Raleigh Modern: Catalano House

Not all mid-century modern houses in Raleigh have fared as well as the Fadum House. Without a doubt, the most serious loss has been the Catalano House, demolished six years ago.



How could that have happened? Mid-century modern fan George Smart of Durham wanted to know, and so he investigated. Here's his report.

1954 - Eduardo Catalano House, perhaps the coolest house ever designed in North Carolina. 1467 Ridge Road, Raleigh.

Catalano, an Argentinian architect who taught at NCSU's School of Design, drew this 1700 sf home for himself but only lived there a few years. The design was highly publicized as the "House of the Decade" by House and Home magazine in the 1950s and was praised by the rarely praising Frank Lloyd Wright. As with most modernist houses in Raleigh, it was built by Frank Walser. The Catalano House was sometimes referred to as the "Potato Chip" house because of the swooping hyperbolic paraboloid roof.

Catalano sold it to engineer Ezra Meir and his wife Violet in September of 1957. The Meirs sold it to William and Bettie Hinnant in December of 1966. The Hinnants sold it to Raleigh attorney Arch E. Lynch, Jr. in May of 1978. Lynch lived there until approximately 1996. From 1996 to 2001, the house was unoccupied. Vandals, storms, lack of heat, and neglect made the house rapidly deteriorate. The roof rotted in sections over time. It would have taken tens of thousands of dollars to repair, if repair were even possible. Eventually the damage was too extensive to repair.

Preservation North Carolina bought an option on the house and tried unsuccessfully to sell it for $360,000 to anyone who would rebuild the same design. Lynch sold it to JBar Associates in March of 2001. The house was destroyed later that year. JBar, owned by Andrew Rothschild and Jonathan Bluestone, have since built two large houses on the property.

Shortly after its destruction, Catalano lobbied to have just the roof rebuilt on the grounds of the NC Museum of Art, which they declined. In early 2005, he proposed a gift of $1.5M rebuild the roof as part of a central campus Pavilion plan but strong faculty opposition caused him to withdraw, despite the fact NCSU hired an architectural firm to evaluate seven other alternative sites.

Auden at 100

February 21 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of W.H. Auden. wood s lot has a nice roundup of tributes, including photos by Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon. Since September 11, much has been written about the poem "September 1, 1939" and Auden's attempt to repudiate it, especially one particular line; but I didn't know till I heard Wednesday's NPR interview with editor Edward Mendelson that it was specifically in reaction to LBJ's "Daisy" TV spot that he did so.

Beloved (belated)

Toni Morrison's masterpiece, the best American novel of the past 25 years according to a New York Times survey, came out 20 years ago. For that long, through its rapid canonization in college English departments and its popular acceptance as a classic, I avoided it. A slave mother would rather kill her children than see them into the life she'd known? I didn't care to suffer the details.

This semester, thanks to Minrose Gwin's seminar in southern literature, history, memory, and trauma, which she has generously allowed me to audit, I put myself to the task.

Morrison has said that she started writing because she couldn't find the kind of novel that she wanted to read. "I want to write for people like me, which is to say black people, curious people, demanding--people who can't be faked, people who don't need to be patronized, people who have very, very high criteria," she has said.

It's one thing to know that enslaved families had no legal protection, that on whims of others they were broken up, split apart, auctioned, bartered and traded away. From the point of view of the master class, it was economics: "most commonly the articles [the enslaved] sell best, singly; and therefore they ought, in general, to be so offered," wrote North Carolina judge Thomas Ruffin (Cannon v. Jenkins, 1830). And it's one thing to know that attempted flight from slavery was perilous and just as likely to result in families broken, unable to reunite or even to know who survived and who didn't. Morrison plumbs the depths of these stories.

Beloved carries the reader toward trauma, shattering and irrevocable. The form, inseparable from the content, conveys as much: "124 was spiteful" reads the alienating first line. With time and patience you discover that 124 is a house number, that the house is not just filled with spite but is the very source of spite, owing to the presence of an agitated baby ghost; that the ghost is capable of being run out of the house, only to return, palpably and insistently, as a young woman offering some potential for healing. But no one emerges whole in the end. These lives are unable to gain the consistency or coherence that could anchor them in wholeness, though there's plenty of effort and longing.

It's one thing to know that babies were separated early from their mothers. It's another to learn that the only thing Baby Suggs can remember about her firstborn is the way she liked the acrid taste of burned bread.

"We could move," [Sethe] suggested once to her mother-in-law.
"What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don't you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil." Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows. "My firstborn. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember."
"That's all you let yourself remember," Sethe had told her, but she was down to one herself--one alive, that is--the boys chased off by the dead one, and her memory of Buglar was fading fast. Howard at least had a head shape nobody could forget. As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. . . .

Sethe tries not to remember, yet she can't not remember. "The undoing of the self in trauma involves a radical disruption of memory," writes Susan J. Brison,* "a severing of past from present and, typically, an inability to envision a future." Time contracts to the present moment. Having been reduced to objects ("articles" as Judge Ruffin called them), having lost faith that the world holds any safety, victims of trauma are abandoned to a primal searching for a self.

Beloved has a basis in fact, the story of Margaret Garner, a fugutive slave from Kentucky. Writes Morrison in an introduction to the novel, "The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating, but, to a novelist, confining. Too little imaginative space for my purposes."

Last fall when I spoke on Elizabeth Spencer's novel The Voice at the Back Door and its reinscription of an actual event, the Carrollton Massacre of 1886, I was asked a great question: what is the relationship of the novel to the history? It's a question that deserves a long answer, because the relationship of history to fiction is deep and tangled; but the short answer is this: History can tell us what happened and, to an extent, why. But it takes a skilled novelist to tell us how it felt. A suspicion of this truth--or, perhaps, in Brison's words, "an active fear of empathizing with those whose terrifying fate forces us to acknowledge that we are not in control of our own"--is what kept me from approaching this powerful, essential American novel for so long.

*Susan J. Brison, "Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self," in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Univ. Press of New England, 1999).

It can happen here.

Via Feminist Law Professors: In the U.S. territory of the Marianas, an Asian woman might pay up to $7,000 to get a job in a garment factory. Since (thanks to the efforts of Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay) the territory remains exempt from wage and hour laws, she has a hard time paying back the loan. So she turns to work in the sex-"tourism" industry.

Think something like that can't happen in North Carolina?

Think again.

The world is flat.

Lisa Scheer goes Escheresque.

Raleigh Modern: Fadum House transformed

Last June, I blogged about the Fadum House as one stop on Preservation North Carolina's tour of modernist architecture in Raleigh. It was in the midst of an expansive, sympathetic addition/renovation. Here's what it looked like then, from the rear. (More pics.)



Now finished, it's featured in today's N&O. (More pics.) "The original house, along with the handful of other modernist residences left in the city, is one of the last vestiges of a promising post-war Raleigh that bloomed but never flourished," writes Richard Butner. Being not so big houses, even very fine examples of the houses of this period can end up as teardowns.

They are small houses, and yet there are those who love them. Largely because of my June blog series, I hear right along from folks who do (including Richard Butner, who I hope will keep on writing about Raleigh's mid-century treasures). One woman wrote from Washington, N.C. to say she was looking for a mid-century modern house anywhere in the state, or the country. She said she'd called a Chapel Hill real estate agent who promptly tried to talk her out of the "ranch house," the only term in her vocabulary for what she interpreted to be this woman's interest. We experienced a similar bias when we were looking for our own house. What will it take for the agents to get a clue? (They're clued in Charlotte.)

Ruth Little's book on Chapel Hill architecture has a whole chapter on mid-century design in Chapel Hill. Will that advance the conversation?

Meanwhile over in Raleigh, the new owners of the Fadum House are setting an example for preservation, in both senses. The pine trees that were cut for the expansion were put to work as flooring and paneling.

Save the country.

Laura Nyro had fury in her soul.

Wonders large and small

Two leading structural engineers name their picks for the top 10 engineering feats in the world.

Meanwhile, others think small.

Lot 5 decision

The Town Council took a momentous step on Monday night in approving a contract with Ram Development for the Lot 5 project. I have been involved with this project since the beginning of my term in December 2003; and with Bill Strom and Cam Hill I represented the Council on the negotiating team. I believe the final result is something that will make the town proud: a development combining first-story retail with 137 residential units (21 of them permanently affordable); a large public plaza; art, through our percent for art initiative, designed and directed by accomplished public artist Mikyoung Kim; architecture designed with the advice of Marvin Malecha, dean of the College of Design at North Carolina State University. Good design, significant and well-designed public space, new retail opportunities, enough residential density to put "eyes on the street" and enliven downtown, the retention of the existing public parking, these are goals that this council and several before it have had for the redevelopment of this site.

In response to concerns raised by Council members Jim Ward and Laurin Easthom, we made one significant change to the contract that was before us Monday night. We directed the manager to require that Ram achieve a 20 percent improvement in the energy efficiency of the project beyond the standards set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers. We authorized him to achieve that commitment by negotiating, as necessary, minor changes to the contract.

The manager has the flexibility to find the negotiation points wherever he can, but the suggestion that I put on the table at the meeting was that he look to the LEED certification process and see if savings could be made by not strictly following it. It may be time to reconsider our thinking on the best way to ensure true energy efficiency. We are requiring Ram to go through the process of LEED certification and commissioning. In recent months, however, citizens have come forward to suggest that LEED standards alone do not guarantee an efficient building. I have come to suspect they are right: The certification process may wind up costing Ram money that could be better spent on physical aspects of the building that would, in fact, achieve energy efficiency.

Prior to Monday's meeting I had brought to the Council's attention a report published in October by two experts in constructing energy-efficient buildings. Auden Schendler and Randay Udall have, in a real sense, "written the book" on LEED. By now thay have concluded, "LEED is Broken; Let's Fix It."

Between the two authors, we've built a passive solar home, designed the world's first renewable energy mitigation program, participated in the pioneer program that developed LEED 1.0, built two LEED-rated buildings (with half a dozen more planned) and played a consulting role on numerous other green building projects, including a high performance affordable housing project. We're concerned that LEED has become costly, slow, brutal, confusing, and unwieldly, a death march for applicants administered by a soviet-style bureaucracy that makes green building more difficult than it needs to be, yet has everyone genuflecting at the door to prove their credentials. The result: mediocre "green" buildings where certification, not environmental responsibility, is the primary goal; a few super-high level eco-structures built by ultra-motivated (and wealthy) owners that stand like the Taj Mahal as beacons of impossibility; an explosion of LEED-accredited architects and engineers chasing lots of money but designing few buildings; and a discouraged cadre of professionals who want to build green, but can't afford to certify their buildings. A growing number of LEED veterans have, or soon will, throw in the towel. LEED is broken. . . .

And further,

The danger is that LEED certification will cannibalize funds that otherwise could be used to improve the building. At today's price point, developers face a choice: pursue LEED--or purchase a photovoltaic system, daylighting, or efficiency upgrades.

About the LEED point system they have pointed observations:

"LEED brain" is a term for what happens when the potential PR benefits of certification begin driving the design process. LEED can be a way to facilitate regulatory approvals, appease the public, and get free press. There's also a powerful incentive for mechanical engineers, architects and contractors to gain LEED expertise. It labels their firm as "green," increasingly a prerequisite on requests for proposals. Unfortunately, if you know how to scam LEED points, you can get the PR benefits without doing much of anything for the environment. . . . The dirty little secret is that you can certify a building without doing much at all (other than mountains of paperwork) to make it green.

An example: A project got one LEED point for spending $1,300,000 for a heat recovery system that would save about $500,000 a year. The same project got one point for installing a $395 bike rack. If you were simply after points and you needed only one more for your project to make the grade, what would you do? Another example: on a project in Colorado, a reflective roof counted toward the LEED rating. Reflective roofs are preferred over black roofs because the black tends to create a "heat island" effect. But this project was 8,000 ft. above sea level, where the heat island effect did not apply. So it got a credit without any measurable benefit. "In truth," the authors write, "LEED is based less on scientific analysis than on committee consensus."

The intent of LEED is great. So is the momentum it's generated. But aren't energy-efficient results what we want? "In the final analysis," write Schendler and Udall, "LEED is just a tool." There may be better, more straightforward ways to measure whether the building Ram is designing is going to achieve energy efficiency. As long as they can demonstrate the 20 percent savings in measurable ways, I think a compromise on LEED is worth investigating. Ram told the Council that they were looking at around $200,000 for LEED certification and commissioning. I simply suggested to the manager that the LEED process might be one place to look to find the trade-off needed to achieve the 20 percent improvement in actual energy performance.

Elihu Yale: what's wrong with this picture?

Since 1910, presiding over meetings of the trustees of Yale University has been a portrait of Elihu Yale, attended by a slave. Word about it got out in a major way after a student slipped into the board room and took a digital photo. "Elihu Yale apparently did not own slaves but critics over the years have objected to the painting's racist overtones and the significant place it is displayed at the university named for him," the Hartford Courant reports.

Although Elihu Yale was not himself a slave owner, over the past several decades students have spoken out about the portrait’s implication of slavery. There are two other portraits of Elihu with black servants in the Yale collection.


“Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” [University Vice President and Secretary Linda] Lorimer said.

But even if Elihu Yale owned no slaves, it remains that eight of Yale's 12 residential colleges bear the names of slaveholders, including John C. Calhoun: In Calhoun College, "[s]ome of the stained-glass windows in the . . . dining hall depict slaves picking cotton," according to the Yale Daily News. Picking the remnants of slavery out of Yale, or Brown, or New York City or just about any place on the eastern seaboard with any history at all is pretty impossible. Plucking a picture off a wall is easy, in some ways too easy. Yale's history might be better acknowledged and dealt with if that troublesome portrait were to hang around a bit longer.

Black History Month trivia question

Who was the first black student at UNC?

• Pauli Murray
• George Moses Horton
• Zora Neale Hurston
• None of the above

It was not George Moses Horton, for whom a residence hall was named last fall. Horton, who famously penned poems for students at all-male UNC to send to their girl friends, was a Chatham County slave. He's believed to be the first black to publish a book in the South. As I've recently heard Tim McMillan tell it, his master allowed him to hire himself out on weekends, to come up to Chapel Hill and market his poetic skills; probably because his temperament wasn't all that suited to physical labor. He wasn't universally loved at the time. There's evidence that the students "ridiculed" him. UPDATE 2/13: Yesterday's dedication of the George Moses Horton Residence Hall.

It was not Pauli Murray, descendant of Orange County slaves and at least one white master, graduate of Hunter College who wanted to enter graduate school at UNC. According to Glenda Gilmore's profile of her in today's N&O, "On Nov. 10, 1938, the day after the Supreme Court heard arguments that state universities had to offer graduate education to African-Americans, Pauli Murray requested an application to the graduate shool of the University of North Carolina." In violation of the Supreme Court decision in that case, UNC denied her application. Murray's path took her in other directions, ultimately to ordination as an Episcopal priest. In 1977, she celebrated her first Eucharist here at Chapel of the Cross. "She looked up at the balcony where her grandmother had worshipped as a slave and gripped a lectern engraved with the name of her white great-aunt. To Murray, 'it was as if all the strands of my life had come together.'"

In 1939, Zora Neale Hurston was hired as a professor at North Carolina College, Durham (later North Carolina Central University). She wanted to take a class at UNC with Paul Green; according to Tim McMillan, she was interested in getting him to work with her on a play that would be based on some of her folklore research. She was allowed to enroll, and so she did attend classes on campus for a brief period. But her presence was too much: they soon moved the class sessions to Green's home.

Woolf hunting

From 1996 through 1999, I was the bibliographer for the International Virginia Woolf Society. I took it online (where it has remained) at what was called SunSITE, then MetaLab, now ibiblio. For fun, I added a feature I called "passing glances"--a place to record other works of fiction or nonfiction in which Woolf plays a bit part. As I recall, the inspiration in part came from the work Brenda Silver was doing, culminating in her 1999 book Virginia Woolf Icon,

a book about "Virginia Woolf": the face that sells more postcards than any other at Britain's National Portrait Gallery, the name that Edward Albee's play linked with fear, the cultural icon so rich in meanings that it has been used to market everything from the New York Review of Books to Bass Ale.

Enlisting the help of Woolfians everywhere, I tried to call attention to these literary Woolf sightings. And I challenged readers to help me try to understand what these references were all about:

In these and other books making up our reading at random, Woolf is there--a testament to her genius and, further, to several decades of her readers' passionate and public scholarship. But she is not just there--she is being used. She is "passing" for (or against) something . . .

Even a decade ago, just to try to follow Woolf's tracks through contemporary writing was overwhelming. No grand theories, well really not any theories, emerged about what this phenomenon meant, although, then and now, it seems clear that there is Virginia Woolf and there is the idea of Virginia Woolf. Brenda Silver approached a theory; choosing to focus on Woolf's recurring image in popular culture, she asked why it was that Woolf seemed so often to be associated with dis-ease:

We cannot stop the proliferation of Virginia Woolfs or the claims to "truth" or authenticity that accompany each refashioning of her image; nor would I want to, however much I might disagree with or be scared by the effect produced by any particular representation. Instead, I have focused on those places where Virginia Woolf becomes symptomatic of embedded layers of cultural anxiety, in an effort to formulate as precisely as I can the issues--and the stakes.

And yet there was always more to write about. As her book was going to press, Silver was already trying to identify Woolf sightings on the web.

Woolfian friend Anne Fernald, now a professor of English at Fordham University-Lincoln Center and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, is threatening to pick up the challenge in her blog, even though it is more daunting than ever now, with the internets to contend with.

One of Anne's recent sightings is a great one for these cold winter days, Amardeep Singh's post "Virginia Woolf, In Winter," a brief meditation on Woolf's wonderful, rambling London essay "Street Haunting."

"Light in the Piazza" comes to Raleigh

Byron Woods of the Independent Weekly interviews Elizabeth Spencer on the award-winning musical "The Light in the Piazza" and its upcoming performance in Raleigh. It'll be at Progress Energy Theater, February 13-18. If you haven't seen it, you shouldn't miss it. I'm enjoying the CD right now, remembering how magical it was. Again congratulations and thanks to our friend Elizabeth for writing such an inspiring, enduring story.

UPDATE: A review of the Raleigh performance.

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.