Mayor Elaine O’Neal’s tenure has been marked by acrimony and scandal on the Durham City Council. Ahead of the municipal elections this fall, voters and leaders are grappling with what’s next.
By Matt Hartman, p. 8
VOL. 40 NO. 26
6 Durham's participatory budgeting process will be finalized this month.
BY JENNA SPINELLE8 Ahead of the municipal elections this fall, Durham voters and leaders are grappling with a city council tenure marred by two years of chaos and scandal. BY
MATT HARTMAN12 Orange County has been swept up in the nationwide cultural clashes over education, and Superintendent Monique Felder is the latest casualty.
BY BARRY YEOMAN19 INDY40: A photo retrospective. BY NICOLE
34 Mockumentary meets musical theater in the indie comedy Theater Camp.
BY GLENN MCDONALD
36 A garden tucked behind Chapel Hill's Lantern Restaurant has become a space for small businesses to grow and connect with customers.
BY HANNAH KAUFMAN38 Artists Derrick Beasley and Pierce Freelon discuss growing up and making art in a gentrifying Durham. BY
MARCELLA CAMARA40 Cara Hagan's American Dance Festival commission channels chaos at the Nasher Museum of Art. BY
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has engulfed Carrboro and Chapel Hill residents and elected officials for more than a decade. We received the following message from Carrboro Town Council candidate JASON MERRILL, who says he is “prodensity and deeply skeptical of developers, especially the large, out-of-state developers that have been plopping garbage buildings all over the Triangle”:
I really appreciated the recent article about the Bolin Creek Greenway because I felt like it was a fair assessment of where we’ve been and where we’re at with a decision that has been surprisingly contentious. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing if I didn’t have a nit to pick so I want to apologize in advance for being “that guy”. :)
I feel that the characterization of the current Carrboro Town Council as “pro-development” is unnecessarily divisive and inaccurate. It would be more accurate to say that they’re actively trying to address the housing affordability crisis, which is a complicated problem that will require a variety of treatments to solve. Part of the solution will be finding ways to increase the supply of naturally occurring affordable housing. Carrboro has been anti-development and anti-density for decades and those attitudes and ordinances have played a major role in the scarcity of high quality affordable housing that we’re dealing with today. The larger question we now must answer is whether we want to slam the door closed in the face of the people behind us who are seeking the same opportunities that we found here, or if we want to hold the door open and make a little more room at the table to share what we love about this place?
Also in our last paper, we bade farewell to staff writer Thomasi McDonald (or McDonald bade farewell to us in his own words in a goodbye column titled “I’m Out, Yo”). Readers told us they will miss McDonald (we all will, too!) as he starts his new job in communications at Duke:
From reader KATHY M.:
Just to say I’ll miss your words. Maybe your old readers will have access to your new words at Duke’s communications office, but if not, maybe the new readers there will provide you with enough time and money to write a book for all of us.
From reader PAM C.:
I’ve read your work at the Indy with much appreciation over the years. Never written a letter, so sorry to learn you’re gone, wish you all good things!
Hope this doesn’t sound rude, but I’m hoping you will write for the chronicle.
From reader BURRELL W.:
I’m a 69 yo mother of 3 adult children! I am proud of my kids but the Mother in me just can’t pass up the opportunity to praise one more! I read, “I’m Out, Yo”. It touched me in a special kinda way!
In our paper two weeks ago, writer Cy Neff took a deep dive into the Bolin Creek controversy that
Professor John Diop Williams, chair of the African American Studies Department of Marcus Garvey University, was in the middle of giving what he thought was a powerful lecture on Black-on-Black violence to a predominantly white middle-class audience when he noticed most of the crowd members were either checking their emails or nodding off. Frustrated, he randomly yelled out, “I’ve never been a stranger to homicide / My city’s full of gangbangers and drive-bys!” From that point on, the suddenly attentive audience hung on every word he spoke until he ended his lecture with an impromptu rendition of “All Eyez on Me.”
While this story is just allegorical (courtesy of watching too many late-night Boondocks episodes), the scenario is familiar to many African American activists working to stop gun violence in our cities.
Back in 1959, there was a tearjerker of a movie called Imitation of Life about a lightskinned Black woman who gained entry into high society by passing for white. However, for the last 30 years, a surefire way to win the attention of middle America, if you are an African American male, is to be an imitator of “thug life,” a term popularized by the late rapper Tupac Shakur.
Recently, I attended a Stop the Violence meeting in Durham and engaged in what I hoped would be a deep conversation with an older white gentleman about a major problem facing our city. As I told him about the books I had read about violence in the African American community from authors such as Amos Wilson and Joyce DeGruy, he wasn’t overly enthused. His only response was, “Yeah, I just finished reading The Hate U Give (T.H.U.G.),” a novel by Angie Thomas.
Like my character Professor Williams, this was not the first time that I have tried to speak to white folk about gun violence only to have my rising crescendo of Black analysis deflated by the condescending question “So what’s it like growing up in the hood?”
The reality is, despite what you see in the movies, most Black men’s first experience with gang life comes courtesy of Hollywood or the music industry, not what we grew up seeing outside our front doors everyday. White America became infatuated with the gangsta lifestyle in the early ’90s as the popularity of groups like N.W.A began to capture the imagination of white Americans who vicariously lived the lives of LA gang members through videos on Yo! MTV Raps. In literary circles, books such as Monster by Kody Scott (who writes under the name Sanyika Shakur) and Dr. Michael Eric Dyson’s Between God and Gangsta Rap made hood stories become the bibles of the Black experience.
It’s troubling that places like Durham have turned the gangsta stereotype into public policy, as the idea that in order to reach Black youth you have to have shot somebody in a past life becomes a dream that million-dollar grants are made of.
are us and we are them. As I walk through Durham neighborhoods every evening passing out free Black cultural books and giving impromptu history lectures to young Black men, I don’t see them as gangbangers. I view them as my brothers in the struggle. As the scholar and writer Dr. Dyson once reminded the audience at a lecture he gave at NC Central University many years ago, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, and the Notorious B.I.G. all suffered the same fate.
“Nobody” —Nas featuring Lauryn Hill
Although well-funded groups like Bull City United and others that use former gang members to help steer young men away from the vicious cycle of street violence may be well intentioned, it gets problematic when they become replacements for community members who could offer an African-centered, scholarly critique of systemic white supremacy as the root cause of the socioeconomic factors that lead to criminal behavior and who do not pander to white liberal guilt. For those of us engaged in Black radical politics, the degree of separation is not wide enough for us to view the “street cats” as the proverbial “others.” They
Durham, of course, has a history of Black middle-class success. Dr. E. Franklin Frazier, in his book Black Bourgeoisie, wrote in 1957 that at one point the Bull City was “regarded as the capital of the black bourgeois.” But a “get this money by any means necessary” attitude has resulted in a phenomenon that could only exist in a town with this kind of economic legacy. In Durham, this economic ideology has led to a gangsta-ized version of the lumpenbourgeoisie, which embraces middle-class money but rejects its traditional code of ethics. What makes members of this class problematic to a race suffering under systemic white supremacy is that they bypass revolutionary or even reformist ideology and, immediately, join the ranks of reactionary politics. Whether via the black market economy or grants from the nonprofit-industrial complex, instead of fighting the powers that be, they become part of them.
Although there is much said about defunding the police, there is relative silence when it comes to defunding the nonprofit-industrial complex. (Read The Revolution
Will Not Be Funded by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence for arguments for the exception.) Well-intentioned nonprofits bankroll negative stereotypes of Black men as gangstas instead of functioning as deterrents to crime; they aid in portraying that lifestyle as a necessary step to upward socioeconomic and political mobility.
This is most pronounced during election season when gangsta-ism is used for political leverage. What is sold to politicians and suburbanites is a false ideology known as street knowledge, or what Dr. Bobby E. Wright, in his book of essays The Psychopathic Racial Personality, called street sense, which propagates the idea that there is a sacred code of conduct that only gives someone who has spent at least seven years behind bars the street cred to inspire young Black men to turn away from a life of crime. In these scenarios, street knowledge requires no sociopolitical analysis, just a long rap sheet.
We will never stop the gun violence in the community with politicians and their nonprofit-industrial-complex homies promoting the nihilist idea that criminal behavior is some sort of rite of passage for young Black men. Unfortunately, in order to even enter into the marketplace of ideas, you have to play the role of a ’90s wannabe gangsta rapper.
To borrow from the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, as Black men in 2023, we wear the mask that grimaces and lies. W
Minister Paul Scott is an activist based in Durham. He can be reached at (919) 9728305, bullcitygriot@gmail.com, or on Twitter at @truthminista.
In Durham, well-meaning residents and leaders are caught up in a narrative that doesn’t fit reality.
“Let me give it to you balanced and with clarity / I don’t need to turn myself into a parody.”Minister Paul Scott PHOTO BY JADE WILSON
BY IRIS MILLER backtalk@indyweek.com
How did Sarge’s Shrimp and Grits Sauce come to be?
We’re named in honor of my dad, who was a lifer in the military. We started as a food truck—Sarge’s Chef on Wheels—and our menu was based on all the different places that we’d lived, being a military family. We called our cooking style “down-home cooking, Asian and Caribbean in flair.” We’d lived in Japan, we’d lived in England. My mother’s originally from Charleston. We moved all over the country.
I grew up cooking with my mother, she loved to cook for people. If you came to our house there was no question: she would not [just] offer you food, she would make it and serve it, put it in front of you. She truly meant for you to enjoy it and she wouldn’t go, “Might you have some?” She made sure that you knew that she meant it was no bother. Living at different bases my mother would run the Noncommissioned Officer’s (NCO) Club. She would run the food service in these different clubs, and so I was
always exposed to that. She taught me that if you work in a restaurant, you can always eat, no matter how broke you are. So I’ve always worked in a restaurant on the side, no matter what my regular job was.
and in 2019 we received our first shipment of our sauce in a jar. We started marketing that from the food truck.
What excites you about the Triangle food scene right now?
It’s just that it’s so vibrant—you do have everything from A to Z, it’s not just a niche of Southern, a niche of this, a niche of that. You have everything from vegetarian to Venezuelan. Certainly tacos, Mexican … but it’s just so wide-ranging. And so well-supported, which is also important.
What is next for Sarge’s?
Did the lessons you learned
jobs help you with the food truck?
Oh, absolutely. The food business is a people business. I jokingly say I used to sell everything from chicken to lamb. I started in a chicken restaurant when I was real young. Many people have a dream of starting a restaurant based on having a good food product, which you have to have, but we had a good food product and we had a good understanding of how to operate. We were lucky we opened our food truck in 2012, operated for seven and a half years. The menu was based on the different places we’d lived. We had shrimp and grits as our signature dish; hot Italian sausage; a New York dish; cheesesteaks; Northeast; Caribbean jerk chicken; black bean veggie burgers; jerk turkey. And shrimp and grits was our number one dish. People were always asking us how to make it; they couldn’t seem to make the sauce as well. My wife came up with the idea that we should package our sauce so people could enjoy it at home. We did that,
[In addition to our] Shrimp and Grits Sauce, we have our own grits, our own seafood seasoning. We’re working on a couple more products. We like to provide gourmet, restaurant-quality food you can make at home, so we make ways of making it easier for you. We’ll release a lump crab cake mix. Home cooks always want to go to restaurants because they [cook] so well. [It’s] not that the home cook can’t do it, but the restaurant does it all day, every day. Instead of making a recipe once, we may have made it 5,000 times. So we’re better at it, we like to take the edge of that kind of experience and make it easy for the home cook to duplicate.
Do you have any advice for parents that want their children to have a passion for cooking?
My mother’s favorite saying was “If one eats, one oughta know how to cook.” It’s as simple as that. We’ve always been family-oriented. I’ve gone through some trials and tribulations, my wife has always hung in there with me. We’re coming up on our 44th year of marriage. We’ve been through a lot, but we’ve always stayed together and we keep at it one step at a time. W
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When parents from Book Harvest stood behind tables at the Child Care for NC event at the North Carolina General Assembly in April, they were there in part because of funding that came from their fellow residents in Durham.
Book Harvest, a Durham-based children’s literacy organization, was chosen for funding as part of Durham’s participatory budgeting program. The city began using participatory budgeting in 2018 and has since awarded nearly $3.5 million in city funds to projects chosen by residents. A third cycle that will allocate $2.4 million is currently under way, with funding decisions expected in August.
Book Harvest received $40,184 from Durham’s second participatory budgeting cycle in 2021. Amy Franks, the organization’s associate director of school and family engagement, says the funds were used to hire parents to work as ambassadors. Parents set up tables at neighborhood events, built a parent-to-parent network, and held events that allowed parents to connect with one another.
“We wanted to shift the power and decision-making to parents and have them at the table from the beginning, rather than decisions being made for them,” Franks says. “We were at grocery stores and laundromats and parks and bus stations so that we could make sure the parents were aware of things that we were doing and to bring them to the table so that ultimately
they are leading the charge.”
In many ways, what Franks articulates about Book Harvest’s use of participatory budgeting funds is similar to the overall goal of participatory budgeting—to shift the power of the purse away from a small group of elected officials and city staff and to the residents. As organizers in Durham and Greensboro have learned over the past decade, it’s a goal that’s sometimes easier said than done.
Participatory budgeting, often referred to as “PB,” began in Brazil in 1989. Since then, it’s been adopted by thousands of cities, school boards, and other institutions striving to give stakeholders a direct say in funding decisions. PB is part of a larger set of reforms known as direct democracy that aim to give greater decision-making power to people who are not elected officials.
The PB process typically involves residents forming a steering committee to create the rules and an engagement plan to develop ideas for projects that the community wants to fund. Volunteer budget delegates from across the city turn those ideas into concrete proposals that residents vote on. The city government then funds the winning projects from the overall pool of PB-allocated money.
Hollie Russon Gilman, a fellow in politi-
cal reform at the New America think tank and author of Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America, studies participatory budgeting and its impacts. She says PB’s impacts extend beyond the immediate funding decisions of individual projects and lead to a greater appreciation for how local government operates.
“People are signing up to become budget delegates, which is my favorite part of the process because you get to really see how this sausage is made,” Russon Gilman says. “And then those proposals get turned back to a wider group of residents for a vote. One of the great things about participatory budgeting is that it’s more inclusive than traditional elections. So non-citizens, young people … we’re seeing some places as young as 11 or 12 are eligible to vote.”
Greensboro was the first city in North Carolina—and in the South—to implement participatory budgeting, which it did in the 2015–16 budget cycle. Conversations about bringing PB to the city began in 2011 and were led by the Fund for Democratic Communities, a progressive local organization.
Audrey Berlowitz, a teacher and doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, joined the movement
that brought PB to Greensboro through her friend Marnie Thompson, who founded the Fund for Democratic Communities with her husband, Ed Whitfield.
Berlowitz visited Chicago to see PB at work and was inspired by what it could mean for more democratic city politics. PB has the potential to reduce the influence from what she describes as the “technocrats and bureaucrats” on the city’s council and staff.
“It seemed like a very open-ended, fluid thing,” Berlowitz says. “And then it became interesting to discover people here wanted that. We also had to work to understand what kind of projects we could get through PB that would be approved by the city staff.”
After years of lobbying from Thompson, Whitfield, Berlowitz, and others involved in the Fund for Democratic Communities, the Greensboro City Council approved PB in 2014. It passed with a 5-4 vote. Those who opposed it cited overlap with existing neighborhood assemblies and unnecessary spending to bring in the Participatory Budgeting Project from New York City to act as consultants for the first round.
The steering committee report from that first year called the PB implementation a success at generating ideas and involving all parts of the community, but it noted communication breakdowns between the steering committee and city staff over vetting project ideas before putting them up
for a vote, as well as difficulty reaching young people and non-English-speaking communities.
Greensboro PB ran three additional cycles, in the 2018–19, 2020–21, and 2022–23 budget cycles. Projects funded included the Hopper Trolley, a free transit service that operates Thursday through Sunday in downtown Greensboro.
Durham began its own journey with PB when the city’s former manager learned about what was happening in Greensboro. Today, Andrew Holland, Durham’s assistant director for strategy and performance, is part of the team that leads PB in the city’s Office of Performance and Innovation.
“Our former city manager had communicated to us that he wanted the PB program to be a true reflection of Durham,” Holland says. “And with our city council, especially during that time and even now, there’s a focus on equity. Everything that we do as a city, it needs to be equity focused. So how we went about designing our outreach and communications plan, it was targeted to those underserved neighborhoods.”
Holland says Durham’s PB team and volunteers knocked on doors and visited bus stations to engage underrepresented groups. They also made voting available on paper and iPads to accommodate varying comfort levels with technology.
One advantage of PB, advocates say, is that it gives residents a chance to present ideas that might seem trivial but have a large impact on day-to-day life, like which plants and shrubs should be part of their neighborhood’s landscape or what kind of equipment a playground should have. Holland says this is exactly what happened with the city’s Belmont Park and Drew/Granby Park.
“It was a very interactive exercise in which we wanted to make sure that the people who voted for the project had the opportunity to weigh in on what the park should look like,” Holland says. “We wanted the project to be a true reflection of that community.”
PB also caught the eye of Durham City Council member Jillian Johnson. She made implementing PB one of her priorities and served on the PB steering committee.
“I’ve always believed that having more people’s voices at the table is really critical. No one should worry about not having enough experience in politics,” Johnson, who will retire from the council at the end of this year, told Elle magazine in 2017. “I didn’t have any experience in elected politics, and I did it. I’ve learned that many
different kinds of life experience translate well into what you need to know to be in an elected office.”
Former Durham mayor Steve Schewel learned about PB from Johnson. He says he was skeptical at first but came around once he saw the process in action.
“I was a big believer in Jillian and had a huge amount of trust in her, and she convinced me to give it a whirl,” Schewel says.
“I’m very glad that happened, and it’s proven to be a good decision.”
Schewel says he knew that staffing would be essential to making PB work and committed additional funds to add staff to the budget office, including the position Holland now holds.
Schewel says some of the projects completed as a result of PB—including park enhancements and other public works projects—likely would have happened anyway but it was important to have community buy-in.
“It was gratifying to me that we got the increased democratic participation and
“What’s great about it is all of these organizations, whether they get voted for or not, are having a platform to share what they do. So even the process itself, by informing the community about these various organizations and initiatives, it’s already doing great work.”
Voting for Durham’s third PB cycle will begin in September. The process, however, appears to be on hold in Greensboro. On July 11, the city sent an email to its PB supporters saying the 2023–24 budget did not include funding for the projects approved in the most recent PB cycle, and the program will be reevaluated before it continues.
At the same time, North Carolina’s legislature continues to make changes that impact voting rights and civil rights.
“Democracy is getting smaller in North Carolina,” Schewel says. “We have to do everything we can at the local level to ensure access and participation. PB has been a great tool for democratizing the budget process, which is the most important thing we do in local government.”
The Participatory Budgeting Project continues to work on PB processes in Seattle, New York City, Cleveland, and other cities across the country. But at a time when the political stakes feel so high—especially in North Carolina—is pursuing PB worth the time and energy?
Berlowitz says she thinks about this a lot, both in her efforts to bring PB to Greensboro and her current work to unionize faculty at UNC Greensboro.
opened up access to our budgeting process,” Schewel says.
Book Harvest’s Franks, a Durham resident, voted in Durham PB and says she saw equity at the forefront of the process.
“I put this question to a colleague and I agree wholeheartedly with what she said …. Participatory budgeting is about equity and justice,” Franks says. “It’s by the people, for the people.”
Benay Hicks, Book Harvest’s associate director of communications and marketing, says the organization is often asked to participate in fundraising challenges or competitions that pit nonprofits against one another as people vote on which organizations to fund. She says Durham PB had a markedly different tone that she observed felt true to the goal of gauging what the community truly wants rather than which organizations put on the splashiest marketing campaigns.
“It felt like we were all on one page. Nobody was bashing anybody, and nobody was being obnoxious about it,” Hicks says.
“Our supermajority Republican legislature is introducing really draconian laws, culture war laws,” Berlowitz says. “We need some power to push back against it, and we’ve got to figure out how to organize for power.”
Russon Gilman also hears this question a lot in her work studying PB. She says a common theme across cities that implement PB is that people feel more connected to their communities, which can be the first step toward building political power and a way to combat America’s loneliness epidemic.
“What’s the alternative? Is the status quo going so well? Are there a lot of people who still think America is a beacon on a hill and our democracy is thriving?” she says. “You don’t need to be a political scientist to think that we have some problems. If you ask people, across both sides of the aisle, they’re very disaffected with their institutions.” W
For more information about Durham PB, visit pbdurham.org. For more information about Greensboro PB, visit pbgreensboro.com.
“Participatory budgeting is about equity. It’s by the people, for the people.”
Mayor Elaine O’Neal’s tenure has been marked by acrimony and scandal on the Durham City Council. Ahead of the municipal elections this fall, voters and leaders are grappling with what’s next.
BY MATT HARTMAN backtalk@indyweek.com
Leo Williams leaned back in his chair, a hand over his eyes. Jillian Johnson, his colleague on the Durham City Council, had just introduced a resolution to censure their council colleague Monique Holsey-Hyman over allegations that she improperly used city staff’s time to work on her fall election campaign.
“We didn’t really discuss who was going to introduce it, so I will step up and do it,” Johnson said near the end of a contentious March 23 work session. The move came after Mayor Elaine O’Neal read a letter revealing allegations of corruption against an unnamed council member (identified also as Holsey-Hyman, four days later) at the beginning of the meeting.
All of the council members seemed tired.
Maybe they were worn down following the shooting of three teenagers the day before. Maybe it was the brewing debate over the controversial SCAD proposal. But no one, current mayoral candidate Williams included, was having an easy time.
“As you disrespect us, we have a right to come up here and disrespect you as well,” James Chavis, a public speaker, said to the council from the chamber’s floor. It wasn’t the only public comment in that vein.
Holsey-Hyman, on the verge of tears, defended her record. Williams said he was confused about whether they were debating the facts of the case against Holsey-Hyman or just the resolution to censure her. O’Neal spoke like a stern parent, chastising an unnamed council member for allegedly using her signature without permission—a reference to Johnson that foreshadowed a preoccupation from the mayor that would reemerge in the summer. (Johnson said later that she had merely included a blank line for O’Neal to sign if the resolution passed.)
Council member DeDreana Freeman, also a mayoral candidate, and mayor pro tem Mark-Anthony Middleton exchanged barbs, with Freeman saying she was “angry and
disgusted.” She blamed sexism for the way her colleagues dismissed Holsey-Hyman’s explanations.
“As one of the two men on this board: What? What does that even mean,” Middleton retorted, giving Freeman an exaggerated side-eye.
“Stop being a bully,” Freeman replied off mic.
Then came the real fireworks.
WRAL cameras caught audio of Freeman launching a profanity-laced verbal tirade at Middleton after the meeting adjourned. Two eyewitnesses told the INDY that Freeman also took a swing at him, missed, and hit Williams and O’Neal, though a local pastor said no punches were thrown.
The day’s embarrassing events are the most dramatic evidence of the tension, conflict, personal disdain, and conspiracy theories that have been roiling Durham politics for at least the past four years.
Amid a world historic pandemic and a national racial reckoning, O’Neal, Williams, Middleton, and Freeman won their elections in 2021 with broad public support to shift Durham’s response to a spike in murders and an ever-deepening housing crisis.
Less than two years later, community trust is in tatters and confidence in the council is flailing.
Despite marquee achievements like expanding an unarmed first response team and introducing a $10 million fund to improve Fayetteville Street, this council’s tenure is best known for scandal.
Durham politics has become a morass of bitterness and resentment. Policy discussions are rancorous, government staff are often left confused, and much of the voting public seems disoriented and dispirited. Many worry the results will harm the city’s reputation, give investors second thoughts, and scare away potential public servants.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to run for office right now,” former council member Charlie Reece tweeted about the environment in March.
“I’m going to go public about seeking therapy, because I saw what it did to me as a person,” Williams tells the INDY “I saw what it did to me and my family.”
As the city heads into municipal election this fall, the INDY is launching a four-part investigation into what brought Durham to this point, how it’s impacting local government responses to the pressing issues of crime and gentrification, and what comes next.
O’Neal’s late-2020 announcement that she would run for mayor was meant to be a unifier in an increasingly fractured Bull City. “Durham for Everyone. United. Not Divided. Grab hands and let’s move forward into a bold and bright future for all of us,” went one campaign slogan.
So long the maligned bronze medalist of the Triangle, Durham spent decades trying to attract new capital and investment. For much of former mayor Bill Bell’s long tenure, the city’s urban center was the focus.
“We had to build up confidence in the community,” Bell says in the conference room of UDI Community Development Corporation, the nonprofit he still runs. Sepia-toned photos of the company’s long history cover the walls, and a tube TV plays the news from its mounted place in the corner of the room.
“We could do something in a positive way, and the biggest showcase, for me, was ‘What could you do in downtown?’” he says.
By the time Bell stepped down in 2017, the effort had largely succeeded. The foundations for Durham’s tallest building, One City Center, were being laid. When it opened in 2018, construction cranes simply moved across the skyline to new projects.
But for many in the predominantly Black and brown
neighborhoods surrounding downtown, the changes were more threat than success. The pandemic decimated jobs and support networks; violent crime rose, incomes fell, and many wondered if they would still have a place in the new Durham.
“There’s quite a few people in city government that really want the problem to disappear, which is the materially poor Black and brown people that are embarrassing them and making their lives difficult,” says Camryn Smith, cofounder and executive director of Old East Durham’s Communities in Partnership.
Though the downtown-centric approach started under the moderate Bell, who is Black, its success became particularly visible under the progressive councils that succeeded him, starting in 2017 and led by Mayor Steve Schewel, who is white.
Many critics placed the blame squarely on the progressives. Smith points to research by former NC Central University business professor and current U.S. Department of Energy official Henry McKoy showing that racial disparities are higher in blue counties than red ones.
“Right now, Durham is nothing close to what it says it is in terms of a city that thinks highly progressively, where we want a lot of diversity, a lot of different ways of being, a lot of different thoughts,” Smith says. “I don’t think that’s who we are, to be honest with you.”
The racial divide began to sour local politics as the city went into the 2019 election. Javiera Caballero became the first Hispanic council member in Durham’s history when she was appointed the year before, but the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People (DCABP), one of the city’s oldest political organizations, objected to the fact that Schewel had “expressed a preference for the appointment of a Hispanic or Latino applicant.”
Caballero solidified a progressive council majority alongside Schewel, Johnson, and Reece, who often voted together for their shared priorities. But many of Durham’s most prominent Black activists—often, though not exclusively, moderates connected with the DCABP—saw their votes not as a democratically endorsed mandate from voters but as an elitist bloc that cut out the people already excluded from Durham’s prosperity.
When Caballero, Johnson, and Reece ran together in 2019 as the Bull City Together slate, opposition intensified. Johnson became a particular target of criticism.
“When we went through that whole crisis, we never saw Jillian,” says Ashley Canady, a tenant leader at McDougald Terrace, referring to the time in 2019 when the Durham Housing Authority complex was evacuated due to carbon monoxide poisoning. “She has not been around, she has not been seen. That is my biggest issue with her: she is not in
community at all.”
Johnson, in response, says no matter what one does as a public official, it’s impossible to avoid criticism from opponents.
“If you show up, they call you an opportunist,” she says. “If you don’t, they say you’re disconnected from the community.”
Still, there’s plenty of criticism to go around.
“When this bloc came together, the unfortunate part about it—in my belief, from the people I talk to—is that they were only going to be accommodating of a certain segment of the population of Durham,” says former council member Jackie Wagstaff. “And that would most likely be people that agreed with them. The other people: you’re on your own.”
The distrust grew so large that the year’s now infamous People’s Alliance (PA) endorsement meeting launched a fight about whether someone used a Nazi slogan. (The People’s Alliance, a four-decades-old grassroots political organization, is also one of the city’s most influential PACs.) In the end, the progressives won the endorsements and the election, completing a decade in which only a single municipal candidate endorsed by the historically white PA lost.
Though the progressives passed major pieces of ambitious, popular legislation aiming to combat the inequalities plaguing Durham—including shepherding a $95 million housing bond, at the time the largest housing bond in North Carolina history, through a public referendum in 2019 and launching the Department of Community Safety two years later—the racial battle lines became entrenched.
“Something was lost in that election cycle that took a long time to build,” says the Latino filmmaker and activist Rodrigo Dorfman, who played a central role in the endorsement meeting brouhaha.
Some criticisms of Johnson and other progressive Black figures also veered into claims that they weren’t “really” Black, say many PA supporters.
“Durham has been treading dangerous territory in terms of questioning the Blackness of our Black leaders like [Johnson] based on notions that themselves are deeply rooted in white supremacy,” says Nana Asante-Smith, chair of the PA PAC.
That was the Durham O’Neal was elected to unify—one in which accusations of racism abounded as murder rates rose, income inequality grew, and housing costs soared.
After Schewel announced he wouldn’t seek a third term, O’Neal swept into office with nearly 85 percent of the vote, facing only a last-minute challenge from Caballero, who suspended her campaign after the primary.
Freeman, Middleton, and Williams all won DCABP endorsements, and only Middleton had also received the PA’s support. Their ultimate victories were a clear statement that Durham voters wanted a change.
Though much of the campaign focused on debates over moderate and progressive approaches to police reform, O’Neal’s popularity had less to do with any policy position than with her relationships—particularly with the people who felt shut out by the progressive majority.
“It’s her history with the community that made people trust her,” says Wagstaff. “She’s always been that type of person that you can have confidence in. People knew her and trusted her, and that’s what we wanted to see up there.”
After a scandal-plagued two years, the people who most wanted a change find themselves deeply disappointed.
“The Black community in particular had high hopes in the leadership, given that you were electing the first African American female mayor,” says Bell. “And it turns out six out of the seven council people were African American. I just think it was felt there was going to be more cordiality among the council members in terms of getting things done. At a minimum, people thought the mayor and the mayor pro tem [Middleton] would be on the same page.”
The disappointment doesn’t mean O’Neal’s backers blame her, however. One of the new divides in Durham politics is about whom to blame for the divides on council.
According to O’Neal’s staunchest supporters, she and her allies Freeman and Holsey-Hyman were undermined and made to look weak and ineffective by an oppositional majority composed of the other four.
But the obvious fact is that a majority vote in an elected body is not a nefarious plot. It’s the way democracy is supposed to work.
The majority isn’t actually a majority, either. There are also divisions between the progressives, such as Caballero and Johnson, and the moderates, such as Williams and Middleton.
“The four of us who vote to approve housing developments do it for somewhat different reasons,” Johnson says. “It’s not like a pro-business ethic that gets me there, where for other folks it might be. So what looks like a voting bloc is actually people coming together across difference.”
The allegations against Holsey-Hyman suggest that such political differences are only partial explanations, though. Simply, some council members just don’t like each other.
Most troublesome for DCABP activists and others who cheered the 2021 election returns is that the most vicious fights haven’t been between the moderates and the progressives, but among the moderates. Freeman yelled at Middleton, after all, not at Johnson.
The explanations for the acrimony quickly devolve into conspiracy theories that wouldn’t be worth considering if they weren’t amplifying the hostility among elected officials.
The theories range from mundane political ambition (that Middleton hoped to be mayor), to baseless allegations of corruption (that Williams is being paid by developers), to outlandish and convoluted setups (that Middleton manufactured the claims against Holsey-Hyman as punishment for not voting with him).
The source for most of them—by her own admission—is Wagstaff.
“Right now, Durham is nothing close to what it says it is in terms of a city that thinks highly progressively.”
“The Black community in particular had high hopes in the leadership, given that you were electing the first African American female mayor.”
“I believe that Mark-Anthony Middleton orchestrated this,” she says. “If he were standing here looking at me, I would tell him that. I’m not one of those people that’s going to sit around and throw a rock and hide.”
An effective organizer with deep ties to various Black communities across Durham, Wagstaff also has a history of controversy over her long political career, including being censured and suspended by the DCABP in 2013 for being “insubordinate, uncollaborative, and extremely impolite.”
But she remains a close and prominent ally of O’Neal, Freeman, and Holsey-Hyman.
“It’s just nonsense,” Middleton says. “And unfortunately, some of it is being driven from the dais, which should be the paragon of sensibility and rationality and the chief brand ambassadors of our city.”
Middleton even wrote an email to his council colleagues in March alleging that “one or more members of the city council” shared a claim that “meets the legal standard of slander” with “prominent members of the Durham community.”
If O’Neal, Freeman, and Holsey-Hyman have retained support, it’s largely among those who believe the unflattering media reports and allegations are untrue. Instead, those supporters believe they are just another example of the long-running sexist and racist status quo.
“It bothers me that everybody is so quick to pathologize a Black woman, but then they want to have Black Lives Matter signs in their yard, and then they want to say #TrustBlackWomen,” says Smith, the East Durham activist and a Freeman ally.
“There’s a lot of people that know DeDreana in this community,” she adds, pointing to the conflicting accounts of Freeman’s altercation with Middleton. “We’ve never seen her hit or do that, so why did you believe that so quickly? Because of the trope of the angry Black woman.”
“What folks try to label as toxic,” Freeman says, “is the discomfort they feel when people challenge their racism, their sexism, all of those -isms.”
Because Middleton, in particular, has grated on his political opponents, the response has found purchase in some parts of Durham.
A dominant force on council—he received more votes in the 2021 election than anyone else—Middleton is prone to long speeches and sharp rebukes such as the eight-minute explanation he gave at the March 23 work session of what a censure is and isn’t and the need for moral rectitude on council.
Opponents have found such rhetoric more fitting for the church he pastors than for council chambers, and Freeman was not the first to call him a bully.
“There’s that saying, ‘Everyone can’t tell the same lie,’” says Whitney Maxey, executive director of the progressive group Durham for All. (Disclosure: I was formerly a volunteer member-leader with the group.)
Middleton, for his part, thinks he’s just doing his job by asking “pointed” questions. “Some of those meetings where I’ve been accused of talking down or putting people on trial? I think that was due diligence,” he says. “I think it would have been malpractice for me not to ask.”
With three divided blocs, allegations of federal crimes, and a populace growing desperate, the council was in clear need of a leader—someone who could unite the various factions, or at least keep the conflict behind closed doors.
O’Neal proved incapable of the task.
Sources inside city hall report that members from each
bloc barely speak to the others outside of public meetings. While past mayors Schewel and Bell would act as facilitators for the everyday work of governing, O’Neal doesn’t hold regular one-on-one meetings with most council members. Instead, she approaches the work the same way she approached her time as a judge and law school dean: by trying to build community relationships.
Other council members were left in the dark about key efforts, like her attempt to negotiate a truce among gang members.
“I have no idea,” Johnson says about it. “She did all that on her own.”
The approach allowed divisions to deepen and conflicts to fester. Then they’d explode into public view, like with the clear confusion over whether the council would censure Holsey-Hyman, whether they were voting on the resolution at all, and who had approved the draft language, or with this summer’s surprise vote on additional raises for firefighters and police officers at the start of a heated budget meeting.
That siloed, suspicious environment helps explain the quixotic quest against Wikipedia that O’Neal, Freeman, and Holsey-Hyman launched to reveal who was adding unflattering details—or a simple signature, in O’Neal’s case—to
itics are undergoing a generational shift that such segregated networks can’t manage.
For decades, the city’s two most influential political organizations—the progressive, historically white People’s Alliance and the moderate Committee on the Affairs of Black People—negotiated political power along Black-white racial lines.
“In the old days,” Johnson explains, “they would meet up for fried chicken and decide who were going to be the city council members.”
Today, a cohort of younger activists—including Black and Latino activists—are diversifying the PA and pushing it in even more progressive directions.
But the PA still has prominent skeptics who believe the organization’s many leaders of color are little more than figureheads. The membership, they believe, represents a subsection of Durhamites who are wealthier and whiter than the city as a whole.
“It would be really nice to see them shift,” Freeman says. “Equity is more than tokenism. It’s not just the loudest voice in the room. It should actually be something of substance. The identity-politics era needs to go.”
For those PA leaders, though, such criticisms amount to complaints from those who didn’t get the PA’s influential backing.
“The reality is PA—supported statistically and with data—has truly evolved in its membership as it pertains to age, race, and engagement, to name a few characteristics,” says Asante-Smith, the PA PAC chair.
But even if the PA is replacing a largely white old guard with a more diverse group of young members, it still represents a particular social group—as does the DCABP. Half of the PA’s current leadership are alumni or employees of Duke, and only one has ties to NCCU. The ratios are nearly perfectly inverted in the Committee’s leadership. Working-class people are often left out of both.
“The history of Black Durham is highly stratified by class, by color, by education, and by which family you came from,” says Smith.
their biographies. The broken trust is undeniable.
Only Williams was able to maintain cordial relationships across all three council blocs for any length of time, often acting as the point of contact between them. Holsey-Hyman even noted that he was the only council member to call her before the March 23 work session (though she missed the call).
Now, O’Neal is leaving office after a single term. The long-serving Johnson is leaving too. Holsey-Hyman is running to retain her council seat but with an ongoing State Bureau of Investigation probe hanging over her. Freeman and Williams are rivals in the mayoral race, and, whatever happens this fall, they’ll still have to work together on the next council.
In the midst of such chaos, all sides are relying more heavily on the network of people they already know. Who better to trust than the people you already work with, who talk like you, went to the same school you did, live in the same neighborhood?
But the fundamental issue is that Durham’s racial pol-
The tragedy of it all is that nearly every person involved in Durham politics agrees that nothing can be solved by Durham’s government alone. No amount of power the PA or the DCABP can gain will be enough to meet their agendas, which require organizing for state-level policies as well. And all the recent controversy, toxicity, and scandal risk a crisis of confidence that undermines efforts to build toward larger political change.
“In an institution of public trust, maintaining that public trust is the most important thing,” Johnson says. “If someone does something that violates the public trust—regardless of who they are—a transparent and robust response is necessary or you risk the integrity of the entire institution.”
After roughly 40 minutes of bickering, hectoring, and occasionally speaking to the issues at hand, O’Neal brought the March 23 work session to a close.
“These are the people you elected, Durham, and it’s up to you to hold everybody accountable,” she said. “We should be ready for that, whatever that looks like.
“I don’t know where Durham is poised and where it is going, but I do hope that Durham city is paying attention to all of us.” W
This is the first story in a four-part series covering Durham’s upcoming municipal election
“In an institution of public trust, maintaining that public trust is the most important thing.”
Orange County has been swept up in the nationwide cultural clashes over education, and Superintendent Monique Felder is the latest casualty.
BY BARRY YEOMAN backtalk@indyweek.com
Monique Felder peered through the tall windows, studying the dozens of demonstrators outside A.L. Stanback Middle School in Hillsborough. Even though their voices were muffled by the glass, she could hear their agitation.
She considered whether they might rush the building, where the Orange County Board of Education was discussing the rise of white nationalism. She hoped the police could contain them if they did. She wondered if she, the school district’s superintendent, was safe.
It was October 2021: a tense time for a district in the maw of the culture war. The previous month, a group that included the Proud Boys, an organization linked to the Capitol insurrection, had assembled with flags and a bullhorn near the entrance to an Orange High School football game. They called for an end to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for students (though none existed) and masking rules, and for the deaths of those who disagreed.
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s office, meanwhile, had singled out Hillsborough’s Cedar Ridge High School library for carrying Maia Kobabe’s memoir Gender Queer. The book, written in graphic-novel format, chronicles the author’s coming out as nonbinary and contains panels depicting adult sex.
“There’s no reason anybody, anywhere in America, should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Robinson, a Republican, had said.
Now, protesters had descended on the board meeting. Several signed up to comment on the math curriculum but instead used the microphone to claim the board was promoting antiwhite “racism” or seeking to destroy America. Gretchen Schmid, chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, signed up to discuss masking policy, then accused the board of working alongside its “antifa allies” to silence students and parents who opposed mask mandates. “This, folks, is a manifestation of critical race theory,” she said before officers led her away for veering off-topic.
Felder wasn’t worried about the speeches, the audience outbursts, or even the members of the Proud Boys sitting inside wearing gaiters to cover their faces. “There was plenty of law enforcement within that auditorium,” she said. “You’d at least have time to duck and run.”
But the gathering outside, billed as a “Rally Against Filth,” felt different. “It’s as if hell was unleashed,” Felder said. “They were loud. Belligerent.”
Several carried enlargements of the most explicit Gender Queer illustrations. They
demanded the schools “quit trying to sexualize” children. They called for Felder’s resignation. And they whooped as a local Proud Boy emerged from the building and made a speech tying the board’s leader to the “Marxist” Black Lives Matter movement.
As Felder took in the scene from inside, someone in the crowd spotted her and pointed. “I’m not a person who frightens easily,” the superintendent said. “But I was afraid. And I was afraid for my life.”
The educational battles that have swept across America have taken deep root in Hillsborough, a county seat better known for its colonial-era architecture and literary vibe. Three separate factions—a Venn diagram of overlapping interests and conflicts—have been sparring over what the public schools should deliver and how a board of education should govern.
They have faced off at the podium, on social media, within the bureaucracy, at the polls, and at the barricades. They have met in public spectacles and behind closed doors. They have spoken in both blunt and coded words.
At stake is the success of 7,000 students attending seven elementary and six secondary schools.
Some of the battle in Orange County fol-
lows a national script, with an emboldened conservative movement organizing around themes like critical race theory. “The issues the public brings to school boards are increasingly refracted through the lens of national political discourse,” reported Education Week, a nonprofit news organization. The controversies “are now as much about political identity as they are about keeping students safe and engaged.”
It’s not just school board members feeling the heat nationally. Superintendents, too, have become increasingly targeted. In North Carolina, the Republican-sponsored Senate Bill 90 would give parents a tool to force out superintendents who repeatedly violate the “fundamental right to parent.”
The tension in Orange County doesn’t stop with the classic culture war. Board members and their supporters have also split into camps that call themselves “progressive” and “moderate.” Their central dispute is over how aggressively the board should prioritize the dismantling of systemic discrimination. But that doesn’t begin to describe the hostility between those two sides.
Orange County may seem like an unlikely setting for such a skirmish. But look at an electoral map of the school district and the polarization makes more sense.
Hillsborough, with its riverwalk and rainbow flags, has grown as a progressive hub since the 2000s, when rising home prices in Chapel Hill established it as a relatively affordable alternative. But it is a blue hole at the center of an expansive red donut, including rural precincts that voted for President Trump by margins of three- and four-to-one. (Chapel Hill and Carrboro, also blue, form their own adjacent school district.) What appears, on the surface, like a liberal dominion is actually a place of stark contrasts.
Orange County Schools have undergone their own demographic change. A student body that was 65 percent white in 2012 is now less than 50 percent white. Students speak 40 languages at home. More than one in four is Hispanic. The number receiving free and reduced-price meals has climbed to almost half. LGBTQ+ kids are more visible.
To understand what this new diversity has meant politically, it’s worth detouring back a few years, to a moment when America’s capacity for coexistence hit rock bottom.
During the months surrounding President Trump’s 2016 election, Orange County Schools mirrored the divided nation. Anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and white supremacist graffiti appeared in school restrooms. A student told a Black teacher that “Black lives don’t matter.” Others chanted “build a wall” and taunted classmates with claims that Trump would
deport Black and Latino students.
Amid this, a parent named LaTarndra Strong was dropping off her daughter at Orange High School when she passed a white pickup truck waving a large Confederate flag.
Strong’s heart sped up as she flashed back to her Florida childhood. Hers was the first Black family in their suburban neighborhood, she said, and drivers with similar flags yelled the N-word through their windows as she walked to the park. “I would be afraid that truck was going to come around and hurt me,” she said.
Strong was a Republican in 2016 but not particularly political. She believed that if she alerted school authorities to this “blind spot,” they’d surely order Confederate flags—along with T-shirts, belts, and hats, which she said students wore—off campus.
She didn’t get the response she expected. “When you start banning symbols, you start attacking freedom of speech,” then Board of Education chair Stephen Halkiotis, a former Orange High School principal, said at the time. “You ban one flag, you’re going to have to ban every flag.”
Strong wrote to other parents. “I can’t do it alone,” she told them in an email. “I need your help.” They began turning out for school board meetings in December 2016, calling for an immediate ban on Confederate emblems.
Their numbers grew in the new year. Among them was Hillary MacKenzie, a white stay-at-home parent. She had been jolted into action after hearing the lan-
guage that fueled Trump’s election, a racism more overt than the hushed bigotry she had heard as a child in Orange County. “It made me realize, as a young mother, it was not the time to sit on the sidelines,” she said. MacKenzie met Strong and her daughter at a political gathering, listened to their story, and decided to join the effort. “Students should be able to go to school without hate symbols around them,” she said.
Halkiotis wanted to proceed slowly, with advice from legal experts about how to balance racial-climate and free-speech concerns. “Unilateral decisions can be made quickly,” he said. “A good, solid decision involving many people takes time.” Critics called him cowardly and tone-deaf for demanding patience in the face of white supremacy.
“It was my time on the cross,” he said. “I’m serious.”
In August 2017, the board came around. It voted to ban Confederate flags, swastikas, and Klan symbols. “I respect a flag that is held up as part of one’s heritage,” Halkiotis told a reporter, explaining his change of heart, “but not when it’s been co-opted by a militant racist group.”
Strong and her allies celebrated. They also noted that the board had waited until two days after a neo-Nazi struck and killed Heather Heyer during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “One of the things that became apparent,” MacKenzie said, “was that we needed a new school board, because it took them nine months to do this.”
MacKenzie ran in 2018 on a racial justice platform. She placed third in a field of eight, enough to secure a seat on the board.
The Confederate flag victory offered a tailwind to those eager to confront the obstacles faced by students of color. In 2019 the board acknowledged the “persistent racial intolerance, inequities, and academic disparities in our district.” That was the preamble to a new equity policy crafted by a task force that included Strong.
The policy called for recruiting a diverse workforce, improving training, and ferreting out barriers that keep certain students from learning. Halkiotis originally opposed it, saying the preamble’s mea culpa “puts us on shaky legal ground.” But the final vote was unanimous.
The board also hired Felder as superintendent in 2019. She had been working in Nashville and was impressed by how Orange’s equity policy acknowledged the district’s own shortcomings. “To me, here’s a board and a community saying, ‘We’re not trying to sweep anything under the rug,’” she said. “This was a district that had what I call teeth and muscle by way of a policy.”
Felder catapulted into the work, and her impact has been significant. The percentage of Black high school students in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes increased from 18 percent to 30 percent over a year. The faculty looks more like the student body. Families who speak limited English at home or don’t use email have better access to school
“This was a district that had what I call teeth and muscle by way of a policy.”L to R: Gretchen Schmid’s laptop, LaTarndra Strong PHOTOS BY JULIA WALL
communications.
Wide demographic gaps persist, and on standardized test scores, only 48 percent of students achieved grade-level proficiency in 2021-22 (statewide, it’s 51 percent). But Orange ranked no. 1 among North Carolina’s 115 districts in terms of how many schools exceeded the state’s academic growth targets. And data released in June showed sizable gains in early-elementary literacy skills, with Black students outpacing the average.
MacKenzie and her allies remained a minority on the board until 2020, when a progressive electoral wave created a 5-2 majority with her as the new chair. The other two members were moderates.
From the moment she took the gavel, MacKenzie understood the clock was ticking. “I didn’t know how long I would be chair,” she said. “So I was going to make decisions to get as much done as we possibly could in a short period of time.”
Much of the board’s energy went into COVID-19 policy, which leaned toward caution in health matters. But board members also pushed on equity. They renamed two schools, one that had been named for a slaveholder and the other for a segregation-era school official. This cost the progressives some political capital; even supporters wondered about the timing.
“When Hillary first shared that she was going to move forward with renaming, I said, ‘Not now,’” said Strong. “Yes, we should do it. But not now, because the pandemic was still under way.”
The board also passed detailed guidelines to protect students and employees who are transgender or transitioning. This reflected a recognition that LGBTQ+ students in Orange County, as elsewhere, face considerable hostility. Teachers told The Assembly about students who tear down GayStraight Alliance posters or belittle their trans classmates with barbs like “I’m feeling like a sheep today.” One high school English teacher described a student who was trying to write about what made him proud of his trans identity and coming up dry. All he could focus on were the hardships.
The most contentious of the guidelines notes that some trans students feel endangered or unwelcome at home if they come out. “The school principal or their designee should speak with the student first,” the policy says, to decide “how to involve the student’s parents, if at all.”
Mental health professionals said the discretionary language would protect students’ safety. MacKenzie, who helped write the guidelines, said that was her intention. “I am in the business of keeping children alive,” she said.
Some voters, though, considered the language an encroachment on parents’ rights. One of them was a Colorado transplant who soon became the face of the conservative opposition.
It was affordable land that brought Gretchen Schmid to Orange County. Back in Colorado, her four children had attended private Waldorf schools, which emphasize
arts and the outdoors and limit technology. But after they relocated in 2020, one of her sons wanted a traditional high school experience with competitive sports. Schmid and her husband enrolled him in the ninth grade at Orange High School.
At the Waldorf schools, Schmid said, she met monthly with her children’s teachers. They explained what the students were reading and how those stories supported them at their developmental stage.
Schmid still wanted to know what her son would be studying. As she looked online for the curriculum, she stumbled on conservative websites from other states, where parents had scoured their children’s reading lists. “They identified the themes that kept coming up,” Schmid recalled. “And they were cannibalism, church is bad, family is bad, scary white people.”
Schmid’s alarm mounted the following year, when she learned her son’s English class was reading Like Water for Chocolate aloud. Laura Esquivel’s novel follows a Mexican woman whose cooking transmits powerful emotions, including sadness and lust. The tale has magical realism, political metaphor, evocative food writing, and extramarital sex.
“A totally inappropriate book,” Schmid said. “We teach our family about the importance of family and that we follow God’s plan for the family—and that is a very sacred emphasis on the power of procreation.” This means celibacy until marriage, and Schmid felt the book was at odds with that teaching. “We don’t need extra kindling
to put on what’s already really strong for a teenager,” she said.
Schmid considered this “grooming” and one example of public school overreach. She also disapproved of mandatory COVID19 testing and on-field masking for unvaccinated student-athletes. (Waldorf schools tend to draw vaccine-averse families like hers.) And she considered the transgender guidelines antifamily because they give schools leeway about notifying parents.
Schmid had already started organizing a chapter of Moms for Liberty, a self-described “parental rights” group that originated in Florida. The organization, known for its confrontational tactics, grew rapidly during the pandemic.
She set out to spread the word. Facebook reached a limited audience, so Schmid began approaching parents as they waited to pick up their children after school. One afternoon, she put on a purple T-shirt from a charity race, then walked the car line at an elementary school that serves many immigrant families. She handed out a QR code for a conservative website, promising parents they’d learn about library and classroom materials, test scores, and teacher attrition.
MacKenzie was there picking up her child. She spotted Schmid—“looking like a nice white lady, looking like a teacher,” she said. “And something about it just made me so angry.”
The board member jumped out of the car, leaving her husband to wait for the child. She followed close behind the Moms for
Liberty chair. “It’s propaganda,” she shouted to the drivers. “Call the school board if you have questions.”
MacKenzie threatened to call the police if Schmid held up the line. “How does it feel to spread lies, Gretchen?” she asked. “Why are you so against gay kids?”
“Why do you want to sexualize children?” Schmid shot back.
“Why are you a fascist, Gretchen?” the board member later asked, in a part of the exchange that Schmid recorded and conservative activists shared online.
In retrospect, MacKenzie said, she probably should have walked away. But she said she stands by her choice of words. “She is alt-right conservative and spreading misinformation,” MacKenzie said. “To me, that falls pretty closely in the line of fascism.”
Schmid’s Moms for Liberty chapter joined a matrix of groups organizing around district policies, including the Orange County Republican Party, which urged the board’s opponents to “sign up for public comments to push back on their equity agenda.” They already had. At a September 2021 meeting, parents called board members dictators and compared mask mandates to the Trail of Tears. They chastised the board for displaying a “terrorist”—meaning Black Lives Matter—flag. One paraphrased the book of Matthew, telling members to “tie millstones around your neck and throw yourself into the sea before you mess with these kids.”
Conservatives were also active online, describing the transgender guidelines as “parental subversion” and suggesting that next teachers will help students get secret piercings and change their religions. The Apex-based Education First Alliance, which sponsored the “Rally Against Filth,” claimed in a video that antifa was “informing the school board” and that MacKenzie supported “indoctrinating kids in gender fluidity.”
When Orange County’s schools announced an “affinity space” where Black employees could meet and support one another following some traumatic national headlines, the Virginia-based Parents Defending Education filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education. The 2021 complaint, which the department did not take up, alleged the district was promoting “explicit racial segregation.”
Both MacKenzie and vice chair Brenda Stephens said they received threats to their safety—and in MacKenzie’s case, death threats. This fits what the U.S. Department of Justice described in 2021 as “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school board members and school personnel nationally.
MacKenzie bought a home security system. Stephens, a Black retired librarian who served 20 years on the board, obtained weapons training and a concealed-carry permit.
“I remember someone saying, ‘I know where you live,’” said Stephens. “I said pub-
licly, ‘You step foot on my property, and you might meet your maker.’ Because I’m not going to be harassed or intimidated. This is not the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. They’ve been doing it to Black people for years.”
Three days before the “Rally Against Filth,” in October 2021, a parent named Jacquie Barker filed a complaint seeking the removal of Gender Queer and two other books from the Cedar Ridge High School library. Barker, who had a child at Cedar Ridge, said she had watched a video of a school board meeting from another district, where Gender Queer was discussed. It was the most challenged book in a year that such challenges increased fourfold, according to the American Library Association. The book contains several references to masturbation and five pages depicting frontal nudity or sex. On the most explicit page, the author and a partner, both young adults, awkwardly try to use a dildo for oral sex before abandoning the effort.
Barker said she wanted to see if the parents’ concerns were legitimate, so she borrowed the book from the public library. The LGBTQ+ characters didn’t bother her, she said, but the graphic content did. “These types of stories are over sexualizing our youth and indoctrinating them with grotesque sexual encounters,” she wrote in her complaint. She also found the author’s support for pediatric gender-affirming care, including medications to delay puberty, offensive.
Barker found sympathy within Cedar Ridge. In a conversation she recorded, then principal Carlos Ramirez told Barker that he had not read all of Gender Queer, but the pages he viewed online surprised him. “Our mouths kind of fell open,” he told her. “How is it that a national library association— where librarians across the country, really across the globe, buy books from their recommendation list—how did they not put a warning asterisk or something?”
Ramirez said the comment reflected his opinion rather than school policy. Two review committees, one of which included Ramirez, later read the full book and recommended keeping it. So did Felder, the superintendent.
The school board made the final call during a Zoom meeting in January 2022. Members described Gender Queer as more complex than opponents depicted: the sexual sequences were a small slice of the author’s journey from confusion to self-respect. “I was also deeply touched by the loving and supportive family and community that helped Maia Kobabe,” said Carrie Doyle, MacKenzie’s successor as chair and another progressive. “My hope is for [our] community to be equally supportive of our LGBTQ+ students, staff, and families.”
MacKenzie noted the high suicide rate among transgender and nonbinary youth. Her motion to retain the book, indefinitely and district-wide, passed 7-0.
The board then voted to keep the two other books that were contested for their
descriptions of sex and abuse: Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, about a young landscaper trying to break out of poverty, and Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness, about an interracial romance during the lead-up to a fatal school explosion in 1930s Texas.
Each vote was unanimous: a display of common ground by a politically divided board. “My mother was an Auschwitz survivor,” member Bonnie Hauser, a moderate, told The Assembly. “So book banning has real meaning.”
By then, the 2022 elections were approaching, and the next skirmish was brewing—over issues more mundane but no less contentious.
Orange County still had to deal with runof-the-mill school concerns, including a nationwide teacher shortage. The district pays smaller salary supplements than nearby Chapel Hill–Carrboro, Durham, and Wake, which have more students. It relies on the county government for the local share of its budget, as it can’t independently levy taxes to pay teachers more.
This has consequences in the classroom. Seventh graders at Gravelly Hill Middle School in Efland went a year without their own math teacher. Instead, they logged into North Carolina Virtual Public School and communicated with remote teachers by email, text, and instant messaging while other educators provided in-classroom support. At least twice, a substitute-teacher shortage meant that multiple
classes had to gather in the auditorium. The state’s Department of Public Instruction gave Gravelly Hill a failing grade last year based on student test scores and academic growth.
Parents across the district felt frustrated by issues at their own kids’ schools. Some blamed the Board of Education for misplaced priorities. “We have all of these issues in the school district,” said Polly Dornette, whose son attends Gravelly Hill.
“And the primary focus was renaming two schools”—spending $97,000 for new signs and equipment—“instead of addressing teacher shortages, learning loss, all of these things that are much more pressing.”
Dornette held Felder responsible as well. “I certainly don’t think there is malice on her part,” she said. “But at the end of the day, she steers the ship.” At board meetings, the superintendent gave presentations that Dornette considered overly upbeat. “I think she swept the challenges under the rug,” the parent said.
In mid-2021, two former board members, Stephen and Susan Halkiotis, invited disaffected residents to their home outside Hillsborough. Both had long played leadership roles in the school system: Stephen spent 17 years as a principal before joining the board and presiding over the Confederate flag debate, and Susan served on the board for two nonconsecutive stints. They both considered their successors’ direction wrongheaded.
“There was so much effort and focus on
what I call the signaling of the righteous,” Susan said. “If you look at agendas, there’s equity and name changing and more equity and division. There’s not much education and achievement …. [It’s] all about equity and promoting Black kids over any other ethnicity.” (She hastily added, “We have to look after Black kids. No question.”)
As Orange High’s principal, Stephen had a reputation for quietly helping individual students—for example, working with g3ay leaders to find housing for gay kids whose parents had kicked them out. But now the district was shifting its attention to more systemic injustices. He had attended equity training as a board member and questioned its value. “Nobody had to tell me how to be fair to people,” he said.
While on the board, Stephen had voted for the equity policy. But he believed that, over time, the word “equity” had become “weaponized,” with white people cast as oppressors.
He cited the district’s plans to teach the 1619 Project, which explores the legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in history. “Go anywhere in the world and you can do a 320 BC Project,” he said. “Greeks enslaved other people. Romans enslaved other people …. The beauty of America is that it offered folks— oppressed people from all over the world— to come to a new world to find a better way of life. That’s why my parents came to this country. They didn’t come here to raise children to become oppressors.”
From the meeting at the Halkiotises’ house arose a new political action committee, Friends of Orange County Schools, which formally organized in February 2022. It criticized the board for fixating on what Susan called “a sociocultural political agenda” at the cost of student achievement.
Friends of Orange County Schools branded itself big-tent and moderate: “Not the vocal left or the vocal far right,” Stephen said. It attracted a broad membership, though the group won’t reveal numbers. “I’d look across the room and be like, ‘Whoa, my political ideologies are nowhere near what this person’s are,’” said Dornette, the Gravelly Hill parent.
Stephen did feel sympathetic toward some stances Moms for Liberty had taken, including their distaste for explicit library books. “I used to look at Sears, Roebuck catalogs,” he said. (That’s where teenage boys in the mid-20th century could glimpse women in lingerie.) “And I know growing up today, it’s hard for kids. But do we really need to have what appears to me to be pornographic cartoons in a little booklet showing kids sexual acts being performed with males and females and with strap-on fake genitalia?”
Friends of Orange County Schools endorsed four school board candidates that spring. Three of them overlapped with the slate Moms for Liberty had endorsed.
Both moderates and conservatives often framed the issue this way: the schools
are paying more attention to social justice goals than to academics.
Equity advocates call this a false dichotomy—you can’t promote learning without tackling bias and making students feel safe. “I don’t know why anyone thinks that protecting a child’s sense of humanity is not part of education and part of their ability to walk into our schools and learn,” MacKenzie said.
What’s more, she added, she and other board members spent a tremendous amount of time during the pandemic discussing academic challenges. “We were having so many extra meetings,” she said, “to make sure children didn’t fall behind academically in the middle of the biggest disruption … to the public education system in recent times.”
But she added that school boards are policy- and budget-making bodies. They don’t manage academics or dictate curriculum. “I’m not an expert in that,” she said. “No one should want me in charge of that. That isn’t the board’s role.” The board hires the superintendent, she noted, and Felder brought three decades of experience improving learning outcomes.
MacKenzie decided not to run for reelection in 2022, citing health reasons. Stephens also declined to run again, saying the ongoing conflict made her “sick and tired.” That gave the election a wide-open feel. Candidates that Friends of Orange County Schools endorsed won three of the four contested seats, giving the moderates a 4-3 majority.
The new board has turned away from passing large equity-minded policy initiatives. Instead, it has taken a more granular approach to overseeing the district’s daily operations. Neither Anne Purcell, the current chair, nor Will Atherton, her immediate predecessor, agreed to timely interviews for this story. The current vice chair, André Richmond, didn’t either.
The one moderate who did speak to The Assembly, Bonnie Hauser, described the current majority as proactive and results-driven. “I’m hands-on,” she said. “With a small district like this, everybody’s very hands-on.”
This is a controversial approach to governance. An independent audit, prepared in 2021 and updated in 2022, said Orange County’s board has traditionally been too hands-on, exceeding its statutory role, and that was “causing definite operational obstacles and morale problems.” Felder believes these blurred lines help explain the turnover rate for her job: the district had six superintendents, including interims, in the decade before her arrival.
“I’ve come to know that no veteran superintendent would ever apply for
the superintendency here because of the dynamics of this district,” she said. “When you’re getting results for children, and there’s still this space of conflict, I don’t understand that.”
The “hands-on” debate blew up last fall, three months after the new members took their oath. A split board voted twice to delay approval of a school improvement plan for Gravelly Hill, which the state requires for low-performing schools. The school-level team that wrote the plan had no authority over personnel, as the board’s attorney pointed out several times. Still, moderate members said they wouldn’t approve it until they received hour-by-hour staffing details. “I want to see names,” Hauser said.
Progressive board members objected. “I … don’t think it’s the school board’s job to oversee exactly what’s happening in which classroom at what period,” said Carrie Doyle, the former chair. “I think we’re really overstepping.”
efforts had gone too far.
“They could have announced that they have five PhD math teachers [for Gravelly Hill], and the board would have said, ‘We don’t know that they’re vetted,’” said LaTarndra Strong, who remains on the equity task force. “They had Dr. Felder’s head on a guillotine and this was the horse that they were riding in on.”
Shortly afterward, Roulhac left Gravelly Hill. “Why did she leave in the middle of the school year?” Felder asked. “Principals don’t do that, unless they’re at a breaking point.”
On Saturday morning, July 22, Strong set a table with bottled water and snacks in front of the old courthouse in downtown Hillsborough and waited for others to arrive for a hastily organized “Save Our Superintendent” rally.
Felder’s supporters had been growing anxious about her job security. For months, they asked the board why it hadn’t extended Felder’s contract, which ran through
the surprise,” Hauser said of the shortfall. “We didn’t know it was coming.”
Felder defended the spending decisions, saying they were essential to running a functional system during a pandemic. “This was not a district calling parents to cancel bus routes,” she said. The district did cut expenses, she said, but only to a degree: “Staying on budget but not meeting the needs of our students, is not—and I repeat, is not—an acceptable strategy.”
Now, as about 15 others arrived at the old courthouse for the rally, they formed a circle and listened as speakers touted Felder’s successes, including Orange’s no. 1 ranking for the number of schools that exceeded North Carolina’s academic growth targets.
“How do you, in the same year that we have the largest growth in the state, also have a leader that’s inadequate?” Strong told the ralliers. “It doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t.” Given the recent blowback against racial equity, she added, “it’s no surprise that … they would come against Black leadership in our district.”
On July 28, the board convened online for yet another closed session. When they emerged an hour later, none of the members mentioned what had transpired in private. Instead, Chair Purcell searched her Zoom screen. “Dr. Felder, are you with us?” she asked.
“I am indeed,” Felder replied.
“We will give you the floor,” Purcell said.
Felder wore an orange blazer and a strand of pearls. She looked directly at the camera. “It is with a very heavy heart of appreciation and admiration,” she said, “that I share that I will no longer serve as your superintendent.”
But the three members pressing hardest for details—Hauser, Atherton, and Purcell—said they wanted to ensure Gravelly Hill had the tools to succeed. “It was a great school improvement plan,” Hauser said. “I hoped by delaying the approval, the district would place more urgency on putting full-time teachers at the school.” Dornette believes pressure from the delay got educators into her son’s school faster.
There was something else going on, though, and the visual was hard to miss. Three white board members were confronting Felder and Gravelly Hill’s principal, Gwen Roulhac—both Black women with doctorates—and withholding their imprimatur over details the plan could not legally address. (The fourth moderate, Richmond, who is Black, did not participate in the discussions.) Felder had made equity her signature initiative, and the board’s new majority was promoted by a political organization that said equity
2025. North Carolina school boards often extend such contracts after annual evaluations; Durham’s superintendent received an extension to 2026 and Alamance-Burlington’s to 2027.
“This inaction is a quiet way to push a superintendent out of the district,” MacKenzie had told board members at a February meeting.
Then, throughout July, the board had spent hours in a closed session, including long stretches from which Felder was excluded.
One closed session on July 10 followed an independent financial review that revealed Orange County Schools were spending down their rainy-day fund “at a level that is not sustainable.” The board had commissioned the review after learning about a $985,000 budget shortfall, triggered by the unpredictable demands of a COVID-era labor crisis—for example, incentives to keep bus drivers from quitting. “The hard part is
The personnel agreement, which included a $195,000 severance payment, described her August 2 departure as “voluntary.” But Felder had wanted to keep the job. “Churn in school districts is not good,” she had told The Assembly a few weeks earlier.
Before she concluded her departing remarks, Felder reviewed the district’s accomplishments under her watch, from navigating the pandemic to elevating more students of color into advanced classes.
“Orange County Schools has become a beacon,” she said. “It has become a district that is lighting the way by breaking barriers to equity for students. It is my fervent hope that this light will continue to shine. Our students and their futures are depending on it.” W
“When you’re getting results for children, and there’s still this space of conflict, I don’t understand that.”
Shortly after he became Orange County Schools’ chief equity officer in 2022, Lee A. Williams II was summoned to a tense meeting at an elementary school.
A father had objected to an art project in which students had the option of coloring in their pronouns. Williams defended the project. The father turned to Williams. “Are you a pedophile?” he recalls the man asking.
For those who have studied school districts embroiled in culture wars, this was a predictable encounter. According to a UCLA study published last year, equity officers across the country have reported being targeted by conservative groups as a part of the growing backlash against antiracist and LGBTQ-inclusive policies. Though not an entirely new tactic, the intensity has ramped up over the past two years as activists have made “critical race theory” a key talking point.
Sometimes, the UCLA report said, the campaign against equity officers (and especially officers of color) takes the form of explicit threats and intimidation. One father, Williams said, called him 19 times in a single day. “Do you think you’re safe?” the parent asked. “Do you think your family’s safe?”
He’s not sure. He tells his team to leave school board meetings together. He lifts weights to strengthen his body. “I have reckoned with this idea: this is work I will die for,” he said.
Williams knew he’d face hostility, though he didn’t realize how much, when he left his job as a middle school principal in Guilford County to come to Orange. Shortly after his arrival last summer, Education Week published an article quoting his predecessor. She explained that she left the Orange County post because the blowback against critical race theory had made her job both ineffective and exhausting.
This past May, Williams’s office hosted a panel discussion for LGBTQ+ school system employees and their allies called Pride in the Profession. It was open to the public, but there were enough safety and confidentiality concerns that organizers decided not to record it.
Gretchen Schmid, the local Moms for Liberty chapter chair, was there. The event poster had welcomed both LGBTQ+ people and their “coconspirators,” a word that caught her eye. “If you’ve been labeled a conspirator in our country in the last three years,” she said, “the FBI is hunting you down.”
Panelists shared their personal stories and discussed age-appropriate ways to support queer kids and educate all students. They discussed a Pride Month slide
deck for elementary classrooms. And they shared their fears about North Carolina’s Senate Bill 49, a Republican-sponsored “Parents’ Bill of Rights” that Gov. Roy Cooper later vetoed. (No override vote has taken place so far.) The bill would require schools to notify parents when their children adopt new pronouns.
“A lot of teachers have already said they’re not comfortable throwing their kids under the bus,” panelist Billie Markham, a fifth-grade teacher, remembered saying.
Afterward, Markham said, audience members lined up to thank her. She felt so supported, she said, that later she used the phrase “my wife” in her classroom for the first time in 26 years. “It got zero reaction from my students,” she said.
Schmid viewed the event differently. She bristled at the mention of the slide deck, believing that its message of inclusion and allyship masked a pro-transgender “indoctrination” campaign. And she disliked when Williams asked the audience not to debate panelists. “Basically,” she said, “this was like a communist meeting.”
Barred from recording, Schmid took detailed notes instead, and reported them through email and social media. Word spread from there. “The district is using celebrities and children’s picture books to brand LGTBQ by instilling thoughts into undeveloped children’s minds that they too can switch genders,” Jacquie Barker, the parent who challenged the Cedar Ridge High School library books, wrote to elected officials.
One of them was SB 49’s cosponsor, Alamance County Republican state senator Amy Galey. She in turn wrote to Superintendent Monique Felder, asking about plans to disobey the law if it passes. (“Orange County Schools complies with all federal, state, and local laws,” Felder replied.) Galey also requested Orange’s elementary school curriculum and teaching materials related to sexuality and gender identity.
The right-wing journalist A.P. Dillon wrote to the district, requesting Markham’s employment details, including her salary. And at the next regular board meeting, a
Moms for Liberty member without kids in the system publicly named Markham and another panelist.
Williams knows that some colleagues are uncomfortable in the spotlight. But he also believes that change is birthed from discomfort.
“There is no more hiding in fear in the shadows,” Williams said. “I’m right here. I come in every day, head held high—on a swivel, still wanting to make it home every day, but also knowing this is the right work for me.” W
LeeA. Williams II took over as chief equity officer for Orange County Schools last year amid turmoil in the district over how to address systemic discrimination. Lee Williams PHOTOS BY JULIA WALL
This summer, INDY creative director Nicole Pajor Moore and I spent some time at the Durham County Library poring over this newspaper’s archives.
It was remarkable to see records of how much the Triangle has changed over the last 40 years, but also to see how much it has stayed the same—the INDY is still reporting on some of the same development, environmental, and labor issues as it was four decades ago. Our state legislature remains similarly dysfunctional. But we were there on a mission, and that was, as a follow-up to our INDY40 package earlier this spring, to capture photojournalism from the INDY—the Independent, the Independent Weekly, and finally INDY Week—from that span of time. That’s what you’ll see in the following pages: stories brought to life from the trained eyes of some of the most talented photojournalists working in the state.
As with print journalism, it’s a strange time for photojournalism. Aside from the ubiquity of cameras—everybody has one on their phone these days—the specter of AI looms over the craft as the internet did over print media in the early 2000s, threatening to change it in fundamental ways. But as with print journalism, there is still a hunger from the public for visual storytelling that demands the human skill. As you’ll see in this photo retrospective, sometimes images say things that no words can.
We begin the retrospective with photos from the INDY’s very first photography editor, Alma Blount, and end it with a selection of photos from our current staff photographer, Brett Villena. We’ve tried to include images from all of the paper’s photojournalists from the years in between. We also want to recognize all of the paper’s talented staff members—art directors, illustrators, graphic designers, and other creatives—for their less visible but crucial roles in providing compelling visual experiences to our readers over 40 years.
Villena is leaving the paper this month to begin a new chapter in Wilmington. We wish him all the best and are grateful for the work he has done at the INDY giving our stories lives beyond the newsprint page.
We’ll hire a new photographer soon, and our creative team and I feel confident that the INDY will continue to be celebrated for its photojournalism—alongside its award-winning reporting—for many decades to come.
—Jane Porter
Nominate your favorite bar, veterinarian, bookshop, museum—whatever it may be, there are over 100 categories in which you can profess your favorite Orange and Chatham County treasures.
ORANGE OR CHATHAM COUNTY
Best Triangle 2023 of the Orange & Chatham Counties Orange & Chatham Counties
NOMINATIONS BEGIN
WEDNESDAY, JULY 19 TH
Rickety, funny, and dizzy with affection, the indie comedy Theater Camp is an ode to that most noble of high school cliques: the theater kids.
It goes like this: Camp AdirondACTS is, as the name suggests, a performing arts summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Founded by the legendary Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris), an old-school theater lifer, the camp is dedicated to providing a summer oasis for those who love drama, musical theater, and adjacent disciplines (juggling, say).
As a practical matter, that means Camp AdirondACTS is a second home and safe space for a lot of misfits and queer kids— campers and counselors alike. They love their summer camp, and their summer camp loves them. The trouble this particular season is that owner Joan has lapsed into a coma during a production of Bye Bye Birdie. Money is tight, and now the property is being targeted by the corporatized rich kids’ camp across the lake.
Determined to save the day, camp alumni Amos (Ben Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon) rally the returning campers, who need their summer camp like flowers need the sun. Will Amos and Rebecca-Diane draw on memories of their own magical summers? Will desperate plans regarding Cole Porter go hilariously wrong? Will the kids stage one last musical extravaganza to rescue the camp?
Yes, yes, and kind of! It gets weird!
Lead performers Gor-
don and Platt wrote the script with fellow theater nerds Nick Lieberman (who codirects with Gordon) and Noah Galvin, who plays the camp’s beleaguered technical director. Filmed in just 19 days at an old summer camp facility, the production relied heavily on improvisation from its talented cast.
Everyone involved in the film clearly has a deep knowledge of children’s theater and summer camps. The result is a ballistic style of comedy powered by enthusiasm, specificity, and detailed character work. The focus is also mostly kept on the grown-ups, which is the right choice.
The educators at this camp consider themselves artists; you know the type. I particularly liked the moment when costume designer Gigi (Owen Thiele) wheels on a young camper: “It says here you’re allergic to polyester. Why?” In another scene,
the adults have a boozy bonfire using the alcohol they confiscate from the campers.
The kids, meanwhile, are left to sort out the lessons of their vital but frequently inappropriate education. One sequence in the big musical finale has children acting out a cocaine sight gag with a giant nose at Studio 54. It’s hard to explain, actually. The humor has real heart but is always delivered with some kind of spin, as when a nervous camper finally comes out as heterosexual to his visiting dads.
With its high spirits and improv riffing, Theater Camp necessarily suffers a bit structurally. The film’s mockumentary conceit is forgotten about halfway through and the ending is a joyful train wreck of loose threads and half-baked ideas. Several plot points are resolved in post-credits scenes and title cards.
But that’s about right for this particular movie, which is all about slapdash art and in-the-moment glory. In a way, Theater Camp is a throwback to the kind of gonzo comedies that ruled the early ’80s, updated with 21st-century improvements to inclusivity and relaxed self-awareness.
In the end, it was the cheerful audacity of the film that made me happy. Most of the movies in multiplexes these days feel like skilled merchants selling engineered products. Theater Camp feels like artists making art, however clumsily: real people making real comedy out of the stuff they really love. W
Things are always changing on Franklin Street, and fast. Businesses pop up, move in, shut down; shops rebrand; scaffolding becomes a permanent sidewalk fixture as construction drags on through long, dreary months. But about halfway down Franklin, hidden from street view, there’s one change that’s gone relatively unnoticed.
It’s called Garden Spot.
A 60-by-60 lot tucked behind Lantern Restaurant, Garden Spot is a new community space that brings people together to share food, art, music, and culture every weekend. The space was purchased by Lantern Restaurant in 2020 with the goal of building community and uplifting emerging food businesses.
There’s no place like it on Franklin Street, says Sophie Dubois, a server at Lantern who is also working as the Garden Spot publicist.
“There’s plenty of good restaurants, but there’s not necessarily a place that people can hang out that isn’t specific to a certain demographic,” Dubois says. “The Garden Spot is for anybody who wants to try new food—and it’s a good opportunity for the people making new food to get people to try it.”
Lantern, an upscale Asian-fusion restaurant started by award-winning chef Andrea Reusing, has a history of community engagement—all of its ingredients are locally sourced from North Carolina farmers—but Garden Spot is the first time it’s created a physical space to support small businesses. The space, once an empty parking lot, is now lined with beds of flowers and plants—tomatoes, cucum-
bers, and zucchini, this season, among other vegetables and herbs—planted at the June opening, and contains a long gazebo, stage, tables, and bar.
The plan is to do four residencies per year, each running between three and six weeks long, featuring four different vendors. Pop-up events at Garden Spot run for three to four hours every Friday and Saturday evening, giving vendors ample time to sell their products to the community.
The vendors are chosen based on a rolling application, which allows the team behind the Garden Spot to get to know the owners and determine whether their businesses would be a good fit for an upcoming residency, program coordinator Abby Parcell says.
“We want to support small food businesses who are either just getting started and looking for an opportunity to test out a new concept, or for folks that want to explore what it would be like to move into brick and mortar,” Parcell says. “But we also want to focus particularly on people who have been disadvantaged by our historical and current financing structures and social networks, so we’re focusing on businesses that are run by people of color, women, queer folks.”
This first residency, which kicked off on July 14 and stretches until August 18, features four vendors. There’s Mr. Gravy’s, which serves up Southern comfort food; King’s Pepper, a spice brand known for its award-winning African tacos; Cilantro, a Mexican food catering and salsa business; and Elaka Treats, dishing out handcrafted ice cream inspired by South Indian and Arabic flavors.
This residency is the first time that some of the vendors have been able to engage with their customers in person. Gail Jennings, the owner of King’s Pepper, primarily sells her spice and African taco kits online, which means she isn’t usually able to observe reactions or hear feedback.
“It was the ideal opportunity for me to manifest the desire I had to sell my African tacos to the public,” Jennings says. “I don’t have a brick and mortar, I don’t have a food truck—so this gave me the opportunity to get realtime reactions.”
Jennings grew up in Los Angeles and learned to cook from the women around her. She experienced West African cuisine in the ’80s, which inspired the King’s Pepper flavor, but her exposure to taco trucks in Los Angeles led her to combine the two cuisines into a new product: the African taco, a vegan mixture of the Mexican street snack and West African black-eyed pea fritters.
Zim Torain of Mr. Gravy’s also learned to cook at a young age—though not by choice, he says jokingly.
“One summer, I think I was like 10 years old, I was out of food and said to my mom, ‘What are you going to cook for me?’” Torain says. “She was like, ‘Cook for me? You’re 10. You need to start learning how to cook—if you’re going to eat, you’re going to cook yourself.’” So he learned. Decades later, Torain’s mom, Christine, is still by his side but now as a fellow chef for Mr. Gravy’s catering business. They’ve built up a committed fan base in Cedar Grove and Hillsborough, but this residency is the first time they’ve done business in the Chapel Hill area. “There’s so many
people in North Carolina, and sometimes businesses are just so secluded to one customer base,” Torain says. “I want everybody to know about Mr. Gravy’s, and I felt like there’s not a better area than Chapel Hill to kind of get yourself out there.”
But Chapel Hill also wouldn’t be Chapel Hill without its arts scene, which is something else that the Garden Spot is incorporating into its weekend pop-ups. On opening weekend, a sunny Friday evening saw a crowd of 40 lounging around at tables while Cortland Gilliam, Chapel Hill’s new poet laureate, read poetry alongside three other poets. The August 18 event will host local artist John Vance screenprinting T-shirts with their Garden Spot design.
Parcell is brimming with other ideas for future pop-ups: demonstrations from a garden club about pollinating, a mending circle led by artists, or a quilting lesson from an aficionado in the Northside neighborhood.
“All those kinds of demos, so that we’re making it a place that’s welcoming for lots of different parts of the community, lots of ages and families,” Parcell says. “Giving people another reason to come be on Franklin Street and to be part of the neighborhood in a different way.”
Both the artists and small businesses benefit from community engagement at these events, but it’s not just the weekend pop-ups that help the food vendors
gain experience and exposure. Garden Spot also connects the four vendors with an advisory council made up of nonprofit leaders, restaurants, and experts in the local food scene. In addition to their advice, Garden Spot is partnered with Durham Tech’s Small Business Center so that vendors can learn information about grants and industry tips.
“There’s so much information that I didn’t know,” Torain says. “It’s almost sad that there’s so much information out there that you don’t know, and until you can get connected with the right people, sometimes it’s hard to find that information.”
In another effort to combat industry gatekeeping, the Garden Spot team is working to eventually set up a peer network so that past vendors can stay connected and advise businesses who are just starting their residencies.
But for now, the first Garden Spot residency is approaching its last pop-up. Torain says he’ll be sad to see Mr. Gravy’s residency come to an end, but he’s excited for future involvement with the people he’s met and the next round of vendors who will be taking the leap in October.
“I look at things as a two-way street: if somebody helps you out, it’s supposed to go the other way, too,” Torain says. “I want to stay connected to those people, so I will continue to go down there and support them at the Garden Spot.” W
“I felt like there’s not a better area than Chapel Hill to kind of get yourself out there.”Guests mingle during a Garden Spot event PHOTO BY LINDA NGUYEN
Friday, Aug. 11–Friday, Sep. 15
Everyone in Durham has personal lore— the story of who we are and how we came to be. And if you do the work of being present enough to make your mark on this community, your lore becomes a part of the fabric of the city.
When I think about the artist Derrick Beasley, I think about an architect of Black abundance, cultural memory, and place making. Once an administrator at community education organization Student U, now a full-time artist and member of the city’s open space and trails committee, Beasley has allowed his work to take many shapes throughout the years.
Depending on who you ask, his legend takes many forms, from his time at Riverside High School and AT&T to his work with Black August in the Park and with Tall Grass. Like many unsung members of this community, though, the moments that shaped his identity, creative output, and place as an architect of this city have gone unexplored in our communities’ signature public media and archives.
Surviving the Burn, Beasley’s upcoming solo exhibition and residency at North Star Church of the Arts, begins August 11 and runs through September 15. Through self-portraiture, sculpture, and installation, this show explores apocalyptic notions of environmental collapse, nature, masculinity, community, and Black identity.
Embarking on Surviving the Burn allowed Beasley to join hands with community members who parallel his role as an import-
ant piece of the tapestry of his hometown: arts advocate and producer Myra Weise of Proxemic Media worked alongside Beasley to develop and curate the exhibition; photographers Kennedi Carter and Cornell Watson turned their lenses on Beasley in a rare opportunity for him to be the subject; and I had the honor of reflecting on Beasley’s legacy while helping curate programming for the exhibition. The exhibition coincides with several community events, including Swamp Jam, a block party in celebration of Surviving the Burn. Ahead of the show, Pierce Freelon sat down with Beasley to discuss growing up and making art and community in a gentrifying Durham.
PIERCE FREELON: Just kicking things off: What’s fire about Durham and what’s on fire?
DERRICK BEASLEY: Durham has always had this energy that I think in some ways, even if you’re from here, it takes, like, leaving for a little while and to get kind of a broader perspective to understand.
I remember when I first moved back, Runaway was popping in a really dope way, and that pro-Durham culture was popping. And that was part of what attracted me back from Atlanta and so I wanted to be a part of this energy that was claiming Durham in a certain way.
But that claiming also opens up to appropriation. And I don’t know if I’ve even ever thought about it that way myself, but it’s
NorthStar Church of the Arts, Durham
Monday, Aug. 18, 6 p.m.
almost like an appropriation of the Bull [City]. This is not to say people can’t come to Durham. That’s not what I’m saying. But there’s a way that people from Durham move and carry themselves that I feel like has been appropriated by the folks who ain’t from here.
And that’s happening in all urban centers; that’s not unique to Durham. It’s a national trend, gentrification and urbanization. But I think that’s the crux of what’s on fire about Durham—folks coming to Durham and just squeezing people out, squeezing Black folks out, specifically, and even in the way that they’ve leveraged that history squeezes [them] out. Growing up it was almost like, “We gotta get out of the Bull [City]. We got to do something different, and that’s fine.” That’s what most people feel about the place they’re from.
Right. Especially at a particular age.
A lot of my friends who are here now or who have come back still don’t feel a place here. Like moving out to the ’burbs, mov-
ing out to Morrisville, Cary, Wake Forest, still feeling like “This is still not for me.”
I think that’s a real loss, and it’s unfortunate, because I think we’ve lost and are continuing to lose [Durhamites], especially during the pandemic. There was like a grand reverse migration that’s been happening, like, people from up north in bigger cities coming back south, and there’s also been almost like a grand exodus of people from Durham. A lot of our culture bearers have dipped or just quieted and fell back from some of the culture-making that they were doing, and the pandemic accelerated that.
There’s a lot of new spots, and I’ll be at the new spots, too—this [NorthStar] is kind of a newish spot. I’m not mad at all of the new spots inherently, but it’s like, damn, where we at?
What is driving you to create these spaces, and what is the connective tissue between them?
Yeah, I mean, Black is a connective tissue for sure. And even when I think back to, like,
when we were starting Black August in the Park—shout out to Moses, Crystal, Ja’nell, Gunn—part of it was us seeing the trend that we just discussed. We could see it in a different stage, and it’s like, “Oh, we need to make space for us here.”
That’s always been part of my creative practice—making space for Black folks and taking space and taking up space. And not taking up space necessarily in response to whiteness, but just, like, not quieting ourselves or our culture.
We talked a lot about Durham. Could you talk about the role that it plays in North Carolina and the way that your work is expansive beyond the containers of the Bull [City]?
Durham is an influential, progressive place, similar to and in the middle of a conservative place—the South. But radical action also lives in the South and is birthed in the South.And so I always saw—with Black August in the Park, but also Tall Grass— that our movements have got to come from the South because we experience things in a very specific way. Even thinking about Durham’s positionality—not in just the Southern United States but as a Black community positioned in the Global South—Durham is uniquely positioned. I think it’s just one of those places that quietly has always been part of the conversation, politically.
[With] Tall Grass Food Box, we are striving to build an infrastructure for Black farmers in the region. Farming doesn’t know county limits—I mean, it does, but it’s a regional endeavor, because soil is not bound by the state or county lines. So we access folks who are still within what I would say is the Durham metropolitan area, the surrounding counties, the surrounding counties of the Triangle.
I wonder if you could talk about a moment from your childhood, perhaps in Durham, where you felt possessed by that public spirit. Because I think we take those vibrations and translate them into adulthood.
I think it was definitely my rearing. My mom was a social worker and worked for Wake County Human Services for the majority of her career and was always talking about facilitating things in the community. My grandmother was the social services director in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and my dad would preach and was really rooted in the community.
I did some organizing work in Atlanta, and that definitely shaped my perspective. I worked with a group home and being able to see the good, bad, and the ugly of what happens when community wraps its arms around people—and what happens when we don’t wrap our arms around people—and seeing the possibilities when we do. People always benefit from community.
You have a solo show coming up. Community will certainly be involved, but you’re at the center. How does that feel?
I’m at a point where I have been doing more work with and for myself, and I’ve been in a very intentional mode of development around my creative practice. And that’s been with the help of Margaret Brunson, who—everybody, if you’re from here, you know, because she’s an incredible
Because I don’t want it to feel like going to work. That’s not what I want. But how do I take it seriously? In the same way, I’m not perfect. But this morning, waking up, I got my “breathe, gather, and write” practice. So I’m waking up, I’m breathing, I’m touching earth, literally. I feel like I’ve been preaching the gospel of this to everybody. I’ll gather, which for me is consuming some kind of art, or, most mornings, reading. And that’s feeding into my research for my artwork also. And then I’m writing. So I’m either writing a reflection on what I’ve read and how it makes me feel.
You’ve mentioned Marcella [Camara] and Monet [Noelle Marshall]. Can we just take a moment to celebrate Black women? And maybe you could talk about what Black women in Durham have meant to you?
edgment of the centrality of Black women in this area, as opposed to when you think about narratives around Black Wall Street, it’s like all these men that we’re naming with suits looking like a frat picture. And, yeah, they were dope, but there’s always been women there doing important things and leading, and I think now it’s more visible.
I want to talk a little more about your work. What does Surviving the Burn mean to you?
So really, it’s like—assuming that we gone make it. So it deals with eco-grief, but it also deals with eco-possibilities. It’s assuming that Black folks, as resilient as we are and have been, we’ll get through this too.
Rooting in that possibility feels important. So really it’s like looking back and seeing like, OK, we survive. Who did we have to become? Who do we have to stop being? What cultural ways of being did we maintain, invent, and shed? What knowledge did we center? And what are the artifacts of that survival, and what did those lives look like? I’ve been increasingly obsessed with swamps.
There’s a book I was reading about the Great Dismal Swamp, and it kind of positioned it as being inherently resistant to capitalist extraction and how in order to live and survive there, you got to be in relationship with that place.
You can’t scale it. That idea, that everything must grow and scale, is extractive and destructive. So going back to Surviving the Burn, thinking about the swamp as an example of how we could live. We have marooned ourselves to swamps in the past in community with Indigenous folks and some poor white folks. That’s been a place that we’ve gone as a solution and I think as a place of refuge, a place of abundance. I’ve just really been enjoying exploring narratives around swamps and thinking about how we can use them as an example of what we can do moving forward. Whether we return geographically is still a question for me, but restoring our wetlands is incredibly important, and being in community with our wetlands is important. Yeah, I think it’s a place we need to go back to, whether it’s philosophically or topographically or geographically. We got to return to the swamp. W
facilitator. She’s been helping me develop a ritual for my creative practice. When I stopped my full-time work with Student U back in ’21, I’d been an artist, but now I [was] like, “OK, how do I make this not like a job?”
Personally, professionally, spiritually, emotionally—I mean, everything. And I’m so grateful.
I think that’s what’s interesting and unique about this moment in Durham is not just the centrality, but the acknowl-
BY LAUREN WINGENROTH arts@indyweek.com
If you’ve seen a dance film in the state of North Carolina, odds are that Cara Hagan had something to do with it.
A prolific dance filmmaker herself and the former longtime director of the American Dance Festival’s (ADF) Movies by Movers, Hagan has long shaped the North Carolina dance scene with her thoughtfully curated dance film festival programs and her own fascinating films (plus, she recently literally wrote the book on screendance, with her 2022 Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice).
You could see the medium of dance film as a relatively controlled setting. Without the unknowns of a live performance, audiences sit in their seats and generally see what the filmmaker wants them to see.
Hagan’s latest work, were we birds?, a site-specific live dance piece at the Nasher Museum of Art, which closes out this year’s ADF on August 22, pivots firmly in the opposite direction, handing the reins back over to audiences and allowing them to shape their own experience of the work—from where they choose to watch it to the music they choose (or not) to listen to.
For Hagan, who is now based in New Jersey while teaching at the New School in New York City, giving audiences the agency to choose “echoes the choices we need to make as human beings in these chaotic situations,” she says. “Do I go over here or over here? Do I listen now, or do I choose not to listen? What is my role in all of this chaos, and how much of a choice do I really have?”
By “all of this chaos,” Hagan means the COVID-19 pandemic and everything that’s come with it. Her own chaotic pandemic experience—she was apart from her husband for a year, moved three times
with a small child, and had an international job opportunity fall through—partly inspired were we birds?, which explores migration and displacement, upheaval and reorganization.
“I began thinking of all the ways that people are displaced—not just because of COVID, but I think COVID brought to light a lot of ways that people are disenfranchised and the ways that we don’t make space for the chaos in people’s lives,” she says. “We live in a society where we just have to keep going like everything’s fine—we’re moving, we’re shaking, we’re doing what we’ve got to do. And meanwhile, everybody is having these huge experiences in their lives that we’re just glazing over.”
were we birds?, which was commissioned by ADF, is arguably Hagan’s largest-scale presentation in this state, after she spent many years here on faculty at Appalachian State University and High Point University, where she created the dance program. For Hagan, though, that framing is complex, as she’s long orchestrated screendance projects of equal or larger scale but in the sometimes-forgotten role of curator.
“Curating is such an invisible kind of work—people see the thing that you put together, but they don’t necessarily equate you with it,” she says.
But in were we birds?, Hagan will be highly visible, both as the piece’s author and as one of its three performers (alongside fellow NC School of the Arts alums Laura Gutierrez and Tammy Carrasco), who will be up close and personal with audiences as they wander throughout the Nasher’s lobby, observing from whatever vantage point they choose. Audiences will also be in charge of using their own devices to scan QR codes throughout the museum to access the music, a dreamy original jazz score by com-
poser Amanda Addleman, via headphones.
This was partially a logistical choice. “The Nasher is sonically really challenging,” she says. “We want people to hear this beautiful music—how can we do that and make sure everyone is having the experience they want to have?”
But since audiences will be able to decide when to start and stop the music—or when to watch in silence—they’ll inevitably end up on a journey that is entirely their own.
“I’m interested in how people will see the same sections to very different music, and how that will change their perception of what they’re seeing,” says Hagan, who is not rehearsing to the music. “The way each audience member interprets the piece will
be very different depending on where they choose to stand, what they choose to listen to, who’s around them, how they’re navigating other people.”
The ADF premiere will be something of a test run for were we birds?, which Hagan hopes to someday tour to spaces like train stations, where performers and audiences must navigate not only one another but masses of other bodies coming and going. It’ll be an added layer of chaos, and one that Hagan will welcome.
“How do you reconcile chaos and create some sort of order only to know that there’s chaos on the horizon at some other point?” she asks. “We never actually get out of it.” W
MUSIC
An Evening with Lyle Lovett and His Large Band $60+. 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic: Just for the Funk of It Tour $58+. 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
STAGE
The Prom $30+. Aug. 2-13, various times. Theatre Raleigh, Raleigh.
Weave & Spin Performance Series 7 p.m. Orange County Arts Commission, Hillsborough.
PAGE
Laura Morelli: The Last Masterpiece 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.
MUSIC
Alesana $25. 7 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
The Big Net / Nico Headly / iamdynamite $10. 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.
DJ KJB on the Rooftop Aug. 10-12, various times. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
The Great Reset 10 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Julian Lage $30. 7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Light to Shine feat. C. Shreve the Professor, Defacto Thezpian, and more $7. 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Thursdays at 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.
The Owners $12. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill. Pine Cone Bluegrass Jam 7 p.m. Riparian Provision Company, Raleigh.
T. Davis 6:30 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Toosii: NAUJOUR Tour $55+. 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Adam Lee Decker Trio
6:30 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Buridan $15. 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.
Death Grips $52. 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Eric Wayne Band 10 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Jason Aldean with Mitchell Tenpenny, Corey Kent, and Dee Jay Silver: Highway Desperado Tour $86+.
7:30 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.
Rah Digga / Sa-Roc $25. 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Rod Abernethy / Rebekah
Todd $15. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
The Spectacles $10. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.
Beer Garden Comedy Showcase 8 p.m. The Glass Jug Beer Lab RTP, Durham.
Toosii performs at the Ritz on Thursday, August 10.
MUSIC
Angela Bingham Group
$25. 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
Caique Vidal / Também
$15. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Goth Babe: The Lola Tour $44. 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
The Great Reset 10 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Kerry Long Duo 3 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
The Mad Starlings $10. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.
The Miss Adventures
4 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.
Real Rowdy 6:30 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Rhonda Robichaux and Trio Du Jour 7 p.m. Succotash, Durham.
Stone Whiskey $10. 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
Sugar: Nu-Metal Dance Party $18. 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Tapes on Ten / RIBS $10. 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
The ComedyWorx Show
Matinee $9. Saturdays at 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.
COMMUNITY
8th Cary Eid Festival 4 p.m. Cary Arts Center, Cary.
Mustard Seed Project Charity Drive and Celebration 10 a.m. The Glass Jug Beer Lab Downtown, Durham.
Circles around the Sun $23. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
The Clientele $22. 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Kudzu Dru 4 p.m. Speakeasy, Raleigh.
Strawberry Runners / Emma Geiger / Libby Rodenbough $10+. 7 p.m. perfect lovers, Durham. Threeplustwo $25. 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
Tyler Childers: Send in the Hounds Tour $295+. 6 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.
The All-American Rejects / New Found Glory / The Get Up Kids $25+. 6:30 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.
Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová of The Swell Season $45+. 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Baylen Levine: The Never Grow Up Tour $45. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
The Great Raleigh Cleanup Monday Night Stroll Mondays at 6 p.m. Brookside Bodega, Raleigh.
50 Cent with Busta Rhymes and Jeremih: The Final Lap Tour $28+. 7 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.
The Baseball Project $25. 7 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro. Brit Floyd $40+. 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Trio $8. Tuesdays at 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.
Queens of the Stone Age: The End Is Nero Tour $29+. 6:30 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.
Shawn Dove: I Too Am America 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.
Nominate your favorite Orange or Chatham County bar, veterinarian, bookshop, museum— whatever it may be, there are over 100 categories in which you can profess your favorite Orange/Chatham County treasures. Later in the year we will vote among the winners from all participating regions to determine the Best of the Triangle for 2023! Orange &
NOMINATIONS BALLOT LIVE
The most recognized award throughout the Triangle is back for 2023—
MUSIC
Molly Parden $12. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
PAGE
Short Story Panel with David Lawrence Morse and Joseph Bathanti 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.
MUSIC
The Beths SOLD OUT. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
DJ KJB on the Rooftop Aug. 17-19, various times. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Eggy $16. 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
Gengis Don & the Empire $15. 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Hotel Fiction / Trash
Panda $17. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Josh Branch 6:30 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Thursdays at 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.
Overgrown Throne / Paranoid Maniac / Hot Rats $10. 8 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.
Super Nash Bros 10 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Leanne Morgan $36+. Aug. 17-18, 7 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Kate Doyle: I Meant It Once 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.
Arcy Drive $18. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro. Awen Family Band 9 p.m. Speakeasy, Carrboro.
The Blatant Beast / Medium Heat / Megayacht 7:30 p.m. Ruby Deluxe, Raleigh.
Brent Cobb $25. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
Sasha McVeigh 10 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Steep Canyon Rangers / Amythyst Kiah $30. 7:30 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.
That’s My Jam! $35+. 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh. Thrio $25. 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
Thrio performs at Sharp Nine Gallery on Friday, August 18.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SHARP NINE GALLERY.
Arrival from Sweden: The Music of ABBA $40+. 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Dan Davis Group 4 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.
The Heavy Heavy $20. 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Joe Natelli 3 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Juniper Lights 6:30 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Mark Tipton Quintet $25. 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
Pentatonix and Lauren
Alaina: The World Tour
$26+. 8 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.
Ruen Brothers $15. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
The Seven Deadly Bibs $8. 8 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.
Slow Teeth and Friends
Perform Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon $15. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro Super Nash Bros 10 p.m. Tin Roof, Raleigh.
Taxicab Preacher 4 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.
STAGE
The ComedyWorx Show
Matinee $9. Saturdays at 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.
Please Don’t Destroy $33+. 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.
PAGE
Bookstore Romance Day
Tea Party 4 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.
COMMUNITY
Summer Celebration Artspace, Raleigh.
Third Saturday Local Maker and Vintage Market 3 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.
HEATWAVE: A Summer Day Party Series $10. 5 p.m. PS37, Durham.
Jill Andrews $20. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Zephyranthes $10. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.
STAGE
No Shame Theatre 3 p.m. Carrboro Century Center, Carrboro.
COMMUNITY
DPS Fest 3 p.m. Durham Central Park, Durham.
The Great Raleigh Cleanup Monday Night Stroll Mondays at 6 p.m. Brookside Bodega, Raleigh.
Adithya Vaidhyan Quartet
$15. 7 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
The Anchor $12. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Trio $8. Tuesdays at 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.
Sheer Mag / Hot Rats / The Gunline $16. 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
STAGE
Cara Hagan: were we birds? $16. 7 and 9 p.m. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham.
PAGE
Matt Zemon: Psychedelics for Everyone 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.
this week’s puzzle level:
There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.
If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages” at the bottom of our webpage.
If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key and previous puzzles at indyweek.com/puzzles-page.
Best of luck, and have fun!
08.09.23
Editorial and Research Assistant
Editorial and Research Assistant for book concerning Grand Teton National Park, Wyo. Part time, work from your home. Good computer skills and creativity mandatory. $25/ hour. Start soon. Resume to: teton2021@ gmail.com
Display Engineer
919-416-0675
Display Engineer. Dsgn, dvlpment & qualification of Flat Panel Displays for both monochrome & color display products. Work on flat panel displays both at the component & system level, serving as a focal point between customer’s system dsgn team, display electrical engg team, display mechanical team, supply base mgmt team, & display suppliers. Manage all activities necessary to deliver displays into final products from initial concept to production. Res Master Deg in Electrical Engg or Comp Engg. Apply to: LXD Research & Display, LLC. 7516 Precision Dr., Ste 100, Raleigh, NC 27617. Attn: HR.
Business Intelligence Analyst Business Intelligence Analyst sought by Grifols USA, LLC for the Durham location. Candidate must have Bach’s deg in Comp Sci or IT & 2 yrs of exp in dsgng business intelligence solutions & dashboard dvlpmmt. Must have exp in: Writing complex SQL queries to pull data from different data warehouse tables; Dsgng BI solutions to assist users in converting conventional reports to interactive automated dashboards; Publishing data extracts to BI Server from Oracle & other enterprise data warehouses; Providing user training regarding the usage of the BI tool, & KPIs in the dashboards; Data security & access control to regulate the data visibility based on the user groups; Dvlpg entity relationships (ER) models based on data architecture; Project mgmt & dvlpmt using agile methodologies; Prep’g tech’l business reqmt docs (BRD) for the BI dvlpmt; & Interpreting statistical data from reports & advising clients on business solutions. Respond to: Attn: HR Dept., 79 TW Alexander Dr, Durham, NC 27709 or apply online: https://grifols. jobs/jobs/.
Senior Data Scientist
Senior Data Scientist II sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to develop technical solutions in natural language processing, machine-learning, information retrieval including topical classification, legal sentiment analysis, user intent detection, open Q&A. Minimum of Bachelor’s or foreign equiv degree in Computer Science, Computer Engg, Data Science, Machine Learning, Statistical Analytics or rltd + 7 yrs exp in job offered or rltd occupations required. EE reports to LexisNexis USA office Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates apply by mail to T. Hayward, RELX Inc; 1000 Alderman Dr, Alpharetta, GA 30005. Ref job code: 00164
