, yesterday the House Select Committee on Capital Punishment "gave up a chance to weigh in on the issue that has derailed three executions."

Nobody wants this issue.

Analogies are risky to be sure, so I wouldn't press this one farther than my intent. But in a conversation I had with Mark this morning it struck me that there are certain parallels between the death penalty and slavery. Mark pointed out that the conflict is between two arms of the state: the Council of State, which defines the protocol for executions, and the Board of Medical Examiners, whose members are appointed by the governor, which has its own standard of ethics. One is carrying out the will of the people, through the legislature, to put certain criminal defendants to death. The other is working out in concrete terms a body of ethical practices to ensure that a doctor "does no harm." These missions are bound to clash.

By the 1830s, slavery was a robust enough system to have its own body of case law. But these cases were riddled with contradictions, contradictions at the heart of which was the conflicted position of the slave body itself: is it a piece of property, or does the enslaved person have human rights that must be recognized in court? If the slave does have certain rights, how are those rights to be adjudicated differently from the rights of the free?

Just within the line of North Carolina cases involving quarrels between a white man and a slave, the results are all over the map. A white man may be guilty of a crime of battery against a slave that belongs to somebody else. (State v. Hale, 1823.) But a master may with impunity commit assault and battery upon his own slave, or even one he has leased, as a form of correction; his powers are "absolute," wrote Judge Thomas Ruffin. (State v. Mann, 1829.) But then, if a slave lashes out violently against a master in self-defense, held Judge William Gaston, the crime may be mitigated from murder to "felonious homicide," just as it would in the case of two white actors; the logic of Mann was "never intended to cover the entire relation between master and slave." (State v. Will, 1834.) And even though a master has virtually unlimited powers of physical "correction," he may be guilty of murder if he goes too far, Ruffin held. (State v. Hoover, 1839.) Further, the court will look sympathetically even upon a slave, reducing murder to manslaughter, if he kills a white man in a fit of passion brought on by that man's attack upon another slave, held Gaston, over Ruffin's vigorous dissent. (State v. Caesar, 1849.)

These difficult cases--even, at one level, the quarrel they represent between two judges who were great friends, Ruffin and Gaston--are, in James Oakes' analysis in Slavery and Freedom, "emblematic demonstrations of the problem of slave resistance in a liberal society." Placed, as they were from time to time, in the position of criminal defendants or victims, slaves forced the courts to address them as human beings. Indeed, as Oakes argues, although in one way the slavery opinions rallied the master class to solidify its defense of the institution, in another way the very slipperiness of the slave's legal position underscored the moral conundrum. Contradictory in outcome, the cases if anything tended to extend the rights of slaves as criminal defendants--intimations of liberty. Slavery was in some danger of breaking down under force of law, even before the war started.

When we judge the moral actions of those who came before us, such as slaveholders--when it seems so clear to us that what they participated in was wrong--we're sometimes led to wonder what moral failings future generations will accuse us of. It's my prediction, or at least a hope, that the death penalty will be one.

UPDATE 2/8: Richard Hart in the Independent Weekly on the "contradictions that simply can't be resolved."

UPDATE 2/9: NC nurses oppose requirement to participate in executions.

UPDATE 2/11: Today's N&O on the origin of the current, troublesome procedures for lethal injection. They were conceived by a Davidson College graduate, an Oklahoma legislator, who now regrets it. The rationale for this "three-drug cocktail," which starts with a sedative then moves to a paralytic and then a drug to stop the heart, has to do with the spectators: with us. It has to do with not wanting to watch a person die, with the shame of putting someone to death. The troublesome issue is that it's possible that the dose of sedative isn't enough for the person not to feel the paralysis or the heart drug. It is known that a person can be killed with a high dose of the sedative alone. But there's a problem. The person's body will react with physical movement. And it might take up to 30 minutes.

As Elizabeth Kuniholm, one of the lawyers for the defendants in the North Carolina case, said, "We don't want to feel like barbarians, and so we want it to look like a peaceful death.

It's about us.

Daffy daffodils

There's probably nothing to this early daffodil season, nothing alarming about the weather or anything. Still it's worth pointing out that Bill Hunt's stand of daffodils, a remarkable field of green that has been blooming, now in the shade, for many years down on Morgan Creek, came out very early this year.

Early March, 2006

Chimney Rock

For awhile, it looked like it wouldn't happen. As recently as six months ago, the family that had owned Chimney Rock for more than 100 years was asking $55 million. At that point the N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation had been negotiating with them for a year. According to the News & Observer of July 19, "Parks officials said they would continue trying to buy the park, but they would not say Tuesday whether they were willing to fork over $55 million."

Let's be grateful for whatever breakthroughs enabled the state to buy the property for $24 million, $2.35 million of which will come from an anonymous private donor.

More info and photos. Some photos may take time to load, but they are breathtaking.

UPDATE: Jack Betts of the Charlotte Observer writes about the negotiations, as well as how the governor's office was scooped on the announcement.

On blogging

In this morning's N&O is a story by Jesse DeConto on local political bloggers, three of whom--Mark Kleinschmidt, Laurin Easthom, and I--are on the Chapel Hill Town Council. If you're visiting this site for the first time via his article, welcome!

On this blog I'm likely to write about whatever interests me, from local issues such as homelessness or the Lot 5 development to university happenings like the civil rights panel I recently moderated to mid-century modern architecture. But the blog is not the only way in which I communicate with citizens. I also have a listserv that I use to report on recent council decisions and activities. If you would like to sign up for the listserv, please go to sallygreene.org and follow the link on the left. On that page you will also find more direct links to town government sites.

Pick of the week

While working on last night's posting, I noticed that the picture of the week at "The State of Things" is by Lisa Scheer. I liked this one the first time around--glad they do too. Congratulations, Lisa.

Hillsborough's homeless

When the temperatures dip and the weather threatens, it's time to think about the homeless. The county's annual "point in time" count was taken last week. (Results will be published on February 13.) Under HUD's guidelines, January is the time the count must be taken, because that's when the homeless are most likely to be visible. Even those who prefer the anonymity of the woods will come in out of the cold if they can. Shelters fill up.

This story is first of a series in The New of Orange County on homelessness in Hillsborough. It highlights the work of Vanessa Neustrom of the Orange-Person-Chatham Area Program mental health agency, for her good work on the count; Vanessa is also a member of the work group for the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessnes.

Does it seem odd to think that there could be many homeless people in Hillsborough? Neighbor House, Inc.'s "Food for All" program serves 300-350 meals a week.

The educational divide

A poignant moment in the other night's panel discussion among civil rights veterans came when Braxton Foushee talked about what he imagined, while in the thick of those protests more than 40 years ago, that the future would bring. He talked about education. With only a high school diploma himself, he was determined that his own children would go to college. Three out of four did; the fourth went to technical school and did find a career. So, that's a success story. But it is a fragile one.

This week, The State of Things is hosting a series called "Considering College":

More Americans are going to college than ever before. But a closer look at the numbers reveals some troubling realities. Low-income students are even less likely to go to college today than high income students were 30 years ago. In other words, while more low income students go to college now, they have yet to "catch up" to the parents of their high income peers. And while college enrollment has increased significantly among African-Americans and Latinos, minority students are still less likely than white students to go to college, and less likely to complete their degree. Put another way, access to college has expanded significantly in the past generation, but it has expanded much more for white and high-income students than for other groups.

In Tuesday's episode, Graig Meyer, coordinator of the Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate program in Chapel Hill-Carrboro city schools, talked about how difficult it can be to get low-income, primarily African American and Latino students to see that going to a four-year college is in their interest, as opposed to a two-year program that will get them to a paycheck faster. Or even to imagine going to college at all, with no family example to look to.

An article at Inside Higher Ed describes research that documents "educational segregation": the way in which educated people tend to flock together, leaving concentrations of the uneducated. This research "suggests that educationally selective migration is fundamentally altering America’s social geography, and that this change has consequences that we are only beginning to understand." If you're, say, an educated person in Chapel Hill, you can experience the benefits of this self-selection by walking down the hall of your office or up to a coffee shop and having a great conversation with a colleague: "When smart people cluster together, innovation occurs, productivity rises, and growth occurs." But the flip side of the this picture is bleak.

For every booming human capital hub, there are dozens of brain drain communities, and for these communities educational segregation can be disastrous. While brain drain is not exclusively a rural phenomenon, the picture is particularly bleak for rural America. In any given year, more than 6 percent of America’s non-metropolitan B.A. holders migrate to a metropolitan area. Economic growth has stalled in these brain drain communities. In the worst cases, communities are left with insufficient medical care and limited educational opportunities, as they find themselves unable to replace retiring small-town doctors and teachers. There’s no reason why college graduates need to be distributed equally across the United States. But deepening educational segregation closes off opportunities for people born into brain drain communities, creating new social and economic inequalities.

Breaking this self-perpetuating cycle is what Judge Howard Manning has been seeking to do in the long-standing Leandro case. When some school districts have far fewer resources than others, and with test scores to reflect it, who wants to teach there? who wants to live there?

Short of equalized state funding, which isn't likely to happen, I don't see a solution to this problem.

Molly Ivins, Texas patriot

For these past few years, since, oh, around the turn of the century, whenever people have learned I'm from Texas I've been likely to add, "But I left." Molly Ivins never did, at least not for long--until today. Till the end, she was calling her former governor to account. In her last column she wrote,

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge.

"When she unleashed the full force of her writing style and her big heart, she could make a statue weep," writes Siva Vaidhyanathan, who was lucky enough to be her friend.

Links via Feminist Law Professors.

UPDATE: Mark Kleinshmidt points to the tribute pages at the Texas Observer. The Observer's obit may not have been written by Molly, but it's strongly under the influence: "Her father, James Ivins, was a corporate lawyer and a Republican, which meant she always had someone to disagree with over the dinner table. . . . Molly, being practical, used many of her most prestigious awards as trivets while serving exquisite French dishes at her dinner parties." Even in death, she leaves us laughing.

"Pressing the Holdouts" in 1960s Chapel Hill

What an honor and a pleasure to moderate last night's panel discussion by three who participated in the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963-64 and one student eager to learn from them. The DTH story is just a glimpse at how rich the discussion was.

Next week in the series: the speaker ban law.

Word matters/words matter

Via Feminist Law Professors: The Judicial Language Project of the New England School of Law's Center for Social Responsibility is hosting a conference called "The Troubling Language of Rape: How Eroticism, Gender Myths, and Blaming the Victim Affect Social and Legal Discourse." On the premise that it matters intensely how judicial opinions articulate the facts, the Judicial Language Project seeks "to identify language in judicial opinions that inappropriately implies that the victim of the violence sought out the violence, participated willingly in the violence, or otherwise was in some way responsible for the violence."

Examples.

Doll study redux

More than half a century ago, Kenneth Clark's use of black and white dolls to demonstrate the impact of racism on young black children became one of the rationales for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

A young filmmaker in New York City, Kiri Davis, performs the same experiment, to virtually the same results.

Watch "A Girl Like Me."

The quilt code: fabricating history

The so-called "quilt code," by which, supposedly, slaves gave each other directions to the Underground Railroad, first got my attention over a year ago. I thought that historians on the H-Slavery listserv had successfully debunked it. It flared back up about a month ago when listserv members learned that the faculty member from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who had posed the question to the list in the first place had gone ahead, despite the answers he got, and directed a master's thesis that assumes that the "code" did exist. (See Ralph Luker's report of this development.)

Then, more news. On Tuesday the New York Times had a p.1 story about a proposed monument to Frederick Douglass, at the base of which is to be a "coded" quilt made of granite. There are also to be plaques to explain the "historical" significance of the quilt. Once again, historians weigh in. Writes David Blight, author of a book on Douglass and editor of his autobiography, "To permanently associate Douglass' life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best."

Responding to the controversy, New York City commisssioner of cultural affairs Kate Levin has said that the inclusion of the plaques would be reconsidered, but that the granite quilt was set in stone. “Something can inspire an artist that is not be based in fact,” she said. “This isn’t a work of history, it’s a work of art.”

So many questions are raised by this controversy: the lines between art and artifact, fact and fiction, history and imagined memory, issues peculiar to black history (given centuries of oppression, with many traditions truly lost, why not believe, especially if it alleviates white guilt by sowing a success story as children in classrooms sew cozy new quilts?), conspiracy theory (of course there is no historical evidence of the quilt codes; it was all a secret), the dynamics of popular vs. academic history (it was a popular book Hidden in Plain View, published in 1999 to scarce notice or response by academic historians, yet noticed by Oprah, that gave the myth its current authority), and even the history of the women's movement. For, as Leigh Fellner concludes in a thorough study of this whole phenomenon,

Along with many other myths involving quilts and subcultures (such as the Amish), the Code materialized in the 1980s during the post-Bicentennial revival of folk art, the popularization of women’s history studies, and Western notions of African culture comparable to early Hollywood depictions of Native Americans. The earliest mention of a "quilt code" is a brief statement in a 1987 feminist video: quilts were hung outside Underground Railroad safe houses. (No source is given for the assertion and it is conspicuously absent from the companion book.) In 1993 a white Massachusetts woman elaborated on the Code idea in Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, a children’s fiction book; its heroine makes a quilt containing a topographical map she uses to escape from slavery.

The discussion on H-Slavery suggests that some are sympathetic to the quilt code's teaching in schools, especially elementary schools, as a "usable past." Under this view it's no worse than the legends of Betsy Ross or the Pilgrim Thanksgiving. Seems to me that's a pretty weak defense, as if in any of these cases the real history (or as close as we can come to it) lacks the power to hold a child's attention.

Or is it that the real history of slavery is too powerful, too graphic for tender minds? If that were ever true, surely in a world in which the evening news is likely to report another beheading, that's a tough argument to make. But let me not dwell on elementary school. I probably would have let this whole episode go unblogged, but for one thing: Tucker's 8th grade language arts class, this week, is learning about the quilt code!

Paul was quickly on the case with a note to the teacher citing the NYT story and the H-Slavery discussion, urging him to "teach the controversy," as Gerald Graff taught us 20 years ago to say.

Here's one lesson plan that does just that.

UPDATE: Paul cites the Amazon discussion of Hidden in Plain View for showing "the polarity between history carefully practiced and folklore wishfully constructed."

UPDATE 2/2: More debunking from the author of a book on the Underground Railroad; and an interview with David Blight on the CBC program "As it Happens."

Lens wide open

Lisa Scheer has been taking her new wide-angle lens on the road, and she says it's had a bit of an influence on what she chooses to shoot. This photo is from Reidsville, N.C. The slide from magenta to red to orange reminds me of what Josef Albers wrote about "color memory":

If one says "Red" (the name of a color)
and there are 50 people listening,
It can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.

Even when a certain color is specified which all listeners have seen
innumerable times--such as the red of the Coca-Cola signs which is
the same red all over the country--they will still think of
many different reds.

Even if all the listeners have hundreds of reds in front of them
from which to choose the Cocal-Cola red, they will again select
quite different colors. And no one can be sure that he has found
the precise red shade.

UNC protest exhibit opens today

"I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill" opens today in Wilson Library. Sponsored by the library's manuscripts department, it features diaries, letters, personal papers, photographs, and other documentation of a tumultuous period. The exhibit will formally open this evening at 5:15, with, at 6:00, a keynote presentation by Peter Filene. Programming will continue for the next three Tuesday evenings with panel discussions on the topics of the sit-ins of 1963-64; the speaker ban controversy; and the food workers' strike of 1969.

I'm going to be moderating the talk next week on the sit-ins.

Details.

NC Democrats apologize for 1898

Via the North Carolina Miscellany: Yesterday the North Carolina Democratic Party formally apologized for the events leading up to and including the 1898 Wilmington "race riot," a move prompted by the publication of the report of the Wilmington Race Riot Commission.

“Sometimes, moving forward requires a sober look at the past. I am pleased that the State Executive Committee considered and unanimously passed this resolution,” said North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jerry Meek. “The Democratic Party of 2007—and of the last half century—isn’t the same Party that it was in 1898. This resolution is important because it renounces past actions of the Democratic Party and celebrates the Party of today.”

In Wilmington, the resolution is called "a step in the right direction."


From The North Carolina Election of 1898, an exhibit in Wilson Library, UNC.

Ricoeur in/on translation

John McGowan has a thoughtful review of a posthumous little book by Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, reminding us that all communication involves, at some level, an act of translation.

The possibilities of alienation (these words do not reveal the real me) and of misinterpretation (no, that’s not what I meant at all) are ever present. Our desire to translate ourselves to ourselves and to others is always shadowed by the fear of failure and by resentment of the very necessity of the task. The development of “linguistic hospitality,” the welcoming of the foreign into the privacy of the self, is the ethos Ricoeur promotes as the proper and humble response to the fact that some ideal union between a text and its translation, between our sense of self and the words with which we express that sense, and, ultimately, between the self and others, can never be ­achieved.

Ricoeur insisted, especially in later works such as Oneself as Another (1995), that the path to ­self-­understanding lies through the detour of an encounter with the other. His essays on translation dramatize this call to recognize in the foreign the lineaments of one’s own ­imperfection.

The Ze Frank story

How sad it will be when "The Show" with Ze Frank comes to an end in March! It won't be the end of Ze Frank, though.

His fame goes back to a video he produced for his birthday in 2001 called "How to Dance Properly."

He also appeared at the TED 2004 conference.

Council in retreat

The Town Council's annual annual retreat goes uptown this year. In a grand improvement from the previous retreats I've been to, which have been in the windowless downstairs meeting room of the public library, this time we're in the new Franklin Hotel on West Franklin. Last night we had a lovely dinner. Today we will get down to business.

This elegant boutique hotel--with Chapel Hill's first revolving doors!--arose from the rubble of the old Trailways bus station. Before the bus station was demolished, Matt Robinson staged some powerful graffiti art there, memorializing an important chapter in our history. (See this post and scroll down for photos; more photos here.) I had hoped that the art would be preserved--I know that Josh Gurlitz, the architect, made an attempt to save it from the bulldozer--but I'm not sure that it was.

Good-neighbor policies in Chapel Hill

Last semester, Richard Simpson and Bruce Curran's journalism class produced three public service announcements for the Town of Chapel Hill. They obviously had a lot of fun with the project. We received them, gratefully, at our January 8 Council meeting. They're airing on Channel 18.

A special showing just for you.

Changing position on MLK

Jonathan Tilove writes to let me know about a recent story of his on the continuing saga of MLK road naming. "Despite stereotypes, MLK streets are economically vibrant," he reports in a story that centers on New Bern, N.C. New Bern's primary commercial street was named for King in 2000--and ever since, it has "flourished."

The picture is not so rosy in nearby Greenville. Since 1998 the racial divide in this city has been enshrined in the name of a single street, a street that's called Martin Luther King Jr. Drive up until the point that it leaves the black neighborhoods and enters the whiter, wealthier precincts of East Carolina University, where it remains Fifth Street. What happened last year I did not know:

Last year, the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others pressed to name all of Fifth for King. Instead, the City Council's white majority voted to name a new bypass for King and remove his name from all of Fifth.

The Council would sooner take the name away from the black community than extend it into the white.

Other subtle changes of position are revealed in Tilove's story. In Chatanooga, Tennessee, a white developer faced with having to change the address of his building to MLK simply "gave his building its own address--Union Square." A nearby hotel "executed a familiar sidestep, switching its address to reflect its side street instead of King."

One business owner that I know of in Chapel Hill changed his address to that of the side street rather than suffer the change from Airport Road to MLK.

Then on the other hand, Town Hall changed its address from North Columbia Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, becoming one of some 590 government offices nationwide on MLK.

Cornel West is not one to change his position on MLK. He made a rousing, riveting speech at Memorial Hall last night as the university's MLK Week speaker. Paul gets to the essence of it. I don't know if it was videotaped. But you can see similar themes in a video of a talk he gave at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro last year.

Design blog within easy reach

It seems a little odd to be recommending a blog sponsored by a furniture chain, but Christine French of the Recent Past Preservation Network is right: Design With Reach's Design Notes is very cool.

Oddly related: Nineteen Soviet roadside bus stops, like this and this, crying out for preservation. (Via Boing Boing.)

MLK Day in Chapel Hill

At the Post Office rally about 200 hundred people heard a variety of messages, a number of them (including mine) linking King's domestic and international peace agendas.

The traditional march from the Post Office to the First Baptist Church was more comfortable than I can remember--warming us up for Curtis Gatewood's fired-up speech, which was designed to return us to a proper state of discomfort.

UPDATE: In his post, Mark Kleinschmidt reminds us that the Post Office space has a name--Peace and Justice Plaza--a name the Council gave it back in June. We asked the Public Art Commission and the Historic District Commission to design an appropriate marker. I see that we have an "information item" on this project coming up on February 12. The wheels of public process turn slowly (but they do turn).

At the Riverside with King

Today after you've heard the "I Have a Dream" speech for the n-teenth time, not that it isn't worth hearing again, you might spend a little time with Dr. King's 1967 sermon at the Riverside Church (full text and audio), in which he dared to say,

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in [a] revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

As Taylor Branch reports in At Canaan's Edge, the final volume of his magisterial trilogy on King's life, while the Riverside congregation "embraced King's message as though relieved to hear biting reflection sustained with nuance so devoid of malice," rewarding him with two standing ovations, public reception of the speech ran from mixed to hostile. His longtime adviser Stanley Levison

considered the speech itself an obstacle to public understanding. "I do not think it was a good expression of you," he bluntly advised, "but apparently you think it was." With his trademark directness, Levison called it unwise to focus on Vietnamese peasants rather than average American voters. "The speech was not so balanced," he told King. It was too "advanced" to rally his constituency, and covered so many angles that reporters sidestepped his message by caricature and label. "What on earth can Dr. King be talking about?" wrote a Washington columnist on April 5, wondering how any civil rights leader could overlook the benefits of integrated combat. "If there hadn't been a war, it would have served the Negro cause well to start one."

It simply seemed a betrayal for King to shift from civil rights to the war. From Branch again,

While neither [the Washington Post or The New York Times] engaged the substance of his Riverside argument, both archly told him to leave Vietnam alone for his own sake. "Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence," declared the Post. "He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people." Editors at the Times pronounced race relations difficult enough without his "wasteful and self-defeating" diversions into foreign affairs. In "Dr. King's Error," they summarized the Riverside speech as "a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate," and predicted that his initiative "could very well be disastrous for both causes."

Upon which King "broke down more than once into tears."


Emancipated slaves, New Bern, N.C., 1863, accompanied by Union troops

Crisis intervention needed for state mental health care

Mark Sullivan, executive director of the Mental Health Association in Orange County, opened the 29th Annual Legislative Breakfast for Mental Health yesterday morning with a sobering statistic: The national average per capita spending on mental health services is $92; in North Carolina, it is $52. "As a state we are ashamed," he said, as he called for "a responsible, compassionate, and effective" system of delivering mental health services.

Writer and Orange County resident Lee Smith led off the session with a moving account of the life and tragic death of her son, Josh Seay, after struggling since high school with schizophrenia. What came through as she recalled the onset of his illness during the summer before his senior year, at a music camp at the Berklee College of Music, and then the years of diagnosis and treatment, marked by steps forward and backward but largely (until the end) forward, thanks to effective treatment programs, was that the fundamental means to treat mental illness are in place: if you can find them, if you can afford them. Yet the story of mental health services in North Carolina is one of dwindling resources. Smith gave credit to her son's ability to progress to the extent that he did--from institutionalization to independent living and employment--"to the resources available in this community." Yet, she continued,

the promise of community health remains unfulfilled. Many people living right now with the most serious and persistent mental illness are not being provided with the treatment they need. Treatment works if you can get it, but many just can't get it. Our family was lucky but we were also persistent, and we had insurance--a key factor--and we were educated enough to figure out how to navigate the system, which is not so easy. . . . In fact it is almost impossible for a seriously ill person to do so.

During the remainder of the morning, a number of points got my attention:

1. North Carolina is one of 13 states that do not require "insurance parity," meaning equal coverage for mental health treatment.

2. More people with mental illness in North Carolina are in jails and prisons than in any other facility. A few counties (starting in Orange County where Judge Joe Buckner has been a leader) have mental health treatment courts. But expansion faces resistance. Some district attorneys actively resist mental health courts, because it means putting fewer people behind bars: "it lowers their batting average."

3. People with mental illness are often not eligible for Medicaid because they are not identified as "disabled."

4. North Carolina is one of only five or six states that does not provide across-the-board special assistance money to support independent living for the mentally ill in their communities. At least 50 percent of the mentally ill are in adult care homes--exactly the wrong place for nurturing independence.

5. Transitional housing is a huge gap in North Carolina.

These facts are especially discouraging to those of us working on the 10-year homelessness plan, for certainly a great percentage of the chronically homeless are mentally ill; and the percentage of mentally ill homeless is bound to rise with the continuation of the state's mental health "divestiture" plans.

With a new legislative session about to begin in Raleigh, the time is ripe to speak out. The good news is that this Chapel Hill session was full to overflowing people from Orange and Chatham Counties who care passionately about these issues. The bad news is that this is the only legislative breakfast scheduled so far in the state--and there are 98 other counties.

Get your war on stage.

The comic strip "Get Your War On," created by David Rees, son of Phil and Peg Rees of Chapel Hill, comes to life in an off-Broadway production. The Austin company Rude Mechanicals performs the show through January 28. From the Times review:

Eventually, what separates this show from most Bush-bashing satires is a subtext about our own powerlessness. The critics onstage — and those laughing in the seats — seem content to poke fun without ever asking that old, essential question: what is to be done?

Promo video.

Hear no Monkees, see no Monkees

The other night at the Flying Burrito, the music that we were munching our chips to put Paul in mind of a story to tell Tucker: about the time he met Jimi Hendrix. "Met" is maybe a stretch--there was no formal introduction, and anyway, Paul wasn't setting out to meet him. He was actually in hot pursuit of the Monkees.

You just have to read this wonderful story.

I've known Paul for a long time. I've heard him tell lots of stories, a few of them more than once. This was such a great one, I couldn't believe I'd never heard it.

Sally: Paul, I've known you for almost 20 years. Why have I never heard this story before?
Paul: You've never cared anything about Jimi Hendrix.
Sally: But I did care about the Monkees.
Paul: This is not a story about the Monkees! There are no Monkees in this story!

Foiled insurgency in Texas

Little did I know, till being tipped off by Cliopatria, that since 2003 a Texas law has required all school children to start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Flag of the Great State of Texas.

Now, I was brought up by Texas patriots. They showed me Washington-on-the-Brazos, where our Declaration of Independence was signed. They taught me about the Centennial Exhibition of 1936. In my school we had prayers and the pledge to the stars and bars, but I did not even know there was a pledge to the Texas flag.

Here's the story, from the Handbook of Texas Online.

In 1933 the legislature passed a law establishing rules for the proper display of the flag and providing for a pledge to the flag: "Honor the Texas Flag of 1836; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible."

But there was a bit of a problem--an error that was not corrected until 1965. The 1836 flag looked like this:



It was called David Burnet's flag, after the man who was the first president of the Texas Republic. Yes, 1836 was the year that, down at Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas declared its independence from Mexico! It did not become a state until 1845: nine years of sovereign independence. (I have earlier told the story of the Lone Star Flag.)

So for more than 30 years, from 1933 to 1965, Texans--at least the secretly initiated who actually knew about the pledge--swore their allegiance to the flag of the failed but still deeply imagined and warmly remembered Republic of Texas. What were they thinking?

The post-1965 version is the same but for the deletion of the year. Even more abbreviated than the old one, it lacks music entirely: "Honor the Texas Flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible." As long as schoolkids have to say it every day, they ought to give it an overhaul. I hear Kinky Friedman has time on his hands . . .

Welcome to historic Hillsborough.

Props to Laurie Paolicelli, executive director of the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau, for commissioning local writers to write about their home towns. Today in the Chapel Hill News we have Michael Malone's rhapsodic take (scroll down for the story) on Hillsborough and its "small-town charms."

This may be the first promotional article on Hillsborough in modern memory that mentions Judge Thomas Ruffin not only for his general high acclaim as an early 19th century jurist but also for his infamous decision in State v. Mann--the 1829 opinion in which he wrote, "The powers of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect."

Michael Malone ought to know: he and his wife, Maureen Quilligan, have in their own back yard the small, beautifully preserved office that Ruffin worked in; the Burnside property, where they live, next to St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, where he is buried, was the site of his home.

Has southern history turned a corner? Is it finally OK to talk candidly, even in the local newspaper, about our troubled, troubling past?

Tim Tyson thinks it has and is. Earlier this week he spoke on "The State of Things" about his upcoming course, through Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, called "The South in Black and White," as well as about his experiences lecturing on race around the state.

I sense a kind of new openness. There’s something going on out there, and I don’t exactly know, but I know that when we’re going to high schools and community colleges and churches these days we’re seeing a new willingness to talk about history in an open way and to tell the story a little differently. . . .

The fact that here in the South right now we’re seeing a new imagination about our prospects and this willingness to talk about race and history is not a surprise. If you look globally, everywhere where people are struggling for decent wages, for the dignity of human personality, for basic human rights, you will hear the vision of the black South that we’ll be studying in this course. This culture already echoes around the world, wherever people are standing up against what Dr. King called “the thingification of human beings.” The black South echoes for the ages. It’s a world historical culture that has come about in the South, of immense importance.

Next week I'm having lunch with Laurie Paolicelli, county commissioner Barry Jacobs, Afro-American Studies professor Tim McMillan, and others to talk about ways to highlight the history and experience of blacks in Chapel Hill and Orange County.

So it's really true.

One of the best blogs in the blogosphere just folded. What Michael Berube pulled off over the past three years was simply amazing, and it would have been even if he hadn't been so productively writing books and stuff at the same time. A giant hole has been rent in the internets. All the best to him in whatever's next.

Another one of the seven

Remarking today's news item from the North Carolina NAACP about their planned march on the General Assembly next month, Mark Kleinschmidt notes that the organization's head, the Rev. William Barber, was recently named (along with Tom Jensen) one of the "seven who will matter in 2007." This is a man who is already making a tremendous difference.

I first experienced the power of Rev. Barber's presence two years ago, on Martin Luther King Day in Chapel Hill, 2005. We had just emerged from the throes of renaming Airport Road for King--a subject the preacher did not shy away from. Warming to the metaphor of the road, he urged us all to keep traveling in the ways of social justice. I've been watching, and occasionally (not often enough) working with, this gifted leader ever since.

She stood there ironing

Tillie Olsen died on January 1 at age 94. She's a writer I never got around to in grad school, or later--my loss. There was a kind of feminism, back then, that struck me as special pleading. I was wrong, I think, in her case. After all, it took a mainstream male writer, Wallace Stegner, to recognize that her story "I Stand Here Ironing" was worth an investment. If it hadn't been for him, back in 1955, she wouldn't have won the Stanford University Creative Writing Fellowship that launched her career. This story and much more is told in Anne Fernald's moving tribute.

Finger pickin' good

On Saturday night, acoustic guitarist Muriel Anderson played to a sold-out audience of 2,000 in Charlotte. We weren't there. We were luckier. We saw her last night at a house concert in Chapel Hill. We had front row seats in clear view of her incredible fingers.

She started off with the Flamenco flair of "Leyenda," then moved around all over the place, including the classic piano rag "Nola," the romantic "Arioso," and her own September 11 composition, "Owls' Psalm."* She said this composition was inspired by a walk in a park where she heard two barred owls calling to each other in minor sixths, one a half-tone lower than the other. Sure enough, the sound of the female barred owl is a little higher-pitched than that of the male. Are they minor sixths a half-step apart? If you're Muriel Anderson they are, and it's hard to quibble with that.

*These mp3 sound files and more are available to sample.

Memo to Gore: You might have a point.

No time to blog when it's 70+ degrees on a Saturday in January.

2006: year of ibiblio

What an amazing list of accomplishments! Congratulations to Paul and all the other ibiblians old and new, near and far.

Blogroll additions, etc.

My blogroll keeps growing. Two new ones today. First, I've broken down and added Ze Frank. I watch him more than I'd like to admit, but honestly, not often enough. It was the champagne fairies that did it. Second, for local color, Wilson Library's North Carolina Miscellany.

Check them both out.

In other housekeeping matters, I've updated my sallygreene.org home page. The Town Council has a lot on its plate, but over the past year we've accomplished a good bit, too. The Lot 5 proposal, which we are scheduled to finalize in February, is probably the biggest. In the new year, I hope one of the things we will do is to follow through on something the Planning Board is encouraging right now: to articulate, clearly and publicly, a new vision is for downtown Chapel Hill (indeed for the whole town). This is a pivotal time for our cherished "village." Growth is going to happen. It's a matter of making it smart and consistent with our needs and values.

Our annual Council retreat January 19-20 is going to be held at the new Franklin Hotel.

Segwaying into the new year

The Chapel Hill Police Department is trying out a couple of Segways. "It's a combination of visibility, accessibility and mobility," says police chief Gregg Jarvies.

Sadly, we will lose Jarvies to retirement on April 1. After 31 years of service, seven as chief, he's entitled--but he leaves big shoes to fill. The town is seeking your input on the qualities to look for in a new chief. Creative thinking is clearly one.

Fairy dust

Who knew that the trains of bubbles that arise so magically from the bottom of a champagne glass are caused by a bottom-line inability to get the glass clean?

An amazing fact that bubbles up in a story about absinthe.

UPDATE 1/5: The inimitable Ze Frank on those mischievous champagne fairies. (Thanks, Paul.)

A gaggle of grammatical gaffes

Not the first time noted here, but you can't have too much "fun" with stuff like "this."

Evidently (see their interlocking blogrolls), these kinds of folk flock together.

Literally, a Web Log (An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word "literally")

Apostrophe abuse

Apostrophe catastrophe

--all of which somehow calls to mind the odd blog about the lowercase L, which I see is still marshalling its evidence.

Inspired by Feminist Law Professors.

Emancipation and remembrance

Today is the 144th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. New Year's Day--not a hard connection to make. How come we don't remember? (Well, some people do remember.)

Relatedly, from several sources lately I've heard about the call by the president of the University of Texas to have a discussion about the campus' memorials to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. He's planning an "advisory committee." I don't know the particulars of this one, but both the call and the response are achingly predictable. We've seen it at UNC.

Kevin Levin's posing of the question on his blog has generated an interesting dialogue with a Georgia man. This man's comments challenge Kevin to get to the heart of the matter:

I am not suggesting that these monuments were placed for necessarily "anti-black" reasons. What I am asking you to think about is the fact that until recently the overwhelming number of statues that commemorate the Civil War throughout the country were placed by white Americans. Again, I am not suggesting overt racism in all of these cases, but you must remember that the decision re: who and/or what issues would be remembered were decided by white Americans who enjoyed a monopoly on political control, especially in the South. I guess what I am wondering is if the landscape of monuments would have been more diverse had political participation through basic civil rights been extended to black Americans. The answer seems to me to be a resounding yes. Is it any surprise that African Americans would find statues to N.B. Forrest offensive? Don't you think black Americans would have voiced these concerns at the time these statues were unveiled? Might Monument Avenue in Richmond looked different had its substantial black population had a chance to voice its concerns about who would be immortalized?

I am working on the assumption that if one race monopolizes political power they will also monopolize the process of remembrance. And that process of remembrance will reinforce political control. It's a vicious cycle.

I heartily endorse Kevin's suggested further reading: David Blight's Race and Reunion and Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves.

Congratulations, Tom!

Tom Jensen made the Raleigh News & Observer's cut as one of the "seven who will matter in 2007."

Tom has mattered a great deal to me ever since he threw himself into my 2003 campaign for Town Council. His help was invaluable, and he was all of a college sophomore. It's official now, Tom: we expect great things of you.

Is joy here?

Paul says so.
He may be
insincere.

Edwards rally in Chapel Hill

As the moon rose over Southern Village, John Edwards gave a rousing stump speech. It's time we were patriotic about something besides the war, he said. Kirk Ross has details and a video clip.

More from Bora; see also Kirk's Daily Kos diary and the report at Blue NC.

Spin patrol

When Paul told me that a new study suggested I could cut my risk of breast cancer by vacuuming and doing the dishes, I said the research must have been done by a man. Turns out, maybe only the headline was.

Chicago: watchtowers and watchdogs

Photo by Looper (Devin Caldwell)

Security cameras that were inartfully placed on top of Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain in Chicago's Millennium Park were brought down by a couple of blogging "architecture enthusiasts." Photo-blogger Devyn Caldwell and his partner Mike Doyle happened to notice them on Sunday, December 17. "It looks like a Martian sitting there with a little antenna on his head," said Doyle. Caldwell got the attention of Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin; interviews, investigation, and more blogging followed; on Monday night, December 18, the cameras were felled.

More in today's Times, which reports that Plensa was not informed about the cameras but "was pleased to learn that they had been removed." (Local readers will remember that Plensa was the artist proposed for the recently failed public art project on Fayetteville Street in Raleigh.)

Even with cameras gone, there's something wrong with this picture. The objection was not to the cameras as such: it was the "Orwellian" conjunction of the serious surveillance camera and the playful faces of actual Chicagoans that rankled. The offense was not to the public: it was to art itself. Cameras are all over Chicago. Eight others keep watch over Millennium Park alone. Indeed we learn in the Times that "[t]he cameras were meant to stay atop the towers for only a few months until a permanent fixture could be built nearby." Presumably those fixtures will be built; the friendly faces will bear their "third eyes" more subtly and from oblique angles.

Doesn't it remind you of an old joke? The one about how we know what the lady is: now we are just establishing the price.

The year in planning

A round-up of some great moments in city planning from 2006. For example:

In July, a local council in Rockdale, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, started a six-month trial of playing at high-volumes hits by Barry Manilow and Doris Day to chase away car enthusiasts who were gathering on weekend nights at a local park. The council's deputy mayor reported that, four weeks after the effort, "Barry's our secret weapon. It seems to be working."

Edwards launch

When we got home yesterday evening, we had a robotic phone message from John Edwards inviting us to his rally at Southern Village this Saturday. An hour or so later, Paul and I dialed in to a conference call with a live John Edwards that had been set up for bloggers. By 10 p.m. I got the first of three email messages from John Edwards inviting me to watch a YouTube video of him in New Orleans at the site where he is planning to announce today.

Back in November, I'd had the privilege of having coffee with Elizabeth Edwards and a small group of power geeks and bloggers in Carrboro to talk about internetworking strategies.

The Edwards campaign is on its way to exploiting the resources of the internet in ways never yet seen in a presidential campaign. Political strategist Zack Exley, director of online organizing and communications for Kerry-Edwards in 2004 and, prior to that, one of the creators of MoveOn.org, put it this way back in June:

. . . [Edwards] speaks explicitly to the members of his "online community" as though he knows them -- as though he genuinely appreciates them.

I could be cynical and wonder how hard Edwards, the most talented politician in America, has to try not to sound like a politician. But I know from the Kerry campaign that both he and Elizabeth Edwards take this online stuff seriously. I'm convinced that this is a simple case of John Edwards understanding that there is an enthusiastic base out there who supports him and his anti-poverty fight. He seems to genuinely want to reach out, thank them, and let them in on what he's up to.

A continuous stream of emails and YouTubes is not going to do it alone. There's the matter of his message, what he stands for, do we believe him. (Also the matter of reaching the millions not on the internet, as Zack has noted in another context.) I want to believe him. I want to believe he has the courage to stick to his principles when it comes to health care, serious approaches to ending poverty, the whole populist agenda he's promoting, in addition to Iraq and foreign policy. Will he?

On the conference call, previewing the announcement he will make this morning, he said,

This will be a campaign built from the ground up, which means all of you are critical getting this message out. . . . We don’t want this to be a situation where everybody is listening to candidates make promises for two years, [with the hope] that someone will be elected who will bring change. . . . There's everything wrong with that. We shouldn’t wait. That’s what we’ve done in the past and change has not occurred. I want to help lead this grassroots movement to accomplish things starting right now. The idea that some politician is going to come along and save all of us is nonsense to begin with. We have to take charge. I feel very strongly about this. This will be the core message tomorrow. I will of course talk about two Americas, . . . but I’ll go on to say that what I’ve learned from last campaign is that it’s one thing to identify problems but the way to identify change is to take action. "Hopeful" is about tomorrow. We’re about today. We’re about taking action today. You all are critical to that. I appreciate all of you taking time to hear from me directly about this. I’ll be doing it on TV nationwide tomorrow morning. The truth is the net is critical and I want it to be a principal component, not an afterthought.

My Town Council colleague Mark Kleinschmidt is blogging from New Orleans. I hope he'll weigh in with a live report from Edwards' official launch this morning.

Have a magical day.

(Though Mrs. Houdini was in Hollywood, her choice of typeface is Park Avenue, a tired choice by now but hot off the presses in 1935.)

Dey House undone

A long sad story of the deterioration and of what was said to be one of Chapel Hill's 25 oldest structures has ended with the demolition of the Dey House. The Historic District Commission was able to postpone the demolition for one year, but after that it had no authority. Even the town's recently enacted demolition by neglect ordinance, which would have imposed substial fines for not repairing the property, was something the owner managed to work around.

The earliest owner of this house was Dr. William P. Mallette, who supervised the university infirmary. The date when he purchased the property is not known, but he sold the house in 1871 to Methodist minister Joseph Martin. Martin's wife, Clara, ran a boardinghouse here for students. In 1921 Professor William M. Dey, head of the romance languages department, and his wife, Alice, purchased it and made their home here for forty years. At Alice's death in 1965 it was purchased by the Delta Upsilon Fraternity.

The two-story, one-room-deep house has simple features that are characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century--weatherboarded walls, six-over-six pane sash windows, a gable-end brick chimney, and a boxed roof cornice. The front door with fanlight, sidelights, and an arched enrance porch are early-twentieth-century replacements. It is likely that the house originally had a wide porch.

From M. Ruth Little, The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1795-1975 (2006).

UPDATE: Chapel Hill News, "Requiem for Dey House": "There are only some two dozen 19th-century houses left in Chapel Hill. One by one they go. With each one that comes down, we lose another little bit of the heritage and character of the town in which we live."

Babes in Santaland

Has it really been 14 years since we woke up every morning to a new episode of David Sedaris' "Santaland Diaries"? It's been packaged into theater by now; in the Triangle area it's in two different performances. That's well and good, but I can't imagine it not in Sedaris' voice.

I was pregnant with Tucker when the "Santaland Diaries" first aired. If I ever put him on Santa's lap with innocent thoughts of a perfect Christmas, luckily by now neither of us remembers it. Sedaris puts his finger on what that's all about when he describes his experiences as Santa's "photo elf":

The parents had planned to send these pictures as cards or store them away till the child is grown and can lie, claiming to remember the experience . . . which supposedly means on paper that everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be, that everything is snowy and wonderful. It’s not about the child or Santa or Chirstmas or anything but the parents’ idea of a world they cannot make work for them.

Fortunately, not all parents are so invested in perfection. Some are willing to share photos of their children's perfect horror at being forced to sit on a strange man's lap.

Changing technologies, timeless Seuss

One of my favorite records (remember LPs?) as a child was a jazzy version of Green Eggs and Ham. It was lost, as things go, by the time Tucker was within the target age. (We could not find it anywhere.) Other musical recordings of the book were out there, but once you've heard Sam's pointed protestations to the sultry pulse of bass fiddle and snare drum, no other version will do.

Finally, a number of years ago by now, I found a vintage copy online! (Thank you, thank you, thank you.) Tucker thinks it's cool, in the campy way that you would hear it if you were 13, but it was his friend Henry, his fellow DJ on the "Teen Spirit" radio show on WCOM, who was inspired to play it on the air.

You can hear a snippet of it here (scroll down).

A couple of the kids in the radio club claimed they'd never seen vinyl before--maybe an exaggeration, but they had a point: to them, it was practically a wax cylinder.

When old Christmases were new

When a friend of mine was pregnant with child no. 2, she told child no. 1 she had a baby in her tummy. "Get it out!" he shrieked.



The Santa Claus "hiding" in this 1922 Edison wax cylinder recording seems anxious to get out. But his performance was a way of celebrating this amazing new technology, which brought Santa's voice (ever so mysteriously) into your own home.

Santa Claus Hides in Your Phonograph.



Another novelty: a moving picture of Theodore Roosevelt calling on neighbors, Oyster Bay, N.Y., Christmas 1917.

Inside Gertrude Stein

Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked
to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has
hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as
you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside
gertrude stein. This is what it feels like to be a huge type--
writer in a dress. Yes, I feel we have gotten inside gertrude
stein, and of course it is dark inside the enormous gertrude, it
is like being locked up in a refrigerator lit only by a smiling
rind of cheese. Being inside gertrude is like being inside a
monument made of a cloud which is always moving across
the sky which is also always moving . . .

more

via wood s lot

Modern cartography

What do the Georgia towns of Poetry Tulip, Due West, Po Biddy Crossroads, Cloudland, and Roosterville have in common?

They all fell off the map.

Father's day out

Ed Cone beautifully describes the unexpected rewards of being a parent.

What she teaches me goes well beyond the upstreaming of pop-culture knowledge that every generation offers its predecessor, although my grasp of instant-messaging abbreviations is pretty impressive. It comes down to this: Sydney is making me a better person.

Albion Tourgée and Samuel Field Phillips

We learn via Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory blog that there's a biography of Albion Tourgée just out from Oxford. It's about time for an update on this important civil rights figure. Chief architect of the claims brought by Homer Plessy to the Supreme Court, he argued that the Constitution was "color-blind," a notion that Justice Harlan picked up in his vigorous dissent.

Tourgée's stint in Greensboro from 1865 to 1876 as a Union idealist (a/k/a/ "carpetbagger") who became a local judge and civic leader lends his story regional interest; even closer to home is his influence on a Chapel Hill man, Samuel Field Phillps. Phillips was one of Cornelia Phillips Spencer's brothers. Spencer, the woman who famously "rang the bell" in celebration of the reopening of UNC in 1875 after its closing during Reconstruction, is controversial for her part in supporting the Democratic establishment both throughout and after the Civil War. In 2004 a conference was held on the UNC campus to reconsider the Reconstruction period of UNC's history and, more particularly, to revisit the appropriateness of the "Bell Award" given annually in recent years to distinguished UNC women.

Chancellor Moeser subsequently discontinued the Bell Award (conversations with potential winners indicated more trouble ahead: a number of them said they would not accept it). But Spencer Residence Hall remains (so that we might "tell our story better," said the chancellor earlier this year), and Spencer's legacy remains mixed. As Harry Watson said in his remarks at that 2004 conference, "the antebellum University of North Carolina was part of a massively unjust society." It's a common defense of the defenders of the old South, Spencer among them, that they were products of their time, that their culture left them without resources for thinking around or against the racism that chained them so thoroughly.

But as Watson also notes, this defense fails in Spencer's case. It fails by way of her brother's example.

Samuel Phillips started out much like any Southern partisan. A Chapel Hill lawyer and a Whig legislator in the 1850s, he hoped a civil war could be avoided; when it was not, he was as enthusiastic as any for the war. He even supported the prospect of continued fighting after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But by December 1864 he was aligned with other North Carolina legislators who favored suing for an immediate peace. Even this position, though, was one ultimately aimed to preserve the status quo: it was based in a "belief that negotiated peace would prevent immediate emancipation," writes Robert D. Miller in a 1981 article on Phillips. (A "delusional" belief, as it turned out.)*

At the 1866 constitutional convention Phillips, by then Speaker of the House, worked to enact a strict Black Code that allowed freedmen no political rights but did extend to them certain property rights. When the voters rejected this constitution as too liberal, Phillips, convinced that a less generous approach would invite military intervention, retired, for a time, from public life. (Indeed in 1868 "blacks, scalawags, and carpetbaggers--fulfilling Phillips's prophecy--wrote a remarkably democratic state constitution that included full political rights for blacks.")

By 1868, according to Miller, Phillips "had reassessed the state's relationship to the federal government and had accepted the legitimacy of Congressional Reconstruction." The South had lost; he "acquiesced to the constitutional reality of black suffrage."

Phillips was among North Carolina moderates who actually voted a Republican ticket in 1868 rather than endorse the Democrats' outrageous tactics to keep the black vote in check. But he still viewed black enfranchisement as a matter of expediency rather than justice. The credit for his final transformation belongs to Albion Tourgée, who by 1868 was a superior court judge in Guilford County. Writes Miller, "Tourgée's fine legal mind and his impartiality on the bench in the face of increased Klan hostility enhanced Phillips's admiration for the man and fostered a friendship that would culminate in collaboration on the Plessy case in 1896."

In 1870 Phillips ran as a Republican for state attorney general. He lost, of course, but from his new Republican loyalty "there would be no backsliding." In 1872 President Grant appointed him solicitor general of the United States. As advocate for the federal government's positions he "wrote consistnetly strong briefs . . . based on egalitarian principles."

Plessy v. Ferguson was not the first case in which Phillips' work got Justice Harlan's attention. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, his task was to defend the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a law that required equal access to privately owned "public accommodations." Taking the then logical but now inconceivable position that the 13th Amendment's prohibitions of "slavery [and] involuntary servitude" were to be read expansively, he argued that the legislation was protected by it as well as the 14th amendment. Writes Miller,

As Harlan was to do later in his [dissenting] opinion, the North Carolinian returned to Blackstone to argue that the power of locomotion [i.e., mobility] was an essential right of freedom. Slavery had violated that right, and the institution's abolition, therefore, ostensibly freed blacks from impositions on their freedom of movement. Locomotion, however, should not be defined merely as the absence of confinement, Phillips continued, but rather as an expansive right which included mobility on highways, common carriers, and freedom to use public inns. Racially motivated restrictions on such mobility were clear violations of the Thirteenth Amendment, constituting badges of servitude. If mobility were not equally accessible to all citizens, he warned, "the 'pursuit of happiness' will degenerate into a monopoly."

Phillips was clearly arguing against the grain of the Court and public opinion, but his efforts did not go unnoticed by an old friend. In 1885, by which time he was a private attorney, Tourgée asked him to help with Homer Plessy's case. Again he argued both the 13th and the 14th Amendments as guarantors of the right to travel without discrimination. The combination of his legal theories and Tourgée's powerful rhetoric certainly worked on Justic Harlan, though not, unfortunately, on a majority of the Court.

Philips outlived two wives, living long enough to cheer Booker T. Washington's dinner in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt. He'd traveled a long way from Chapel Hill. It'll be interesting to see what else we can learn about him from the new biography of Albion Tourgée.

*"Samuel Field Phillips: The Odyssey of a Southern Dissenter," North Carolina Historical Review 43 (1981): 263-80, by Robert D. Miller, assistant professor of history, Bennett College, Greensboro, N.C.

Post-industrial

I've mentioned before how taken I am with Lisa Scheer's angles on Greensboro. I asked her if she thought her photos were more in the nature of the aesthetic or the political. She replied that the political can't be ignored--"there's a documentary impulse at work"--but she also said she edits out context when a shape strikes her.

This recent one is titled "urban abstract." She's been shooting like crazy lately, and she seems to be challenging herself in the direction of abstraction. The results are riveting.

Chronicling Shakespeare

Toward the end of her persuasive Manifesto for Literary Studies, as part of her argument for the distinctiveness of literature as literature, apart from (while deeply invested in) history and culture, Marjorie Garber turns to Shakespeare. For the proposition that it doesn't matter who he really was, she quotes Emerson, the great Romantic:

Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the noble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and desarts idle" of Othello's captivity--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or priavte letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets?

To which Garber adds, "Not knowing Shakespeare's history is what gives Emerson his Shakespeare."

Not everyone is so quick to agree. There are those who think, for example, that Hamlet would be better understood, perhaps as Freudian drama, if we knew something about the author's relationship with his own father. In my experience, though, it's not the English professors who worry so much about who the man was: it's professionals of a more fact-based turn of mind, say lawyers.

Almost twenty years ago, in September 1987, a three-judge panel of the United States Supreme Court heard the case of de Vere v. Shakespeare--the challenger being Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, considered the most credible of the many contenders to the name. Successfully defending Shakespeare before Justices Brennan, Blackmun, and Stevens was a bright young law professor named James Boyle, whose talents I've recently noted.

Asked whether it had been a tough case, Justice Brennan said (as reported in the New York Times) it had been "an impossible one." But, he added, at least no one had declared "All's well that ends well."

Despite the unanimous ruling from the Court, Boyle has not been able to lay the question to rest in his own mind. He has written The Shakespeare Chronicles, a comic novel about an English professor possessed by the quest for the real Shakespeare. Like many a novel in the picaresque tradition, it is being published serially--on his web site. Or you can buy the whole thing in hardback or as an ebook.

In connection with the novel, Boyle has made a portion of his Supreme Court argument available on YouTube. The final exchange with Justice Stevens is easily worth five minutes of your time.