The very long civil rights movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denis Cosgrove

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

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

In that quest, he was eminently successful. His warmth, humour, kindness, delight in children, theirs in him, and intellectual challenge, charmed and dazzled all who knew him.

Bill Ferris-fest, and much more this weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MLK anniversary resources

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

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

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

Events in Raleigh were less than peaceful.

Combating sex trafficking: UNC conference

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

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

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

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

Introducing Carson Dean

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

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

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

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

Poverty Awareness Week at UNC

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

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

Produced by Durham documentary filmmaker Steve Channing.

Other events to be aware of.

Eyes on public-sector blogging

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

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

The Speech

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

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

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

They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . more.

A real great story

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

We remember Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lesson from Eve: Don't curb your enthusiasm

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

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

Dear Sally,

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

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

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

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

International Women's Day

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

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

Women helping women: may it ever be so.

Real dollars for real change

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

Unfathomable

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

Eve Carson was brilliant, without arrogance.
She was beautiful, without vanity.
She was generous, without self-importance.
She was, as her Clarke Central High School teachers remembered her Thursday, the woman you hope your daughter will become.
"This was a girl who was going to cure cancer, who was going to make Academy Award-winning movies, who was ... going to do something big," said school counselor Sam Hicks.

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

His dance card was full.

Entertaining ephemera from the North Carolina Collection.

Who was Audubon's mother?

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

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

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

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

Homelessness marathon tonight

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

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

We welcome your phone calls. Live streaming.

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

Daffy.

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

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

"To Europe"

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

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

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

Show and no show

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

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

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

A local apology

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Roland.

D. J. Spooky weekend

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

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

New titles in African American studies

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

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

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

Welcome life support for Graham house

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

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

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

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

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

The landscape of property law

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

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

The women behind Rosa Parks

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

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

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

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

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

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

1947 "Freedom Ride" remembered

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

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

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

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

Lot 5 public art preview tomorrow

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

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

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

"Durham: A Self-Portrait"

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

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

Window into a colorful past in Wilmington

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

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

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

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

Slide show.

Harriet Jacobs observed the "Johnkannaus" in Edenton:

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

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

Recently speaking

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

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

Starbucked

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

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

Fifty years of Reynolds Price

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

On violence

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

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

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)