12.21.22 INDY Week

FEATURES

6 Our list of 23 reasons to love the Triangle.

BY JASMINE GALLUP AND SARAH EDWARDS

8 A look back at the INDY's most impactful reporting of 2022.

BY JANE PORTER

BY PAUL ROSENBERG

14 A list of 2022's Hazards of Duke. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

Students and faculty at Riverside High School worry they could lose their lunch program BY LENA GELLER 18 A tribute to luminary local journalist James Powell who we lost long before his time BY THOMASI MCDONALD

B A C K T A L K

“Any chance Durham could do this too??” asked commenter DONYA SMITH

“Durham Planning Commissioners proposed this type of program in 2018 as part of an amendment process that they called ‘expanding housing choices,’” responded commenter NATE BAKER (who is also a member of the Durham Planning Commission). “Ultimately, the city chose not to pursue that option. But we should and there’s nothing stopping us.”

Commenter KENNETH WEBB says that Durham already has a version of the program. But, Webb notes, “Raleigh’s sounds easier.”

“What do you think it costs for labor/supplies to build? For the insurance? And for maintenance?” asked commenter MARY MOLINA

“A lot,” THAD ANDERSON said in response to Molina. “I mean, we have a garage that is a perfect candidate and it wasn’t really worth doing because of the costs and being located in a non-prime neighborhood. I’m a big fan of the council’s work on ADUs, but the costs are going to be prohibitive for a lot of use cases. I say that in part bc the scare stories about these being in every back yard are very overstated due to cost vs. ROI. If someone lives right near downtown, yes this could be a great idea.”

“I imagine it would be worth doing for someone who is going to use it as a granny flat or an office rather than an Air b n b,” added commenter KELLI RAKER.

“Makes you go hmm,” said commenter SARAHJESSICA FARBER. “I clicked through and looked at the plans and they are fantastic.”

But every plan has its critics.

“So now a lot of people are going to be running Airbnb in their backyards,” said commenter ROBERT SHANK. “Rental properties!”

“I’m wondering where this ‘affordable housing’ they speak of is located,” said commenter CHRISTY LANCASTER BROWN

We also got the following email message on Gallup’s cover story from last week on the lawsuit that two Raleigh families are bringing against RPD for illegally raiding their homes using a no-knock warrant, handcuffing their children, and generally traumatizing everyone involved. Writes reader TERRENCE DUFF:

“As I write this, I just heard about another police officer ambushed and murdered coming to a domestic violence complaint, 218 police killed this year from all causes with 9 in North Carolina. Of course, the police need a watchdog group but the police are not the problem. Of course anyone, Kenya Walton, who has been wronged needs a proper apology and recompense. The root cause problem starts with the rejection of the many freedoms and opportunities that our great Country provides everyone and continuing to vote for those failed schools and crime ridden neighborhoods. I wish there were organizations like Emancipate NC that focused on the reform of neighborhoods, which is the real problem. The goal would be to conform to simple norms; get an education, a job, then get married and then children, buy a house, avoid criminal activity and quit blaming others for your failures. Works every time it is tried.”

Ah, yes, conforming to “simple norms.” Defnitely works every time.

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Last week for the web, Jasmine Gallup wrote about Raleigh’s new program to fast-track design and permitting for ADUs, a.k.a. accessory dwelling units, a.k.a. granny flats, backyard cottages, or attached apartments. The piece generated a lot of discussion on our Facebook page.

QUICKBAIT

Buyers Rejoice

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

The housing market may finally be cooling off after years of inflated prices and ultra-competitive bidding wars, according to the latest monthly report by Triangle MLS. Although Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill each still face housing shortages, numbers show that the market is gradually becoming friendlier to buyers.

While the number of new listings was down in October from a year ago, the number of homes on the market grew by 93 percent, giving buyers substantially more choice. The average number of days

a home was on the market also more than doubled, from 10 in 2021 to 24 in 2022, giving buyers more time to look around and place bids. Pre-COVID, on average, homes spent more than a month on the market before being sold, which gave buyers hefty negotiating power.

The median sales price is still on the rise (up 8 percent over last year), but many are hoping the increase in housing stock will lead to a slowdown of the massive price increases the Triangle has seen in the past few years.

Source: www.trianglemls.com

A Call to Action

BY GABRIEL I. GADSDEN backtalk@indyweek.com

I n 2017 the NC Department of Transportation (NCDOT) began Project U-3308. More commonly known as the Highway 55 (Alston Avenue) expansion project, NCDOT deemed the project necessary to “reduce congestion and improve safety” along the corridor of Highway 55, connecting Highway 70 and the Durham Freeway. The plan also included sidewalks on both sides of the roadway and wide outside lanes to accommodate bicycles. The road expansion was completed in 2021. However, nearly five years and millions of dollars later, congestion is no better than before, nor is pedestrian and bicycle travel safer. Though unfortunate, the tale of Project U-3308 is not uncommon, as globally, municipalities strive to keep pace with rapidly changing cities. Too often, though, the plans approved impede progress. The Highway 55 expansion project hurts Durham citizens rather than aiding congestion due to myriad issues, from failing to innovate outdated road planning, neglecting the reality of climate change, and disregarding social cohesion. Cities will continue to grow, and upgraded travel infrastructure will be needed. But in its present state, the Highway 55 expansion project set Durham farther away from being prepared for the future urban experts predict. To ensure North Carolina’s future includes sustainable urban growth and development, an integrated and green redesign of Highway 55’s Alston Avenue corridor and the entire NCDOT planning process is needed and must be a top priority for citizens and political leaders.

Failure to innovate urban road planning America’s car-centric society has shaped urban design and form for decades. Urban

sprawl and ardent individualism mean there are nearly 284 million cars on the road in the United States. Up until three decades ago, it was thought road expansion was the only viable solution for efficient travel. But the mega-hybrid roads in the United States, including Highway 55, pair high-speed traffic with residential intersections and numerous traffic lights, creating traffic congestion that cannot be remedied by more lanes. Frameworks like the Dutch sustainable road safety, which advocates for slower speeds and smaller lanes near residential areas, demonstrate that adding lanes along the Alston Avenue corridor was a callous decision.

Failure to recognize how road expansion exacerbates climate change and pollution

In addition to road expansion increasing congestion, it also increases the emission of greenhouse gasses that are known to cause respiratory illness. Road expansion also increases stormwater runoff, polluting water systems and increasing the urban heat island effect. In a world already experiencing more intense storms and drier weather, road development without environmental considerations is likely to lead to sewage overflows, localized flooding, and abnormally hot weather, all of which have the potential to cause public health emergencies for ill-prepared communities.

If NCDOT had properly accounted for climate change, its highway design would have included significant funding for infrastructure including bioswales, street trees, and more land for parks to mitigate air pollution, reduce heat islands, and manage stormwater runoff. Perhaps more importantly, forethought regarding the effects of climate change would have meant con-

sidering alternate forms of transportation altogether. Transportation alternatives include fully protected bidirectional bike lanes, light rail, and updated bus infrastructure. Even without the introduction of costly projects like light rail and bus right-of-ways, the U-3308 project may have been more successful at easing congestion with thoughtful integrated urban canopy planning and technology rather than more vehicle lanes.

Failure to account for historical institutional harm directed at East Durham

The development of urban roads also decreases social cohesion as roads widen and become more challenging to cross. The expansion of Highway 55 originally cut through the East Durham neighborhood. East Durham was once a burgeoning upper-middle-class neighborhood supported by Durham’s textile industry. Yet, like many affluent neighborhoods, 1950s practices of blockbusting, neighborhood grading, and predatory lending left East Durham devoid of political capital and open to environmental degradation, reeling from generations of neglect and, frankly, racism. The Highway 55 expansion project exacerbated these historical harms by avoiding environmental justice rather than embracing it. Instead of adding green space and greenway overpass bridges to connect Durham residents, Highway 55 continues to bisect a minority community while doing nothing to quell the air pollution exposure of nearby residents. The Highway 55 expansion ignored urban ecology’s best practices of collaborative thinking and resilient infrastructure, and was counterproductive to climate justice, public health, and neighborhood solidarity

goals. For a community that has already experienced neglect for nearly 70 years, the expansion will likely only exacerbate disinvestment as large expansive roads are unideal for communities to who strive to congregate.

What to do

I suspect many Durham natives have spent countless miles on Highway 55. It truly is the main artery of Durham, as it takes drivers to Highway 70, the Durham Freeway, Highway 85, and Interstate 40.

The illustrious NC Central University borders Highway 55, and the Union Insurance building and numerous recreation centers are blocks away in either direction. Should one of the oldest roads in Durham that connects numerous neighborhoods and is dotted with history not be more than asphalt to “ease congestion”? A sustainable redesign of Highway 55 is a necessity. Durham’s environmentalists, activists, and planners must reevaluate what Highway 55 represents to Durham and more broadly North Carolina. Project U-3308 suffered from a lack of integrated and complex thinking needed to build a sustainable city and tackle the challenges facing many urban cores. Highway 55 can ill afford to remain shackled to antiquated ideas of urban expansion. Rather than putting Durham further from reaching its goals of decarbonization, Highway 55 can be an example of sustainable urban design meant to adapt to the trends of urbanization while creating healthy and connected citizens. W

Gabriel I. Gadsden is a second-year PhD student at Yale School of the Environment and a Durham native.

Durham residents and political leaders should demand the redesign of Highway 55 from the NCDOT.

BY JASMINE GALLUP AND SARAH EDWARDS backtalk@indyweek.com

1. IN-PERSON EVENTS ARE BACK

After two years of COVID isolation, the Triangle cautiously came back to life this summer, with people flocking to music festivals, plays, and Pride parades that were all back in person.

2. WORKERS ARE ORGANIZING

The movement for workers’ rights started strong in North Carolina when baristas at a Raleigh Starbucks decided to unionize in March. Employees across the Triangle soon joined a nationwide movement for better pay and working conditions with workers at a local restaurant and Planet Fitness franchise deciding to strike. It’s an exciting time for employees, who seem to finally have the power. Who knows what next year will bring?

3. TENANTS ARE ORGANIZING

North Carolina is still a landlord-friendly state, but after facing possible homelessness during the COVID pandemic and rising prices afterward, tenants are taking a strong stand against an unfair system. In Durham, Walltown residents united to push the city council to use a rezoning request as leverage for affordable housing, while vulnerable residents on the Eno River are resisting eviction.

4. THE LOCAL MUSIC SCENE CONTINUES TO BEND THE RULES

Staging a miniature music festival at a ballpark? Check. (Sylvan Esso.) Sourcing musical material from a 19th-century rug? Check. (Jake Xerxes Fussell.) Giving a Gen Z spin to Gen X label aesthetics? Check. (Trash Tape Records.) Releasing music and forgoing standard streaming platforms altogether? Check. (Defacto Thezpian.) Going 20 years between record releases? Check. (Archers of Loaf, who are technically not Triangle-based anymore, but this list, too, can bend the rules.) We could go on.

5.

THE RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL IS NOW MAJORITY WOMEN

Some Raleigh residents may not be completely happy with this year’s city council election results, given that Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin’s pro-development agenda will likely face some resistance from newcomers. But it’s hard to get mad at the the youngest, most diverse city council in North Carolina’s history—one that also now includes six women.

6. CROOK'S CORNER'S LITERARY REPUTATION LIVES ON (AND THE RESTAURANT MAY, TOO)

When Crook’s Corner announced that it was shuttering in the summer of 2021, the Chapel Hill restaurant’s closure made national news. But hope for the famed Southern institution still sparks: the Crook’s Corner Book Prize has endured, continuing to nurture emerging writers, and pop-up openings pedaling honeysuckle sorbets and other Crook’s staples have continued to nurture our hope that the restaurant will reopen. Fingers crossed for 2023.

7.

NOW-CONGRESSMAN JEFF JACKSON IS MAKING WAVES ON REDDIT

Jeff Jackson, a North Carolina senator who was elected to U.S. Congress this November, has always had a reputation for straight-shooting, particularly in his infamous AMAs on Reddit. After Election Day, Jackson stayed true to form, using his large social media following to give people a firsthand account of what happens after you get elected to Congress.

8. SECRETS ARE JUST A DUSTY ROAD AWAY

Earlier this summer, the question “Did the Duffer brothers base Hawkins Laboratory in Stranger Things on the Pittsboro ‘Big Hole’ facility?” evolved quickly into “Wait, what exactly is Big Hole?” Several thousand words later, we know more about the mysterious Cold War–era facility—though it’s still behind a locked gate.

9. READING SERIES ARE BACK (AND BETTER THAN EVER)

In-person reading series have been one of the last kinds of events to return to the public sphere since the onset of the pandemic. But between local bookstores like Flyleaf and Letters and scrappy local series like Paradiso and Evenings, it’s easier than ever to go hear a favorite writer—or to discover a new one.

A big list of reasons why living here this year was great—and why next year could be even greater than the last

10.

IRA DAVID WOOD III'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL IS STILL MAKING FUN OF REPUBLICANS

After nearly 50 years, the Triangle’s local production of A Christmas Carol is a holiday tradition for many families. And it didn’t disappoint this year, continuing to make audiences laugh with well-timed physical humor, inside jokes for repeat viewers, and North Carolina–specific jabs at Donald Trump, COVID naysayers, and Ticketmaster.

11. THE NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART KEEPS GETTING BETTER

The North Carolina art museum is looking to the future with its new environmentally friendly renovation, increasing number of guest artists, and creative visiting exhibits. For art lovers around the Triangle, it's exciting to see the museum growing and changing (questionable new logo aside).

12.

NEW PERFORMANCE GROUPS AND VENUES ARE POPPING UP

It’s not easy running a theater company in 2023. And yet, new companies (like RedBird Theater Company and Fun Mom Band) are springing up alongside new venues (like Mettlesome’s Golden Belt location) to host those companies.

13. PEOPLE CARE ABOUT ABORTION RIGHTS

Abortion rights may be far from secure in North Carolina, but it’s certainly not because pro-choice advocates have been quiet. Earlier this year, the leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade prompted statewide protests and drew hundreds to downtown Raleigh to speak up.

14. DRINKING DOWNTOWN HAS MORE VARIETY

After years of debate, the Raleigh City Council finally added a little fun to downtown Raleigh by allowing open containers on and around Fayetteville Street (shortly followed by a similar decision from the Durham City Council for its own downtown area). We haven’t seen much partying yet, but just wait until next summer.

15.

SEABOARD STATION IS STILL AROUND

Development is a hot topic these days, but one thing most can agree on is that more people should participate in local government. This year, thanks to an active community group, Raleigh residents got involved and managed to save a property with a rich history from demolition.

16. GOING TO THE NASHER IS FREE

Thanks to a $1 million donation from two Duke University alumni, the Nasher Museum of Art is now indefinitely free to the public. Seize the day now by going to see the museum’s Roy Lichtenstein exhibition, and return in February to see Spirit in the Land

17. LOCAL OFFICIALS ARE BUYING BACK GUNS

The Triangle made a big positive step this year by holding gun buybacks, which turned out to be massively popular. Ultimately, law enforcement officials collected hundreds of guns from Raleigh and Durham owners who felt that selling them to the government was the best thing to do.

18. THE FIRST STATE MONUMENT TO BLACK NORTH CAROLINIANS IS GOING UP

North Carolina’s first state monument to African Americans—dubbed Freedom Park— took years to set in motion. But this fall, construction finally began on the one-acre park and a 40-foot-tall Beacon of Freedom, shining a light on the contributions of Black residents to the state.

19. TRIANGLE TEENS ARE WALKING OUT IN PROTEST

Like high school students across the country, Triangle teens are taking a stand on climate change, gun control, and abortion rights, mostly by walking out of classrooms. Bring on the next generation of lawmakers and leaders.

20. THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY HAS NEW PROTECTIONS

The LGBTQ+ community scored a major victory this summer when Raleigh finally got with the times and passed a local nondiscrimination ordinance. Now, the rights of people who are queer are stronger than ever, at least on paper. Those who are discriminated against in public or at work have the right to hold their antagonists accountable.

21. RALEIGH IS HOME TO A CHEESE-ROLLING CHAMPION

What do you do after graduating from NC State? Apparently, you travel to England and become the first American woman to win the Cooper's Hill annual cheese-rolling championship in Gloucester. Thanks, Abby Lampe, for giving us something unique to celebrate.

22.

THE INTERNATIONAL FOOD SCENE IS ALIVE AND WELL

The restaurant industry took a major hit during COVID, with some of our old favorites closing. This year, however, many ambitious residents took advantage of pandemic downtime to finally open their own restaurants, including, in Durham, a new Polish bakery (Chef Chick’s Bakery) and French-Algerian bakery (La Recette Patisserie) and, in Cary, a micro-bakery selling Filipino sweets (Bad Oven).

23. THE AMERICAN DANCE FESTIVAL IS BACK

The emergence of COVID-19 necessitated that the prestigious American Dance Festival become a smattering of online and short weekend events. But seeing dance in person is truly special, and this year, the festival returned with 15 programs and a bonus weekend. W

BONUS! Thanks to the Orange County Animal Services' Working Barn Cats initiative, local feral cats are getting jobs as mousers. (Shoutout to INDY feline subjects Alvin, Simone, and Theodore!).

INDY Week’s Most Impactful Reporting of 2022

BY JANE PORTER jporter@indyweek.com

Another year has gone by, and the Triangle continues to grow, and continues to recover, albeit rather slowly, from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. And while it’s certainly the end of the beginning of the pandemic, it remains to be seen if it’s also the beginning of the end.

As we’ve reported in the last weeks, Durham and Raleigh have opened social districts to get more foot traffic on their downtown streets. And as we report today, the housing market looks, finally, to be cooling down. But some of the local issues that predate the pandemic—outsized growth resulting in gentrification and displacement, gun violence, and police brutality—persist. And some issues, such as addressing workers’ rights and responding to an alarming rise in anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, have taken on a new sense of urgency.

Here at the INDY, we’ve been watching life unfold across our Triangle communities and chronicling it all. Join me as I take a look back on some of our writers’ most impactful work from the past year.

Workers are organizing, unionizing, and demanding better wages and treatment

We started out the year in March looking at the efforts of workers at a local Starbucks to form a union—the first store in North Carolina to try to do so—and ended it with reporting on labor rights groups demanding better protections for frontline workers who have to work in person during public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In between, we saw a strike at a local Planet Fitness and demands from housekeepers at UNC-Chapel Hill for better treatment and pay. North Carolina, routinely, is recognized as the worst state in which to work, and it is one of the most, if not the most, anti-union states in the nation as well as the one least amenable to workers’ rights and protections. Still, there was some notable progress this year. In February, Duke University Press employees won their union election. In November, service workers from across the South launched a cross-sector union to protect their interests on the job. And this month, UNC administrators agreed to raise wages for its housekeepers, groundskeepers, and waste and recycling services staff. We have no doubt the fight for fair pay and treatment will continue in 2023.

The service industry adapts

Along with more pandemic-related closings, some new and exciting openings, and an effort to bring people back to the Triangle’s still-quiet downtowns, we’ve seen the service industry take steps to adapt following a tough three years. Crowdsourcing review behemoths like Yelp are increasingly losing their relevance during a time when everyone’s just struggling to stay afloat, writer Lena Geller reported back in January. And food service industry stalwarts are pivoting to new models, such as meal prep entrepreneur James Hunt’s quest to make the service industry healthier; Matt Northrup’s gourmet approach to takeout; Mei Li’s “waste not, want not” philosophy; and Trevor Spear’s approach to modular farming.

Housing and development in Raleigh

As rents and housing costs skyrocketed over the last year (rents in Raleigh rose by an average of 14 percent and home prices rose by around 22 percent), Raleigh’s city council introduced a “missing middle” policy that largely deregulated development across the city. In other words, it’s easier for developers to build more densely now,

in more places, though critics say the policy doesn’t have explicit stipulations for procuring more affordable housing. And, as we saw in the city council elections that resulted in a close mayoral race and a developer-friendly council member losing his seat, the discontent among residents around the city’s policies guiding Raleigh’s growth strategy is discernible. In January, Jasmine Gallup reported on the development pressures on the neighborhoods located around the edges of Dorothea Dix Park—some of the last affordable neighborhoods in Raleigh—and the displacement residents living there face. Then there’s the issue of city-owned land near Moore Square and whether the city council is going to use it for affordable housing. This summer, transit overlay districts became a point of contention, with many fearing displacement of people already living in naturally occurring affordable housing along these transit corridors. And a rare compromise over the preservation of Seaboard Station alongside a new two-tower mixed-use complex off of Peace Street provides a good blueprint for how the city can maintain its old buildings in the future.

Reform in the Raleigh Police Department

The first year on the job for Raleigh police chief Estella Patterson, in whom many placed their hopes for real changes within the department, opened with a tragedy. Raleigh officers shot and killed Daniel Turcios in January in front of the man’s family following a rollover car wreck on a busy Raleigh highway. Another man, Reuel Rodriguez-Nunez, died after Raleigh police shot him outside a police station in May. No officers were charged in either incident. When it came time to make the budget, criminal justice activists said they didn’t see a lot of improvement in the department since the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020, where protesters, such as 17-year-old Nyee’ya Williams, were brutalized at the hands of police. The Raleigh City Council gave the RPD an $8 million budget increase anyway. And recent reporting on a lawsuit brought by a pair of families whose homes Raleigh police violently raided with the use of a no-knock warrant has cast fresh doubt on the department’s capacity for meaningful change. We haven’t written Patterson off just yet, but we’ll continue to watch the department closely for indications of reform.

2022 saw a disturbing rise in anti-LGBTQ sentiment

Gentrification and displacement in Durham

Raleigh isn’t the only city in the Triangle facing development pressures. Durham residents, especially Black residents, are seeing the gentrification of their neighborhoods and their own ongoing displacement from the communities that they’ve called home for generations. This year, writer Thomasi McDonald chronicled plans for the redevelopment of the historic Hayti community and the tension between a plan favored by many neighbors—a hub for housing, commerce, and education dubbed Hayti Reborn—and a plan to redevelop Fayette Place into affordable housing selected by the Durham Housing Authority. It’s not just Hayti that’s at risk. Residents worry over the future of Walltown as the new owners of Northgate Mall plan for redevelopment of the property without adding any new housing to speak of. And in October, we were the first outlet to report on several residents who received what amounted to eviction letters from the Eno River Association, a nonprofit that wanted to use their homes to house Eno River State Park rangers. The ERA said last month it has now tabled those plans. One other bright spot: a pair of affordable housing developments in Bragtown could slow the exodus of Durham’s Black families.

Gun violence in Durham

Though some violent crime in Durham is down over previous years—there were fewer total shootings this year and fewer individuals shot than in 2021 and 2020—it’s not much consolation to the family members and friends of 39 victims, including children, killed by guns in Durham in 2022. Writer Thomasi McDonald has reported on local officials’ seeming inability to deal with the criminal gang and drug activity plaguing the city’s young people and fueling the violence. Meanwhile, Durham mayor Elaine O’Neal, a former judge, acting out of desperation perhaps, is meeting with gang members to try to get a handle on the issue. In June, the men responsible for killing Z’yon Person, who would have turned 12 this year, were found guilty; but not much has changed since the boy’s accidental gunfire killing in 2019, McDonald wrote. Initiatives creating violence interrupters and new spaces for the city’s young people are hoped to help. But it’s becoming clear that addressing the scourge of gun violence in any city troubled by it is increasingly out of the hands of the local leadership; look no further than this year’s mass shooting in Raleigh for proof of that.

Efforts in Wake County to ban LGBTQ+ books

This year marked the beginning of what looks to be a disturbing new, or maybe just resurrected, trend in Wake County’s library and school systems. Writer Jasmine Gallup has followed the controversy since January, when she reported on a school board meeting besieged by angry parents demanding that certain LGBTQ+themed titles be removed from school and classroom shelves. Thanks to a united progressive front on Wake County’s school board (which, mercifully, emerged from the November election intact), would-be book banners have met with little success. But the county’s library system is another story, as administrators initially were successful in getting the well-known young adult graphic novel Gender Queer off of shelves, prompting, as Gallup reported in February, an internal investigation and revisions of the library system’s collection and book challenge policies, as Gallup later reported in March. In September, Wake libraries came under scrutiny again when they ordered the anti-trans children’s book Johnny the Walrus

Rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment

It’s been a scary and depressing time to be part of the LGBTQ+ community this year, and the Triangle hasn’t been insulated from anti-gay, anti-trans national trends. While largely shunned by Durham residents, the anti-LGBTQ+ Pioneers church and business space, on which Sarah Edwards first reported for the INDY last November, is still up and running in its location on Geer Street. Pioneers Durham did, however, receive a stern rebuke earlier this month from the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, in which the NCCUMC apologized to the community for its “action and inaction” related to Pioneers Durham. In June, we reported on the Town of Holly Springs’ refusal to recognize Pride Month and its resistance to developing a nondiscrimination ordinance. And in September, we highlighted a devastating report that found high numbers of young LGBTQ+ people living in the South struggling with their mental health. It doesn’t help matters that, with Republicans now holding a supermajority in the state senate post–midterm elections (not to mention notoriously bigoted Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson gearing up for a gubenatorial run), there likely will be a whole rash of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the works in the years ahead of us. W

The Censorship Beat

Part Two of Project Censored’s top 10 most censored news stories of 2022.

BY PAUL ROSENBERG backtalk@indyweek.com

Since its founding in 1976, Project Censored has been focused on stories—like Watergate before the 1972 election—that aren’t censored in the authoritarian government sense but in a broader, expanded sense reflective of what a functioning democracy should be, censorship defined as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, underreporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.” It is, after all, the reason that journalism enjoys special protection in the First Amendment: without the free flow of vital information, government based on the consent of the governed is but an illusory dream.

Yet, from the very beginning, as A.J. Liebling put it, “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

In their introduction to Project Censored’s annual State of the Free Press, which contains its top censored stories and much more, Project Censored’s Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth take this condition head-on, under the heading State of the Free Billionaire, in contrast to the volume’s title, State of the Free Press 2023. Following a swift recap of historic media criticism highlights—Upton Sinclair, the aforementioned Liebling, Ben Bagdikian, Edward Herman, and Noam Chomsky—they dryly observe, “History shows that consolidated media, controlled by a handful of elite owners, seldom serves the public interest,” and briefly survey the contemporary landscape before narrowing their gaze to the broadest of influencers:

Despite the promise of boundless access to information, Silicon Valley mirrors legacy media in its consolidated ownership and privileging of elite narratives. This new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including the companies often referred to as the FAANGs—Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet).

Obviously, this was written before Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, but it’s an apt reminder that his wildly out-oftouch world view is not just an individual, personal aberration but also a symptom of wider systemic dysfunction.

“In pursuit of their own interests and investments,

media tycoons past and present, again and again, appear to be conveniently oblivious to the main frame through which they filter news—that of class, including class structure and class interests,” Huff and Roth write. “Consequently, they often overlook (or ignore) conflicts of interest that implicate media owners, funders, investors, and advertisers, not to mention their business clients on Wall Street and in Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the military–industrial complex.”

This observation perfectly frames the majority of stories in Project Censored’s top 10 list, starting with the first two stories: massive subsidies of the fossil fuel industry and rampant wage theft—concentrated on the most vulnerable workers—that eclipse street crime in the magnitude of losses, but are rarely punished, even when offenders are caught dead to rights. It echoes clearly through the stories on Congress members’ investments in the fossil fuel industry, the role of corporate consolidation in driving up inflation in food prices, Bill Gates’s hidden influence on journalism, and major media outlets lobbying against regulation of surreptitious online advertising, and only at slight remove in two others having to do with dark money, and one about the suppression of Environmental Protection Agency reports on dangerous chemicals. Indeed, only one story out of 10 is somewhat removed from the sphere of corporate corruption concerns: the story of the CIA’s plans to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.

Every year, I note that there are multiple patterns to be found in the list of Project Censored’s stories, and that these different patterns have much to tell us about the forces shaping what remains hidden. That’s still true, with three environmental stories (two involving fossil fuels), three involving money in politics (two dark money stories), and two involving illicit surveillance. But the dominance of this one pattern truly is remarkable. It shows how profoundly the concentration of corporate wealth and power in the hands of so few distorts everything we see—or don’t—in the world around us every day.

Here then, is this year’s list of five of Project Censored’s top 10 censored stories (look for the rest in next week’s edition of the INDY or read the whole list online at indyweek.com).

Corporate Consolidation Causing Record Inflation in Food Prices

“Corporate consolidation is a main driver of record inflation in food prices, despite claims by media pundits and partisan commentators to the contrary,” Project Censored reports. “The establishment press has covered the current wave of inflation exhaustively, but only rarely will discuss the market power of giant firms as a possible cause, and then usually only to reject it,” as they did when the Biden administration cited meat industry consolidation as a cause of price increases in September 2021, “treating administration attempts to link inflation to consolidation as a rhetorical move meant to distract from conservative critiques of Biden’s stimulus program.”

But as Food and Water Watch reported in November 2021, “While the cost of meat shot up, prices paid to farmers actually declined, spurring a federal investigation.” That investigation is ongoing, but meat conglomerates Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Smithfield Foods, and JBS have paid just over $225 million to settle related civil suits in the poultry, beef, and pork markets.

That’s just part of the problem. A July 2021 joint investigation by Food and Water Watch and The Guardian “reported that a handful of ‘food giants’—including Kraft

Heinz, General Mills, Conagra, Unilever, and Del Monte— control an average of 64 percent of sales of sixty-one popular grocery items,” Project Censored noted. Three companies own 93 percent of carbonated soft drink brands, while another three produce 73 percent of the cereals on offer, and a single company, PepsiCo, owns five of the most popular dip brands—88 percent of the market. Altogether, “four firms or fewer controlled at least 50% of the market for 79% of the groceries,” The Guardian reported.

It’s not just producers: in an October 2021 article for Common Dreams, Kenny Stancil documents that food producers, distributors, and grocery store chains are engaging in pandemic profiteering and taking advantage of “decades of consolidation, which has given a handful of corporations an ever-greater degree of market control and with it, the power to set prices,” according to research by the Groundwork Collaborative.

As for grocers, “Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the country, cited rising inflation as the reason for hiking prices in their stores even as they cut worker pay by 8 percent,” Project Censored noted. “Yet, as Stancil explained, Kroger’s CEO publicly gloated that ‘a little bit of inflation is always good for business.’” That CEO earned 909 times what the median worker earned, while worker pay decreased by 8 percent in 2020, and “the company spent $1.498 billion on stock buybacks between April 2020 and July 2021 to enrich its shareholders,” the Groundwork Collaborative reported. Kroger was one of just four companies that took in an estimated two-thirds of all grocery sales in 2019, according to Food and Water Watch.

More broadly, “a report for The American Prospect by Rakeem Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, and David Dayen revealed that one of the most common inflation scapegoats, supply chain problems, is itself a consequence of consolidation,” Project Censored noted. “Just three global alliances of ocean shippers are responsible for 80 percent of all cargo … .” These shippers raked in “nearly $80 billion in the first three quarters of 2021, twice as much as in the entire ten-year period from 2010 to 2020,” by increasing their rates as much as tenfold.

Supply chain consolidation reflects a broader shift in the global economy, the Prospect argued. “In 1970, Milton Friedman argued in The New York Times that ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.’ Manufacturers used that to rationalize a financial imperative to benefit shareholders by seeking the lowest-cost labor possible.” This led to a surge in outsourcing to East Asia and eventually China. “This added new costs for shipping, but deregulating all the industries in the supply chain could more than compensate.”

Occasionally articles touched on the issue of consolidation (mostly to debunk it), though there are a couple of opinion pieces to the contrary. “But these isolated opinion pieces were far out-numbered by the hundreds, even thousands, of reports and analyses by commercial media outlets that blamed everything but oligopolistic

price gouging for the rising cost of groceries,” Project Censored concluded.

newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera,” he reported.

“MacLeod’s report includes a number of Gates-funded news outlets that also regularly feature in Project Censored’s annual top 25 story lists, such as the Solutions Journalism Network ($7.2m), The Conversation ($6.6m), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism ($1m), and ProPublica ($1m), in addition to The Guardian and The Atlantic,” Project Censored noted. “Direct awards to news outlets often targeted specific issues, MacLeod reported. For example, CNN received $3.6 million to support ‘journalism on the everyday inequalities endured by women and girls across the world,’ according to one grant. Another grant earmarked $2.3 million for The Texas Tribune ‘to increase public awareness and engagement of education reform issues in Texas.’ As MacLeod noted, given Bill Gates’ advocacy of the charter school movement—which undermines teachers’ unions and effectively aims to privatize the public education system—‘a cynic might interpret this as planting pro-corporate charter school propaganda into the media, disguised as objective news reporting.’”

Concerns for Journalistic Independence as Gates Foundation Gives $319 Million to News Outlets

The list of billionaires with media empires includes familiar names like Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and most recently, Elon Musk. But “while other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well known, the extent to which [Microsoft cofounder Bill] Gates’s cash underwrites the modern media landscape is not,” Alan MacLeod wrote for MintPress News in November 2021.

MacLeod examined more than 30,000 individual grants from the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and found it had donated “more than $319 million to fund news outlets, journalism centers and training programs, press associations, and specific media campaigns, raising questions about conflicts of interest and journalistic independence,” Project Censored summarized.

“Today, it is possible for an individual to train as a reporter thanks to a Gates Foundation Grant, find work at a Gates-funded outlet, and to belong to a press association funded by Gates,” MacLeod wrote.

“Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic. Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European

“There are clear shortcomings with this non-exhaustive list, meaning the true figure is undoubtedly far higher. First, it does not count sub-grants—money given by recipients to media around the world”—because there’s no record of them, MacLeod reported.

“For a tax-privileged charity that so very often trumpets the importance of transparency, it’s remarkable how intensely secretive the Gates Foundation is about its financial flows,” Tim Schwab, one of the few investigative journalists who has scrutinized the tech billionaire, told MintPress.

Also missing were grants aimed at producing articles for academic journals, although “they regularly form the basis for stories in the mainstream press and help shape narratives around key issues,” he noted. “The Gates Foundation has given far and wide to academic sources, with at least $13.6 million going toward creating content for the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.” And more broadly, “even money given to universities for purely research projects eventually ends up in academic journals, and ultimately, downstream into mass media …. Neither these nor grants funding the printing of books or establishment of websites counted in the total, although they too are forms of media.”

“No major corporate news outlets appear to have covered this issue,” only a scattering of independent outlets, Project Censored noted. This despite the fact that “as far back as 2011, The Seattle Times published an article investigating how the Gates Foundation’s ‘growing support of media organizations blurs the line between journalism and advocacy.’”

CIA Discussed Plans to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange

The CIA seriously considered plans to kidnap or assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in late 2017, according to a September 2021 Yahoo News investigation, based on interviews with more than 30 former U.S. officials, eight of whom detailed U.S. plans to abduct Assange and three of whom described the development of plans to kill him. If it had been up to CIA director Mike Pompeo, they almost certainly would have been acted on them, after WikiLeaks announced it had obtained a massive tranche of files—dubbed “Vault 7”—from the CIA’s ultra-secret hacking division, and posted some of them online.

In his first public remarks as Donald Trump’s CIA director, “Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks,” Yahoo News noted, “rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency.” He even called it “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” a designation intended to grant the CIA wide latitude in what actions it took, while shielding it from congressional oversight.

“Potential scenarios proposed by the CIA and Trump administration officials included crashing into a Russian vehicle carrying Assange in order to grab him, shooting the tires of an airplane carrying Assange in order to prevent its takeoff, and engaging in a gun battle through the streets of London,” Project Censored summarized. “Senior CIA officials went so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ detailing methods to kill Assange.”

“WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” a former Trump administration national security official told Yahoo News. “After Vault 7, Pompeo and [deputy CIA director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange.” It went so far that “Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country—a process known as rendition,” they reported. (Assassination entered the picture later on.) Since it would take place in Britain, there had to be agreement from them. “But the British said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that on our territory, that ain’t happening,’” a for-

mer senior counterintelligence official told Yahoo News.

There was also pushback from National Security Council, or NSC, lawyers and the Department of Justice, which wanted to put Assange on trial. But the CIA continued to push for capturing or killing Assange. Trump’s “NSC lawyers were bulwarks against the CIA’s potentially illegal proposals, according to former officials,” Yahoo News reported, but the CIA’s own lawyers may have been kept in the dark. “When Pompeo took over, he cut the lawyers out of a lot of things,” a former senior intelligence community attorney told them. “Pompeo’s ready access to the Oval Office, where he would meet with Trump alone, exacerbated the lawyers’ fears. [The NSC’s top lawyer John] Eisenberg fretted that the CIA director was leaving those meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president that Eisenberg knew nothing about, according to former officials.”

“U.S. plans to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange have received little to no establishment news coverage in the United States, other than scant summaries by Business Insider and The Verge, and tangential coverage by Reuters, each based on the original Yahoo News report,” Project Censored notes. “Among U.S. independent news outlets, Democracy Now! featured an interview with Michael Isikoff, one of the Yahoo News reporters who broke the story, and Jennifer Robinson, a human rights attorney who has been advising Julian Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010. Rolling Stone and The Hill also published articles based on the original Yahoo News report.”

laws in Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia are based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which brings together corporate lobbyists and conservative lawmakers to advance special-interest business-friendly legislation.

“ALEC is deeply enmeshed with the sprawling political influence networks tied to billionaire families like the Kochs and the Bradleys, both of which use non-disclosing nonprofits that help to conceal how money is funneled,” Donald Shaw reported for Sludge on June 15, 2021. “Penalties for violating the laws vary between the states, but in some states could include prison sentences.”

“Shaw explained how these bills create a loophole allowing wealthy individuals and groups to pass ‘dark money’ anonymously to 501(c) organizations which in turn can make independent expenditures to influence elections (or contribute to other organizations that make independent political expenditures, such as Super PACs), effectively shielding the ultimate source of political funds from public scrutiny,” Project Censored summarized. “‘These bills are about making dark money darker,’ Aaron McKean, legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, told Shaw.”

The South Dakota law was overwhelmingly passed by the GOP-dominated legislature despite the fact that voters passed a 2016 ballot measure requiring disclosure of “the identity of donors who give more than $100 to organizations for the purpose of political expenditures,” a requirement the legislature repealed a year later, Shaw reported in February 2021.

There’s a federal impact as well. “In a March 2022 article for Sludge, Shaw documented that the federal omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2022 contained a rider exempting political groups that declare themselves ‘social welfare organizations’ from reporting their donors, and another preventing the Securities and Exchange Commission from ‘requiring corporations to publicly disclose more of their political and lobbying spending,’” Project Censored noted, going on to cite a May 2021 article from Open Secrets about Senate Republicans’ “Don’t Weaponize the IRS” Act that “would prevent the IRS from requiring that 501(c)(4) nonprofits disclose their top donors.”

New Laws Preventing Dark Money Disclosures Sweep the Nation

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision relaxing campaign finance regulations, dark money spending has exploded, and now Republican lawmakers across the United States are pushing legislation to make it illegal to compel nonprofit organizations to disclose who the dark money donors are. Recently passed

Democrats and good government groups have pushed back. “On April 27, 2021, thirty-eight Democratic senators sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig urging them to roll back an anti-disclosure rule put in place by the Trump Administration,” Project Censored reported. “In addition, the Democrats’ comprehensive voting-rights bill, the For the People Act, would have compelled the disclosure of all contributions by individuals who surpass $10,000 in donations in a given reporting period. The bill was passed by the House but died in the Senate.”

While there’s been some coverage of some aspects of this story—a Washington Post story about Democrats pressuring the Biden administration and the Associated Press reporting on South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s defense of her state’s law—except for in regional papers like the Tampa Bay Times, Project Censored reports,

“there has been little acknowledgment in the establishment press of the stream of ALEC-inspired bills passing through state legislatures that seek to keep the source of so much of the money spent to influence elections hidden in the shadows.”

Major media corporations increasingly rely on a vast ecosystem of privacy violations, even as the public relies on them to report on it.” As a result, “major news outlets have remained mostly silent on the FTC’s current push and a parallel effort to ban surveillance advertising by the House and Senate by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.,” Fang concluded.

Major Media Outlets Lobby Against Regulation of “Surveillance Advertising”

“Surveillance advertising”—collecting users’ data to target them with tailored advertising—has become a ubiquitous, extremely profitable practice on the world’s most popular social media apps and platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. But now, as Lee Fang reported for The Intercept in February 2022, the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is seeking to regulate user data collection. Lobbyists for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, or IAB, are pushing back.

“In a letter, IAB called for the FTC to oppose a ban on data-driven advertising networks, claiming the modern media cannot exist without mass data collection,” Fang reported.

“The IAB represents both data brokers and online media outlets that depend on digital advertising, such as CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, Time, U.S. News and World Report, The Washington Post, Vox, the Orlando Sentinel, Fox News, and dozens of other media companies,” Fang explained. “The privacy push has largely been framed as a showdown between technology companies and the administration,” but “the lobbying reveals a tension that is rarely a center of the discourse around online privacy:

“The IAB argues that targeted advertising—and, by extension, the siphoning of user data—has become necessary due to declining revenues from print sales and subscriptions,” Project Censored summarized. “Non-digital advertising revenue decreased from $124.8 billion in 2011 to $89.8 billion in 2020, while digital advertising revenue rose from $31.9 billion to $152.2 billion in the same period, according to Pew Research.” Complicating matters, “the personal information collected by online media is typically sold to aggregators, such as BlueKai (owned by Oracle) and OpenX, that exploit user data—including data describing minors—to create predictive models of users’ behavior, which are then sold to advertising agencies. The covert nature of surveillance advertising makes it difficult for users to opt out.” In addition, “the user information collected by media sites also enables direct manipulation of public perceptions of political issues, as famously happened when the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica tapped into personal data from millions of Facebook users to craft campaign propaganda during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

“The corporate media have reported the FTC’s openness to new rules limiting the collection and exploitation of user data, but have generally not drawn attention to IAB lobbying against the proposed regulations,” Project Censored noted, citing articles in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post as examples. “Neither outlet discussed IAB, its lobbying on this issue, or the big media clients the organization represents.” W

©Random Lengths News, a division of Beacon Light Press, 2022.

Paul Rosenberg is a Los Angeles, California–based writer, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Salon and Al Jazeera English

2022’s Hazards of Duke

Our list of Duke alumni who have been the most notoriously newsworthy this year.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

Even with a multibillion-dollar endowment fund, describing Duke University as having an embarrassment of riches and resources is an understatement.

Googling results for “notable Duke graduates” will yield a cornucopia of world and national leaders in virtually every field, more than a dozen Nobel laureates, two heads of state, and dozens of White House staffers, cabinet members, U.S. senators, mayors, and judges, along with members of royal families, diplomats, literary figures, educators, scientists, military leaders, artists, entertainers, and prominent athletes.

But every now and then, a clunker matriculates from the elite private school in the western shadow of downtown Durham, and this year, many of those clunkers have made national headlines for reasons more akin to maliciously killing light rail than to developing a miraculous treatment to cure a rare disease.

With apologies to the old TV comedy series The Dukes of Hazzard, the INDY presents its 2022 list of the hazards of Duke—the 10 Duke University alumni who’ve been the most notoriously newsworthy this year. To paraphrase Hazzard County sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane, “There’s a flaw in the slaw (or 10).”

10. Weighing in at the 10th spot is Andrew Giuliani, who was trounced in the primaries this year in his run for governor of New York. Never mind Rudy, his hair-bleeding, Big Lie–spouting lawyer daddy; Andrew Giuliani was a 22-year-old duffer in 2008 when he sued Duke University after he was cut from the school’s golf team. He’s a frequent golfing partner of Trump, and a story about Giuliani Jr.’s lawsuit published in the Intelligencer asserted that “Duke is the place where asshole New Yorkers and New Jerseyans send their most hated children to befoul the South.” If the golf shoe fits …

9. Life since 2003 has not been a crystal staircase for former newspaper columnist, novelist, and Durham mayoral candidate Michael Peterson. That was the year Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, Kathleen, who was found unconscious at the bottom of the stairs in the couple’s Forest Hills home. Released in 2011 and placed under house arrest, Peterson took an Alford plea in 2017 and was freed from prison with credit for time served. This year, of course, we were lucky enough to witness the debut of the HBO miniseries The Staircase, in which riveting performances by Colin Firth and Toni Collette put the most notorious spectacle of the erstwhile Lothario’s life on full blast. Peterson, for his part, blasted the series’ “egregious fabrications” and claimed its director “pimped out” his family.

8. Look, we all love Apple, and Apple loves us (read: our money), but Apple’s been acting atrociously of late. First of all, there’s the ongoing antitrust lawsuit between

Apple and Epic Games, where local tech star Epic, rightfully in our mind, is claiming Apple’s App Store is functioning as a veritable monopoly by refusing to sell Epic products, such as popular video game Fortnite, on its platform without taking a massive 30 percent commission. Then there are the reports of similar shenanigans in China, where Apple’s App Store, as reported by Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, is all too happy to acquiesce to requests to censor apps at the behest of China’s Communist Party in ways that could be endangering Chinese citizens. We’re laying all of this squarely at the feet of Apple CEO and Duke business school graduate Tim Cook, who’s fighting Epic tooth and nail and who’s aiding Chinese censorship at the same time as he’s giving DC speeches about Apple’s commitment to running the App Store in ways that promote human rights, civil liberties, and privacy.

7.

Duke Law School graduate Kenneth Starr in 1994 was appointed by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to investigate the Whitewater scandal, which right-wingers hoped would criminally implicate Bill and Hillary Clinton in the suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster or, hell, anything for that matter. In 1998, the Starr Report would lead to the U.S. House’s impeachment of President Clinton for perjury and the cover-up of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was acquitted and, to Starr’s credit and undoubtedly to the chagrin of Clinton haters everywhere, he expressed regret for his role in the investigation. Equally damning is Starr’s role in the Baylor University scandal in which university officials—Starr was president and chancellor at the time—mishandled more than a dozen allegations from women of sexual assault at the hands of members of the school’s football team. Starr resigned from Baylor in 2016. Not one to go out quietly, Starr joined the Trump legal team in 2020 to defend the president in his U.S. Senate impeachment trial. Starr died this year, in September, at age 76.

6.

Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, was on NPR just the other day celebrating a historic photo of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 as they made humanity’s ultimate trip to the moon. The photo shows a blue marble, but up until a couple of years ago, there was no convincing erstwhile Duke basketball standout Kyrie Irving that Earth’s not flat. Irving made news at the end of last year for more antiscience views and for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, but the “hilarity” didn’t stop there. Last month, the Brooklyn Nets star shared a link to an anti-Semitic video on his social media, just as it was being reported that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States hit a record high over the last year. Coming to his defense? None other than rapidly spiraling rapper Kanye West. Perhaps Irving should have spent a second year at Duke instead of bouncing to the NBA in 2011.

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

5.

U.S. representative from Alabama and failed U.S. Senate candidate Morris Jackson “Mo” Brooks is a founding member of the far-right Freedom Caucus. Given his opposition to measures that are popular with most Americans, maybe Brooks’s nickname should be “No Mo.” You know, as in “No Mo” federal funding to Planned Parenthood, “No Mo” recognition of same-sex marriage or U.S. veterans’ service, “No Mo” funding to prevent opioid abuse in rural areas, and “No Mo” support for pregnant women in custody (and most of these were “no” votes just from December!). But aside from his embarrassing votes in Congress, it also emerged this month that, according to text messages between Brooks and Mark Meadows, Brooks is purportedly “the ringleader” of congressional Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election, along with other such GOP luminaries as Ralph Norman, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If he has one saving grace, at least, Brooks didn’t have to suffer the indignity of being caught on text botching the spelling of “martial law.”

4. The blind eyes of justice and global warming be damned: ophthalmologist and early Tea Party movement supporter U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky opposed President Barack Obama’s right to nominate a U.S. Supreme Court justice following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia—which left us with our currently dire situation on SCOTUS—and was one of 22 senators who signed a letter in 2017 urging President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which Trump promptly did. Paul, ostensibly a doctor, has opposed the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare; insists the 2020 election was stolen; and finds same-sex marriage offensive. Paul’s biggest contribution to the discourse this year, after he was reelected to the Senate during the midterms, has been joining Elon Musk in demanding congressional investigations into, and prosecution of, retiring public health expert Dr. Anthony Fauci over his COVID-19 policies.

3. A Rhodes Scholar, a Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient, and a former U.S. Navy Seal, Duke Honor Council founding member Eric R. Greitens served as governor of Missouri from January 2017 until June 2018, when he resigned following accusations of sexually assaulting his hairdresser, plus allegations of campaign finance improprieties. On April 11, 2018, members of a Missouri House Special Investigative Committee on Oversight issued a report that found Greitens’s hairdresser to be “a credible witness” after she described her worrisome encounter with the former governor at his home, reportedly while his pregnant wife was away. Greitens mounted a comeback bid to become a U.S. senator for Missouri this year but lost handily to that state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, in the Republican primary despite running a series of deranged political ads depicting him brandishing assault weapons and seemingly calling for right-wing vigilante violence. Somehow, we doubt we’ve seen the last of Eric Greitens.

2. An American neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, white separatist, supporter of ethnic cleansing and the enslavement of Haitians by the U.S. military, and a featured speaker at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—the less said about Richard B. Spencer is clearly the better. He’s the man who coined the term “alt-right” and described Martin Luther King Jr. as “a fraud and degenerate.” Spencer has laid low since his spectacular downfall last year, which included being shunned by his entire hometown, losing work, his wife divorcing him, and ending up too broke to hire a trial lawyer. But Spencer is apparently trying to get himself out there again, as he popped up in a Jezebel report this summer in which he told the website’s editor—who ran across him on the dating app Bumble—that he’s “no longer a white supremacist” and asked that she respect his privacy.

Duke’s All-Time Hazards

Richard M. Nixon

The Duke Law graduate and the nation’s 37th president resigned the presidency in his second term in August 1974 to avoid certain impeachment following a break-in to the Democratic Party headquarters by political allies at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, and a subsequent cover-up.

Josephus Daniels

News & Observer publisher and Trinity College (Duke before it was Duke) graduate, Daniels, during his tenure at the N&O from 1880 until his death in 1945, used the pages of the paper to help fuel the Wilmington race massacre of 1898 and overthrow the port city’s legally elected multiracial government. It was a violent coup that ushered in the Jim Crow era across North Carolina and disenfranchised Black voters until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which now looks to be on life support; see Rand Paul et al.).

James Arthur (Art) Pope

Though he’s devoted his life to dismantling public institutions of higher learning in North Carolina, including his undergraduate alma mater UNC-Chapel Hill, using a seemingly unlimited supply of financial resources from his family’s chain of discount retail stores, we’re not giving Duke Law a pass for educating the state’s most notorious Knight of the Right.

Tucker Max

The epitome of early ’00s toxic bro culture, Tucker Max is best known for doxxing personal details about his relationship with a famous ex-girlfriend, libeling a teenaged socialite, promoting rape culture and misogyny in his books, and crawling back under the rock from whence he came to retire as a doomsdayprepping podcaster on a ranch in Austin, Texas.

Charlie Rose

1.

Born into a Jewish family whose ancestors emigrated to the United States in 1903 to escape the Russian Empire’s anti-Jewish pogroms, Stephen Miller—who bears an uncanny resemblance to chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels—made the extremist list of the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2020. A chief Trump adviser and the architect of the family separation policy, Miller was instrumental in crafting the administration’s other notably xenophobic schemes, including the Muslim travel ban and the reduction in the number of refugees accepted into the nation for asylum. In the run-up to this year’s midterm elections, Miller’s nonprofit America First Legal Foundation, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” was accused of sending race-baiting mailers to Asian Americans in an attempt to suppress the group’s vote. And in court last month, America First’s legal team successfully argued that President Biden’s $4 billion stimulus package aiding Black farmers to make amends for decades of discrimination “racially discriminated against white farmers”—so now the deal is officially dead. W

In 2017 and 2018, a total of 35 women who worked with the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent and CBS This Morning anchor accused the journalist and Jeffrey Epstein associate of sexual harassment, groping, and making lewd phone calls and suggestive comments.

Lunch Hour

With its hour-long collective SMART Lunch break, Riverside High School’s students have more time to devote to clubs, socializing, or catching up on schoolwork. But could SMART Lunch be on the chopping block for the school’s 1,600-plus students?

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

On a Tuesday in September, more than 75 Riverside High School students spent their lunch period crammed into a history classroom, voluntarily signing up for more homework.

It was the interest meeting for Model UN—a club where students roleplay as delegates to the United Nations and debate real-world problems like climate change and nuclear proliferation—and the turnout was unprecedented.

Model UN is one of the most academically intensive clubs offered at Riverside. But given that the previous two school years at the Durham school have been dominated by remote online learning, it makes sense that students were especially drawn to the globally minded club this year, despite the extra work it entails, says Sam Ostrovsky, a sophomore and one of Riverside’s four Model UN club leaders.

“Model UN allows people to broaden their knowledge of the world outside their bedrooms—which we were all trapped in, during the pandemic,” Ostrovsky says.

In 60 seconds, Ostrovsky lists multiple examples of said knowledge—that Mexicans and Spaniards speak different dialects of Spanish, for one, or that Ukrainians and Russians speak two different languages despite sharing Slavic ancestry and using the Cyrillic script.

“Can you imagine if people commonly knew these kinds of things?” Ostrovsky says. “We would all get along a lot better. There’d be [fewer] political problems and divisiveness, because so many of our current problems come from not knowing what’s happening in other places.”

The club also bolsters students’ public speaking skills, he adds.

While attendance has dropped a bit since the interest meeting, Model UN is still going strong, with more than 50 students who regularly attend the club’s weekly gatherings.

But like the majority of clubs at Riverside, Model UN’s engagement relies on one variable: the school’s lunch schedule.

In fall 2019, Riverside’s then principal, Tonya Williams, made a major alteration to the school’s lunch model.

For years, Riverside used a three-cycle lunch schedule, where students were assigned to A, B, or C lunch windows that took place before third period, in the middle of third period, or after third period, respectively.

(For classes, Riverside uses a block schedule where students attend four 90-minute course periods each day. When the school was using the three-cycle lunch model, students’ lunch periods were dictated by their third period class; all students in third-period journalism, for instance, were assigned to B lunch.)

But Williams had a different idea.

If every student at Riverside shared a single, hour-long lunch period—SMART Lunch, she called it—there could be all sorts of benefits.

With SMART Lunch, all students could eat at the reasonable time of 12:15 p.m. (the three-cycle lunch model, alternatively, required one-third of students to eat lunch at around two p.m.).

Because SMART Lunch would be lengthier than the 45-minute A/B/C lunch periods—and because it would allow all teachers to hold the same office hours—students would have the time, and the accessibility, to do more than just eat. After polishing off their PB&Js, they could attend 30-minute club meetings or tutoring sessions, visit teachers to complete make-up tests or missing classwork, or, for seniors, knock out a few college applications.

In this sense, the SMART Lunch model promised to alleviate stress, increase equity, and boost academic performance among students.

Students long thwarted from participating in afterschool activities—those who play sports or who rely on the school bus for transportation—could join clubs and engage with their coursework in ways that were previously impossible.

And students with medical issues, who frequently have to scramble to coordinate make-up tests with multiple teachers, would have a reliable time window to complete their work.

Of course, some students would use the entire lunch period to socialize, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Students with social anxiety would be guaranteed the same lunch period as their friends—and, though Williams didn’t know this at the time, the COVID-19 pandemic would severely worsen social anxiety among high schoolers in the coming years.

Williams first pitched the idea of SMART Lunch in 2017 but waited to roll out the program until 2019, when she had gotten 80 percent buy-in from faculty and staff, according to a teacher who spoke with the INDY on the condition of anonymity.

While a handful of other North Carolina high schools had implemented similar models, Riverside would be the first Durham Public Schools institution to put it into practice. That seemed risky to some faculty members. And because SMART Lunch, at least in its original form, would allow Riverside’s 1,600-plus students to roam the halls as they desired (as opposed to being sequestered in the cafeteria), some teachers feared that safety issues would

Riverside High School students in the school’s cafeteria after the school switched back to its staggered A/B/C lunch schedule. PHOTO BY ISAAC JANIAK STEIN, THE PIRATES’ HOOK

arise from their inability to supervise the entire campus.

Ultimately, though, most faculty members felt that the potential benefits of the model greatly outweighed the risks, and school leadership devised a comprehensive rotating supervision system where teachers would serve one “lunch duty” shift each week.

In August 2019, when students who are currently seniors were entering high school as bright-eyed freshmen, SMART Lunch finally saw its debut.

Just over one semester later, the pandemic put a long-term pause on the new initiative, but since Riverside’s return to in-person learning in spring 2021, students—who spoke with both the INDY and Wade Gabriel, a Riverside senior, for this story—overwhelmingly feel that Williams’s vision has been realized.

(Williams left Riverside in early 2021 to take a position as area assistant superintendent for Johnston County Public Schools. She could not be reached for comment.)

Ostrovsky, the Model UN leader, dedicates his after-school hours to running cross-country and winter and spring track. The other three club leaders also play sports.

“There’s no chance that any of us would be able to lead the club if we didn’t have SMART Lunch,” Ostrovsky says, adding that he and his fellow leaders devote three lunch periods to planning, hosting, and reviewing Model UN meetings each week. “The club would essentially dissolve.”

Model UN aside, Ostrovsky says SMART Lunch plays an integral role in allowing him to maintain good grades, as he frequently misses chunks of his fourth-period class due to athletic obligations.

“There is no chance that I would have straight A’s right now if I did not have the allotted one-hour time to study and go to tutoring and take make-up tests,” Ostrovsky says. “This is really the biggest blessing that I’ve ever come across.”

More than 20 other students offer similar praise.

“I would spend pretty much every Wednesday and Friday in [Mr.] Bolen’s SMART Lunch last year ... in order to understand the content,” says Elena Paces-Wiles, a junior who runs cross-country. “That is the only reason that I got ‘distinguished’ in the exam and an A in the class, even though I’m not very STEM-oriented.”

“It legit kept me from failing,” says senior Owen Transue. “It’s a huge mental health benefit.”

With SMART Lunch, students say, their grades are higher, their college applications

are bolstered, their social needs are filled, and their stomachs are fed before any kind of hunger-induced brain fog kicks in.

And through a pandemic lens, the initiative could not have come at a better time.

In North Carolina, only 45 percent of students in grades K-12 passed state reading, math, and science exams during the 2020-21 school year. Low-income students and minority students fared the worst, with proficiency ratings in the midto-high 20s.

So at a school like Riverside—where around 60 percent of students are Black or Hispanic and 35 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch— pandemic-induced learning loss has been a major concern.

But thanks to SMART Lunch, Riverside students have been able to put extra time into recovering learning losses—and, from a more long-term perspective, many feel they’re more confident in their ability to complete coursework.

That is, until three months ago, when SMART Lunch was abruptly, but temporarily, taken away.

reported, parents received an automated call from Riverside’s current principal, Dr. Gloria Woods-Weeks, an hour later, who cited safety concerns as the reason behind the schedule change.

“We are very proud of our SMART Lunch program, but we have had some recent concerning incidents during lunchtime that do not meet our standards of respectful behavior between fellow students,” Woods-Weeks stated in the call. WoodsWeeks did not respond to the INDY’s request for comment.

The SMART Lunch suspension would be temporary, Woods-Weeks continued. The model would be reinstated after administrators had a chance to “reset, revamp our program, [and] have those conversations with students who we need to have conversations with.”

Indeed, two weeks later, SMART Lunch returned. But not before students saw what their lives would be like without it.

In that two-week interim, students who typically used SMART Lunch to study and complete make-up work say that they experienced extreme anxiety over their

fights are most common, students said, or students who break school rules could be required to spend SMART Lunch in a designated classroom.

Students say that they didn’t feel particularly heard; administrators weren’t writing down anything they said and sometimes countered their suggestions, on the spot, as being unfeasible. Some students sent follow-up emails to Woods-Weeks but received identical, copy-paste responses and were left with a sense that she didn’t read their feedback.

Regardless, on October 6, SMART Lunch was reinstated, and things returned to normal.

Then, in early December, students started to hear rumors—credible rumors, they say, from their own teachers—that the model would end permanently at the start of the spring semester.

Two teachers, each of whom spoke with the INDY on the condition of anonymity, say that to their knowledge, there is no concrete plan to cancel SMART Lunch. But one of the teachers—we’ll call him Mr. Johnson—shared that faculty members have reasons to believe that the model will soon be revoked and feel that the principal’s calls for student and teacher input are a charade.

On Friday of last week, teachers were asked to attend meetings with administrators during their planning periods to discuss SMART Lunch, Johnson says.

As at many public high schools, physical fights among students have long been an issue at Riverside, with administrators left puzzling over how to best address a systemic problem that is rooted outside the walls of the school.

Mandatory hall passes, well-publicized disciplinary consequences, and the presence of school resource officers act as a first line of prevention. In 2017, when this INDY reporter was a senior at Riverside, administrators implemented a policy that punished “student bystanders”—students who took video recordings of fights—with five days of out-of-school suspension to further deter violence between students. (The policy is no longer listed in the Riverside Student Handbook.)

Still, the fights persist—and now, it seems, SMART Lunch may be in the hot seat.

On September 22 at 4:09 p.m.—six minutes before the end of the school day— teachers received an email from administrators that detailed a shift back to the A/B/C lunch schedule, to be implemented immediately the next day.

As The Pirates’ Hook student newspaper

grades and lost their grasp on class material. Clubs and tutoring sessions, hastily rescheduled to before-school hours, saw a plummet in attendance. Students assigned to the C lunch block, at 1:55 p.m., were so hungry they couldn’t pay attention in class.

Things felt so dire that two students quickly launched separate petitions calling on administrators to immediately reinstate the model. One petition received 345 signatures, while the other, created by senior Myles Ettu, gathered a whopping 1,268.

“If two kids fought in class—let’s say it’s Math 2—would you cancel the class?” Ettu says. “Would you cancel Math 2 and take away the opportunity for everyone?”

The week that SMART Lunch was revoked, Riverside administrators held four grade-wide assemblies to screen slideshows about school safety and listen to feedback from students.

Most students expressed a strong desire for the SMART Lunch model to continue, and some offered solutions to the administration’s safety concerns: the lunch duty map could be reworked to place more teachers in areas where

The majority of teachers in his meeting were strong proponents of the model, he says. Many echoed the safety tips that students had suggested, with some adding that a post-lunch tardy sweep could be helpful—several of this year’s larger fights happened just after SMART lunch transitioned into third period, but the school hasn’t performed a tardy sweep all year— and others encouraging administrators to cover open lunch duty positions.

Woods-Weeks has not shown any data that SMART Lunch has actually led to an increase in fights, Johnson adds.

And even if the data exists, students are asking administrators to broaden their lenses.

There may be a few wrinkles to iron out, students say, but in the long term, the model—and all it does for students’ well-being—will prevent fights from the ground up.

In a few years, if SMART Lunch continues, you might spot a group of fistfight-inclined students in the Model UN classroom—demolishing each other with knowledge. W

Gabriel, a senior at Riverside High School, contributed to this report.

Wade

“[SMART Lunch] legit kept me from failing. It’s a huge mental health benefit.”

A Shooting Star

A praise song for former News & Observer journalist James Powell, who died this year

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

During the night of the 2008 presidential election, I was standing in front of the News & Observer newsroom watching the state-by-state voting results on a trio of television screens tuned to CNN, MSNBC, and a local news outlet.

As Barack Obama came closer to his historic victory, I grew nervous and decided to take a walk. I ended up at the apartment of my fellow journalist and close friend James Powell, who was watching the voting returns on CNN. It was a giddy time. A Black man stood one hell of a chance of becoming the president.

Powell unscrewed the cap off of the box of Franzia crisp white wine he always had on hand and poured me a glass before settling down on the couch next to me.

We howled when the CNN newscast featured election night parties in unlikely places like Harlem and Kenya. Then, Wolf Blitzer announced that “Barack Obama, 47 years old, will become the president of the United States.”

Powell and I leaped off of that tan couch and jumped up and down with glee. We were euphoric, standing on his front porch, screaming.

Kind of hard to believe that was 14 years ago.

This year, on August 1, Powell died. He was 47.

I couldn’t let the year pass without writing about Powell, a great friend and coworker who became my neighbor after my marriage ended.

Powell—I never called him James, sometimes he went by “Jaymes”—was a first-rate character in a newsroom filled with characters. He was a helluva writer, a contrarian by definition who loved wine, a blunt of good marijuana, women by the bushel, and song, preferably New Edition. He must have weighed 150 pounds soaking wet but fancied himself a swashbuckling wide receiver who, with a few breaks, could have ended up in the NFL.

Aaron Pankey, a Washington, DC, pastor and Howard University alum delivered the eulogy at Powell’s memorial service. The eulogy was not without laughter. Pankey said Powell contacted him two years ago and announced that he had been invited to try out for a semi-pro football league.

“I asked him, ‘Jay, is it sponsored by the AARP?’” Pankey said.

The day after Powell died, another former N&O journalist, the film critic Craig D. Lindsey, posted a short tribute on social media. Lindsey’s first sentence summed up the sentiments of a great many folks who knew Powell.

“At one point in my life,” Lindsey wrote, “Jaymes Powell

was the craziest sumabitch I ever knew.”

“Oh, the stories I could tell about this first-rate bullshit artist. He often wore Mardi Gras beads. He used to bust my balls, questioning my Blackness because I hadn’t seen THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR at the time,” Lindsey wrote.

Lindsey had been one of Powell’s deskmates on the second floor of the old sprawling N&O building on McDowell Street in downtown Raleigh, where the features, sports, and arts writers and editors worked.

“He once tried to sue the paper we both worked for because he allegedly heard one of the editors call him an old-school racial slur,” Lindsey wrote. “(The twist: The editor was Black.) He used to heat up cooking oil with a bunch of seasoning in his kitchen, so the apartment wouldn’t smell like weed and his upstairs neighbor, apparently a member of the clergy, wouldn’t complain. He once told me, when he was a kid, he left a bag of porn DVDs on his bed. When he came back, his mother cleaned up his room and wrote ‘Jaymes’s Porn’ on the bag.”

“And these are the stories I can tell you,” Lindsey wrote.

During his memorial service on September 23, Powell’s friends and family described an indefatigable talker and selfless friend, who could be mischievous as a child but

The late journalist James Powell. PHOTO COURTESY OF JAMES POWELL’S FAMILY

also spent a goodly part of his childhood visiting homeless shelters with his mother and sister to distribute tissues, lotion, and encouragement to the residents. A people person and “completely unscripted” was how a Howard University classmate described him. Another classmate remembered how he had tried to build a fireplace in his dorm room, “for the ladies.” Yet another classmate said Powell would merrily dump trash in front of their dorm room door.

Pankey, during his eulogy, recalled Powell visiting his church for the first time in 2002 with his girlfriend. The college couple, both wearing Howard University journalism sweatshirts, sat in the front row where they laughed, talked, and elbowed one another during the entire service. Afterward, the pastor looked forward to meeting the couple.

“What’s up, my Negro?” Powell said to the pastor. “You preached the entire sermon using improper English!”

“Jay was a shooting star,” one of his cousins said at his service. “You couldn’t hold a shooting star.”

During the period when my marriage was going bad but had not yet crashed on the rocks, I would stop by Powell’s crib after work for a glass of wine and a puff of weed. Talking a mile a minute in a voice brimming over with endless enthusiasm and laughter, Powell was a different type of Mr. Excitement, and a balm for my wounded heart.

Before he married in 2013, Powell had at least four or five girlfriends who were always coming and going.

My cousin Barry Saunders, who also worked for the N&O, used to joke that Powell’s blues song would be a lament about having too many pretty women, and we wondered: What in the world did all of those highly attractive women see in Powell? He certainly wasn’t anyone’s idea of a bronze Adonis.

Saunders surmised that women wanted to take care of him, reform his errant ways, and maybe feed him a good meal.

One year the National Association of Black Journalists held its annual convention in Las Vegas, and the big story in the newsroom after the convention was that Big Fluff— another newsroom character—had scored a lap dance. That created quite a buzz; meanwhile, Powell spent most of his time at the convention hiding from two women he was dating at the time.

The skinny guy with the big ears was big-time smart, too, and socially conscious, with a nose for solid sports journalism. One of his more memorable stories while writing for the N&O was a piece that chronicled the absence of Black athletes in Major League Baseball, a half century after Jackie Robinson crossed the color line.

James Leonard Powell Jr. was born September 23, 1974, in Fairfax, Virginia, and grew up in Newport News, Virginia, and Upper Marlboro, Maryland. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from his beloved Howard University in 1999.

By the time Powell arrived at the N&O, he was already a classic ink-stained wretch and a welcome addition to a lively metro newsroom that, at the time, was ranked among the top 25 newspapers in the country.

Prior to covering the sports beat for the N&O, he worked at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where he wrote about the Minnesota Vikings. He also served as a sports editor with The Source Sports magazine and was eventually named the publication’s

executive sports editor.

While at The Source Sports, his obituary noted, he covered every major sport, including the NFL, NBA, MLB, and professional boxing with feature stories about Mike Tyson and Floyd Mayweather.

When Powell left the N&O, he founded the short-lived online news site The Journalism Element. He also traded in his reporter’s notebooks to work as a communications director with the North Carolina Democratic Party.

Powell was committed to fighting for underserved populations, voter rights, racial injustice, and unhoused citizens. He wanted “to help level the playing field for Black children through access to high-speed Internet” and “[rebuild]the roads and sidewalks in Black communities,” which he described as “bridges to food, work, and progress,” his family stated in his obituary.

Powell’s sister, Natasha Powell, an emergency room physician living in Washington, DC, told me her brother died of gastrointestinal bleeding.

I’m no one’s doctor, but I think my good friend died of a broken heart.

One of the happiest times of Powell’s life was his wedding day on November 16, 2013. I still have the wedding invitation. Powell, the ultimate wild hair, the embodiment of id, had settled down and married a woman he deeply loved. He was 39. I can still remember Powell and his radiant bride dancing together during the reception held at the Raleigh Convention Center following their marital

people who suffer from the condition don’t think anything is wrong with them. Sometimes, even if family members convince a mentally ill loved one to seek help, the treatment centers turn them away. Way too often, a mentally ill person finally gets the attention that’s needed after a disaster takes place.

“[Powell] never acknowledged his mental illness,” his sister told the INDY this week. “He would say he had anxieties or was depressed.”

Powell’s former wife told me that she was aware of his mental health struggles before they married and supported him. But over the course of their union he stopped taking his medication and self-medicated instead with alcohol and marijuana. So she moved out.

Powell loved children.

“He loved my kids more than anything in the world,” one of his childhood friends said at the memorial service.

Sometimes I still laugh out loud thinking about how he would delight in ribbing my then elementary-school-age daughter Imani. Powell loved to roast people, but he also loved jokes at his own expense.

One morning, we stopped by to see Powell before he had brushed his teeth, and later I told her our friend’s breath smelled dastardly. Imani thought that was the funniest thing. For Imani, Powell’s dastardly breath ranked right up there with a woman on the Maury show telling the father of her child she needed him about as much as a duck needs rubber boots.

“But a duck doesn’t need rubber boots,” the man said. “Exactly!” the woman replied.

After the breakup of his marriage, Powell moved out of the townhome he shared with his wife and into a nondescript apartment with bad lighting near Saint Augustine’s University. The place smelled like mothballs. One spring afternoon, while Imani—now a teenager—was at track practice at Raleigh’s Millbrook High School, I paid him a visit.

ceremony at Jones Chapel. The lovestruck couple moved into a three-story town house in North Raleigh. They were married for about seven years, when Powell’s wife moved out.

Powell called me, shrieking, screaming. It took me a few minutes to understand what he was saying: his wife had left him.

I called her, and she shared with me an element of Powell’s life that I was not aware of: he struggled with mental illness.

Powell had never shared his medical condition with me. Of course he wouldn’t. Mental illness is stigmatized, and those with the condition are often marginalized. Never mind that mental illness should be viewed as a chronic health problem not unlike diabetes or high blood pressure. Mental illness is a reality in America. According to Mental Health America, in 2020, nearly 21 percent of adults in this country were experiencing mental illness.

I used to think that every Black person in this country should be in therapy, myself included. Now, after the agonies of a pandemic and a political crisis that metastasized with the election of a man no more fit to be president than the assistant produce manager at the local Food Lion, I think that everyone in the United States could benefit from some form of post-traumatic therapy.

A tragic component of mental illness can be that some

Powell didn’t look well, man. He still had a box of Franzia crisp white wine on hand and a bag of marijuana. But the signature joy and effervescence that were so much of a part of his being were gone, or at best forced.

I promised to stop by again, but that was the last time I saw him alive.

I later learned that over the ensuing months his health deteriorated. Worse, he refused to seek medical treatment and rejected appeals from his physician sister and mother, who formerly worked as the dean of nursing at Howard University and as associate dean of nursing at Duke University.

Depressed, with his body failing him, I think my beautiful friend gave up.

Powell’s memorial service was on September 23, the same day John Coltrane was born. They both left us way too soon. Trane was only 40 when he died.

Powell’s family held his memorial service at Ben’s Chili Bowl. The iconic, Black-owned restaurant on U Street in Washington, DC, is about a two-minute drive from Howard University.

Pankey, the eulogizing pastor, said Powell “epitomized Howard University’s values of excellence, leadership, and service.”

Lindsey said he had received an email indicating Powell died in his sleep.

A shooting star.

I hope he woke up in Heaven, man. W

“Jay was a shooting star. You couldn’t hold a shooting star.”

CULTURE CALENDAR

North Carolina Chinese Lantern Festival $16+. Nov. 18–Jan. 8, various times. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.

Carolina Ballet: The Nutcracker $42+. Dec. 16-24, various times. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Beowulf in the Mead Hall Wed, Dec. 21, 7 p.m. Moon Dog Meadery, Durham.

stage

Fantasia $90+. Thurs, Dec. 22, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Jump, Little Children: The Farewell Tour $35. Thurs, Dec. 22, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Winter in tha Carolinas $19. Thurs, Dec. 22, 7 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Larry & Joe’s Holiday Show & Singalong Fri, Dec. 23, 7:30 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Maddie Wiener $7. Thurs, Dec. 22, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

The Hip Hop Nutcracker $76+. Fri, Dec. 23, 3 and 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Exist to Resist: A Night of NerdThemed Burlesque and Drag to Support a Good Cause $10. Thurs, Dec. 29, 7:30 p.m. Ruby Deluxe, Raleigh.

Science Cafe: An Evening of Humor with Science

Comedian Brian Malow Thurs, Dec. 29, 7 p.m. North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh.

African American Dance Ensemble 37th Annual Kwanzaa Fest Sun, Jan. 1, 12 p.m. Durham Armory, Durham.

TINA: The Tina Turner Musical $35+. Jan. 3-8, various times. DPAC, Durham.

Smell the Glove $10. Fri, Dec. 23, 10:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Xmas Dance Party Fri, Dec. 23, 10 p.m. The Station, Carrboro.

Ho Ho Holidays Dance Party $7. Sat, Dec. 24, 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio Tues, Dec. 27, 9 p.m. and Tues, Jan. 3, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Al Riggs Final Show $10. Thurs, Dec. 29, 8:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

New Year’s Jazz with J.A.M.F. $10. Thurs, Dec. 29, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

The Gunline with C. Albert Blomquist Band and The Carolina Cutups $10. Fri, Dec. 30, 9 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

#LastFriday Concert Experience $10. Fri, Dec. 30, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Marcus King: Young Blood Tour $55+. Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Holiday Classics Screening Series: Elf Wed, Dec. 21, 7 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Co., Durham.

Babylon: Costume Screening $14. Thurs, Dec. 22, 7:15 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Raleigh.

Holiday Classics Screening Series: Die Hard Wed, Dec. 28, 7 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Co., Durham.

music screen

Marcus King performs at the Ritz on Saturday, December 31.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE RITZ

Elf screens at Durty Bull Brewing Company on Wednesday, December 21.

PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS.

Please check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.

new year’s eve

8-Track Minds: New Year’s Eve Bash $25. Sat, Dec. 31, 8:30 p.m. The Blue Note Grill, Durham.

Between2Clouds’ New Year’s Eve Party: Better Together $50. Sat, Dec. 31, 8 p.m. The Matthews House, Cary.

Bizarre: A Krampus Rumpus NYE Bash! $10. Sat, Dec. 31, 10 p.m. Ruby Deluxe, Raleigh.

A Different World: A High Energy NYE Dance Party Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

The Doomsday Ball $25+. Sat, Dec. 31, 8:30 p.m. The Wicked Witch, Raleigh.

First Night® Raleigh $16. Sat, Dec. 31, 2 p.m. City Plaza, Raleigh.

A Golden New Year’s at Arcana! $20. Sat, Dec. 31, 7 p.m. Arcana Bar and Lounge, Durham.

Masquerade Murder

8: A New Year’s Eve Murder Mystery $100+. Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. City of Raleigh Museum, Raleigh.

New Year’s Eve Family Skate $20+. Sat, Dec. 31, 8:30 p.m. United Skates of America, Raleigh.

New Year’s Eve Gala $203. Sat, Dec. 31, 8 p.m. Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh.

The New Year’s Eve Party! $20. Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

New Year’s Eve Party at Fortnight Brewing Sat, Dec. 31, 8 p.m. Fortnight Brewing Company, Cary.

New Year’s Eve Party at PLUS Dueling Piano Bar $30. Sat, Dec. 31, 6:30 p.m. PLUS Dueling Piano Bar, Cary.

New Year’s Eve Party with DJ Cleve $25+. Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. TJs NightLife, Raleigh.

New Year’s Eve with Jay Renee $35+. Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. Oasis Cigar Lounge, Carrboro.

North Carolina’s Official New Year’s Eve Extravaganza 2023 $15+. Sat, Dec. 31, 9:30 p.m. Hilton North Raleigh/Midtown, Raleigh.

NYE Party at Raleigh Beer Garden $10+. Sat, Dec. 31, 8 p.m. Raleigh Beer Garden Event Tent, Raleigh.

Raleigh New Year’s Eve Party: Gatsby’s House $109+. Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. Sheraton Raleigh Hotel, Raleigh.

Raleigh NYE Bar Crawl $30+. Sat, Dec. 31, 6 p.m. The Ugly Monkey Party Bar, Raleigh.

Speakeasy New Year’s Eve Party $50. Sat, Dec. 31, 9 p.m. Unscripted Hotel, Durham.

Wye Hill’s First Night NYE Party $55+. Sat, Dec. 31, 10:30 p.m. Wye Hill Kitchen & Brewing, Raleigh

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