New titles in African American studies

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

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

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

Welcome life support for Graham house

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

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

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

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

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

The landscape of property law

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

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

The women behind Rosa Parks

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

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

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

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

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

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

1947 "Freedom Ride" remembered

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

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

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

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

Lot 5 public art preview tomorrow

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

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

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

"Durham: A Self-Portrait"

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

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

Window into a colorful past in Wilmington

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

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

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

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

Slide show.

Harriet Jacobs observed the "Johnkannaus" in Edenton:

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

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

Recently speaking

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

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

Starbucked

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

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

Fifty years of Reynolds Price

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

On violence

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

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

Spooky return

D.J. Spooky returns to the UNC campus on February 8.

Preview: "Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus Mix: Buddhist hip hop." Featuring Monks of Deprung Loesling Monastery, Daniel Bernhard Roumain, King Tubby, Philip Glass, The Beastie Boys, Saul Williams, John Coltrane, and Alice Coltrane.

The Lutherans are fitting in.

Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Rosemary Street gets my personal Sierra Club Anti-Sprawl Good Infill Award. The long, slender building is nestled between homes in a historic district, and the neighbors are happy about it. All around, a beautiful thing.

Disaster at the AHA

The History News Network has done a great job of blogging the American Historical Association's conference in D.C., in text and a few choice YouTube clips.

I enjoyed the two clips of Kevin Rozario of Smith College (day 3), whose work I remember from a conference at MIT that took place shortly after Sept. 11, "The Resilient City: Trauma, Recovery and Remembrance." (Organized by Larry Vale, whom I got to meet later at a UNC conference on affordable housing, and Tom Campanella, now a professor of urban studies at UNC.) In that paper, he argued that the great disasters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--to wit, the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906--for all of their devastation, paradoxically were reinscribed to conform to a great American narrative of optimism and recovery. From the version of his talk in the conference proceedings, published in 2004,

A quick glance at American history shows that narrative has long been the magic that makes blessings out of calamities. Sermons and private writings attest that calamities were among the most enthralling topics in colonial America. Disasters had to be explained but there was little doubt that theyw ere meaningful. They were part of God's greater designs. Misfortunes were not exactly welcome, of course, but a religious framework for understanding them was by and large consoling. Possessing a strong conviction that God was especially close in calamity and that God was good, Puritans, like most other European settlers, simply had to believe that disasters possessed some benevolent purpose. Hence they foun themselves plotting their disasters according to "comic," as opposed, in the Aristotelian scheme, to "tragic" conventions. The narrative sequence usually went something like this: some wretch or group of wretches commits a sin; God sends a disaster to punish and test the individual or the community; people heed the warning and mend their ways; they rededicate themselves to God and ultimately earn salvation.

This spring, Rozario's book came out, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America. But by then, another disaster: Hurricane Katrina.

As Rozario turns to the present, he finds that the impulse to respond creatively to disasters is mitigated by a mania for security. Terror alerts and duct tape represent the cynical politician’s attitude about 9/11, but Rozario focuses on how the attacks registered in the popular imagination—how responses to genuine calamity were mediated by the hyperreal thrills of movies; how apocalyptic literature, like the best-selling Left Behind series, recycles Puritan religious outlooks while adopting Hollywood’s style; and how the convergence of these two ways of imagining disaster points to a new postmodern culture of calamity.

This is the idea that he elaborates on in his AHA talk: why did this progressive narrative "fail at the moment of Katrina"? Having just read Naiomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, he heads there for his tentative conclusion: "crisis as a tremendous opportunity for profit."

Relatedly at the AHA, Elizabeth Turner of the University of North Texas recalls the Galveston Flood of 1900 (day 3).

Not so disastrously, our friend Bruce Lawrence of Duke with a reconsideration of Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam (day 1).

Give a little. You'll feel better.

Researchers conclude that "charitable activity induces endorphins that produce a very mild version of the sensations people get from drugs like morphine and heroin."

Prize "planning" in 2007

Texting for toilets, insuring against paper cuts, and more.

Betty Friedan, wielding a spatula and a sharp kitchen wit

Two musty old fifty-cent paperbacks that have followed me around since college, probably lifted from my mother's kitchen, are Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book and the Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book. This past Sunday's Times Magazine tribute to her as one of the notable deaths of 2007 puts her work in context.

The men who ruled the world in the late 1950s, or at least six of the men who ruled publishing, rejected Peg Bracken's manuscript, "The I Hate to Cook Book." It would never sell, they told her, because "women regard cooking as sacred." It took a female editor at Harcourt Brace to look at the hundreds of easy-to-follow recipes wittily pitched at the indentured housewife and say, "Hallelujah!" Since its publication in 1960, Bracken's iconic book, which celebrated the speedy virtues of canned cream-of-mushroom soup and chicken bouillon cubes, has sold more than three million copies. That helped lift her spirits, her daughter, Jo Bracken, said, about her $338 advance.

Bracken had the nerve to say what so many women felt: they liked cooking fine, as long as they didn't have to cook all the time. There was scant takeout in postwar America, no prepared foods, certainly no men rushing home from the office to don an apron and help out. The job of a wife and mother was to put food on the table, three times a day, seven days a week, and not just like it--live for it.

I can't remember ever making a recipe out of these cookbooks, not even in college when I was much more of a cook. They were too interesting as little bites of laugher. For example, a two-page dissertation on "The Leftover" speaks to me again today, timelessly:

Some women can keep a leftover going like an eight-day clock. Their Sunday's roast becomes Monday's hash, which becomes Tuesday's Stuffed Peppers, which eventually turn up as Tamale Pie, and so on, until it disappears or Daddy does. These people will even warm up stale cake and serve it with some sort of a sauce, as some sort of a pudding.

But when you hate to cook, you don't do this. You just go around thinking you ought to. So, much as you dislike that little glass jar half full of Chicken a la King, you don't throw it away, because that would be wasteful. Anyway, you read somewhere that you can put spoonfuls of it into tiny three-cornered pastry affairs and serve them hot, as hors d'oeuvres.

Actually, you know, deep down, that you never will. . . . But you still can't quite bring yourself to dispose of it! So you put it in the refrigerator, and there it stays, moving slowly toward the rear as it is displaced by other little glass jars half full of leftover ham loaf and other things. And there it remains until refrigerator-cleaning day, at which time you gather it up along with its little fur-bearing friends, and, with a great lightening of spirit, throw it away.

When I read this passage out loud to Paul, he reminded me that it's more often he who throws away the little fur-bearing friends, and moreover, that it was he who had just made a delicious caldo verde soup as well as a perfect pan of cornbread, smartly finding a recipe that used the masa harina I'd gotten him to buy (it only comes in large quantities) for a dish I once made that I can't even remember any more. (Nobody needs large quantities of masa harina unless they are in the tamale-making business.)

We've come a long way, baby. Happy new year.

An uncelebrated anniversary

Today is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the importation of slaves into the United States. Did you know that? Historian Eric Foner offers an explanation of both why it's too much of an embarrassment to celebrate and why it's too important to ignore.

Let us imagine that the African slave trade had continued in a legal and open manner well into the 19th century. It is plausible to assume that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans would have been brought into the country.

This most likely would have resulted in the “democratization” of slavery as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to purchase slaves, along with a further increase in Southern political power thanks to the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. These were the very reasons advanced by South Carolina’s political leaders when they tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.

More slaves would also have meant heightened fear of revolt and ever more stringent controls on the slave population. It would have reinforced Southerners’ demands to annex to the United States areas suitable for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Central America. Had the importation of slaves continued unchecked, the United States could well have become the hemispheric slave-based empire of which many Southerners dreamed.

Jan. 1, 1808, is worth commemorating not only for what it directly accomplished, but for helping to save the United States from a history even more terrible than the Civil War that eventually rid our country of slavery.

Professor Jack Balkin adds some thoughts about the constitutional bases upon which Congress acted.

Bright ideas

Thanks to the Carrboro Citizen for including Orange County's adoption of a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness among its 10 "best ideas of 2007."

Meanwhile down in Dallas, an inspirational former corporate executive leads their efforts to end chronic homelessnes.

For inquiring minds, a trusted source

Congrats to Paul and ibiblio.org for ranking right up there with the CIA as a trusted internet authority! So says the Sunday Times of London.

A Thomas Nast Christmas

Christmas Eve 1862, as seen in Harper's Weekly, January 1863.

More.

Have a mod Christmas!

George Smart's Triangle Modernist Houses just gets better and better.

Tackling chronic homelessness in L.A.

"Project 50" aims to take the 50 most vulnerable homeless off of Skid Row and put them into permanent supportive housing.

Surveyor Mack Garland pushes on, asking probing questions about health problems and drug use. The answers will be used to create a "vulnerability index," determining who gets housing and who doesn't. To put it bluntly, these questions are meant to identify those most likely to die on these streets in the next year.

Garland also snaps a picture so his group can later locate the 50 fortunate enough to have been determined the most unfortunate and get an apartment.

"You get stuck down here. We're here because we don't accept love and we don't give it," says a man who calls himself "Artist Woods." He's been on the streets for 28 years, he says, ever since he was honorably discharged from the Marines.

Law as magic

Via the Law & Humanities Blog (new to my blogroll, a great find), a fascinating article on the "magical" properties of law, an argument with the Legal Realists who tried to separate the two, to demystify the law, to expose its true roots in raw power. In this essay, Jessie Allen, who teaches law at NYU, draws on the work of anthropologists to argue that there are socially constructive, even socially constitutive ways in which the ritual of law functions like magic.

To anyone interested in law or magic or the rational or the irrational or the transformative power of words, I recommend it.

Modern chairs

As noted by the NYT's personal shopper: "A number of midcentury modern chairs that have long been out of production — some of them for decades — are being produced again, some by new manufacturers."

Not to be confused with Modern Skirts.

R.I.P. Rick Sessions

A guest-post by Jonathan Riehl.

Every once in a blue moon we are lucky enough to encounter people in our lives who seem too good to be true; a combination of kindred spirit and mentor even when there is a difference in age. I learned last week that I’d lost such a friend, Rick Sessions, who ran the Soundhaus hi-fi shop in Durham for many decades. I recall first meeting him when, as a fellow esoteric fan of audio technology, I came to him with an 8-track player for my classic car that needed some repairs; typically, Rick outdid me: He not only fixed the problem but also knew the inventor of the 8-track, and owned a copy of its predecessor: an in-dash 45rpm record player. Who knew!

Over the past five years Rick became a friend and I know his generosity was not exclusive. Almost every time I’d stop in the shop on Broad St., another customer would saunter in with a busted CD player—or a multi-thousand-dollar HD unit—and in his low-key demeanor, he treated us all the same. Rick was a throwback to a bygone age, a general store proprietor out of a John Wayne Western who treated everyone with generosity . . . but would inevitably offer up a sarcastic remark when the previous customer left the shop!

I’m certain there were many others Rick extended his expertise and friendship to, beyond myself. I met many of them. To all the Sessions family, our condolences.

I teach rhetoric at N.C. State, and in Classical terms, we emphasize "ethos," the root idea from which we get our modern idea of "ethics." Rick had it, and the Triangle community has lost not only a community legend, but a good and decent man, a man of rich ethos. Not to mention, someone who kept our turntables turning, was always ready to spin a yarn, and, not least of all, served his nation honorably in wartime, as does his son today.

Marking civil rights history in Durham

Congratulations to the folks in Durham who succeeded the second time around in getting a state historical marker for the site of a civil rights sit-in in 1957.

"I think it's significant because it does illustrate the civil rights movement before Greensboro," said committee member Jeff Broadwater, a history professor at Barton College in Wilson. "Sometimes we think the civil rights movement started with Greensboro."

Durham activists have long argued that the Durham event, coming 2 1/2 years before the Greensboro sit-in, laid much of the groundwork for future civil rights protests.

Creeping up on Christmas

It's been an unusual December so far. Too warm to think about shopping, then finally the time is right for a tree. We find the perfect tree, maybe a bit too easily this year, and then look what happens.

Eric Muller on "Book TV"

Eric Muller gave a talk about his new book, American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II, at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles on December 1. It'll be broadcast tonight at 10 p.m. on C-SPAN2's "Book TV."

Luckily for those of us who are cable-deprived, it'll be available on the "Book TV" web site as well.

Booking the holidays

For book lovers on your list, suggestions from independent book sellers and from the board of directors for the National Book Critics Circle.

The rich get richer.

Sometime last year at one of our Orange County homelessness round tables, I met a young single African American woman who was living at the women's shelter. She'd lost her job in the health care business and so she couldn't make rent any more. At the time I met her, she was working at Chick Fill-A, but that wasn't enough to pay for shelter. All she had was her car, and it needed repairs totaling a couple hundred dollars that she didn't have.

Can't your family help? I asked naively. After all, that's what I would do--ask for help. (Wouldn't you?) They sympathized but there wasn't any way they could help, she said.

I thought about her again when I read Henry Louis Gates' op-ed in the NYT last month. Looking for "clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality," Gates writes,

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

And so, Gates concludes, "The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth." Forty acres and a mule would would have made a difference. Is he right?

Comes now Melinda Miller, a Ph.D. student in economics at the University of Michigan, to test this proposition. She has studied the records of families of former slaves of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma who did receive property settlements because the treaty negotiations required it. Her conclusion:

I find the racial gap in land ownership, farm size, and investment in long-term capital projects is smaller in the Cherokee Nation than in the southern United States. The advantages Cherokee freedmen experience in these areas translate into smaller wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than in the South. Additionally, Cherokee freedmen had higher absolute levels of wealth and higher levels of income than southern freedmen. These results together suggest that access to free land had a considerable positive benefit on former slaves.

Via historian Ralph Luker, who can't help noticing that Miller is a student of economics, not history.

What's new in law and literature

A hearty helping of new books on law and literature. Via Legal History Blog.

Restaurant wrap-up

With the exception of the Flying Burrito, which has sadly entered into historical memory, Matt Barrett's review of local restaurants pretty much hits our own favorites.

Leave home for the holidays and enjoy a night out!

"Complete streets"

The term "complete street" is something I first heard from my colleague Ed Harrison. It means a street that accommodates more than cars and trucks. According to the New Urban News, Charlotte is more complete than most.

Green and affordable

From the Utne Reader, a profile of an affordable housing development where the residents have affordable utility bills.

Viking Terrace’s green upgrades, which were completed last summer, offer its melting pot of low-income and formerly homeless residents access to a world commonly reserved for companies and individuals with the financial means to go green. Affordable housing developments like this one are springing up across the country, showing that green homes can and should be built for everyone, not just because they’re good for the environment, but also because they’re healthier, more comfortable, and—yes—more affordable.

Check your pulse.

By Lisa Scheer.

Debating: a legacy

Denzel Washington is starring in a movie set in 1935 about the great debating team at Wiley College, a black college, now a struggling HBC, in Marshall, Texas. I hope the movie lifts its fortunes. One of Wiley's founders was former slave and Reconstruction legislator Meshack Roberts.

The Carrollton Massacre: One of many forgotten histories

At long last, sometime this summer my essay on Elizabeth Spencer's novel The Voice at the Back Door and the Carrollton Massacre of 1886 was published. It came out in the Winter/Spring 2005-06 issue of the Mississippi Quarterly (Vol. 59, Nos. 1-2), which was published this summer. I recently obtained a .pdf copy to share here with you.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about visiting Carrollton, where the scene of this tragic violence, the county courthouse, still stands. I gave a talk about it as a Hutchins Lecture at UNC last year. The reaction in the blogosphere has been very interesting. A couple of comments to that "field trip" post:

"I live in Carrollton and I don't appreciate you coming into our town and digging up racial history and trying to stir up racial tensions."

"I grew up in North Carrollton and I don't recall ever hearing about the incident at the courthouse that I just read about in the 'field trip' story. I must admit that I am intrigued."

And quite recently,

"As a greatX4 grandaughter of the Confederacy, born and raised in the South of the 1950's, brought up with mint juleps and sitting on the veranda... I just want to say thank you. For far too long the truth of the horrid things that happenned has been hidden or twisted so badly that it could hardly be called truth at all.

"I have my own wound that must be healed... the lynching of L.Q. Ivy in Union County, MS. My grandfather was there when it occurred along with a crowd of several hundred and told me the story when I was a child. I was horrified then and am disgusted now at man's inhumanity to his fellow man."

I've had others say they knew, or kind of knew, about terrible violence way back when in the southern towns where they grew up, things that it wasn't polite to talk about. A crucial part of the rhetoric of the Lost Cause was to ensure that those stories didn't see the light of day.

The story of what happened in Wilmington in 1898 is an important example of the revised understanding of this history that is going on today. What used to be called a "race riot" is now, thanks to a study initiated by the North Carolina legislature, understood as a coup--a violent overthrow of legitimate governmental authority by the conservative white establishment. Al Brophy's work on what happened in Tulsa a little later is another example.

There are lots of stories. Nicholas Lehmann's book Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War provides a larger context to what happened in Carrollton and across the South. From a recent review of the book,

Nearly one month after resigning as governor of Mississippi, Adelbert Ames told a New York Times reporter in April 1876 that he did not blame the northern public for dismissing reports of fraud and violence in southern elections. "Before I went South," the Maine-born, former Union general explained, " ... I do not think that any amount of human testimony could have induced me to believe in such a condition of society as exists in Mississippi." Ames knew that it was difficult for northerners to believe that heavily armed paramilitary organizations would scatter peaceful political gatherings, that ballot boxes were stolen and burned, that public officials could be gunned down in broad daylight in the center of town, and that battles erupted between white and black militias in response to local elections.

The electoral violence of the mid-1870s remains perplexing. Although historians have documented the violent counterrevolution that undermined Reconstruction, the general public knows little of these events and seems skeptical that white terrorists could have so brazenly subverted democratic governance in the United States. Nicholas Lemann's intention in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War is to bring this forgotten story to a wider audience and explain why southern democracy and civil rights were snuffed out.

Stephen Cresswell's Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi After Reconstruction, 1877-1917 also contributes to this new understanding specifically as to Mississippi.

And so, history and memory continue to tussle each other about. Writes Ira Berlin in a recent essay,

Slavery lives--and will continue to live--in both history and memory. But the time has come to put the two together, to join history and memory, to embrace slavery's complex history, to accept the force of slavery's memory, and thereby elevate both. For only by testing memory against history can a sense of a collective past be sustained. Perhaps by incorporating slavery's memory into slavery's history--and vice versa--Americans, white and black, can have a past that is both memorable and--at last--past.

"American Slavery in History and Memory," in Slavery, Resistance, Freedom, ed. Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock (Oxford 2006).

UPDATE 12/03: More on the lynching of L.Q. Ivy mentioned above. Warning: not for the faint.

Curbing the urge to purge

The campaign is over, the Ruffin symposium is over, Thanksgiving is over, it's December already. I'm in a maintenance mood; took a load of books to the PTA Thift Shop today to clear out space for the ones stacked on the floor. I rarely buy books for their long-term value; they're to be read, or at least read at, and available for research. Some, to be sure, I need to have around for unexplainable reasons--old grad school books mostly. But more often, when I feel pretty certain I'm not going to need a book again, it's no pain to give it away.

I almost gave away my Everyman's Library copy of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Other Writings. But as I landed on the last page, I decided I wasn't ready to part with it:

Think not thy time short in this World since the World itself is not long. The created World is but a small parenthesis in Eternity, and a short interposition for a time between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it. And if we should allow of the old Tradition, that the World should last Six Thousand years, it could scarce have the name of old, since the first man lived near a sixth part thereof, and seven Methuselas would exceed its whole duration. However to palliate the shortness of our Lives, and somewhat to compensate our brief term in this World, it's good to know as much as we can of it, and also so far as possibly in us lieth to hold such a Theory of times past, as though we had seen the same. He who hath thus considered the World, as also how therein things long past have been answered by things present, how matters in one Age have been acted over in another, and how there is nothing new under the Sun may conceive himself in some manner to have lived from the beginning and be as old as the world; and if he should still live on, 'twould be but the same thing.

--"Christian Morals," sec. XXIX

Virginia Woolf in her own way suggests why I might want to hold on to old Thomas Browne.

Accustomed as we are to strip a whole page of its sentences and crush their meaning out in one grasp, the obstinate resistance which a page of Urn Burial offers at first trips and blinds us. . . . He is an amateur . . . has no call to conciliate his reader. . . . Here we approach the doubtful region--the region of beauty. . . . But why beauty should have the effect upon us that it does, the strange serene confidence that it inspires in us, none can say. Most people have tried and perhaps one of the invariable properties of beauty is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering one must make; some act we must dedicate, if only to move across the room and turn the rose in the jar, which, by the way, has dropped its petals.

--"Reading" (1919)

Another Ocracoke Thanksgiving

Ten years ago, Paul started a family tradition that he'd enjoyed as a child himself: Thanksgiving on Ocracoke. This year's trip was especially memorable--a bear crossing the road in front of us on the way to the Swan Quarter ferry, a baby harbor seal in apparent distress (or possibly not) on the south point of the island, another great benefit concert for the Ocrafolk Festival. This year we also had the treat of being the house guests of Peter, Mary, and Michael Vankevich, who are transitioning to becoming full-time O'cokers.

We all had a lot to be thankful for.

Remembering Thomas Ruffin

As a prologue to the symposium "The Perils of Public Homage: State v. Mann and Thomas Ruffin in History and Memory," which takes place tomorrow, Sanford Levinson, Eric Muller, and I were on WUNC's "The State of Things" today.

The symposium runs all day tomorrow.

A useable past

Dateline Edenton, N.C.:

Michael Montaro, who owns the Taylor Theatre on Broad Street, has appealed the Edenton Town Council's decision on the Southern Bank's expansion project at the corner of Queen and Broad, next to his property. "Montaro specifically objects to the demolition of the Furlough building that would in turn demolish the Taylor Theatre's rear 5' by 20' structure, used during segregation as the 'historic black bathrooms.'"

To the courthouse--finally

After a painstaking restoration project that took an awfully long time, the Chowan County Courthouse reopened in October 2004. I said at the time that I wished I had been there for the reopening. Today, finally, I got there. They leave it open during the day. You can walk in and imagine what it was like to be in court there in the nineteenth century, or eighteenth (the building was built in 1767). Upstairs was a grand ballroom where President Monroe was lavishly entertained in 1819. They partied so hard then and on other occasions that by the latter 19th century it became prudent to add columns to the courtroom below.



This is the courtroom where, in the fall of 1829, John Mann was found guilty of assault upon a hired slave named Lydia, an opinion that Thomas Ruffin for the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned.

Thank you, Chapel Hill!

When I won my seat on the Chapel Hill Town Council four years ago, I felt buoyed, uplifted, carried forward on waves of support of so many folks who believed in me, had confidence that I could do the job. That was a great feeling.

This Tuesday's win was even more gratifying and humbling. My reelection--with would not have happened without the help of so many--says that the voters believe I've been true to my campaign pledges and have worked hard to make them a reality. And more: that my continued work on the Council is valuable and important. I am overwhelmed and honored to have earned the confidence of the voters of Chapel Hill again.

I will indeed continue to work on homelessness, affordable housing, neighborhood protection, historic preservation, environmental preservation, sustainable development, and issues of social justice. I will continue to count on you all to let me know what's important to you as we all work together to keep Chapel Hill the progressive, inclusive place that it has been for generations, even as it has changed and grown.

1957, fifty years later

Although the 1960s bore the brunt of the civil rights movement, with bombings in Birmingham, violent protests in Selma, and on and on, the 1950s were not all sock hops and saddle loafers. Fifty years later, scholars are convening at Binghamton University to discuss "Black Liberation and the Spirit of '57." The major papers are online.

David Garrow's treatment of Little Rock exposes President Eisenhower's utter lack of commitment to the cause of civil rights. I recommend it.

But if you can only find the time for one of these essays, I highly recommend Robert Darden's “Sam Cooke, ‘You Send Me,’ and the American Highway." Darden deftly links the infiltration of black music into white popular culture to a dramatic rise in black mobility thanks to a combination of the new interstate highways (authorized by Eisenhower from his sickbed in 1956) and the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When Cooke created his own record label following the success of "You Send Me," one of his first projects was with the Pilgrim Travelers. But long before that day, their first hit back in 1948 had been "Standing on the Highway," which included the mournful line,

She left me standing out on the highway
Left me wondering
Which way to go.

The promise of the Federal Aid Highway Act, which ultimately would be fulfilled in a way that not Eisenhower . . . and not even Sam Cooke could imagine, would provide the answer to the Travelers' question. Which way to go? It was another small stap on the road towards an America someday that lives up to the considerable promise of its own origins, where all men and women are free.

[Peter] Guralnik calls his biography of Cooke, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, and the title is taken from the Langston Hughes poem of the same name:

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred. --Langston Hughes, "Dream Boogie"

In this, at least, the intersection of the on-going struggle for civil rights for all people and a relatively obscure piece of federal legislation, worked together to see that the dream would not be forever deferred.

It took me a little while to realize that I know Bob Darden. He was a master's student in journalism at the University of North Texas when I was an undergraduate journalism minor. We often worked the rim together. I believe Doug Starr was usually in the slot.

(Via Cliopatria.)

Joe Herzenberg

I don't know if Joe recognized me this afternoon in his hospital bed as I held his hand and told him to rest peacefully, his friends were there with him. I was there with Kathie Young as well as Mark Chilton, Mike Nelson, Mark Kleinschmidt, Lenny Rogoff, a few others I didn't know, as we all held hands as rabbi Jennifer Feldman offered prayers for the dying in Hebrew and in English. Joe died at about 6:15 this evening.

Joe was such a friend and was so inspirational to so many of us. The last time I talked to him, it was about the marker for Peace and Justice Plaza. I asked him what he thought a good date would be to celebrate the installation of the marker. He thought that Easter Week would be as good as any. During Easter Week 1964, some civil rights protesters, trying to persuade the town council to pass a public accommodations ordinance, staged a fast there at the base of the flagpole.

I hope we can have that celebration next year in Joe's memory.

UPDATE 10/29: Thanks to Mark Chilton for posting this obituary.

UPDATE 10/30: N&O's obituary.

UPDATE 10/31: A moving tribute from historian and blogger Ralph Luker.

"It Takes a Candidate."

Last night the Carolina Women's Center sponsored a great talk by Jennifer Lawless, professor of political science at Brown and a recent candidate in a Democratic primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Rhode Island. Mixing reports from her own unsuccessful (but energetic!) run for office with conclusions gained from researching some 4,000 men and women eligible for public office around the country, she argued persuasively that although women candidates do not face substantial barriers in terms of fundraising and support once they make the decision to run for office, the thinking patterns behind the decision to run are very different for women than they are for men. Given a man and a woman of equal qualifications, the woman is likely to say she is not qualified--or not yet--whereas the man is ready to jump in. Even men with much lesser qualifications are likely to downplay the importance prior experience, claiming that "vision" and "passion" are more important.

I had the privilege of introducing Dr. Lawless as she spoke from her book It Takes A Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Public Office.

Project Homeless Connect was a great success.

Thanks, thanks to everybody, especially organizer Jamie Rohe, who worked so hard to make yesterday's first Orange County Project Homeless Connect a great success! By the end of the day, 100 people had received services. There were about 150 volunteers. Clearly this community has the will and the energy to commit its resources to ending and preventing homelessness.

We were honored to have Philip Mangano, the inspirational head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, lead us off with encouraging words. Martha Are of the state Department of Health and Human Services, homelessness coordinator for the state, was also on hand.

But the truly honored guests were the folks we had the privilege to serve.

Dry as dust

Droughts sneak up on you. It's hard to describe how it makes you feel to go for so long without rain. You might never think about it, but it can't be denied or avoided. With every bit as disastrous a potential as a hurricane, still as long as you aren't paying attention to the dead dogwoods and the parched and withering shrubs you can pretty much ignore it. That is, as long as you have water in the faucet.

As of now, according to the update Ed Kirwin of OWASA gave the Town Council last night, our water supply is 50 percent full, or 50 percent empty. Kirwin prefers to think of it as 50 percent full. He shared some very interesting charts. He is certain we will "manage" this drought the way we did in 2002. Still there is cause for grave concern.

We're into Stage 2 restrictions on water use. We're talking about ways to fit or retrofit our homes with systems to recapture waste water, rain water, rigging things up every which way to keep from draining our lakes of precious drinking water.

The third world has been dealing with water management issues for awhile now. What's happening in our part of the world is, by comparison, a wake-up call. It's not like the fires in southern California, but it's just as alarming.

Hard landing for Flying Burrito

Paul noticed it said "closed for renovations" yet there didn't look like any activity was going on. He was worried. He was right. Phil Campbell--the man who was the Flying Burrito--has sold the restaurant.

What will our lives be like without the Flying Burrito? The story says it will come back under new ownership. But it won't be the same. Phil had recently opened another restaurant up in Hillsborough, the Flying Fish. It was trademark Phil, excellent seafood prepared in his unique style. Last time we went there, it was the same restaurant . . . only new ownership and a different name! It was not the same at all.

I could tell the story of my 20 years in Chapel Hill through Burrito meals: hot dates over hot food; watching the first Gulf War unfold on TV in the bar; meals with a toddler knowing it was a place where screaming is OK; graduate school get-togethers; hot food eating contests with Paul's more macho crowd; the place where a mother could explain to her daughter how to root for "our Tar Heels"; the place where father hands down to son the lore of rock and roll; the reliable alternative for dinner when you're too busy to cook (thinking you'll get the cheap burrito but splurging for the seafood special). And beyond that, conversations with Phil, who cares about food and cares even more about people.

What a shock and a loss for Chapel Hill. Not even a chance for a last meal and a farewell toast! Whatever you're doing next, Phil, we wish you well.

On choosing not to know

Listen as our friend (and senior producer of WUNC's "The State of Things") Susan Davis explains her choice not to undergo a certain genetic test. Do you think she made the right decision?

American Inquisition

Congratulations to Eric Muller on the publication of his new book on the subject of the Japanese American internment.

Leaded lips

How astonishing to learn that some lipsticks contain lead!

I'm sticking with Burt's Bees.

Thomas Ruffin: eyewitness to history

While searching in the Southern Historical Collection for something else, I came across a fascinating letter from Supreme Court Judge Thomas Ruffin to his family, an eyewitness account of the fire that destroyed the North Carolina Capitol building in 1831. So urgent was the occasion that he didn't date the letter with the date, but with the time of day (9 a.m.). Realizing that the building was going to be completely destroyed, happy that by valiant efforts the public records were removed before it was too late, he was most distressed about the certain loss of the marble statue of George Washington: "There is no man alive, who can replace it!"

The state of North Carolina had commissioned this impressive statue by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova in 1815. It was not replaced until 1970, when a duplicate was placed in the rotunda of the rebuilt Capitol. Meanwhile in 1857, a bronze statue of Washington, from a mold of the statue by Jean-Antione Houdon that stands in the rotunda of Virginia's capitol, was erected on Union Square. It was the first statue placed on the grounds of the North Carolina capitol.

History, not in black and white.

Charles B. Aycock, venerated as North Carolina's "education governor," was among the state leaders who engineered the Wilmington coup of 1898, ushering in white supremacy for a new century.

Over at ProfsLawBlog, guest blogger Eric Muller has some interesting thoughts about how ("if at all") we ought to honor such a "complex" historical figure.

UPDATE: Responses to the News & Observer article to which Eric was responding.

Fallingwater in 3-D

Via Greenespace reader Justin Watt, a most amazing computer-animated video, etc. of the construction of Fallingwater from the ground up.

Amazing.

Seeking volunteers for Project Homeless Connect

On Thursday, October 25, Project Homeless Connect will take place at the Hargraves Center. This exciting event is sponsored by the Project to End Homelessness in Orange County. Similar events in Wake and Durham County will take place the same day.

Project Homeless Connect is not an "information fair." It is a time and a place where people who are homeless or at risk of being homeless can get "connected"--right then and there--to services they need: housing and employment assistance; health and dental care; counseling for mental health, developmental disabilities, and substance abuse; Social Security assistance; and more.

The event is supported by grants from the Triangle United Way and the Stroud Roses Foundation, as well as by the Town of Chapel Hill, which, in addition to donating the Hargraves space, is allowing town employees to take paid time off to volunteer on the 25th. My hope is that its success will be a model for new ways in which we can serve the homeless year-round.

Jamie Rohe is heading up the project, bringing to it tremendous energy and dedication. Now is the time when she needs folks to volunteer. I'm passing on the following from Jamie:

Volunteers Needed to Assist Homeless

Volunteers are needed at Project Homeless Connect Orange County, a one-day, one-stop center to be held from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, to provide homeless people with a broad range of services including housing, employment, health, dental and mental health care, social service benefits, disability and veterans’ benefits, legal services, meals, and personal care (haircuts and foot care).

Organizers anticipate serving more than 150 homeless people at the Orange County event, with the help of hundreds of volunteers. The event will be held at the Hargraves Community Center, 216 N. Roberson St.

Volunteers are needed to escort homeless guests through the event, serve as greeters, conduct intake and exit interviews, serve as parking attendants, direct foot traffic, and set up before and clean up after the event.

If you are interested in participating or would like to learn more about the event, please contact Meredith Costa, mcosta@hiddenvoices.org or (919) 923-2559.

Please consider donating an hour or two of your time to this worthy event.

Sad anniversary

Two years ago today, a young Chapel Hill woman took her own life not far from our house, over in Jones Park.

Her family is inviting people to drop by the park any time today. Here is their invitation.

Please join us for a celebration of Chelsea Huff's life on Tuesday, October 2nd, the second anniversary of Chelsea's death.

We are not planning a group celebration because it is so difficult to find a time when we can all come together. So, we will set up a small memorial for Chelsea by Morgan Creek in Jones Park. You can visit anytime during the day or evening.

Chelsea was very proud of her Native American heritage so we are honoring her Cherokee spirit this year. Native Americans believe that baskets serve as a link between the material and the spirit world, a passageway by which the two worlds become one. We are creating a basket for Chelsea this year, weaving in some of her favorite things as well as photographs of her. Similar to the Day of the Dead ceremonies in Mexico, we hope she will be lured to the park and join us in the celebration. We will have slips of paper if you would like to write something to Chelsea's spirit to be placed in the basket. If you cannot come to the park, you could email your thoughts and we will place them in the basket.

We understand if you are not able to visit the park on Tuesday. We ask that, instead, you light a candle for Chelsea to honor her wonderful life.

Thank you,

Tim, Hjordis, Whitney, Matt and Booda

Directions to Jones Park:

If you are on South Columbia Street, leaving UNC, turn left at Merritt's Grill, onto Purefoy. If you are on South Columbia Street, going to UNC, after you go over Hwy 54, turn right at Merritt's Grill onto Purefoy. Once on Purefoy, take a left then take a right at the entrance of Jones Park. If you walk into the park, you will come to a clearing. Originally there was an observation deck, which is where Chelsea died. That deck has been removed so we will set up a small memorial where it used to stand by Morgan Creek.

WE HOPE YOU CAN JOIN US TO HONOR SWEET CHELSEA

Carrboro in Norfolk

UNC's own Jock Lauderer of the journalism school was the star of the NNA session yesterday called "Filling the gap--a new kind of community 'paper.'" He and his colleague Andy Bechtel talked about their experience creating and editing the Carrboro Commons. He talked about the rush the students experienced as they realized that their class was not dealing in hypothetical news stories--they were actually, really and truly, going online! Jock is running the show alone this semester, but in the spring once again he and Andy will turn their reporting and editing classes loose in and upon Carrboro.

They and others in this session stressed to these mostly non-daily newspaper editors and publishers the need to have an online presence that does more than just "shovel" the content of the print edition onto the web. Use the strength of the web--its immediacy--to your advantage, they urged. Break the news as it happens. Follow up later, but be the first to get it out there. You are not "scooping yourselves" when you do that, these presenters said. Rather you're bolstering your own audience.

Presenter Elizabeth K. Hansen of Eastern Kentucky University illustrated the point with a photo by Jack Delano taken in 1940 in Brockton, Mass. It's of a newspaper office posting headlines of news that had broken since the last edition.

Off to Norfolk

I'm heading out today to Norfolk, with my mother, for the annual convention of the National Newspaper Association. Three years ago I joined her in Denver, where she won a lifetime achievement award. This year, we are just hanging out.

Endangered: Paschal House, mid-century treasure

"I personally think this is, flat out, the greatest modern house in North Carolina," says Raleigh architect Frank Harmon about the house built in 1950, designed by James Fitzgibbon for George and Beth Paschal.

It happens to sit on seven developable parcels in inside-the-beltline Raleigh.

The family recognizes the importance of the house, which is on the National Register; but they are asking $5.6 million. Preservation North Carolina is on a rescue mission--would be willing to sell off parts of the property if the house could be preserved.

See photo gallery for an idea of what could be lost.

Scheer fun

Lisa Scheer has been to the fair.

Queen Anne's lace

Queen Anne's lace is an exotic invasive, a cousin of the carrot that shouldn't be here. But in August, when everything but the crape myrtle is wilting, it is lovely in its sturdiness. Here it is going on October, but we've had such a protracted, dry summer that it made perfect sense to receive this beautiful little poem in my inbox today, published in the Christian Science Monitor, sent to me by the author.

Queen Anne's Lace

Terri Erickson teaches at Salem College. She's the niece of Stephen White, of Stephen White Graphics in Carr Mill Mall. He did the cover art for her book.

Fair Trial Initiative

What a pleasure to be there tonight for Mark Kleinschmidt and the Fair Trial Initiative as they launch a tradition. At tonight's fundraiser at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center, they gave the first annual Kirk Osborne award, to honor a great advocate, sadly taken from us. The award went to Buddy Connor. I didn't know Kirk and don't know Buddy, but the passion with which both of them, and all of these people, approach their difficult jobs is inspiring.

Then we heard a talk by Stuart Taylor Jr., who knew Kirk well, most recently as Reade Seligmann's lawyer. With Robert KC Johnson he has just published a book on the Duke case.

He said one of Osborne's memorable sayings was that luck was the combination of preparation and opportunity. I like that. It's kind of like the saying attributed to Thomas Jefferson: The harder I work, the luckier I get.

Happy Constitution Day.

The signers of the Constitution, including a few from North Carolina.

Extreme weather

This afternoon's rain is such a surprise it's almost like snow! Today I was doing some historical research that led me (as it has many times lately) into genealogical sites. I found this item reposted from a 1995 genealogical society newsletter from Jefferson, Tennessee:

As we wander in the archives and wonder about our ancestors, here is another item of interest about our past. It is another aspect of the our ancestor quest. I am going to pass on a tidbit of Info 1816: The year without a summer.

As a result of the eruption of Mt. Tambour Volcano in Java 1815, 12,000 island residents lost their lives. The Volcano is also to blame for an unusual weather pattern the following year in North America, resulting in mass migrations of people trying to avoid the ensuing climatic changes.

The summer of 1816 was unusually cold, with killing frosts and even snowfall destroying crops throughout the United States. June and July were the coldest months, 19 states had snowfall in June! There were no fall harvests; animals and people starved; wild animals ravaged the frontier. Not understanding the meteorological causes, people blamed the wrath of God for their hardships. Some, destitute and despondent, committed suicide.

By 1817 the climate had returned to normal. However, many had moved to warmer parts of the country and numerous farmers left for the cities to go into industrial work.

If you have no explanation for why your ancestor may have migrated or you can not determine exactly when it happened just sometime around 1815-1820 consider that this event may have been the cause.

So I did a little more investigating and found out more about "The Year There Was No Summer."

I've also learned that there was an earthquake in Edenton in December-January 1811-12.

The long civil rights movement

For several years, UNC history professor Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has been arguing that the received version of what constituted the "civil rights movement" is impoverished:

The civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested. Civil rights memorials jostle with the South's ubiquitous monuments to its Confederate past. Exemplary scholarship and documentaries abound, and participants have produced wave after wave of autobiographical accounts, at least two hundred to date. Images of the movement appear and reappear each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and during Black History Month. Yet remembrance is always a form of forgetting, and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement—distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture—distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.

Centering on what Bayard Rustin in 1965 called the "classical" phase of the struggle, the dominant narrative chronicles a short civil rights movement that begins with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, proceeds through public protests, and culminates with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then comes the decline. After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the 1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-called white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one's ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now.

Martin Luther King Jr. is this narrative's defining figure—frozen in 1963, proclaiming "I have a dream" during the march on the Mall. Endlessly reproduced and selectively quoted, his speeches retain their majesty yet lose their political bite. We hear little of the King who believed that "the racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem" and who attacked segregation in the urban North. Erased altogether is the King who opposed the Vietnam War and linked racism at home to militarism and imperialism abroad. Gone is King the democratic socialist who advocated unionization, planned the Poor People's Campaign, and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers' strike.

By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objectives, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement. It ensures the status of the classical phase as a triumphal moment in a larger American progress narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas. It prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.

It's nice to see that Hall's project has found serious traction. Harvard's Charles Warren Center is sponsoring a workshop on "Race-Making and Law-Making in 'the Long Civil Rights Movement.'"

A local footnote: At Monday night's town council meeting, we approved plans for a granite paver to be placed in front of the Old Post Office on Franklin Street to mark the space with the name Peace and Justice Plaza. Three long-time social activists, Joe and Lucy Straley and Charlotte Adams, will be honored by having their names carved on the paver. There is plenty of room for other names in the future. These three people were exceptional in their devotion to social justice, in the sheer number of hours they spent in active protest.

But of course, they were not the only ones. One notable moment of social protest was the period of 1963-64 when, despite the determined activism of Chapel Hill college and high school students in particular, the town council not once but twice refused to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. During Holy Week 1964, protesters positioned themselves in front of the Post Office and stayed there day and night for a week, fasting.


The three in the center--Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, and Braxton Foushee--reflect upon their experiences as students and protesters in Chapel Hill in 1963-64. On the right is UNC student Erika Stallings. It was a privilege to moderate this panel, to hear the panelists' brave stories.

In today's story about Peace and Justice Plaza in the Daily Tar Heel, Laura Bickford, a current-day protester, complains that "It's unfair for this one moment 40 years ago to be memorialized when there are a lot of other struggles that are going on." But that is precisely not the point. This is not a marker that commemorates the past only. By giving this space the name of "Peace and Justice Plaza" and by honoring three notable activists with the explicit acknowledgment that others may be honored in the future, the town is acknowledging its part in the long and unfinished civil rights movement. We are saying that protest is a welcome and healthy part of civic discourse--even when (as in the 1963-64 episode) it turns out that the town is on the wrong side of history.

This American Carrboro

Paul has posted this great parody of "This American Life" that Tom Maxwell and John Ensslin have done, "This Carrboro Life." (Duncan, you would have gotten an email thank you by now, but your mail address bounced, even though I used "reply"!)

Shrimp and grits . . . not

OK, so it's passe and kitch, I still like the Silver Palate recipes. On Saturday night I served the classic Basque Salad to guests. "Like shrimp and grits only with rice," said one. Just so. And (dare I say it in Chapel Hill, home of Crooks Corner which has cornered the market on that one) just as good.

Destination Chapel Hill

Laurie Paolicelli, for the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau, is spearheading an effort to have Chapel Hill selected as one of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Distinctive Destinations for 2008. (Hillsborough is one for 2007.) She asked me to write a letter in support of the nomination. Here is what I wrote.

To the National Trust:

In November 1829, William Ruffin wrote from Chapel Hill to his father, Thomas Ruffin, who was soon to begin his distinguished career on the North Carolina Supreme Court, with a complaint about his new college town:

I think that the Trustees were imprudent in their choice of a site for the University. Instead of situating it in a town where there is good society or at least respectable with whom the students might have intercourse, they picked upon a spot at the time almost uninhabited and entirely destitute of persons with whom a gentleman ought to have intercourse. . . . The Trustees chose the spot where young men were to be trained up in the paths of science and morality, but left it open for vagabonds. If they wished a retired place aloof from the world, secluded from all intercourse with men—they should have permitted no one to settle on it. Whereas they have let all come who wished until finally half the villains in the state have congregated and fixed upon this place as one in which they can spend their time idly and at their ease.

Young Mr. Ruffin, no model student, should not be taken as a reliable witness. His father had pulled him out of a private college in Baltimore in favor of the state school that was both less expensive and closer to his watchful eye in Hillsborough. William’s sense of a clear difference between the town and the gown is accurate; but by the early 21st century, I believe most people have come to find the tension to be creative, healthy, and productive.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was “the first state university to open its doors.” I understand that folks down in Georgia had their charter earlier, but Chapel Hill brought more determination to the project. The physical campus, a beautiful space full of old buildings still in use surrounded by giant canopy trees, offers fascinating glimpses into a rich past, “rich” as in bountiful and “rich” as in fraught with the complexities that mark the entire American South. On McCorkle Place is an obelisk to the Rev. Joseph Caldwell, first president of the university. This marker was erected in 1904 to replace one considered not fine enough. The old marker was removed to the African American cemetery, where it marks the burial place of three slaves, including November Caldwell, who had belonged to Joseph Caldwell. Professor Tim McMillan offers a walking tour of the campus that reveals other interesting traces of the university’s racial history.

The African American cemetery and its white counterpart are next to the Center for Dramatic Art, which houses the Paul Green Theater, named for the first southern playwright to gain national attention. The original Playmakers Theater, which has just been renovated, is in an 1851 building that is a National Historic Landmark. A couple of blocks away, on beautiful Franklin Street with its large historic houses (within one of Chapel Hill’s three National Register districts), is the Horace Williams House, named for a UNC philosophy professor and home to the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill. Thomas Wolfe’s portrait hangs in the Dialectic Chambers in New West (actually an old building, recently renovated), and his shadow is everywhere.

When I came to Chapel Hill as a graduate student twenty years ago this fall, I was drawn to the university for its academic strengths, of course—but also to the town itself for its reputation as a beacon of light within North Carolina and the South. Thanks to the work of Frank Porter Graham, Howard Odum, and many other university figures, Chapel Hill has a secure reputation as a place where progressive ideas are born and progressive ideals are lived out. It has been my privilege to participate as a public official in the thoughtful evolution of this thriving and inclusive town. For me, the pleasures of living and working in Chapel Hill are inexhaustible. I am convinced that the history and character of Chapel Hill, as reflected in its built environment and the generosity of its citizens, are more than enough to make it a Distinctive Destination for 2008. I hope you will agree.

Homelessness plan moves into action phase

At tonight's meeting of the executive team of the Partnership to End Homelessness in Orange County, we will declare ourselves off to the start of our 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness. We haven't hired a plan coordinator yet--finalizing the job description is one of our agenda items--but there's already real work going on that is having an impact on homeless people. Tonight we will hear from some of the people doing this work:

• Jamie Rohie, heading up the planning for Project Homeless Connect on October 25
• Liz Parham, executive director of the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, to talk about the "Real Change from Spare Change" initiative planed for Franklin Street
• Terry Allebaugh and Julie Ransford, from Durham's Housing for New Hope, to talk about the street outreach program that is already under way

Project Homeless Connect, a one-day, "one-stop" offering of services to the homeless, is happening because of a $3,500 grant that the staff working group for the Orange County Partnership secured this spring. That represents just one way in which the 10-year plan promises to enable us to leverage new resources as well as to better coordinate existing ones.

Since November 2004, when the community held a forum on homelessness that attracted more than 300 people, it has been clear that there's a tremendous amount of public interest in working constructively to help the homeless in our midst. In September 2005, we kicked off the project of creating our 10-year plan. "Our challenge is to make an enduring difference," said Mayor Foy at that meeting. "It is possible to have a society as rich as our based on moral values that does not accept that people will be homeless."

Now it is time to act. Please give your support in whatever way you can to our "bold proposal."

Labor Day weekend round-up

The celebration of the 65th reunion of the Navy B-1 Band in Chapel Hill was very moving.

Farewell to a man whose powerful influence on my life was unknown until he died.

The Loray Mill in Gastonia is finally going to get the historical marker it deserves.

Paul has a nice Labor Day poem in yesterday's N&O.