August 2015 – Page 2 – NC Miscellany

‘Not to offend,’ but you are ‘profoundly ignorant’ of South

“Boosters made it clear that the New South could not accept Northern attempts to control, define, legislate, or even narrate activities south of the Mason-Dixon line….

“In July 1884, Robert Bingham, a North Carolina educator, appeared before a Washington, D.C., audience, and proceeded to tell the assembled Yankees precisely how little they knew about Southern race relations. ‘I came here to conciliate, not to offend you, but I tell you that the great mass of your people, however much you think you know about it, are profoundly ignorant of the conditions in the South and of the relations between the races.’

“Even as he pleaded for federal aid to Southern education, Bingham held fast to a central New South mantra: When it came to Southern affairs, particularly racial ones, the North was uninformed, unequipped and unprepared. It should, therefore, be uninvolved: ‘Social relations must be left to take care of themselves in the South.’ ”

— From “Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915″ by K. Stephen Prince (2014)

Did some Roanoke Colonists head to Bertie County?

The dig had turned up many Native American artifacts, which are common in the region — but also some European artifacts. At the time, Mr. Luccketti hypothesized that they had been left by later European settlers, from a nearby plantation or the homestead of a trader who arrived in the mid-1600s.

But the recent insights from the British Museum’s analysis of the map prompted the foundation to re-examine the 2007 findings from Merry Hill and other dig sites in the region. A key to identifying the earliest colonial life was a type of ceramic known as Surrey-Hampshire Border ware, which was no longer imported to the New World after the Virginia Company dissolved in the early 17th century….

Slowly, the pits gave up their secrets. In just the small areas excavated, the hillside has yielded an unusually high concentration of Border ware and other colonial artifacts, such as a food-storage jar called a baluster, a hook used to stretch hides, a buckle, and pieces of early gun flintlocks called priming pans. No signs of a fort or other structures have been found, but the aggregate of the artifacts convinced the archaeologists that at least a few of the colonists wound up there.

Mr. Luccketti insists on the caveat that only a small number — fewer than a dozen — were present for an indeterminate amount of time. ‘ It wasn’t the relocated colony — I keep emphasizing that — and we need to do some more work here to understand,’ he said.

–from “The Roanoke Colonists: Lost, and Found?” in New York Times, August 10, 2015. The First Colony Foundation will discuss its latest findings in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of Wilson Library on the UNC campus at 10 am on August 11.

Triangle loves its NPR (Charlotte, not so much)

“Given [NPR’s] cultural associations, we were interested in finding out where there was the most demand for the likes of Terry Gross and Garrison Keillor….

Dan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: RADIO ONLINE

“NPR’s headquarters are in Washington, and it is also the market in which their stations have the largest share. DC is followed by the higher-education saturated market of Raleigh-Durham — part of the ‘Research Triangle’ — driven by the huge popularity of University of North Carolina run WUNC. Ray Magliozzi of ‘Car Talk’ would be proud to see Boston sliding in at No. 3. And given the stereotypes about Pacific Northwesterners, it is no surprise that Portland and Seattle make the top five.”

— From “How Radio Explains America” by Dan Kopf at Priceonomics (Aug. 4)

Not to be left out, Charlotte’s radio audience can claim a No. 2 share of its own….

J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton on the law and Prohibition

“On June 1, 1925, the Chief Justice of North Carolina in an address to the bar of Wake County, assembled in Raleigh, said: ‘The best friend you have is the law of North Carolina. It protects you before you are born, it surrounds and shields you as long as you live, and it stands sentinel and guard at your tomb.’

“In this sonorous phrase we have the theory of the law.

“On June 1, 1925, in Wake County, one mile from Raleigh, a sergeant of the plain clothes department of the city police, in the presence of the chief of police, without warning, shot and killed S. S. Holt, a prominent lawyer from an adjoining county, as he was returning home from arguing a case in the United States District Court. The only justification advanced for the officer was that Holt’s car had stopped for a moment on the roadside and this made him jump to the conclusion that it was carrying liquor, a judgment, as the event proved, entirely unjustified by fact.

“In this coldblooded taking of human life, we have an important phase of the practice of the law. For thus nowadays in North Carolina is the citizen’s ‘best friend’ apt to operate….

“With Prohibition enforcement to point the way we are rapidly approaching a time when we shall have a government of men — and of such men! — and not of law at all….”

— From “These Things Doth the Lord Hate” by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton in Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1926)

I’d be interested in learning the outcome of the Holt case — anyone able to dig that up?

Then and now, fearing ‘evils arising’ from free assembly

“During the antebellum era, citizens in Southern states recognized the significance of assembly and routinely sought to prohibit its exercise among slaves and free blacks…. In 1818, citizens in North Carolina petitioned for restrictions against ‘the Numerous quantity of Negroes which generally assemble,’ and 40 years later sought ‘to relieve the people of the State from the evils arising from numbers of free negroes in our midst’….

“By the end of the 1960s, the right of assembly had largely disappeared from American constitutional law. The Supreme Court, in fact, has not addressed an assembly case in 30 years. But Ferguson — and the history toward which it points — shows us why assembly cannot be forgotten….”

— From “The Right of Assembly Violently Wrested” by John Inazu in the Hedgehog Review (Sept. 11, 2014)