INDY Week 6.17.20

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill June 17, 2020

LET THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN

Whether they’re rapping, protesting, or just living, Cypher Univercity keeps the code

BY BRIAN HOWE, P. 14

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June 17, 2020

INDYweek.com

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 37 NO. 21

CONTENTS NEWS 8

When it comes to defunding the police, Durham activists have been ahead of the curve. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

10 The McDougald Terrace crisis was long in the making. BY CAROLINE PETROW-COHEN 12

North Carolina just made absentee voting much easier. BY

SARA PEQUEÑO

13 Raleigh City Council made a big move last week that you might have missed.

BY LEIGH TAUSS

FEATURE 14

From hip-hop to protest, Cypher Univercity keeps the code.

BY BRIAN HOWE

CULTURE 19 The Durham and Raleigh mural projects underscore the challenges of supporting the Black aesthetic of resistance without co-opting it. BY KYESHA JENNINGS 21

The uneasy immortality of Henrietta Lacks.

BY JAMEELA F. DALLIS

A Note from t he Publisher As all of you know, this is an incredibly challenging and difficult moment in our history. Every day we see the very serious issues facing our cities, our state, and the world at large.

We at the INDY have faced our own significant internal challenges over the past couple of weeks, including the destruction of our Raleigh office as well as being confronted with serious questions about our journalism. On top of that, after many difficult discussions with staff, I concluded I needed to ask our editor to leave.

The INDY Week staff continues to be committed to the Triangle and to essential values. So while this has been seriously uncomfortable for all of us, it is my hope we can come through this stronger— especially when we all believe so fervently that our journalism has never been more important here.

For now, as we search for new editorial leadership, Brian Howe will serve as the INDY’s editor. Brian has been part of the Triangle community for many years and is committed to great journalism as well as guiding the editorial department at this time.

Please be patient with us, but continue to always push us to be better. We can’t do our work without you.

THE REGULARS 4 Voices 5 15 Minutes

Thank you, Susan Harper

6 Quickbait 7 A Week in the Life

sharper@indyweek.com

18 1000 Words

COVER Photo by Jade Wilson/Design by Jon Fuller

WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER Susan Harper

Digital Content Manager Sara Pequeño

EDITOR I AL

Contributing Food Editor Nick Williams

Interim Editor in Chief Brian Howe Raleigh News Editor Leigh Tauss Deputy A+C Editor Sarah Edwards Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald

Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods Voices Columnists T. Greg Doucette, Chika Gujarathi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Courtney Napier, Barry Saunders, Jonathan Weiler

Contributors Jim Allen, Jameela F. Dallis, Michaela Dwyer, Lena Geller, Spencer Griffith, Howard Hardee, Laura Jaramillo, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Josephine McRobbie, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, Neil Morris, James Michael Nichols, Marta Nuñez Pouzols, Bryan C. Reed, Dan Ruccia, David Ford Smith, Eric Tullis, Michael VenutoloMantovani, Chris Vitiello, Ryan Vu, Patrick Wall

Interns Mary King, Bella Smith

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June 17, 2020

3

BACKTALK

Last week, it was revealed that

Editor in Chief Jeffrey

Billman had failed to follow up on a credible story tip alleging

Why can’t the police keep their hands to themselves?

BY T. GREG DOUCETTE @greg_doucette

widespread sexual misconduct at Bida Manda and Brewery

Bhavana. Before Billman was let go from his position last week, he posted a public apology on our website.

Here’s how folks responded:

BAKARA WINTNER said it “seems odd” that the paper lacked the resources to report on the sexual misconduct allegations but did manage to print several stories about the restaurants in the last 13 months.

“Time to get your priorities straight, Indy,” Wintner wrote.

Commenter BOBBY called Billman’s response “highly suspect.” “‘Simply lacked the resources and personnel’ feels like double-talk for “we/I did not make it a priority.” The question your response raises is— why? I’m asking this publicly because I don’t think emailing people privately is acceptable for a publication that is supposed to serve its community.

I’ll reserve judgement until I learn more, but this response it lacking substance, to say the least.”

Commenter MICK thinks, “it isn’t that complicated.”

“You aren’t actual journalists. You folks are paid political activists who masquerade as journalists under the banner of a mediocre, left leaning, low volume curated news rag. It’s not surprising that you wouldn’t follow up when you could be commenting on Trump’s tweets and stoking fauxdemic fears. It’s not workload, it’s not priorities. You just aren’t that good at this and you aren’t willing to set aside your feelings and egos in order to have the humility to get better.”

User RALITICS echoed that sentiment.

“The trouble with trying so hard to be with the in crowd is that your bias shows when you overplay or lie when you try to please that circle, and you choose to remain silent when in crowd members are bad actors. Hate to break it to you, but...pssst...the real in crowd laughs at you behind closed doors.”

WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD?

indyweek.com backtalk@indyweek.com @IndependentWeekly @indyweek 4

voices

The Cops Are Rioting

June 17, 2020

INDYweek.com

“T

he message is being lost,” a law school classmate texted me. It was four days after the horrific death by suffocation of George Floyd. The night before, the country watched as the Third Precinct police station in Minneapolis went up in flames. The text message came in as cable news was showing protesters damaging CNN Arena in Atlanta. And to my friend— sharp as a tack when it comes to politics—this was the prelude to a 1968-style law-and-order beatdown of a popular uprising.

So I sent him a pair of videos from Twitter.

“Watch this video,” I prefaced one of an NYPD officer calling a woman a “stupid fucking bitch,” while shoving her headfirst into a curb, where she ended up having a seizure and concussion. “Then watch this video,” I said, sending another video of police in Louisville, Kentucky taking aim and deliberately shooting pepper bullets at a reporter and her cameraman while the pair were broadcasting live on air.

“They can’t help themselves from stepping on their own dicks,” I added. “The riots will be forgotten; the ongoing police criminality will remain.”

Turns out I was insufficiently cynical.

In the weeks since those first protests in Minneapolis, we have seen a mind-blowing orgy of violence from America’s police. Several hundred videos across dozens of jurisdictions—from big-city departments like Los Angeles, California to tiny St. Johnsbury, Vermont (estimated population: 7,603)—have livestreamed on Facebook, Periscope, and TikTok as they document police unleashing violent force on unarmed and peaceful protesters.

At least 20 people have had their eyes shot out by police using “non-lethal weapons,” including several journalists and at least one man who wasn’t even protesting—he was walking to his car after work, when police shot him drive-by style from the back of a departing police truck. States that activated their National Guard saw Guardsmen caught on video illegally ordering people off their own porch and then shooting into their home when they didn’t move fast enough. And that was when Guardsmen weren’t killing people, as they did to at least one renowned barbecue chef.

The elderly have been a frequent target of this unchecked police violence, too. Most publicized was the 75-year-old man pushed to the ground by Buffalo police officers with such force that nearby television crews recorded the grisly sound of his skull cracking on the

pavement. The cops stood by as the man bled from his ear onto the ground, focused more on chasing away witnesses than providing first aid.

But the abuse extended even to bucolic Salt Lake City, Utah, as a SWAT team’s first act after hopping out of their vehicle was shoving an elderly man at a bus stop to the ground. It was caught on camera by a news crew across the street while they were broadcasting live on air.

Old and young, Black and white, protesting or not: the police have routinely assaulted citizens from all walks of life these past two weeks. And the result of those repeated abuses and usurpations by the government was similar to 1776: rebellion.

The riots long ago died off, but the protests exploded in size. When Donald Trump ordered the Secret Service to use chemical weapons on protesters so he could have a clear path to a photo op at a nearby church, they gassed one of the largest spontaneous demonstrations Washington, D.C. had ever seen (major protests are typically planned well in advance). Even more protesters showed up after the attack, and the number has grown since.

And it turns out the message is not getting lost after all. In poll after poll, unprecedented majorities of Americans—across racial, gender, and even political party lines— express support for the Black Lives Matter movement and believe reform is needed to address racial biases in policing. In contrast to identical questions asked after the Ferguson protests in 2014, the two-week swing in public opinion is literally unprecedented on any major issue.

Those dramatic opinion shifts have prompted overdue political changes. This past week the N.C. House of Representatives unanimously passed the Second Chance Act after holding it for 10 months since it passed the Senate. Lawmakers in Colorado passed a multi-faceted police reform bill (over the weekend!) that the Governor will be signing into law by the time you read this. And San Francisco announced they will be sending unarmed medical professionals to respond to non-criminal 911 calls— something that should be common sense everywhere, as roughly 90 percent of all 911 calls are for medical care, welfare checks, or similar non-criminal matters.

Those are just a few highlights of the police reforms enacted or under consideration throughout the country.

When the tear-gas cloud clears, the President and his lawand-order supporters may be shocked to discover this has turned out less like 1968 and more like 1964.2 Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.

T. GREG DOUCETTE is a local attorney, criminal justice reform advocate, and host of the podcast #Fsck ’Em All. Follow him on Twitter @greg_doucette.

15 MINUTES 217 WEST MILLBROOK RD. 919-787-9894

~~

Aissa Dearing, 18 Student, activist, and community organizer

BY MARY KING backtalk@indyweek.com

Tell me about your work with climate justice and racial justice.

Climate justice and racial justice are intrinsically linked, so Elijah King and I founded the Durham Youth Climate Justice Initiative to set an intentional space for students of color who may not know a lot about the climate crisis and want an entry point into the movement. It’s such a knowledge-and-science-based movement, and that’s who we prioritize in the fight against the climate crisis.

So, we wanted to shed light on more young people’s experiences with climate justice. And I’ve been working in racial equity, especially around barriers that students of color face in Durham Public Schools and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline.

Can you tell me about your petition to the Durham County school board?

I’ve been working with the Youth Justice Project for a couple of years now, and last year we hosted a town hall that brought together students, parents—even the Sheriff’s Department and a couple of Board of Education members were there—to talk about reforming their relationship to provide more transparency, accountability, and oversight of the school resource officer department. We didn’t get any of the demands that we asked for.

A year later, in light of recent events, I’m asking to completely terminate that relationship. My school has one guidance counselor for 400 students, a part-time school nurse, and we don’t know who our school social workers or school psychologists are. I feel like those are the areas of priority for students, and that’s what truly makes a school climate safer. I’m asking the school board to reconsider their definition of safety.

Where is the petition?

It’s actually on Instagram. I wanted to direct it towards young people, and sometimes people gravitate away from trying to click another link and putting their email into a Change.org petition, so I decided to do it entirely through Instagram and Facebook so it would be more directed for young people. In a recent comment that Durham Public Schools made about this particular issue, in response to my open letter, they said that their stakeholders would be concerned about removing school resource officers. Part of the reason I wrote that petition and part of the reason that I’m planning this march on June 13 is to remind Durham Public Schools who the real stakeholders are. And that’s students and teachers.

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

Is a school resource officer a variant of a police officer that’s specifically for schools?

Yes, but honestly, in my opinion, their role is essentially to act as police. So, while there’s a nicer name attached to it, and they supposedly have more training to work specifically with students, there’s not really a difference. They still have the uniform on, they still carry guns and other weapons, and they still have the capacity and willingness to make arrests, and they do that.

How does the presence of these school resource officers affect students of color?

I feel like there’s a general distrust with government officials [and] with police in communities of color anyway. So, their presence almost makes us feel like threats, and that they need to be there just in case we do something wrong—even though our behaviors are, to be honest, expected of 13-to-14-year-old kids. So, while we believe that we’re just making mistakes or trying to work through behaviors that may be a result of mental health issues or things that we’ve seen at home, school resource officers kind of see that as us acting as adults, or acting as a threatening presence. That’s not what we are.

What can people do to help?

We’re anticipating creating a summit for young people to reimagine what safety looks like. One of the largest concerns that Durham Public Schools has is that they don’t have a replacement plan, and I don’t want them to make a replacement plan without the input of the students that they’re serving. So, right now, Elijah King and I are collaborating on possibly making a youth summit. So, watch out for that happening. W

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June 17, 2020

5

QUICKBAIT

Did We Forget About COVID?

By The Numbers

O

fficials assured us we’d flattened the coronavirus curve enough to start reopening, but after the stay-at-home order lifted and restaurants opened their doors to the public last month, cases of the virus have been on the rise. This weekend, North Carolina hit a record-high for single-day laboratory-confirmed cases of the virus and the number of concurrent hospitalizations. Data provided from the state Department of Health shows upward slopes in these critical health metrics, which weeks prior had seemed to level out. The news isn’t great but the lesson should be clear: We’re not out of the woods yet and should continue to practice social distancing, cover our faces in public, and wash our hands frequently. W

Lab-Confirmed cases:

45,1 0 2

Completed tests:

6 3 8 , 47 9

Currently hospitalized:

7 97

Daily Diagnosed COVID-19 Cases in North Carolina 2000

daily cases 7 day rolling average

JUNE 12

1,768 confirmed cases

1500 1000 500 0 May 17

Get Tested for COVID-19 This Week

May 22

May 27

June 6

June 11

June 16

Daily Number of People Currently Hospitalized

Daily Tests (in the last week) 25,000

(in the last week) 1000

20,000

Don’t forget to make an appointment first! It also ensures that your local clinic has on-site testing.

June 1

800

15,000

600 10,000 400

Avance Primary Care CVS Pharmacy Duke Hospital FastMed Urgent Care UNC Health

5,000

0

200

6/9

6/10 6/11 6/12 6/13 6/14 6/15

0

6/9

6/10 6/11 6/12 6/13 6/14 6/15

County Map by Cases (over 1000)

WakeMed Walgreens Pharmacy

Forsyth 2,250 Guilford 2,061 Mecklenburg 7,321 Durham 2,712

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT

covid19.ncdhhs.gov 6

June 17, 2020

INDYweek.com

Wake 3,099 Sources: COVID-19 North Carolina Dashboard, as of Monday, June 15 at 11:40 a.m.

Wayne 1,533 Duplin 1,213

The Good, The Bad & The Awful

A WE E K IN THE L IFE (Here’s what’s happened since the INDY went to press last week)

6/9 6/13

Raleigh native Matt James was named as the NEXT STAR OF THE BACHELOR on Good Morning America. He is the first Black Bachelor in the show’s history.

Durham Officials announce a (slight) relaxation for PHASE 2 OF REOPENING, with an amendment that permits outdoor exercise classes and realty open houses that do not exceed 10 people.

The state Department of Health and Human Services reported the highest ONE-DAY INCREASE in COVID-19 cases yet, with 1,768 new cases across the state.

Two inmates at Butner—Mark E. Hebert, 61, and John Marrone, 85—were pronounced dead.

Both men had TESTED POSITIVE FOR COVID-19.

6/14

The INDY announced Jeffrey Billman WAS REMOVED AS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF. A federal judge RULED AGAINST A GROUP OF INMATES AT BUTNER FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL COMPLEX who had requested that the prison take action to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Butner has one of the worst outbreaks among federal prisons in the country.

Wake County reported another OUTBREAK OF CORONAVIRUS at Windsor Point, a longterm care facility in Fuquay-Varina.

6/15

6/11

NASCAR BANNED THE USE OF CONFEDERATE FLAGS in their stadiums. They also made statements in support of Black Lives Matter and Pride Month during the week.

Raleigh United PLACED A PLAQUE HONORING GEORGE FLOYD over the Confederate monument on Capitol grounds in Raleigh.

INDY editorial and design staff ISSUED A LETTER TO MANAGEMENT demanding “immediate action” for the failure of EIC Jeffrey Billman to follow-up on Bida Manda/Brewery Bhavana allegations brought to him by a former restaurant employee in May 2019.

Goodbye, summer BULLS GAMES. Mayor Steve Schewel told The 9th Street Journal in a text that it is “possible that there will be games with essentially no crowds” this summer but that he is “pessimistic” about even that.

6/12

Governor Cooper created a RACIAL EQUITY TASK FORCE to develop and implement new strategies to end racial inequality in the state justice system.

Raleigh BANNED THE USE OF CHOKEHOLDS AND STRANGLEHOLDS. Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown also said that the department would conduct an independent investigation of its conduct during the protests.

Van Nolintha stepped down from BIDA MANDA AND BREWERY BHAVANA after sexual assault allegations came to light on social media.

6/10

d goo

Durham biotech company Shattuck Labs reported raising $118 million from investors to RESEARCH CANCER TREATMENTS.

bad

ul

f aw

U.S. Supreme Court It may be long overdue but, in the midst of profound national pain, the Supreme Court made one profoundly good decision.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme court ruled that companies cannot unfairly fire or discriminate against LGBTQ employees. This decision, a reconsideration of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, extends workplace protections to the 11.5 million gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and 1.5. million transgender people living in the United States. The 6-3 majority ruling came from a conservative-controlled bench and was led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee who has nevertheless been a staunch devotee of “textualism,” in which the objective meaning of a text is privileged over the intention of the text’s drafters. In this case, the objective meaning of the Civil Rights Act turned out to be that no one can be discriminated against for either sexual orientation or gender identity in the workplace. Happy Pride Month indeed.

Premature Reopening?

Just in time for summer, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have spiked in North Carolina. We can probably thank the relaxing of social distancing measures, restaurants reopening, and—necessary though they may be—two weeks of packed Black Lives Matter protests for the jump in cases. Last week the state topped 1,000 deaths, and hospitalizations for the virus—which at one point seemed to have leveled—jumped to a record-setting 823 patients on Saturday. You’d think this would be cause for concern, but last weekend a viral video showed crowds of 20-and30 somethings swarming the city’s Glenwood South nightclub district, prompting speculation that some businesses weren’t abiding by the Governor's 50 percent capacity rule. Be cool, y’all: at least wear a mask.

Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda Van Nolintha, the co-owner and general manager of high-profile Raleigh restaurants Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda, was forced to step down from the business and divest his ownership after allegations of widespread sexual misconduct at the restaurants gained traction on social media. Jordan Hester, bar manager for both restaurants, is also “no longer at the company,” according to a spokesperson. The initial posts prompted more employees to speak out about a work culture that they allege allowed abuse from Nolintha, Hester, and others to go unchecked. Those allegations include racist language, sexual assault, groping, and sexual harassment. The company, which does not have an HR department, is currently undergoing a third-party investigation led by an employment attorney. Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda have both enjoyed glitzy national reputations; at home in Raleigh, the reverberations in the restaurant industry and community have run deep—including at the INDY. KeepItINDY.com

June 17, 2020

7

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Durham

Occupied Territory Durham activists have been ahead of the curve on the movement to defund the police

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

tmcdonald@indyweek.com

T

he first publicly funded police force began in St. Parish, South Carolina in 1704. Its purpose was to catch enslaved people who had run away and to maintain discipline in the forced-labor camps known as plantations.

Small wonder that 35 years later, about 100 captives—reportedly kidnapped from the Kingdom of the Kongo—led an insurrection known as the Stono Rebellion in the South Carolina colony. About 25 colonists and 40 insurrectionists were killed in the uprising. It led to the Negro Act of 1740, which made it illegal for enslaved Africans to move abroad, gather in groups, raise food, earn money, or learn to write. It also gave people the right to kill those they had enslaved if they rebelled.

Centuries later that dark melody resounded when James Baldwin wrote that the police presence in Black communities was akin to the occupation of foreign troops that viewed Black citizens as suspects instead of as people they had sworn to serve and protect.

“And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population,” Baldwin wrote in “A Report from Occupied Territory.” Police “are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a 8

June 17, 2020

INDYweek.com

BYP100 led a Durham protest on June 1, 2020

country that makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity— quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.”

While much has changed since Baldwin penned his essay in 1966, one thing has not: Police are still killing Black people.

George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer spurred a national conversation about persistent inequalities in policing that culminated in two weeks of mostly peaceful protests with catchphrases like “Defund the Police” scrawled on thousands of handwritten signs.

But what might dismantling the current system of policing look like, and more specifically, what might it look like in Durham?

Young activists are working to figure that out. From the Black Youth Project 100 to Durham Beyond Policing Coalition, this group of mostly Millennials is at the

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

forefront of re-imagining what public safety means in our community.

This week, Durham Beyond Policing Coalition asked the city council members not to approve a 5 percent increase to the police department’s budget and instead invest in social and community-based programs that are viable structural alternatives to policing and incarceration.

Activists point out that the police department’s $68 million draft budget— about half of the city’s entire General Fund—is so much more substantial than the $18.9 million slated for funds that go toward eviction diversion and affordable housing.

This time, the city’s elected leaders are listening and taking action. In a statement Monday, Mayor Steve Schewel responded by calling on his fellow city council members to approve an initial investment of $1 million for a new vision of community safety. A portion of it will be used to support the work of BYP100’s Commu-

nity Safety and Wellness Task Force. The lion’s share will go toward implementing the task force’s recommendations.

BYP100 was at the forefront of a rally this month in downtown Durham where hundreds of people clad in black marched to the county jail and demanded the defunding of the police department and an end to the prison-industry pipeline.

Residents housed inside of the detention center banged their windows in a show of solidarity.

Durham has made some reforms in recent years. They include requiring written consent for vehicle searches, expanding misdemeanor diversion and access to U visas, deprioritizing misdemeanor marijuana offenses, and emphasizing crisis intervention, racial equity, and de-escalation training.

But what’s really needed, Schewel said in a statement Monday, is a set of “community safety institutions that don’t involve the police.”

“Police departments only function to control Black and brown people’s bodies.”

“We anticipate that these new institutions will be able to prevent violence, peacefully intervene and stop ongoing violence, and be able to take on work that is currently performed by the police, including responding to crisis calls.”

City officials have also committed to “review and reform” the police department’s use-of-force policies over the next 90 days.

Durham Sheriff Clarence Birkhead and Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis have not yet said if their departments intend to adopt the recommendations that BYP100 shared at the summit. But Schewel’s statement, crafted with the help of council member Jillian Johnson, mirrors Durham Beyond Policing’s recommendations, including transferring 911 calls to mental-health professionals for residents who struggle with mental illness, addressing domestic violence by creating safe houses across the city, and providing de-escalation workshops that move toward transformative justice so that residents who call for help will have options other than riot gear and guns.

Since its formation in 2016, BYP100 and DBP have become powerful voices in the city’s policing and public-safety plans.

In 2016, the city council approved a plan to spend more than $80 million to build a new police headquarters on East Main Street. BYP100 members questioned why the police are constantly able to get funding, while the needs of impoverished neighborhoods—like the Liberty Street public-housing apartments just across the street around the corner, or McDougald Terrace, where residents contend with the threat of carbon monoxide—are ignored (see page 10).

The group points to a survey they conducted with Durham residents who said affordable housing, healthcare access, well-paying jobs, and better transportation were needed to keep their communities safe.

BYP100 members also point to the glaring racial disparities in policing methods and policies “that have cost thousands of people their freedom and resulted in

many lives taken from our communities.”

In calling for an end to the police militarization, the Durham Beyond Policing’s proposal lists residents who have died at the hands of the police since 2010, and 14 more who died while in custody at the county jail between 2008 and 2018.

“It’s about putting our dollars where our values are,” Durham BYP100 chapter co-founder Chanelle Croxton told the INDY. “City workers are cut out because there’s a budget shortfall, but the police budget is increased.”

Last year, DBP members presented detailed research to city council members who decided not to fund the police chief’s request for additional officers and instead raised the salaries of the city’s part-time employees.

At the center of the coalition’s work is its proposal for a community wellness task force, which Schewel supports, that will research community health models here in Durham and in other cities, particularly southern cities.

Croxton hopes that Durham, with its history of civil rights and progressive politics, will serve as a social justice model for other towns and cities across the state.

“We need that spark,” she said. “If Minneapolis can do it, we can do it.”

“Police departments only function to control Black and brown people’s bodies,” and to protect the interests of capitalism,” Croxton added. “It’s an antagonistic vision of a free society. Police institutions are about violent control. That’s not necessarily the place where folks can live, can live well, and can live in harmony. They say there are steps we can take together to work and live harmoniously with the police, and we know we cannot.”

It won’t happen overnight, Croxton said, but it really is about the deep work to eventually eliminate the elimination of police departments, jails, prison, and our reliance on systems of punishment as a solution to social problems and punitive criminal justice.

“That is the north star of this movement,” she said. W

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June 17, 2020

9

N E WS

Durham

Too Little Too Late The crisis at McDougald Terrace was decades in the making

BY CAROLINE PETROW-COHEN backtalk@indyweek.com

Editor’s note: This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and The 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.

H

ealth threats from carbon monoxide leaks plunged hundreds of McDougald Terrace residents into a crisis last winter. After Durham County EMS Assistant Chief Lee VanVleet noticed an unusual number of EMS calls linked to the hazardous gas, almost 900 residents were evacuated from Durham’s oldest and largest public housing complex.

Beginning in late December, inspectors found stoves, furnaces, and water heaters emitting excess amounts of the invisible, odorless gas, which can be lethal.

These substandard conditions didn’t come out of the blue. McDougald Terrace failed federal inspections in 2019, scoring a dismal 31 out of 100. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development marks scores lower than 60 as failing grades.

Exposed electrical wires and ventilation problems, including misaligned chimneys and faulty ventilation systems in water heaters, were among 153 health and safety deficiencies detailed in the federal Housing and Urban Development inspection report. Inspectors also found mold and roaches in apartments at McDougald, which was built to house Black tenants in 1954, when racial segregation was still sanctioned across Durham.

Total costs for lodging residents in hotels, providing them with stipends, and completing emergency repairs at McDougald Terrace are expected to reach at least $9 million, the Durham Housing Authority announced this month.

After news broke that parts of McDougald Terrace were unsafe, the Durham Housing Authority and city officials immediately blamed inadequate funding from HUD. They claimed that the federal government failed to give the authority the money needed to keep Durham’s public housing communities in good repair.

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McDougald Terrace, the city’s oldest public housing complex.

PHOTO BY COREY PILSON/9TH STREET JOURNAL

Federal funding for the Durham Housing Authority has actually been on the rise in recent years. In 2017, the authority received approximately $32 million in federal awards. In 2018, awards totaled about $34.5 million, which rose to more than $35 million in 2019.

While federal funding has technically increased each year for the past three years, the authority has not been receiving enough funds relative to its needs, a DHA spokesman said.

Researchers and HUD officials have confirmed that federal grants across the country have not been sufficient for housing authorities to keep traditional public housing well maintained. In 2011, HUD estimated that the deferred capital needs in public housing amounted to nearly $26 billion, and that number has only continued to grow.

Still, housing authorities in other North Carolina cities that operate in the same challenging funding environment have kept their properties in better shape than Durham does.

Public housing in Durham has failed significantly more HUD inspections than has public housing in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Raleigh, and Greensboro. Since 2015, Charlotte has failed only one property inspection, while those other cities have failed none, according to HUD data.

Durham has failed 13.

N

orth Carolina affordable-housing experts say some cities were quicker to embrace a private/public-housing hybrid called Rental Assistance Demonstration, frequently called RAD conversion. RAD allows housing authorities to use non-federal public funding and private investment to improve their properties.

Most Durham Housing Authority properties depend on federal grants. Rents paid by tenants with incomes low enough to qualify for public housing don’t cover operating costs and upkeep. Before the coronavirus outbreak, DHA reported that its residents had average annual incomes of $13,000 a year and average rent paid was $238 a month.

When a housing authority pursues a RAD conversion project, it can use public money besides HUD funding and private investment to improve authority-owned property.

A share of the housing can be rented at market rates.

Durham has converted only three out of its 17 properties to this model. Last fall, Durham voters passed a $95 million housing bond that will help DHA convert four more public housing communities and the DHA office building. Some of these plans call for tearing down what’s there now and building new housing.

The Greensboro Housing Authority, on the other hand, has converted all but one of its public housing communities to RAD properties. This allowed the authority to

leverage more private capital to maintain these properties.

RAD conversion does offer housing authorities new sources of funds. But housing authorities in North Carolina that have not transitioned entirely to the RAD model still keep their rental housing in better shape than Durham does, according to HUD inspection reports.

Even without the extra cash that RAD conversion provides, Raleigh and Winston-Salem had no properties that failed their most recent HUD inspections.

Durham had seven in 2019.

The Housing Authority of Winston-Salem takes steps Durham does not. It hired a company called United States Inspection Group to conduct property inspections that mirror the federal HUD inspections, said Kevin Cheshire, the authority’s executive director and general counsel.

The company specializes in inspecting and mitigating issues prior to HUD’s evaluations. According to Cheshire, this helps the authority keep up with needed repairs and earn high scores when HUD inspectors arrive.

The Raleigh Housing Authority also takes extra steps to maintain public housing despite funding challenges. Over the last few decades, RHA demolished and rebuilt its three largest properties, using Hope VI grant funds for two of the projects.

“The redevelopment of these properties has helped keep repair costs lower for the agency in the long run,” RHA special assistant Laura McCann said by email.

The Durham Housing Authority, which is expected to receive more than $34 million in federal funding this year, has no such success story. And there’s no one place to pin the blame, according to observers inside and outside the organization.

“We’re seeing in Durham the consequences of years of problems,” said Samuel Gunter, Executive Director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition.

Carl Newman, general counsel for the Durham Housing Authority, says that RAD conversion is Durham’s best hope for improving its public housing. RAD conversion has already been completed at Morreene Road, Damar Court, and Laurel Oaks, but much more work is needed.

RAD conversion is at the heart of DHA’s planned redevelopment of five of its properties in downtown Durham. With a share of a $95 million affordable housing bond that Durham voters approved last fall, as well as other additional funds, DHA plans to invest more than $58 million in redevelopment.

The focus is on five properties in and

Shimey Harvey in her apartment at McDougald Terrace.

near downtown, including J.J. Henderson, Oldham Towers, Liberty Street, Forest Hill Heights, and DHA’s office building on East Main Street. DHA aims to create a mix of subsidized housing reserved for low-income residents and market-rate rentals at each site.

McDougald Terrace is notably missing from this redevelopment list. At a glance, this is puzzling, as McDougald is arguably the DHA property most in need of redevelopment.

But shortly after the housing bond passed last fall, Durham Mayor Steve Schewel said that there are economic reasons to wait on rebuilding McDougald.

The city’s largest public-housing property is more than 65 years old, making it a challenge to renovate.

“It’s good to get experience creating these mixed-income communities on a smaller scale first,” the mayor said.

In order to complete these redevelopments, DHA is relying not only on funds from the affordable-housing bond but also on private investment. And private inves-

PHOTO BY COREY PILSON/9TH STREET JOURNAL

tors need to be convinced they’re putting their money into something worthwhile.

“You have to give confidence to people that you’re going to succeed,” Schewel said, “and the best place in Durham to gain that confidence is Main Street and downtown. We know that private investors will come there, and we know that market-rate renters in these communities will want to live there.”

After finding success on Main Street, city and DHA officials can then move on to more challenging projects like McDougald, Schewel said.

“We’re going to do RAD conversion because, actually, that’s the only solution.

It just isn’t a quick one. Had we started this project 10 years ago,” said Newman, his voice trailing off for a few seconds. “But here we are.”

T

here has been significant turnover in management at the Durham Housing Authority in recent years, Newman said. CEO Anthony Scott started with the authority in 2016.

“The people who could have made a different decision 10 years ago, most of them don’t work here anymore,” Newman said.

Gunter, at the statewide affordable housing organization, said that the federal government’s history of underinvestment in public housing bears some of the blame for conditions at McDougald Terrace.

“This is what it costs when you have spent decades under-investing,” Gunter said. “This is the bill coming due. It really is a no-win situation, and the folks that get screwed are the residents” During the evacuation of McDougald, the residents—most of them women and children—were relocated to 16 hotels throughout Durham County, displaced from their kitchens, school-bus stops, neighbors, and, sometimes, practical transportation to jobs.

McDougald resident Shimey Harvey and her son had lived in her apartment for about two years before the evacuations began. She said she had frequent headaches before the evacuation, but when her family relocated to Quality Inn & Suites on Hillsborough Road, her headaches stopped. She was safe from carbon monoxide leaks, but her world had been turned upside down. As a result of the disruption, she was forced to quit her job, she said.

In a scramble to get people back to their homes, work at McDougald was exempted from Durham’s stay-at-home order, intended to decrease the spread of coronavirus, in March. Residents, including Harvey, returned to the sprawling brick complex near North Carolina Central University in May. Back at home in McDougald, carbon monoxide leaks are no longer a threat, Harvey said, but her living space is still in poor condition.

“I still have mold in my apartment. All they fixed was the appliances,” she said.

She blames Durham Housing Authority for the mess at McDougald. “All these years, if certain things had been updated sooner, these problems wouldn’t have gotten so bad. My heater looks like it’s from the beginning of time.”

Although Harvey would like to move with her son to a safer home, this is not the right time.

She hasn’t been able to search for another job while coping with the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, including public schools closing. Homeschooling her son without a laptop or teaching experience has been among the hardships, she said.

And she won’t be turning to the Durham Housing Authority for help of any kind.

“What are they gonna do for me?” she said, “They have a lot of problems to deal with. I’m just a small nut.” W KeepItINDY.com

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North Carolina

Cast Away Absentee voting just got a lot easier in North Carolina

BY SARA PEQUEÑO spequeno@indyweek.com

A

bsentee voting just got a lot easier in North Carolina.

Governor Roy Cooper signed a new law Friday easing absentee voting restrictions in the midst of a pandemic. The Bipartisan Elections Act of 2020 allows some processes to be done online and reduces the number of witnesses needed for the ballot to be filled out.

Prior laws required absentee requests be mailed to the county Board of Elections, a delay that could potentially keep ballots from making it to voters—especially if voters filled out the first one incorrectly and had to send a second request. It was also required that two witnesses to be present when a voter filled out an absentee ballot, despite the fact that the average North Carolina household has less than three people.

You can now request an absentee ballot via email or fax with an electronic signature.

And starting in June, you only need one witness to fill out a ballot.

“Making sure elections are safe and secure is more important than ever during this pandemic, and this funding is crucial to that effort,” Cooper said in a press release Friday. The state will receive over $10 million in funding from the federal government to prepare for the effects of coronavirus on the 2020 election; $424,000 of that will be spent creating a ballot-request website.

Fortunately, the state’s Republican-backed voter ID law remains in appeal limbo after being blocked by the courts as unconstitutional, namely for targeting “African American voters with almost surgical precision.” That means absentee voters won’t have to attach a copy of their ID to ballots unless an appeal is successful.

In recent months, absentee voting in North Carolina was a frustrating process.

The INDY shared stories in February of frustrated N.C. voters across the country having their ballot requests denied or never receiving confirmation that they were received. In response, a group of voters sued the state over the primary election’s voting process.

While the lawsuit was filed before COVID-19 erupted in North Carolina, its requests became urgent once the pandemic took root. The State Board of Elections endorsed two of the seven requests in the suit back in March. For now, the mandates are only in effect until December 31, 2020.

State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell expects up to 1 in 5 North Carolinians to vote absentee this year, a huge jump from the 5 percent participation of previous elections. Request your absentee ballot by visiting the Board of Elections website at ncsbe.gov. W 12

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Raleigh

Bond Ambition Amid pandemic and protests, you probably missed the Raleigh City Council’s commitment to putting an $80 million housing bond referendum on the ballot this fall

2020 Bond Timeline

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

JUNE 2

T

he Raleigh City Council did something really big this month while most of us were too busy panicking over the pandemic and police brutality protests to notice.

The council’s June 2 vote set into motion a series of further votes, public hearings, and finally a referendum that will ask taxpayers to support an $80 million housing bond on the ballot this fall.

It’s $15 million shy of what Durham voters passed last year and a far cry from Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin’s $325 million parks and housing bond “moonshot,” which was abruptly canceled by coronavirus, but it’s more than the city has invested in housing in the last two decades. (Since 2000, the city has issued $50 million in housing bonds.)

So while it’s no moonshot, it’s definitely a start.

On Tuesday (after the INDY goes to print), the Council will take a second vote, perfunctory in nature, to notice a public hearing and introduce the bond’s orders.

The fine print says the bond will mostly split between new housing projects that leverage federal tax credits and partnerships with the private sector. It will also go to purchasing land along transit corridors and financial assistance for prospective and existing homeowners.

In May, the Affordable Housing Bond Advisory Committee recommended a bond as such: $28 million toward constructing housing in partnership with the private sector, $24 million toward low-income affordable-housing tax-credit projects, and $16 million for land banking. The remaining $12 million would be

split between down payment assistance programs and financial assistance for homeowners.

While those buckets could still be reallocated, most of the work moving forward will involve nailing down policies for how funding will be applied, and who will benefit the most.

Council member Corey Branch believes the city should prioritize residents in the most need—those who earn less than 30 percent of the area median income.

“What we’re working on is all the policies and things that we’re going to ask staff to really drill down on. Focusing on 30 percent and below is really the part we’re going to look at holistically across the five categories,” Branch says. “Some of this may not be all about the amount of money we put in, but how we can improve our processes and procedures to shorten the time frame from submittal to construction. So that is something we will look at as well.”

Council member Nicole Stewart echoed Branch, saying that the next step is to take a close look not only at policies but also at existing loopholes such as the lack of available Section 8 housing in the city.

“The conversation is about priorities, and it’s about where we’re spending this money,” Stewart says. “ There’s some who think we need to be focusing more on that deepest need in the community. Then there’s others who talk about getting as many units on the ground as possible because even those with the biggest need can’t get [housing] if they have a voucher.” W

Vote 1: Set dollar amount JUNE 16 Vote 2: Introduce bond orders, notice public hearings

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

JULY 7 Vote 3: Adopt bond purpose and amount and public hearing NOV. 3 Election Day: Vote on the bond DEC. 1 Vote 4: Declare results of the referendum declared INDYWEEK.COM KeepItINDY.com

June 17, 2020

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Jrusalam and Eshod Howard of Cypher Univercity PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

FULL CIRCLE For hip-hop, for protests, for life itself, the Cypher Univercity code stands strong

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

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“C

ipher” refers to either a code—a language known only by adepts, impenetrable to outsiders—or the figure zero.

“Cypher,” meanwhile, refers to both a code and a circular shape. The difference is that the code is ethical as well as linguistic, and the circle connotes fullness rather than emptiness.

To the outside eye, a cypher is a group of rappers standing in a ring and freestyling—improvising rhymes, whether coming completely off the top or ingeniously arranging prewritten bits and impromptu transitions on the fly.

It’s a space to boast and brag, a high wire on which to hone your rep and skills.

To the inside eye, it’s all of that and more: a cultural tradition with deep roots in struggle, survival, memory, community, and knowledge of self.

Cypher Univercity has been rocking weekly at N.C. State’s Free Expression Tunnel since 2012. Its founders don’t claim they invented the form, but they’re proud to have put their distinct stamp on the tradition with a number of innovations.

Usually, cyphers are spontaneous, popping up after shows or in the streets on a moment’s inspiration. But Cypher U turned them into a consistent main event—the party, not the afterparty—and built a community around it. Then they exported it to college campuses across the state, sowing seeds that would sprout around the world.

Most important, before they shared what they’d built, they developed a code, polished by hard experience and battle-tested. It says a lot about Cypher U (and about hiphop) that this code, as its adherents saw when they fanned out through the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the Triangle, effortlessly transposes from the cypher to the protest.

Respect, project, be original, fuck the camera, keep the peace.

J

rusalam is a 33-year-old MC from Raleigh with two albums under his belt, which you can find at the Cypher U website. He started writing rhymes when he was 10 and then turned to poetry as a teenager. Around 2009, he started getting involved in the slam poetry scene in Durham and Chapel Hill, but he wasn’t really a slam poet.

“I was writing ballads in a way, trying to write epic poetry I could commit to my memory,” he says. He frequented spots like Mansion 462 in Chapel Hill with the Sacrificial Poets. “Me, G [Yamazawa], Kane

[Smego], CJ [Suitt], we’d go back to their apartment afterwards and have the cypher for hours.”

Jrusalam felt tugged back to his first love, hip-hop, and he came under the wing of the 1100 Hunters, a hip-hop crew in Raleigh.

“These guys were super lyrical in my opinion, boom-bap golden-age hip-hop, which is what I fell in love with,” he says.

“I remember we had a cypher after one of their shows, and that’s how it goes— spontaneous. I would go to shows with the intention of going to the cypher where I could show and prove.”

Though Cypher U didn’t become official until 2012, Jrusalam dates its origin story to 2010, when the 1100s held a cypher at N.C. State’s famed Free Expression Tunnel for an album-cover photo, then did it again the next week, and the next, and the next, for the good part of a year.

“The first one was just them, and the second one it felt like all the artists from the city came out,” Jrusalam says.

As organic, leaderless movements risk doing, it fizzled out in 2011. Jrusalam had lost interest in music through conflicts in the cypher and gone back to school. But then he heard from some friends that they wanted to bring the cypher back. Thinking he might as well see what happened, he filmed it and promoted it online as #NCStateCypher.

“Before we knew it, the whole city showed up, and a lot of students got involved,” Jrusalam says. The movement was reborn.

By 2012, some core participants— Jrusalam, Eshod Howard, Shep Bryan, and others—had instituted the code, based on what they’d learned the first time around, and come up with the name Cypher Univercity. Hip-hop communities across the state, from Durham and Chapel Hill and Greenville and Boone and Charlotte, were flocking to Raleigh for the cyphers, whose members then traveled to universities in those cities to help get Cypher U events going there. Most faded out over the decade, but the core Cypher U event at N.C. State’s Free Expression Tunnel still goes down at 10:00 p.m. on Mondays, and more recent but related cyphers at UNC-Chapel Hill’s The Pit and Durham’s CCB Plaza are going strong.

“A lot of people involved over the years have spread out over the country, and we’ve started seeing similar things happen,” Jrusalam says. “There’s the Legendary Cyphers in New York, the Soul Food Cypher in Atlanta—this similar idea of an event that’s just a cypher, doing that every week and growing the community. Working

“

THE WAY WE ACT IN CYPHERS IS A MICROCOSM OF HOW WE LIVE IN LIFE.

with Next Level, which is federally funded, Rowdy took it even farther, so in Mexico City they’re saying ‘cypha cypha.’”

“It’s a place where we not only bring people together, but we resolve conflicts, and the cypher always comes back,” he adds.

L

ike jazz—like any form of improvisation—freestyling requires internalizing techniques so deeply you can forget about them and get out of your own way. You’re tapping in, but you’re also blacking out.

“What’s beautiful about freestyling is that it’s a completely different state of mind as opposed to reciting from memory,” Jrusalam says. “They’ve done studies where a person who’s reciting activates a certain part of the brain, but freestyling lights up a whole bunch of the brain. When people improvise off of different signals around them, that’s the moment I’m always looking for, to have a direct channel to my unconscious. I’m not thinking, I’m kind of expressing a dream, verbally.”

The cypher is a training ground as much as an arena. When Jrusalam was the new guy on the hip-hop scene, he asked Lazarus, a hot local artist in the cypher whom he greatly admired, how you got on a hip-hop show. Lazarus pointed him to Ghost Dog from the 1100s, who was running a weekly showcase at Glenwood South.

“That was my first set, and from there I started picking up shows,” Jrusalam says.

“The older guys we had showed me things about performing and showmanship, and it basically became a network where I was able to go perform all over the state. Down the line, when young artists come to me, I do the same thing for them.”

But for Jrusalam, the most powerful incarnation of the cypher is as a vessel for shared memory. When he looks around the circle, he sees not just the people who are there week after week, but also the people who used to be there but died, whether they were in construction accidents or motorcycle crashes during police chases.

“A really strong bond forms, and we have this collective memory of moments, certain nights and people, especially the people who died,” he says. “That’s really what has made it sacred to me over time.

The last time I saw my godbrother was at the cypher.”

It’s not hard to connect the idea of the cypher as a vessel for lost lives to the protests sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and many other Black people.

Jrusalam says that being mixed-race and reading as white has colored his experience with the police in a certain way, who are usually white men dropped into communities they don’t understand, and perhaps, fear.

He can pass under their radar if he’s calm and flare up on it if he’s not, as he learned viscerally some 12 years ago, when he says an officer kneeled on his head until he thought it would pop while responding to a noise complaint about a children’s birthday party. Thinking of that and his friends who were gone, he went out into the tear gas and rubber bullets of downtown Raleigh. He carried the cypher’s code with him.

“The cypher doesn’t have any leaders, but we try to empower young artists and cultivate leadership,” he says. “When people rap, we always encourage them to project so everybody can hear them. We don’t use equipment, so you have to use what you’ve got and speak to the people way in the back of the crowd, so everyone stays in tune with the cypher, captivated and motivated. It’s basically the same thing you do when you go to a protest: use your voice, use your body, be present, and take care of each other.”

And yes, fuck the camera.

O

riginally from Brooklyn, Cypher Univercity cofounder Eshod Howard moved to North Carolina in 2006 to study psychology at Shaw University. He’s gone on to lecture at UNC, N.C. State, and other universities about how hip-hop can address mental-health and social-justice issues of our day. It’s all enclosed in the fullness of the cypher.

“Our code starts with respect and ends with keep the peace, so it’s circular when you think about it,” he says. He remembers one event where Rapsody and 9th Wonder

came to make a video, drawing 400 people with no drama. “The way we act in cyphers is a microcosm of how we live in life. Even if we’re not moving as a collective, we uphold the code within ourselves.”

Beyond participating in the current protests individually, Cypher U members are starting to build for the future collectively. Howard says they’re working on a march for July that will end in downtown Raleigh with Cypher U performing as a unit. They’re also working on an initiative called Wellness to the Elders to help them with errands, shopping, yard work, and more. (See their Facebook and Twitter for details.) Just as Jrusalam invokes the cypher’s sacred nature, Howard describes it partly as a secular church.

“If you go back to the origins of hip-hop, it was built out of a rebel culture where people felt like they were outcasts,” Howard says. “They created this space where they could commune, have fun, and talk about oppression, and they built it into a worldwide phenomenon. We’re carrying on the tradition, and within it, you have people that don’t necessarily identify with the church that still need a place to go and look for precedence in a higher power. Even if you come with negativity, if we stand by the code, we know how to dissolve that into a peaceful resolution.”

And if you want to go deeper than the origins of hip-hop, you’ll find the cypher there, too, and why it connects so powerfully to the current struggle for Black liberation.

“The very essence of the cypher, before it was a hip-hop ceremony, it started as a teaching circle,” Jrusalam says. “Before the mode was rap, it was the direct transmission of lessons and the Five-Percent Nation of Gods and Earths. That’s where the term originated. A lot of Five Percenters became involved in hip-hop, and it crossed from a more spiritual pursuit to a more cultural, musical pursuit. But the roots of it are specifically in Black Islamic nationalism.

“I didn’t know that when I arrived at the cypher,” he continues, unfolding the lesson. “It took people informing me. It led me to the realization this was always a political weapon, a vehicle for social change. It’s to bring in people who are lost and downtrodden and uplift them. To give them knowledge of self, wisdom, understanding, and be a more upright person.

Ideals of love, peace, justice—those are all equally entrenched in the underlying philosophy of the cypher. I think we all recognized as soon as the protests happened, this is what we had been training for, in a way.” W KeepItINDY.com

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CONGRATULATIONS, CLASS OF 2020!

Austin J. Hughes Appalachian State

Congratulations on your degree! Now it’s time for fireworks. We will be saying “Where’s Austin?” while you’re following your dreams.

Hannah Bond

Leesville Road High School

Congratulations Hannah we are so proud of you!!!

“Be bold, be courageous, be your best” Love, Albo and Alice

Matthew Haley O’Connell

Mauricio Nunez-Jimenez

Charles E. Jordan High School

Sophia Johnson

East Chapel Hill High School

So proud of the loving, caring, intelligent young man that you are!

Much love from your godmothers, Treat and Regina

Congratulations Sophia!

We are so proud of you!

Can’t wait to see what happens next!

Congratulations, Mauricio!

From your Blue Ribbon mentor. Even in this COVID-19 time, it’s a great milestone for you.

Durham School of the Arts

Dorian “My Dodo” Hayes

Ezra Marley Resnick We are so proud of you, Ezra. Go out into the world and be wonderful!

raise the cup, tilt it dry come black cloud cover the sky tongue thought pupil of your eye

Love, Mom, Dad & Kol

Love, Dad

Carrboro High School

16

East Chapel Hill, attending N.C. State University

June 17, 2020

INDYweek.com

Kylie Oakes

Durham School of the Arts

Max Clarke

Clare James

Congratulations Kylie!

We love you and are so proud of you.

Keep letting your light shine!

Research Triangle High School

Appalachian State University

Congratulations Max! We are so proud of you! The world is yours, have fun and enjoy the journey!

Congratulations Clare! Master of Arts in Special Education!

We’re so proud of you!

Love, Momma and Lucas

Love, M & D

Love, Mom, Dad, Anna & Lila

Elena Schulmeister-Antona UNC School of the Arts

May 16th, 2020.

Congratulations on Your High school Graduation, we are so proud of you!

Next Step: Brevard College

Lance “Chandler” Johnson, IV Cleveland High School, Johnston County

Eleanor Jeanne Dryden Jordan High School

Congratulations to our incredibly resilient daughter!

Good luck at Muhlenberg.

Love, Mom & Dad

Echo Lilly Wilson UNC School of the Arts (BA, Film/Animation)

Congratulations! We are so proud of you and all you have accomplished!

We’re so proud of you! Your art has flourished these past four years; the world is ready to see it!

Love, Mom, Dad and Luke

Love, Mom, Dad, and Sophie

Martha Calvert

Harrison Hess We’re so honored to be part of your life and watch you soar!

Spencer, better late than never! Your mother and I are so proud of you!

Congratulations to our favorite fermentation friend, baking buddy, and now Master of Food Science graduate! We  you Martha!

Claire van Zwieten

Jane Slentz-Kesler

Colorado University

Durham School of the Arts

Justice Crutchfield Norton

Claire Cornelia van Zwieten.

Worldly student, teacher to many. Sharp, curious, wicked funny, empathic and strong.

Whatchya gonna do?

Congratulations, Jane! Way to nail HS. Now, on to your next great adventure! We are so proud of you!

Congratulations, Justice!

We are so proud of you!

Much love and respect.

Love, Mom & Dad

Love, Grand and Opa Brocious

Spencer Griffith Broughton High

North Carolina State University

Carolina Friends School

Love, The Hesses, Longs, Lees & Keenas

South Granville High School

Sarah Mangum

Sean Kearns

Michael O’Neill

UNC School of the Arts (visual arts)

An incredible artist and activist, Michael is loved and adored by his parents and 7 siblings.

Love, Mom & Dad

Noah Byck Mlyn Brown University

You have explored the life of the mind while being a voice for justice and compassion.

I am so proud of you.

With my admiration and love, Dad

Middle Creek High School

Oh, the places you will go.....

Congratulations Sean! Part of this truly unforgettable year and class of 2020.

We are so happy for you and excited to see where life takes you and your talents next.

Love, Mom & Dad

Raleigh Charter High School Since you first drew breath, you have been determined to achieve any goals you have set.

You are a bright star in not only your family’s lives, but to your friends and your community. Go out and do good. Embrace this strange time and make it work for you. Congratulations on your graduation from Raleigh Charter and may your graduation from NCSU be more traditional!

Wilson Ferdinand Greene IV

UNC Chapel Hill School of Law

“Did you ever waken to the sound of street cats making love?”

—The Grateful Dead #dramafreesummer

KeepItINDY.com

June 17, 2020

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1,000 Words 18

June 17, 2020

The Struggle Continues PHOTOGRAPHY + WORDS BY JADE WILSON

Protests in Raleigh continued throughout the week with a community-led march on Wednesday, June 10 that started at Nash Square and went toward Capital Boulevard, calling for Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin to resign and for the police to be defunded. W

INDYweek.com

A RT

You Snapped a Few Mural Pics. Now What?

Candy Carver’s challenge to Durham states the underlying tension of Black public art

BY KYESHA JENNINGS arts@indyweek.com

One of Candy Carver’s murals at Unscripted Durham PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

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s Toni Morrison has said, art is political. It would behoove us to remember that art is also performative.

In recent weeks, national protests sparked by the unjust police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others— including, as recently as Friday, Rayshard Brooks—have inspired Black artists to convey their frustration, pain, demands, and commitment to Black people through art.

In this historic moment, Black everything is in demand: the intellectual labor, the artistic aesthetic, the cool factor, you name it. Across the country, companies and universities have posted expressions of solidarity with Black lives. It’s a milestone, but it’s only impactful if it actually improves the lives of Black people.

In an effort to stand in solidarity with protestors, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned a 50-foot street mural that spells out “Black Lives Matter” in bold yellow letters. Since then, Black Lives Matter street murals have popped up in cities across America, including Raleigh and Charlotte.

Last week, a racially diverse group of volunteers painted a massive mural in front of CAM Raleigh that says “End Racism Now.” The 20-foot, yellow-lettered mural was initiated by Charman Driver and her husband, Frank Thompson, alongside several downtown business owners.

As Driver told ABC11, she wanted to place the mural closer to the Confederate monument at the State Capitol, but she couldn’t because it was on private property.

“Really it would have made a lot of sense,” she said. “‘End Racism Now’ is what it says, leading up to that Confederate statue that is so painful for so many Americans. We’d like to see it gone.”

Though the messaging arguably is powerful, the mural is leading local artists to question what’s next. Driver, who sits on the board of CAM Raleigh, is well aware of the mural’s shortcomings, saying she wasn’t fully satisfied with it and that “there’s more work to be done.”

After all, the mural is located in a city with a proven dysfunctional police

department, where Southeastern residents are being displaced by gentrification. And CAM doesn’t necessarily have a solid track record of navigating issues of race, power, and privilege, as we saw in its mishandling of a racially charged exhibit by Margaret Bowland, a white artist, in 2018.

Activist and artist Monèt Noelle Marshall is a member of Art Ain’t Innocent, a Southern artist collective working to create equitable, sustainable art spaces in Durham.

She notes that the photo of the mural circulating online may well have been taken from the top of The Dillon, where studio apartments start at over $1,000.

“If we want to end racism, don’t paint it on the street unless you’re also going to couple that with going to these institutions and asking, how are we actually supporting, centering, and funding Black artists without using them as a token or prop?” Marshall says.

This sentiment seems to be shared by other artists across the nation. For exam-

ple, the D.C. mural was criticized by D.C. Black Lives Matter activists, who called it a “performative distraction from real policy changes” on Twitter. It’s difficult not to see Raleigh’s mural as equally performative and superficial. Driver’s original plan is a carbon copy of the blueprint Mayor Bowser laid out.

How can artists unapologetically document the climate of America while assuring that the voices of Black artists are centered? More important, how can we protect the Black aesthetic of resistance from being co-opted and appropriated?

In downtown Charlotte, 17 artists replicated D.C.’s affirmation that “Black Lives Matter,” but instead of bold yellow letters, the colorful mural includes powerful visuals inside of each letter that are specific to the lived experiences of the Black community.

Unlike the murals in D.C. and Raleigh, Charlotte’s mural was a collaboration between the city and local arts organizations. The artists were paid a stipend and received free supplies.

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Just three days after the mural in Charlotte was completed, someone defaced it with tire marks. On June 14, the artists returned to repair the damage, showing their tenacity and resilience.

In Durham, instead of one large mural, 23 local artists, with the assistance of Art Ain’t Innocent and NorthStar Church of the Arts, created 24 smaller murals downtown. Rumors of disruptive protests had caused most businesses to board up, and to show solidarity, some of them commissioned Black artists to paint whatever they desired on the plywood over the glass.

Before that effort, Beyu Caffe—one of the few Black-owned establishments downtown—had already hired Gemynii and Jupiter Black to paint a mural. Dashi also hired Gemynii, and Unscripted Durham had commissioned Candy Carver. Working with other businesses downtown, NorthStar and Art Ain’t Innocent made sure that Black art and voices were centered and that the artists received equitable compensation.

“It’s not about putting something pretty up,” Marshall says.

In the end, thousands of dollars went to local artists, who were not responsible for purchasing supplies. To protect them from any accusations of vandalizing or destroying property, the Art Ain’t Innocent crew required that the businesses call the Durham Police Department to give them a detailed heads-up of what was happening.

“We know that our art creates value for other people—but we are doing this for us,” Marshall says. “We’re doing this for Black Durham. We’re doing this for ourselves.”

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lack artists in Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte have a complicated relationship with their cities’ public art programs. Not only are the opportunities limited by budget constraints, but each city has dropped the ball on prioritizing local artists and artists of color in some way.

Although the Raleigh Arts Commission, the official advisory body and advocate for the arts, is moderately racially diverse, Raleigh’s Public Art and Design board is made up of only white members.

In Durham, the Cultural Advisory Board and Public Art Committee [disclosure: the author is a member of the latter] are both racially diverse, but their history of hiring visual artists outside of North Carolina has garnered stark criticism from the community.

With the national attention the “Black Lives Matter” mural in Charlotte has received, local artist Dammit Wesley said in an interview that he “hopes that the attention increases exposure and opens

“There’s a very different life that Black people live. If you don’t know, you don’t know.” more doors to paid gigs—longtime issues in the creative community and part of the economic equality that Black artists say is long overdue.”

The murals in downtown Durham and the collaborative project in Charlotte demonstrate that public art can be done efficiently with a quick turnaround (most city-funded public art projects have lengthy timelines). More important, it reveals that when working closely with an established art community, a “request for qualification” has little value.

“There’s this triangle of time, money, and quality. I’ve been told you can have two or three, but you can’t have all three,” says Marshall, who sits on Durham’s Public Art Committee. “And with this experience, I recognize that that’s a lie. You can have less time. You don’t have to have a lot of money to have great quality—if you have relationships.”

Though you see her paintings all over Durham, full-time artist Candy Carver’s primary income is from individual clients, organizations, and businesses, not the city.

“The Durham Public Art program is currently ineffective for the community that it is intended to serve,” she says.

When Unscripted Durham told Carver that they were offering creative freedom to paint three large plywood panels located in the front of the boutique hotel, she immediately thought of the cultural significance of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Having applied for mural and other large-scale projects commissioned by the

city in the past, only to be overlooked, Carver decided to take advantage of this opportunity by being intentional with her messaging. She painted the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in white, set against a black background. Originally a poem, it was set to music in 1900 and adopted by the NAACP in 1919. It is known in Black communities as “The Black National Anthem.”

“I knew that the white people passing who were complimenting me would not know what [the lyrics] were,” Carver says.

“There’s a very different life that Black people live. If you don’t know, you don’t know.

This song has been around for over a hundred years, and we still found a way to pass it down to each other.”

During a visit to Portland State University in 1975, Toni Morrison said to a mostly white audience of academics, “When Black artists speak to each other, what happens is that the message is received by people outside the group better. … Educating [others] is not [Black people’s] business. But if it was important, the best way to do it is not to explain anything.”

Carver’s coded artwork follows in Morrison’s spirit. The adjacent panel features her signature abstract style and leans on black, red, and green: the colors of the Pan-African or Black Liberation Flag. Like “Lift Every Voice,” non-Black onlookers often fail to connect with her artwork besides acknowledging how appealing it is, forcing them to figure it out on their own. When thinking about Black art as a political tool, it is important that the conversation has layers and doesn’t just stop at words, phrases, photo-ops, or visual appeal. Carver’s last panel challenges Durham: “You snapped a few mural pics. Now what?”

For Black people, Carver’s artwork offers a sense of pride and healing while battling a global pandemic and systemic racism. To protect her work from being a temporary fix, Carver negotiated for one of her panels to become a permanent piece at Unscripted. The other two will be auctioned off, with proceeds going to a social justice organization of her choice.

In a call to action on Instagram, Marshall reminded everyone that “When you see the work by the Black artists downtown, know that they made a choice. We chose our creativity over their commitment to misunderstanding us. Our voice over their slack-jawed silence. Our freedom over their systemic failure. When we say Black Lives Matter, we are saying that Black housing matters, Black farmers matter, Black land matters, Black children matter, Black trans folx matter, Black families matter, and Black art matters.” W

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INTERGALACTIC SOULSTICE: A VIRTUAL AFROFUTURIST ARTS FESTIVAL

Friday, June 19–Sunday, June 21 | The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill

Project LHAXX at The Ackland Art Museum PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ACKLAND

The Life and Afterlife of Henrietta Lacks An Afrofuturist parable at The Ackland

BY JAMEELA F. DALLIS arts@indyweek.com

Intergalactic Soulstice is a virtual Afrofuturist festival that The Ackland Art Museum is hosting on Zoom and YouTube from Friday, June 19–Sunday, June 21. The festival includes puppet-master Jeghetto performing his “hip-hopera” 5P1N0K10 on Friday afternoon, a concert by Quentin Talley and the Soul Providers on Saturday, a comic-book drawing workshop, and more (see the Ackland’s website for the full schedule and details). The festival was inspired by Project LHAXX, an installation by Intergalactic Soul that opened early this year. Today, we’re happy to reprint Jameela F. Dallis’s fascinating January story about the exhibit and the uneasy immortality of Henrietta Lacks.

H

enrietta Lacks died nearly seventy years ago, but some people say that she lives to this day.

No, this isn’t a ghost story, but it is a story about a kind of immortality. It’s also the subject of Project LHAXX, a polyglot exhibit at The Ackland Art Museum.

Lacks, a 31-year-old mother of five, was treated at The Johns Hopkins Hospital for cervical cancer, which took her life in 1951. For years, George Gey, a cancer and virus researcher, had been collecting cells from biopsies of cer-

vical cancer patients. Lacks was the first person whose cells did not die in the lab. Instead, they doubled every twenty to twenty-four hours.

Her name survives in her “immortal cell line,” which is called HeLa. It played a significant part in the development of the polio vaccine and is still used to study the effects of new treatments on cancer cells without experimenting on humans.

But Lacks’s story is inseparable from issues of consent, ownership, and the troubling history of medical experimentation on Black bodies. Gey took her cells without her or her family’s knowledge, which was standard procedure. Lacks’s family didn’t know her cells had been critically important to medical research until the mid-1970s. The cells have created a billion-dollar industry; at least 11,000 patents contain them. But her children have not, and likely will never, benefit financially from their mother’s genetic material.

Lacks’s story is part of the inspiration behind Project LHAXX, a site-specific installation in the Ackland’s ART& community space. It was created by Charlotte visual artists Marcus Kiser and Jason Woodberry and Durham performance artist Quentin Talley, collaborating as Intergalactic Soul. They approached Lacks’s story through an Afrofuturist lens.

“Afrofuturism is about preserving Black spaces in the future,” Kiser says. “It’s the idea of preserving the culture and making sure that we still have a voice—that we’re still heard, and we’re controlling our own narrative.”

The mixed-media installation fills an entire gallery wall.

Indecipherable gold glyphs are striking against a black background with elliptical, sculptural neon lights at the center. The lights represent stars Sirius A and B and the Dogon people of Mali, who knew about the white dwarf Sirius B centuries before it was recognized by nineteenth-century astronomers. A “cosmic message,” accessible via the free augmented reality app Artivive, accompanies the installation.

Woodberry calls the mysterious markings “hieroglyphs from future ancestors”—evidence of survival. He says he was compelled to develop them because he realized that “African Americans are the only people in this country without a native language.”

The glyphs are inspired by languages from the regions of Woodberry’s ancestry, including Nyo, from West Africa, and early forms of Irish. Kiser, Woodberry, and Talley were also inspired by Alisha Wormsley’s evolving project There Are Black People in the Future, an exhibition they saw years ago in Charlotte.

Lacks’s influence on the installation is evident in more than one way. Woodberry explains that two years ago, many of the glyphs didn’t exist, and some meant something totally different. Like Lacks’s cells, the characters of the language continue to mutate and change over time.

Woodberry learned about Lacks in 2016 during the collective’s residency at the McColl Center in Charlotte, when he happened to meet someone involved with George C. Wolfe’s 2017 film, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, based on Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book of the same name.

Woodberry was frustrated, both by Lacks’s story and by the fact that he hadn’t heard of her until his 30s.

From enslavement to forced sterilization to the Tuskegee syphilis study, bodily consent has been stolen from African Americans in devastating, generation-altering ways.

But the collaborators of Intergalactic Soul also gleaned something extraordinary in Lacks’s story. Her clinical immortality aligns with Afrofuturism and survival against overwhelming odds. Through her cells, Woodberry says, Lacks is “preserving a space for Black people in the future”—the same thing that these artists are committed to doing through art and performance.

Project LHAXX asks us to think about the power of narrative, who tells our stories, adaptation, and extraordinary survival. I asked the artists to consider the significance of the passage of four centuries since the effectual beginning of chattel slavery in the Americas, and only about 150 years since the Emancipation Proclamation.

“We still here,” Talley says.

“Every Black person you see,” Woodberry adds, “is the offspring of a survivor.” W KeepItINDY.com

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