So you think you know North Carolina…. No. 29

1. “Sometimes into Asheville, sometimes Memphis town / The revenooers chased him, but they couldn’t run him down.” Who sang — and wrote — these lines from the 1958 pop hit “The Ballad of Thunder Road”?

2. Before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, he first tried it out in what N.C. town?

3. Which one of these five structures has not been named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark: Dorton Arena in Raleigh, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Bank of America tower, the Bunker Hill Covered Bridge in Catawba County or the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse?

4. True or false: The population density of North Carolina is more than twice that of the United States.

5. True or false: When Strom Thurmond ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, he led the ballot in North Carolina.

Answers below

 

 

 

 

1. Robert Mitchum, who starred in “Thunder Road,” the Southern drive-in classic filmed in Asheville and Transylvania County.

2. Rocky Mount. Nine months before the March on Washington, King told nearly 2,000 people crowded into Booker T. Washington High School, “My friends of Rocky Mount, I have a dream tonight. It is a dream rooted deeply in the American dream I have a dream that one day right here in Rocky Mount, N.C., the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will meet at the table of brotherhood.”

3. The 60-story Bank of America Corporaste Center, tallest building between Atlanta and Philadelphia.

4. True. The national density is about 91 people per square mile. North Carolina’s is 206.

5. False. Harry Truman received 58 percent of the vote, Thomas Dewey 33 percent and Thurmond 9 percent.

 

One thought on “So you think you know North Carolina…. No. 29”

  1. I recall that Mitchum starred in the movie, but I didn’t recall that he also wrote and sang the song! Got the others correct. I’d just read about the Rocky Mount MLK speech in a recent story, otherwise I’d have guessed wrong.

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