Klan thuggery forces end to Moore’s mugwumpery

On this day in 1966: The same day that Martin Luther King Jr. addresses without incident a crowd of 4,500 at Raleigh’s Reynolds Coliseum, Ku Klux Klansmen in boots and helmets jeeringly remove blacks from a Klan rally at Nash Square.

The incident will force Gov. Dan K. Moore, who has tried to treat the Klan and civil rights advocates with equal wariness, to condemn “an attempt by swaggering demagogues to terrorize, intimidate or assume synthetic authority and threaten the dignity of the law.” Previously Moore had ventured no further than to say the Klan “has nothing of value to offer North Carolina.”

 

Should Raleigh, Durham be chasing ‘creative class’?

“[A] test has been done by Mel Gray, who teaches eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of St. Thomas, and the results cast doubt on the idea that a flour­ish­ing artis­tic envi­ron­ment will cause eco­nomic growth….

“Gray told me, ‘I spent a sab­bat­i­cal in North Car­olina, and both Raleigh and Durham have estab­lished these Offices of Cre­ativ­ity, and they’re all doing this with­out a huge amount [of], if any, evi­dence that it makes that big a dif­fer­ence.’ ”

— From “The Fall of the Creative Class” by Frank Bures in Thirty Two Magazine

 

The doctor is in (and, sorry, he’s not getting out)

On this day in 1985: The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, receives an honorary doctorate from Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh.

Although school officials cite Moon’s humanitarianism, his resume also includes $60,000 in donations. “Anyone who makes a contribution has a right to be honored,” one board member contends.

Moon’s wife accepts the degree in his behalf; her husband is serving time in federal prison for tax evasion.

Chapel Hill to Time: We’re not snoozing!

We…  object to the reference to Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh as “a sleepy corner of eastern Carolina.” Wake up! Chapel Hill has long been known as the “Intellectual Center of the South.”
Get out of your concrete office and come down to visit modern, industrial North Carolina.
MARVIN BRODY
SONNY EVANS
Chapel Hill, N.C.
— Letter to the editor of Time magazine, February 4, 1957
In later life, Sonny would become better known as Eli — and as author of “The Provincials.”

Douglass: ‘A sensible modification of black’

“When Douglass displayed pride in presenting himself as the product of a racially mixed parentage — ‘a very sensible modification of black,’  he told an 1872  Raleigh, North Carolina, audience — he was implicitly presenting himself as a prototype of the future American, even the modern man of the future.”

— From “Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism” by Peter C. Myers (2008)


Sedaris given permission Daisey could only dream of

Mike Daisey isn’t the first “This American Life” monologist to see his veracity challenged.

Five years ago this week, under the headline “This American Lie,” the New Republic painstakingly detailed the habitual fabrications of David Sedaris, who grew up in Raleigh and set much of his supposed “nonfiction” there.

Contributor Alex Heard investigated Sedaris’s accounts of being bitten by a naked patient at Dorothea Dix Hospital, taking guitar lesson from “a perfectly formed midget” in a north Raleigh mall and being drafted into a gays-only speech therapy class at Brooks Elementary. Heard’s verdict: More fiction than fact.

The gently rendered expose slowed Sedaris’s career not a whit. Daisey, now being hammered roundly for his false claims about Apple factories in China, could be forgiven for wondering…. how did he get away with that?

 

Marcus Garvey gave audience all stick, no carrot

“At the [1923] state fair in Raleigh, North Carolina, [“Back-to-Africa” leader Marcus Garvey]  meditated on a favorite theme: Negro lassitude….. Garvey sought to inspire by berating the black audience for its laziness. ‘If I waited for Negroes to convey me from New York to Raleigh,’ he lamented, ‘I would be walking for six months.’ Curiously, reported the Greensboro Daily News, even as Garvey ‘took the hide off his hearers…they cheered.’ ”

— From “Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey” by Colin Grant (2008)


At 65 mph, who needs architecture?

“… In rural parts of North Carolina where roads are small, it’s possible to see the face of a farmer coming towards you in his truck because you are both driving slowly. As often as not he will wave. (Imagine doing that on an interstate highway or a six-lane suburban throughway.) In the 200 or so years before automobiles came to North Carolina, our counties were sized based on the distance a farmer could travel on horseback in a day to pay his taxes at the courthouse, or sell his crops at market….

“Country stores, now usually shuttered, [were] spaced every few miles within walking distance of farmsteads; and country churches [rang] steeple bells at a quarter to 11 on Sunday morning to remind folks they had 15 minutes to walk to service.

“High-speed roads have liberated these older landscapes…. And on the whole, this is better. But as [Greensboro journalist] Jim Schlosser  observed, architecture began to go downhill with the construction of the Interstate…. Since people no longer slowed down to drive through cities, architects designed buildings to be viewed at 65 miles per hour, with a consequent loss of scale, texture, and detail.”

— From  “No One Drove Faster than a Horse” by Raleigh architect Frank Harmon (architectsandartisans.com)

 

Tar Heels drank to V-J Day (while they could)

On this day in 1945: North Carolinians take to the streets to celebrate V-J Day, marking the imminent victory over Japan and the end of World War II. In Raleigh, the crowd on Fayetteville Street is joined by a hook-and-ladder bearing a “Victory is complete” sign on its side. Within an hour, Gov. Gregg Cherry has ordered a statewide suspension of alcohol sales.

In black neighborhoods, carriers deliver more than mail

” ‘Here comes Uncle Sam!’ is what I used to hear on my mail route in west Durham. Mostly I heard this from older African Americans — along with the usual jokes about bills, junk mail and checks. Almost one-fifth of my customers received Social Security checks, and many of them relied on me to deliver their medications, including on Saturdays.

“What I didn’t fully appreciate until later was the reassurance they got from seeing their letter carrier and the connection I represented to the Postal Service and the federal government. For them, the post office was also quite likely a place where a relative had found employment — enabling a middle-class lifestyle, homeownership and college tuition for the kids.”

— From “What we’ll lose if we lose the post office” by Philip F. Rubio in the Washington Post (July 29) 

The Postal Service’s list of proposed closings includes 20 locations in North Carolina, from Raleigh and New Bern to the Appalachian Trail.