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Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 37 NO. 23

Don't sleep on Ashleigh Bryant Phillips's Sleepovers (see page 28).

PHOTO BY MISSY MALOUFF

CONTENTS NEWS 9 12 14

The graves of free and enslaved Black people in Raleigh's City Cemetery have stories to tell. BY THOMASI MCDONALD Covid-19 is surging in rural meatpacking plants. BY SANDY SMITH-NONINI Older folks love staffing voting polls, but not during Covid-19. BY BELLA SMITH

FEATURE 17

Activists are fighting an uphill battle against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

BY LEWIS KENDALL

MUSIC 24 John Brown, new Vice Provost for the Arts at Duke University, wants to forge bonds and change lives. BY DAN RUCCIA 27

XOXOK's "Right On" is a meditation on the specter of police violence. BY BRIAN HOWE

CULTURE 28 Sleepovers is a searing new story collection about the rural South. BY SARAH

EDWARDS

30 Rep. John Lewis is the conscience of Congress. BY GLENN MCDONALD 32 Does milk go in before cereal? And other debates on the new app Yaheard.

BY MARY KING

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BACKTALK

In a normal year, our “Best of the Triangle” results would be the biggest topic of debate for our readers, but this week police brutality and racial unrest once again consumed chatter online.

Facebook user JOHN HITE was ready to dissect the recently released body camera footage of the arrest of a 17-year-old protester, which showed no assault on an officer (despite that being the department’s reasoning behind the arrest.)

“Cops are just insecure bullies with guns.

Got picked on a lot in grade school. Wondering what he told his comrades to illicit that level of response. ‘Da wittle girl scared me.

I wee wee’d in my pants a little. Please make a point by overreacting and overreaching.

Nobody will know.’ Doh!” QUINN CHASE had similar comments on Twitter, as well as a recommendation for white people. “JFC they’re animals right out of control with unnecessary violence and arrests. Thank God for iPhones. If you see something video it. Say something. Use your whiteness to try to get these bastards to stop this insanity.”

In Durham, members of the Other America Movement protested at police headquarters after their occupation structures were destroyed and four protesters were arrested. Members had been camping out for over a week.

“They are making a nuisance of theirselves [sic] and it needs to stop. That is not the way to get what you want. It just irritates people,” Facebook user DONNA ADAMS comments.

Reader BOBBY MECUM also weighed in: “Cops should have shot them.”

voices

Seeing Red The lines banks once drew to stifle Black prosperity remain easy to find but hard to erase

BY JONATHAN WEILER @jonweiler

R

ichard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, published in 2017, is among the books excavating the roots of racism and white supremacy in the United States that has zoomed to the top of bestseller lists in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

The book’s title comes from the longstanding practice of redlining, part of the color-coding scheme lenders used to indicate which neighborhoods were fit for home loans and which weren’t. For decades, banks drew red lines around neighborhoods with Black homeowners even if they were well-to-do, signaling that these areas were “high risk.”

As a result, Black families could not finance mortgages on the same terms as whites.

But in a packed and unrelenting 240 pages, Rothstein goes well beyond describing color-coded maps. He shows that “until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live.” And critically, these myriad discriminatory practices ensured that, to this day, Black people are far more likely than whites to be consigned to substandard housing, with access only to underfunded schools in impoverished and unsafe communities.

In addition, these practices robbed Black families of opportunities for the transfer of intergenerational wealth that has sustained so many white families. In 1968, after civil-rights-era legislation and court rulings largely brought an end to legally enforced segregation, the average wealth of a Black family was less than ten percent of that of a white family.

One critical driver of racist housing policy was the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934 during the Great Depression. The FHA backed loans to banks issuing mortgages and spurred massive new investments in residential building projects. But until the 1960s, the FHA largely refused to guarantee loans for integrated housing projects. When the FHA drew up guidelines for appraisers in preparation for home sales, for example, it indicated that they should favorably view “appropriate deed restrictions” and “proper zoning regulations.”

If the point wasn’t clear enough, the guidelines stipulated that “adverse influences” included “infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.” Those guidelines also

made clear the necessity of having deed restrictions that prevented the sale or renting of property to Black people. Combined with other policies, government institutions ensured that major public housing projects would be built in segregated neighborhoods and that new middle-class suburbs, like Levittown, would exclude African Americans.

Federal housing policy worked in tandem with other developments to enforce residential segregation. For example, Black families who did manage to purchase homes in predominantly white neighborhoods were routinely harassed or terrorized, often forcing these families to leave.

The typical police response was to stand by and do nothing.

When the United States poured billions of dollars into a massively expanded highway system in the 1950s, it used the opportunity to displace many African Americans from their homes, often without compensation.

Many new highways ran through the heart of urban neighborhoods, often with the explicit intention of cutting off white from Black residential areas.

The highway system also created the infrastructure that allowed millions of white Americans to decamp from cities to newly built suburbs from which Black families were all but locked out by government policy. By the time federal law shifted fundamentally in the 1960s, the die had already been cast on contemporary residential patterns, school resourcing, and wealth accumulation.

This is but a taste of the exhaustive account Rothstein provides of the scope and consequences of government policy to segregate housing in America. But the implications are profound. In his landmark 2014 article “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates described the Chicago housing market after World War II, where systematic government policy combined with violent hostility to integrated neighborhoods to require African Americans to buy substandard housing on worse financial terms than whites. Among many consequences, African Americans were robbed of individual, family, and community wealth. As writers like Coates and, more recently, Nikole Hannah-Jones make the case for reparations, any accounting of how to redress racist residential architecture has to take seriously the massive intergenerational theft that resulted. 2 Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.

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JONATHAN WEILER is a teaching professor in global studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and co-author of Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide and Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.

15 MINUTES Meeghan Rosen, 57

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Assistant director, Chapel Hill Public Library

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

I heard something big happened at the town budget meeting last Wednesday.

Town council approved the manager’s recommended budget and a part of that budget recommendation was to eliminate charging late fines on overdue library materials. There’s a couple reasons why overdue fines are a bad policy in this day and age.

Essentially, there’s a real social-equity issue here, and overdue fines create a significant barrier to access, particularly for people who are economically disadvantaged. When we have an overdue fine and someone is unable to pay it they stop being able to use the library.

This resonated with the council. Overdue fines that we’ve collected over the years are not a significant portion of our overall budget, and they’ve actually been going down over the last several years. As of July 1 when our new fiscal year begins, we will no longer be charging overdue fines for late materials—although people will still be responsible for bringing their materials back.

How unique is this initiative?

It’s something that’s been on public library listservs and chats for about four years now and the number of libraries across the country that have adopted this model is huge. It is truly nationwide. There’s a website, the Urban Libraries Council, where you can see the map across the country of how many libraries have taken this position, and it’s for those reasons of equity and barriers to access.

Tell me more about curbside pick-up. I heard that books are “quarantined” after they’re dropped off.

So, this is tricky, isn’t it? We’re trying to protect everybody and safety is our first priority. We’re also trying to provide a core service that really resonates with a lot of people in the community. When people return library materials we disinfect

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

them and then we quarantine them. We’re doing that while we’re wearing PPE, so we’ve all got gloves and masks on. And we set them aside for 24 hours before they can recirculate.

Many people, of course, are choosing to be even more careful, and when they get their materials home they’re perhaps quarantining them on their side and wiping them off again.

We have tables and tents set up outside. Basically people drive up to the car circle and when they get parked at a tent, they give us a call. We have a whole assembly-line technique set up inside the library. It takes about eight people to run it. One person answers the phone and another person jogs off and pulls the stuff that the person in the car is waiting for. A third person checks out those materials in the catalog and then the fourth person runs out to the tents. We place the items on the table, and we step away, and once we do that the person gets out of the car and picks up. It’s pretty labor-intensive.

It seems like there’s a lot of care and caution put into the process.

We keep tweaking the process. You know, we started this a couple weeks ago and it’s changed regularly. So it may change up again.

What has the response to curbside pickup been like?

Oh, it’s been over the moon! Somebody brought us a bouquet of roses the other day, which was lovely. They’re still sitting by where we answer the phone. We’re getting a lot of shoutouts from social media and people honk their horns and wave and thank us. It’s been nice to feel so appreciated. W INDYweek.com

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Daily Lab-Confirmed Covid-19 Cases in North Carolina 10,000

daily cases 7 day rolling average

JUNE 21

9,148 confirmed cases

5000

0 Mar 22

Apr 19

May 17

Jun 14

Sources: Onur Aydin1 , Bashar Emon1 , and M. Taher A. Saif* Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; NCDHHS COVID-19 Response

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)

6/23

In a House Committee Hearing, National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief DR. ANTHONY FAUCI WARNS LAWMAKERS that North Carolina risks an “insidious increase in community spread.”

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services also issued a report stating that 915 people are currently in the hospital with COVID-19, the HIGHEST ONE-DAY INCREASE IN HOSPITALIZATIONS SINCE MARCH. The 75-FOOT CONFEDERATE MONUMENT IN UNION SQUARE finally comes down, after a weekend of disassembling attempts.

6/24

d goo

Due to a spike in coronavirus cases, Governor Roy Cooper announces that he is EXTENDING PHASE 2 OF THE STATE’S REOPENING PROCESS by 3 weeks.

The General Assembly announces that the multimillionaire and Republican strategist ART POPE IS THEIR PICK to replace Bob Rucho on the Board of Governors.

6/25

In a 32-15 DECISION made late Thursday night, the North Carolina Senate votes Art Pope through. Several Democrats vote in favor of the appointment.

6/26

bad

Among other things decided in the Senate session, which adjourned at 3:21 a.m. on Friday morning: The RECORDS OF PEOPLE WHO DIE IN STATE CUSTODY WILL BE SHIELDED from the public.

The News & Observer publishes a story in which four N.C. State students accuse RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL MEMBER SAIGE MARTIN OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT. Martin denies the most serious allegations, but resigns from the council that afternoon.

Police release body cam footage of the 17-year old who they had arrested on June 18 and claimed she assaulted an officer. On the recording, the teenager makes no physical contact with officers.

6/27

Two bars on Glenwood South, Cornerstone Tavern and Alchemy, reportedly opened in DEFIANCE OF COOPER'S ORDER keeping bars closed. Per the N&O’s story, Off-duty Raleigh police officers worked as security guards outside both bars.

6/28

A RASH OF GUN VIOLENCE over the weekend results in 8 shootings, one of them fatal.

6/29

ul

Wake County District Attorney Lorin Freeman asked the State Bureau of Investigations to look into the SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS against Saige Martin.

f aw

The Good: Immigration On Friday, a California federal judge ordered that all undocumented children in ICE custody for more than 20 days must be released from the family detention centers, and shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. There are over 100 children currently in the ICE detention centers and another 500 in the ORR’s shelters. These often close-quartered confinements give Covid-19 a chance to thrive—especially since there hasn’t been comprehensive testing in these centers. U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee wrote in her decision that the ICE facilities were “on fire,” and that "there is no more time for half measures." The children must be released by July 17. While there’s still no word on whether adult family members will be released with their children, the measure is still a step in the right direction.

The Bad: Glenwood South Bars We know, we know—everyone is getting antsy in quarantine, especially with phase 2 still in effect for another three weeks. For some bars, this meant throwing caution to the wind. On Friday night, two Raleigh bars—Cornerstone Tavern and Alchemy—on Glenwood South opened in defiance of a judicial order requiring bars to stay closed amid the pandemic, as well as a veto from Governor Cooper on a GOP-backed legislative attempt to reopen them. Both bars were said to be operating as “private clubs” according to the NC Bar and Tavern Association, and required masks inside the establishments, but videos on social media have shown that Raleigh bar-hoppers aren’t the best at following mask mandates and social distancing guidelines.

The Awful: The General Assembly Last Friday was a busy one for the North Carolina General Assembly, and several of their decisions may haunt the state for years to come. At 3 a.m. Friday morning, the state legislature passed a bill that keeps death investigation records from falling under the Freedom of Information Act. The guise is that it makes it easier for the state medical examiner to obtain records of unexpected deaths—including deaths while in law enforcement custody or prison. Now, these law enforcement records will be kept from the press and the families before they reach the medical examiner’s office. If you thought that was disheartening, in a different kind of power play the GA approved Art Pope—a multimillionaire Republican powerbroker and Koch brothers associate— as the newest member of the UNC System Board of Governors. While a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, he sued a Black Student Movement leader for interrupting KKK leader David Duke during a campus visit.

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Raleigh

Forgotten Monuments As Confederate statues fell at the Capitol, a quieter Juneteenth remembrance took place at the graves of the people who built the city

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

H

undreds of Black Lives Matter protesters in Raleigh celebrated Juneteenth this year by pulling down the statues of two Confederate soldiers on the Capitol grounds.

More quietly, just hours before and less than a mile away, a handful of volunteers paid tribute to forgotten monuments: the graves of enslaved and free Black people at the Raleigh City Cemetery, the city’s oldest public burial ground. Clad in bright yellow vests, the volunteers gathered around Ryan Lerch, a Raleigh parks superintendent, who talked about the Black residents buried there.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 7.68-acre Raleigh City Cemetery is one of only two public cemeteries in the state. (The other is New Bern.) With one entrance at Hargett and East streets and another on New Bern Avenue, the park is tucked into a residential area in the shadow of downtown.

The cemetery contains the remains of the city’s earliest settlers and state legislators alongside the stonemasons from Scotland and England who built the State Capitol.

When the Raleigh City Cemeteries Preservation nonprofit was formed in 2006, the acre-and-a-half Black section was intact but badly neglected. Many of the tombstones had been overturned. Some were broken. Others were marred with graffiti.

RCCP partnered with city officials to hire Dean Ruedrich, a restoration specialist who had worked all over the country rebuilding slave cabins and restoring grave markers, to rehabilitate the enslaved section, which was in the worst shape. When it was filled in 1871, it was closed, and the city created the Mt. Hope Cemetery to house the remains of Black citizens.

Even though 1,000 Black people are buried here, only 60 monuments and grave markers remained when restoration work began. RCCP member Jane Thurman says some had been vandalized, while others were removed by

Markers at the Raleigh City Cemetery

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

family members. When Ruedrich started his restoration he found that some tombstones in the Black section had sunk about an inch underground over time. Most of the markers lay flat in the grass after breaking off at the base.

Ruedrich, who died last year, started working in the enslaved section in 2015, finishing three years later. He built new bases for the fallen monuments. He dug up others and found several more, including footstones that contained only the initials of the deceased.

“One of the best days in my life was standing in that section, seeing those graves upright,” Thurman says.

Many of the thin, time-scarred concrete and marble tombstones are inscribed with names and dates that are barely legible. Some are nameless. There are several with only the curving tops are visible. In many ways, these modest, weathered markers are analogous to the physical and psychological condition of the people they stand to represent—gouged, chipped, broken remnants that survived against all odds.

T

he Black graves in the Raleigh City Cemetery offer a striking contrast to the imposing Confederate monuments that are falling across the national landscape. The markers are a metaphor for what was—the majestic “big house” of the slaveowners in close proximity to the terrible quarters where the enslaved lived—and what is: the refurbishing and building of white-owned homes next to creaky, resource-neglected Black-owned dwellings. The global protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd are

about the neglect and desecration of Black bodies, which was already laid bare by the pandemic.

Shelley M. Winters, one of the volunteers who helped clean branches and brambles from the Black graves in Raleigh, echoed that sentiment.

“Where are the statues for the people who built the capitol?” she asks.

It was Winters who came up with the idea to clean the tombstones as a somber and reflective means to honor Juneteenth by paying tribute to those who died wanting freedom.

“It’s not just Black history,” Winters says. “This is Raleigh history. It’s American history, and it should be honored as such. We have no names, no faces for the people who physically built and sustained this city.”

Winters is the niece of John Winters, who, before he died of Parkinson’s disease in 2004, worked as a developer and is largely responsible for Southeast Raleigh becoming a Black enclave. He served on the city council and later became one of the first Black senators after decades of Black voter suppression since the late 1800s. The Winters family descendants were born free. There’s a plaque commemorating them on East Street, a stone’s throw from the cemetery.

Shelley Winters served as chair of Raleigh’s citizens advisory councils and the Atlantic CAC before they were disbanded by the city council in February. She wanted to do something to honor the Juneteenth holiday and called Grady Bussey, the chair of the city’s annual African American Cultural Festival.

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“Where are the statues for the people who built the capitol?”

Bussey, Winters says, was unenthusiastic about “celebrating” the fact that some Black captives endured two more years in forced labor camps after President Lincoln proclaimed their freedom. But then Winters, who is now a member of the city’s planning commission, had the idea of giving dignity to the enslaved population by cleaning their gravesites.

“It was like a light bulb that hit me,” Winters says. “Juneteenth is not just a point of freedom, but also to honor those who were enslaved.”

“We figured the best thing to do was paying homage to the slave ancestors,” Bussey adds.

Winters says she first reached out to the residents of Oberlin Village, the formerly all-Black community that cleans the graves in its own community cemetery each year. When she found out the residents had not planned a cemetery cleaning for Juneteenth, Bussey suggested the City Cemetery.

A little more than a dozen people showed up. The tombstones of the enslaved, even with faded lettering and dates, told many stories.

E

nslaved people in Raleigh died young.

Of the 30 stone markers where birth and death dates are listed or otherwise known, the average age of death was about 29. That’s taking into account Nancy Kenedy, who died in 1858 at 85, and Jane Dickerson, who passed in 1844 at 90. It also includes five babies who were one or younger when they died.

Thurman says that Caroline Stronach, who died at 29, was either the wife or sister of Columbus Stronach, a stonemason who owned a business across from the cemetery and constructed many of the tombstones at the location.

There are tombstones marking the remains of five people who died in their teens. Thomas Weems was 16. So was John Scott. Martha Buffalo was 17. John Johnson, 16, died just days after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Anne Morgan died at 19, one year after Emancipation. Little Albert Norwood was two when he died in 1857.

Harriet Bryan was born in 1799.

“Sacred to the Memory of Harriet,” reads her tombstone. “An Honest and Faithful domestic servant in the family of John H. Bryan.”

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Chaney Harris was beloved by her children. “The stone erected in the memory of our mother, Chaney Harris, who departed this life on June 24, 1832,” reads her marker. Apparently, the enslaved mother’s children were unsure of when she was born.

She died “at an advanced age,” her tombstone says.

Most prominent among the graves of the enslaved was Cato, who had an obituary printed in the Raleigh Minerva newspaper owned by noted citizen William Boylan, who is also buried in the City Cemetery.

Cato, a printer and bookbinder in Boylan’s downtown shop, was enslaved by Boylan’s uncle. Cato died in 1811. RCCP member Betsy Shaw discovered his obituary in the Minerva.

“It is one of the most remarkable pieces of history,” Thurman says. “He was very well-liked and had a lot of interaction with the public.”

The tombstone of Anna Julia Haywood Cooper sits almost on the invisible line that separates the enslaved from the free. That’s apt. Cooper was born a slave in 1858, and after Emancipation she went on to become the first Black American woman to earn a PhD in history from the Sorbonne in Paris.

She was a scholar, author, and early feminist, praised by Frederick Douglass and a peer of W.E.B. Dubois. For African American feminists, she is best known for asserting in 1892 that “only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

Thurman says that in this unique moment, these near-forgotten monuments prompt her to reflect on “how we’re collecting history and what we think of it.”

She says she only recently learned about the Tulsa race massacre because it wasn’t in her school history books.

“It’s time to face how we created a narrative and tell more stories,” she says.

Death and time are great equalizers.

Slave and slaveholder are in the same cemeteries. In a place that holds the remains of the city’s founding fathers and state legislators, Juneteenth was an opportunity to acknowledge those whose names will never be known.

“It was a way to give them the dignity they did not receive in their lifetimes,” Winters says. “It’s way overdue.” W

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North Carolina

Covid Confidential The coronavirus is surging in rural counties with meatpacking plants. North Carolina officials are hiding data on clusters from the public.

BY SANDY SMITH-NONINI backtalk@indyweek.com

A

nalyses of recent spikes of Covid-19 cases in more than a dozen rural counties strongly suggest links to outbreaks at meatpacking plants, yet North Carolina officials continue to ignore requests from health and worker advocates to enforce safety regulations at plants and disclose information about industry clusters to the public. Such secrecy not only endangers workers at the plants but also risks further community spread in rural areas.

From May 1 to June 11 cases in zip codes near meatpacking plants jumped 600 percent, or more than twice the 262 percent rise in cases statewide, The News & Observer reported. In mid-May, North Carolina led the nation for numbers of plant outbreaks, according to the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN).

As of June 26, at least 2,772 meatpacking workers had tested positive for the virus in outbreaks at 28 plants, according to a spokesperson for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). But health officials will not report the locations of such clusters.

The most notable surge of cases at plants was in April and May. Since then plants have voluntarily cooperated with health officials, but most will not reveal data to the public. They are effectively saying to the community: “Don’t worry, trust us.” State health officials say they lack regulatory authority over the industry and do not report plant outbreaks for fear of losing plant managers’ cooperation.

I did an interview study of Latino workers in meatpacking in the early 2000s, which prompted me to drill down into the Covid-19 data. I examined the rise in infection rates in key rural counties for the two weeks ending June 25 (new cases adjusted for population) using data from USAFacts.

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The data show new or ongoing surges of infections in 14 rural counties with significant meatpacking operations, including Sampson, Wayne, Bladen, and Duplin Counties—the state leaders for pork production, which together employ 19,000 workers. Twelve counties with surges are also ranked among the highest in the nation for Covid-19 cases. In addition to the four above, they include Burke, Chatham, Randolph, Johnston, Robeson, Rowan, Sampson, and Union Counties. Two others with smaller caseloads but new spikes are Surry and Wilson Counties.

While cases are rising across the state due to reopening the economy, such high levels of positive cases are typically found in urban counties. Neither can the high rural numbers be explained by outbreaks in nursing homes or prisons, which, unlike meatpacking, the state DHHS routinely tracks.

Also, while elderly, non-Hispanic people make up the bulk of those who have died of the virus, DHHS data show that more than 75 percent of these positive cases are among people of working age, between 18 and 64.

A disproportionate number of those testing positive in these counties are Hispanic—31 to 73 percent of cases, which is consistent with the high numbers of Latino workers in meat plants, although Latino farm laborers, who often live in crowded housing, may explain some of those cases.

A third of those testing positive near a Mountaire poultry plant with an outbreak in Chatham County this month were Hispanic, yet they make up less than 10 percent of the state population.

Also, more than half of Covid-19 patients admitted to UNC hospitals and at least two-thirds of those in ICU beds are now Hispanic, which indicates a high burden of

PHOTO COURTESY OF ISTOCK BY GETTY IMAGES

coronavirus in the Spanish-speaking population, says David Wohl, a UNC infectious-disease physician.

Outbreaks are also ongoing at Pilgrim’s Pride in Lee County and Case Farms in Burke County. An unidentified Latino worker from Case Farms who spoke on a June 14 group call for workers and advocates reported that 150 workers had tested positive and three had died, including one Latino, one Black, and one white worker.

“I have diabetes, so I am super scared to go to work, but because of needs I have, I have to go and risk my life,” she said in a voice that quavered with anxiety.

In April and May, significant outbreaks were reported at the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Wilkes County, the Butterball turkey plant in Duplin County, the large Smithfield pork plant in Bladen County, and several smaller plants.

In late May, a zip code survey by North Carolina Health News found positive tests for Covid-19 were unusually high in the area of the Mountaire plant (414 cases), a smaller Smithfield plant in Clinton (254 cases), and the Butterball plant (204 cases). Many workers commute to plants from other areas. This methodology, while inexact, suggests the magnitude of the problem.

Nationwide, more than 24,000 Covid-19 cases are tied to meatpacking, resulting in 87 worker deaths so far, according to ProPublica. Industry giants Tyson Foods, JBS, and Smithfield account for more than half of all positive cases nationally, reports FERN.

T

o health and worker advocates in North Carolina, the state’s refusal to release data on outbreaks is suspicious.

“I believe they are just protecting the plants,” says Ilana Dubester, executive director of Hispanic Liaison in Siler City, who reports that workers at the Mountaire plant say family members are getting sick.

“One woman worker at Mountaire had a disabled husband who never left the house.

He got the virus first and had to be hospitalized, and then she got it. Since he was housebound, he only could have gotten it from her.”

The plant receives data from the state but does not allow testing onsite despite repeated requests by health advocates for permission to set up testing in the parking lot, Dubester says. Hispanic Liaison worked with Piedmont Health and the Gillings School of Public Health at UNC to conduct tests of Mountaire workers and family members offsite. They found an alarming 634 positive cases connected with the plant, according to Dubester.

Meatpacking’s high risks arise from the frigid air inside plants and crowded workstations on fast-moving lines. Immigrant workers often commute in packed buses and live in crowded households. Punitive sick leave and attendance policies raise risks for community spread. Many plants were slow in providing masks and adopting safety protocols after the spring outbreaks, worker advocates say. Due to incomplete test data, health officials often first learn

of outbreaks or safety lapses from frightened workers.

Unfortunately, recently developed Center for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for meat processors are weak, filled with suggestions rather than requirements, and allowing asymptomatic workers who test positive to return to work rapidly instead of adopting the widely accepted protocol of a two-week quarantine.

One company that now shares data on cases is Tyson’s Wilkesboro plant, where a quarter of 2,244 workers tested positive in April. But it took the threat of a court order to prompt Tyson to report the data, according to ProPublica, which learned through a public-records request that Tyson went silent after hiring a private testing company, leaving health officials confused on how to track infected workers.

Nationwide, 22 plants closed temporarily in April, prompting Tyson to place ads in newspapers claiming the “food supply chain is breaking.” A day later President Trump ordered plants to remain open, a move that union leaders say forces workers to choose between a paycheck and their health. The New York Times found that even as Tyson and Smithfield lobbied for favors, they were exporting record amounts of pork to China.

Governor Roy Cooper’s recent executive order addressing racial health disparities is a start to addressing these problems. But a June 16 letter from NC Policy Watch asked the governor to do more to strengthen transparency and safety rules for meatpacking.

We risk “super-spreader” events when authorities collude with corporations to hide data on viral spread. Family members and businesses that serve plant workers deserve to be informed of risks.

ProPublica learned that during an outbreak at a Tyson plant in Iowa, owners of local businesses that served plant workers or employed their relatives complained to the health department about failing to alert them earlier so they could adopt timely safety measures.

This virus crisis has laid bare our dependency on “essential” minority and immigrant workers, and it is far past time to end the shameful legacy of dumping risk on them. In a pandemic, festering systematic injustices can rapidly evolve into higher risks for everyone. The virus does not discriminate. Leaders who do can no longer claim the public’s trust. W Sandy Smith-Nonini is an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill who writes on public health and Latino workers.

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North Carolina

Youth to the Booth Older folks love working the polls, but not during Covid-19.

The state wants young “Democracy Heroes” to save the day.

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P

olling locations don’t change much: the plastic fold-out tables, the cups of ballpoint pens, the fluorescent overhead lights, and that large printer-looking thing that digests your ballot once you’ve filled it out.

And of course, there are the senior citizens who merrily staff them.

Older folks love working the polls. As of 2018, six in 10 election workers were senior citizens, and nearly a third were over 70. Since many of them return year after year, election officials have come to rely on this elder population of helping hands.

Given their vulnerability to Covid-19, however, a growing number of older election workers are putting their health first by staying home for the upcoming election, according to Patrick Gannon, the public information officer for the State Board of Elections.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections is urging younger, healthier people to pick up the slack. Election officials are seeking “Democracy Heroes” who will sign up to work at polling sites for early voting in October or the general election in November. North Carolinians can take the first step in becoming a paid Democracy Hero by filling out an interest survey sign-up form at NCSBE.gov.

Democracy Heroes will have the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of elections, the bipartisan teams who run them, the safeguards in place to protect voters against fraud and Covid-19, and more.

“We’re encouraging anyone who wants to learn more about the voting process, learn more about elections, and help their communities at the same time to step up and become a Democracy Hero,” Gannon says. “You’ll learn a lot, and you get paid as well.”

“As of 2018, six in 10 election workers were senior citizens, and nearly a third were over 70.”

Polling sites have been a nationwide concern during the pandemic. States across the country have struggled, to varying degrees, with handling their in-person primaries. Sixteen states, including New York, Kentucky, and West Virginia, chose to delay their primaries or replace them with a vote-by-mail system.

Wisconsin, which chose not to delay, was the first state to hold its primaries during the peak of the coronavirus. Seven thousand poll workers stepped down, fearing for their safety, which forced Wisconsin election officials to close hundreds of polling sites.

Milwaukee typically has 182 polling sites for its almost 600,000 residents.

The steep drop in poll workers meant that only five polling places were open, which depressed turnout by 37 percent.

These stark results played out in many other states, especially within urban and marginalized populations. Researchers have shown that a decreased number of in-person voting sites disproportionately impacts Black and Indigenous voters as well as people who have disabilities or require language assistance.

As North Carolina gears up for the general election, election officials and state legislatures have increased funding for vote-by-mail and protective measures for

in-person voting sites. More accessible absentee voting suggests that “there’ll be more people who vote by mail this year than ever before,” Gannon says.

But while absentee voting and early voting will be likely more popular than in past years, in-person Election Day voting remains ingrained in voter behavior.

“We know that there’ll be a lot of people who would rather cast their ballot in person,” Gannon says. “We have to make polling places and early-voting sites safe and accessible for anyone who wants to vote in person. That said, we need election workers to make that happen.”

North Carolina has about 2,700 polling places on Election Day as well as early voting sites October 15–31. Since each polling place is staffed by five or six workers, Gannon estimates that statewide, there are more than 15,000 election workers.

The State Board of Elections is “seeking hundreds if not thousands” of Democracy Heroes to ensure that North Carolina can keep all of its polling sites open and accessible. The State Board of Elections is planning outreach efforts to college students, veterans and retired veterans, and advocacy groups. High school students who turn 17 by Election Day and are U.S. citizens can apply to become a Student Election Assistant. W

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July 1, 2020

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BATTLE LINE Charleston

Richmond

Belinda Joyner is tired of fighting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. But she’s still fighting.

BY LEWIS KENDALL

backtalk@indyweek.com

Raleigh

I

n February, Belinda Joyner caught a ride to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Alongside a couple of close friends, the 67-year-old rode from her home in Garysburg, a 1,000-person town near the North Carolina-Virginia border, up to Washington, D.C. They were there to watch the court hear arguments over whether the U.S. Forest Service should be allowed to issue permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to be built through national forest lands connected to the Appalachian Trail.

The 600-mile, $8 billion pipeline—spearheaded by Dominion Energy and Duke Energy and first proposed in 2014—would run through West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina, delivering some 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Appalachian Basin. In North Carolina, the pipeline is set to snake through eight counties: Halifax, Nash, Wilson, Johnston, Sampson, Cumberland, Robeson, and Northampton—Joyner’s backyard.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 to allow the companies to secure right-of-way under the AT. The ruling was a blow to Joyner and her neighbors. The pipeline, they say, is just the latest example of unwanted industry development disrupting their community with dire consequences for human and environmental health. But

in the marathon that is the fight for environmental justice, setbacks come with the territory.

In the shadow of the nearby second-home tourist haven Lake Gaston, Northampton County, with its predominantly Black population, has been a hotbed of environmental activism for more than 25 years. But with the ACP halfway in the ground and the nearby Enviva wood-pellet facility recently granted permits to expand by the state Department of Environmental Quality—a development that raises additional concerns over air pollution—community members say they’ve been worn down by the Sisyphean task of fighting for a healthy future. “[The companies] don’t live here, so they don’t have to suffer with the damage they cause to the community,” Joyner says. “We are tired of being dumped on.”

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orthampton County is at a crossroads.

Perched on the border of Virginia and the geological fall line where the harder rock of the Piedmont region transitions to the softer soils of the Coastal Plain, the area is bisected by both the CSX rail line, which ships freight from the Deep South to ports in Virginia, and the Roanoke and Meherrin Rivers. The home of Tuscarora and Meherrin Native Americans, the area was later known for its horse-racing scene.

Driving down the highway, you can spot the historical marker honoring Sir Archie, one of the industry’s legendary equine founding fathers.

Today, the fields of peanuts and cotton are interspersed with driving ranges and Dollar Generals. But much of the development has felt less auspicious.

On a warm, cloudless day, Joyner tours me around her hometown, rubbing her temples as she describes the struggles the community of 20,000 has faced.

A retired schoolteacher with an infectious cackle, Joyner was born and raised in Garysburg. She remembers when the Lowe’s distribution center opened, bringing with it one of the first pockets of stable jobs, and when the Piggly Wiggly left, leaving the area without a grocery store.

Joyner is on a first-name basis with as many state environmental groups as she is with company executives. But her activism grew more from necessity than idealism. Her first foray into environmental justice was in the late 1990s when a fertilizer company decided to build a plant down the street from where she lives.

Back then, she says, it was easier to organize and motivate folks. The company sent out a letter notifying residents about the planned plant, and by that afternoon Joyner had 30 people crammed into her house to voice their concerns to county commissioners.

“I’m a curious person,” Joyner says. “I try to pay attention to things and not take it for granted to say it can’t happen to me.

Because if it can happen to you, it can happen to me.”

Their collective action proved enough to stop the fertilizer plant, and the group stuck together. Over the years, Joyner and her allies fought a number of battles against development they saw as environmentally or physiologically damaging: the WestRock paper mill, the hog farm on Warner Bridge Road, the natural gas compressor station.

In 2015, a company called VistaGreen purchased an 800-acre piece of land in the northeastern part of the county with plans to build a pair of landfills to dispose of coal

ash produced by Duke Energy and Dominion Energy.

The landfills, VistaGreen promised, would bring jobs and millions in new revenue for the county. Residents, concerned over reports of the impacts of leaching coal ash, wanted nothing to do with the project. Joyner and the others formed Northampton County Citizens Against Coal Ash, attending county commission meetings and organizing against the proposed landfills. In 2018, the county planning board denied the company its proposal to rezone the area.

Each of these fights made the community more resilient, Joyner says, but also more resigned to industry encroachment.

Citizens Against Coal Ash still meets once a month to stay abreast of developments, but the years have turned some residents’ collective indignation into self-preservation.

To require folks who are struggling to pay the electric bill or find child care to confront an existential threat like climate change or a multinational corporation is asking for division, Joyner says.

“It just destroys a neighborhood,” she says. Now, “everyone’s about self instead of caring about people or your neighborhood or community or where you live.”

D

esignated a Tier 1 county by the state—the “most distressed” based on factors including income and unemployment—Northampton’s median household income is $36,000 (compared to the state median of $52,000). The county is 57 percent Black, and one in every five residents lives below the poverty line.

Last year, the University of Wisconsin calculated a ranking system for all the counties in the U.S. based on health outcomes (such as lifespan and self-reported health status) and other factors (environmental, social, and economic). According to the report, out of the 100 counties in North Carolina, Northampton ranks 92nd in health factors and 96th in health outcomes.

These quality-of-life struggles are exactly why companies decide to expand in communities like Northampton, says Richie Harding, a member of the county board of education.

“You don’t want to have a hog farm in the middle of Raleigh, so you’re going to look at rural areas where there’s going to be less fight,” he says. “People get ran in the ground, they get worn out.”

In a trend echoed nationwide, the area’s economic struggles have led to an exodus, with those who can—roughly 11 percent of the county’s population since 2010—leaving for greener pastures. One of Joyner’s friends in the environmental justice move-

ment was among those to decide he’d had enough. “Unless you’re going to work in a fast-food restaurant, there’s not a lot to come back to Northampton County for,” Joyner says. “Our children go away and only come back for a visit.”

But for her—attached by a commitment to the community—leaving isn’t an option.

“My daughter asked me one time, ‘Mama, if I win the lottery, where do you want me to build you a house?’ And I said, ‘I’m gonna stay right here.’ I don’t know anywhere else I would want to live but right here.”

A

s we wind through the county backroads, Joyner points out the cuts where the Atlantic Coast Pipeline has been routed. By one count, 6 percent of the pipeline is already in the ground—the freshly turned ochre-colored soil is the only indication that anything happened here. But a few of the pipes— seafoam green lengths of steel three feet in diameter—are yet to be buried.

“The companies think it’s a done deal,” she says. “That’s why they’re pressing so hard to get it going.”

According to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission analysis, more than half of

the 105 census tracts in Virginia and North Carolina within a mile of the pipeline’s route have disproportionately high populations that are low-income or communities of color, including some 30,000 Native Americans. Compared to statewide numbers, the analysis also found that Native Americans are over-represented by a factor of 10 along the North Carolina section of the pipeline route, according to Ryan Emanuel, an N.C. State associate professor who wrote a letter in Science about the issue.

The ACP reported it would compensate landowners based on “fair market value,” but according to a review of easement agreements, some were paid as little as $160 an acre for the company to run the pipeline through their land.

“When you’re trying to get [locals’] land and you stick a check in their face and say, ‘You either take our money or we’ll take you to court,’ what is that if not taking our land?” said one landowner at a recent DEQ meeting.

In Northampton County, Joyner and other residents are concerned about the blast zone of the pipeline, an industry-calculated area within which a hypothetical explosion would cause injury or death. (The ACP’s blast zone encompasses some of Garys-

burg and a portion of the nearby Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge). They worry, too, about the compressor station down the road and the increased construction traffic kicking up dust and clogging roads.

“We don’t need no addition,” says Silverleen Alston, another Garysburg resident.

“We dealing with enough.”

The pipes themselves, coated with an epoxy, may also pose a safety risk. Manufactured by 3M, the fusion-bonded epoxy is considered a carcinogen, and the National Association of Pipe Coating Manufacturers advises that pipes coated with the epoxy be stored above ground for no longer than six months. Some pipes have been sitting exposed to the sun since shortly after they were built in late 2015, according to groups like Clean Water for NC. In a response last summer to concerns about the coating and a FERC directive, Dominion downplayed the hazards, writing that “Although 3M has no conclusive evidence at this time to confirm their exact identity, the degradation products are generated in low quantities, have low water solubility, and are therefore not expected to enter the environment in amounts capable of producing an adverse human health effect.”

The project has faced legal challenges since its inception. Environmental groups have lodged a Title VI complaint against the DEQ, alleging the agency discriminated on the basis of race when it issued certifications for the pipeline.

They have also petitioned the state to revoke permits issued in early 2018 that the groups claim were based on faulty math and incorrectly assessed community impacts.

And there are now questions regarding the underlying need for the gas the pipeline plans to deliver, with Dominion admitting (backed up by an Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis report) that natural-gas consumption will likely remain flat for the next 15 years.

The ACP voluntarily halted construction in late 2018 after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of several federal permits. While the recent Supreme Court decision eliminated one hurdle for the project, it is still missing seven state and federal permits, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling does not disturb other aspects of the 4th Circuit’s decision, which found that the Forest Service had violated the National Forest Manage-

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19

ment Act and the National Environmental Policy Act in approving the pipeline’s route through two national forests,” according to one analysis.

The company has said it plans to push forward with the project as soon as it is legally able to and filed a recent notice with FERC requesting an extension for construction until late 2022. And in the end, in keeping with North Carolina utilities law, the ACP will recover much of its investment through charges to taxpayers, regardless of the demand for the project or its eventual production.

“It’s the [taxpayers’] money,” Joyner says. “So, in other words, I’m paying you to kill me.”

I

n Garysburg it’s impossible to miss the trucks.

On the tight, two-lane U.S. 158, which parallels the state line in northeastern North Carolina, the flatbeds rumble along, stacked high with the trunks of soft pine headed to be pulverized, dried, and compacted into tiny, hard pellets, transported north to a port in Virginia, and from there shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe to be burned for heat and fuel.

In Garysburg, the trucks are all headed to the same place: a turnoff marked by a white sign emblazoned with the word Enviva.

Founded in 2004, the company’s first North Carolina plant, which is built on an old Georgia Pacific sawmill, opened in Ahoskie in 2011. Plans for the Garysburg facility soon followed.

Locals pushed back against the company, voicing concerns to the North Carolina DEQ over air pollution from the dryers, dust from construction, and the constant caravan of log-laden flatbeds. They raised questions, too, about the sustainability and benefits of the biomass industry.

But despite the protests, Enviva’s Garysburg plant secured state approval and, in 2013, churned out its first load of pellets.

Situated near several homes and partially obscured by trees, the biomass facility cranks out hundreds of thousands of tons of pellets each year.

At a public hearing last summer to determine if the DEQ should issue permits to allow the facility to increase its production by 235,000 tons per year, residents questioned whether the company was properly measuring emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, in the air.

“People in this community need to know exactly what they’re being exposed to,” J.C. Woodley, a retired EPA worker from Northampton County, told DEQ offi20

July 1, 2020

INDYweek.com

“

It’s the [taxpayers’] money.

So, in other words, I’m paying you to kill me.

cials at the hearing. “We need to know.

We need protection.”

The agency received some 2,400 public comments, at least 95 percent of which opposed the expansion. In October, it approved the new permit under the condition that the company must install additional air-emission control equipment.

Emission controls aside, this type of “bridge fuel” expansion, similar to natural gas, runs counter to the accepted science that calls for drastic and immediate emissions cuts, says Rachel Weber, a former forests-and-climate campaigner with the nonprofit Dogwood Alliance.

“We are on a tremendously tight and aggressive timeline to make carbon emissions reductions,” Weber says. “That’s why we need to be making significant sweeping changes today.”

Viewed strictly from a forestry-health perspective, some argue that wood pellets are a viable form of fuel.

“The carbon bottom line is that forests at a regional scale in North Carolina are sustainable,” Fred Cubbage and Robert Abt, professors at N.C. State’s Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, wrote in a recent op-ed in The News & Observer. “Forest volume and carbon are increasing. Life cycle analysis and dynamic timber markets and investments at the state level support the merits of this renewable resource.”

In terms of overall emissions, however, the jury is out on biomass. A recent UK report determined that greenhouse gas emissions from biomass could be either higher or lower than traditional fossil fuels, but in neither case will come close to the net-zero emissions goal the UK has set for 2050.

While the down-the-line greenhouse gasses are concerning, the main issue for local residents is emissions from the plant that may be directly affecting their health. The plant emits VOCs, a component of smog that, in elevated quantities, has been tied to negative health impacts such as nervous system and organ damage.

Alston lives a stone’s throw from the Enviva plant on land her grandfather inherited. As soon as the facility opened, she

says, she would wake up to find her home covered in a layer of fine dust.

“You have no choice but to deal with it because it’s there,” she says. “I can’t afford to jump up and leave town.”

And there’s noise: heavy machinery operating, sometimes in the middle of the night, which keeps Alston from sleeping. She used to call the company to complain, but it never worked.

“The noise still go on—it ain’t stop. But I got tired of calling,” she says.

As part of discussions with the community, Enviva sent five $100 gift cards to the local school system. Recently, the company also donated laptops to area schoolchildren and hosted a luncheon for first responders.

For Joyner, these are token gestures.

“Damn a book bag. What’s a book bag when a child might have asthma?” she says, pointing to data that in North Carolina, low-income, rural, and non-white residents are more likely to have asthma. “They just prey on communities of color, poor communities. Stuff that they wouldn’t dare have near their community, they don’t have a problem saying ‘You all take it.’”

At public hearings, Envira has painted a different picture: “We care about people, we care about the communities we operate in, and we care about the state of North Carolina,” vice president of environmental affairs Yonna Kravtsova said at one. “The [Northampton plant] has a valid and legal permit and is operating in full compliance.

Why would anyone oppose it?”

In response to a series of detailed questions for this article, an Enviva spokesperson issued the following statement: “Enviva is proud to be an integral part of the communities we operate in, driving economic growth and making communities stronger.

Our Northampton plant contributes over $150 million annually in regional economic impact and supports nearly 300 direct and indirect jobs.”

T

hese days, Joyner spends most of her time at her home, a neat white one-story with a large oak tree in the back.

There’s plenty of news to read

and calls to make, but she misses being able to give Harding hell for forgetting to weed-whack her driveway and embarrassing local schoolkids by checking in on them when she runs into them at the grocery store.

Joyner prefers to highlight the positives. She’d rather talk about Keion Crossen, the Northampton High School football star who won a Super Bowl ring with the New England Patriots in 2018. She’d rather talk about her children, reminiscing about their childhood soccer games. (“I’d be hoarse running up and down that sideline.”) She still enjoys the occasional day of substitute teaching kindergarteners.

“I just wanted what I thought would be peaceful living,” she says. “But now I can lay in my bed at night and hear the trucks going up and down the highway. Sometimes I get discouraged, but then I think. ‘If I give up, who will stand up for us?’”

So she keeps catching rides around the state for environmental justice meetings, confronting commissioners, and taking calls from reporters. Covid-19 has made it even more difficult. A separate wood-pellet plant proposed in Lumberton is currently going through an extended DEQ comment period, and a digital public hearing was added only after pressure from locals.

“When people think you’re sleeping, that’s when they’re trying to do the most damage,” Joyner says.

There are several pathways that, in Joyner’s eyes, could prove part of a workable solution. The state’s new Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan directs agencies to “integrate climate adaptation and resiliency planning into their policies, programs, and operations.” Cumulative impact studies could better describe the long-term health and environmental effects of plants and pipelines.

But her experience with the government means she no longer holds her breath over any of it. She says Governor Cooper’s office does not return her calls. She feels brushed aside by local representatives and the DEQ, which claim to have made “a lot of progress” over the last year on environmental justice and transitioning the state off fossil fuels. And besides, who needs another government task force or study to tell her what she already knows? Her community is suffering.

“I’m tired,” she says. “Sometimes it’s like I’m fighting a losing battle. But it’s not about me, it’s about my people, and I’m going to be a voice for my people until I die.” W

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Southeast Raleigh is known to be a food desert. As a way to address that issue, the Black Farmers Market partnered with Fertile Ground Food Cooperative for its first Raleigh market at the Southeast Raleigh YMCA on Sunday, June 28. Hundreds of people safely strolled around to support Black farmers and other Black business owners. Shoppers were reminded to wear their masks and to practice social distancing. The vendors, who wore masks and gloves, were the only ones allowed to handle products.

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M U SIC

John Brown with his 100-year-old bass at Duke

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

The World on His Strings As the new leader of the arts at Duke, John Brown wants to forge bonds and change lives

BY DAN RUCCIA music@indyweek.com

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July 1, 2020

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W

hen the position of Vice Provost for the Arts at Duke University was created in 2007, the arts at Duke looked a little different than they do now.

The music department housed the only creative graduate-degree program. Duke Performances had just hired Aaron Greenwald as its director, and most of its performances took place in Page Auditorium. The physical spaces for the arts were scattered around random buildings throughout campus. The job was only a part-time position, though composer Scott Lindroth, its first occupant, still managed to oversee a profound series of changes over 13 years.

Today, as Lindroth returns to his composing studio to spend more time banging on motorcycle parts and other unusual-sounding objects, Duke boasts numerous worldclass performing venues, a visionary performing arts presenter, multiple new graduate programs in the arts and revitalized undergraduate programs, and the shining new Rubenstein Arts Center. Duke clearly wants to make the case for itself as a leader in the arts, not just as a hospital, a hub of scientific research, and a basketball team.

The university has also doubled down on the position of Vice Provost for the Arts, making it a full-time job.

Stepping into this expanded role on July 1 is another member of Duke’s music department, bassist, bandleader, and Director of the Jazz Program John V. Brown Jr. Brown has been teaching at Duke for nearly two decades, rising from an adjunct bass instructor.

Born and raised in Fayetteville, Brown has been surrounded by music from nearly the beginning. After trying and rejecting both piano and viola, he found the bass at age nine and never looked back. While in college at UNC-Greensboro, he was simultaneously a member of drummer Elvin Jones’s band and the North Carolina Symphony.

“I would take a red-eye from LA on Sunday night,” he recalls, “get back for rehearsal on Monday, then go to class Monday afternoon. It was crazy, but I loved it.’

After a brief detour to law school, Brown returned to music, teaching at North Carolina Central University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Duke (sometimes simultaneously), performing regularly with a wide array of jazz musicians including a longstanding partnership with Nnenna Freelon, and founding his own ensembles. Currently, he leads seven of them, ranging from a trio to a big band, alongside his duties teaching courses at Duke. (I was a teaching assistant for one of his classes during grad school a decade ago). He even served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2017.

As Vice Provost, Brown will have to give up some of those musical activities, but he is excited about the possibilities of the position, even if he feels like he’s drinking from a firehose right now. I spoke with Brown by phone on Juneteenth, and we talked about his vision for the future of the arts at Duke, the pandemic, anti-racist art, and much more.

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

INDY: What drew you to this position?

JOHN BROWN: I sought the position out

What do you want to see arts at Duke becoming in the future?

because I felt compelled to do more than what I’m doing. I wasn’t unhappy. In fact, I was quite happy doing what I was doing.

While I do very much enjoy performing concerts and being in front of an audience, I recognize that a position like this at a place that I love would give me an opportunity to help connect more people to the arts than playing one concert at a time.

These days, I like to say that I feel called to illuminate more than I am to shine. That is simply being able to illuminate the work of others and help inspire and encourage others to create and, similarly, create an accessible space so that that work can be experienced by wide audiences. When I’m on stage, one arguably might state that I shine. In that context, I do have the meaningful experience of affecting the lives of the people who are in there. But as Vice Provost for the Arts at Duke that could be happening across all different types of arts, across many different types of audiences. Coming off stage and putting my bass down to do it may seem unattractive or even mundane, but I like knowing that I do that work that helps us enable people to connect with art.

I am committed to making arts accessible on every possible level, starting at home, looking at our student experience and enhancing those opportunities, inspiring people to collaborate, giving people license and motivation to use arts as the foundation for connection. There isn’t a part of our lives without art. I often challenge groups that I’m addressing: “Remember back to your childhood, did you sing? Has anyone in the room never sung in the car? Never sung in the house when you were by yourself? Anyone who’s never painted or drawn something? Is there any of us who’s never gotten some good news, don’t you have a little spring in your step? Has anyone here never danced?”

When you help people understand the breadth of art and how it really is an integral part of all of our lives, then they can further appreciate it when they become more educated about all types of art, and then even further appreciate people who commit their lives to making it, commit their lives to sharing it.

Arts have to be shared, arts have to be experienced, and if I gotta be on a Zoom call all day and go to ten meetings and don’t get

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up from my office chair except to get something to drink—if all that time and work and conversation leads to a meaningful experience that might change somebody’s life, connecting an artist to students who are looking to find their voice, it’s all worth it to me.

What do you see the artistic life of campus looking like in the near term as we deal with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath?

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rience art, one must recognize that that is someone’s product. It is the result of someone’s experience that led them to create something and share it with the world. If we talk about an emotion or a thought or a feeling, there isn’t anyone who does not have those. Depending on what that thought, emotion, or feeling is, there is art to connect you with that and connect you with other people who also have experienced that. I view the arts as a uniting force that is a very effective tool of combat to win the war over these negative things in our world. I have great hope for

It’s going to be a challenge. I mean, that’s obvious, right? I’m encouraged by the fact that we all recognize that challenge exists, and that there are serious con- “ These days, I like to say that I feel called versations takto illuminate more than I am to shine.” ing place about how we’ll beat it. If it’s got to be Zoom a moment, then what art will do in the world right now. It’s it’ll be Zoom. There are so many opportuni- my charge to help all these worlds come ties that might not actually involve us put- together as much as possible and in as ting ourselves in an auditorium or theater or many ways as possible. inside a museum, but there still will be ways that we can enjoy the existence of this art. I’m also thinking about the email that Right now, musicians, writers, poets, and Duke President Vincent Price sent out filmmakers have all been thrust into these to the Duke community yesterday. He’s moments of solitude. All this is doing for talking about refocusing the mission of many of us is creating a space to just really the university to try and make it into a let loose. We are all in zones of creativity. I’ll leader of anti-racist thought, research, just tell our audiences to be ready because and practice. How can the arts at Duke I predict there will be a flurry of productiv- support this newly articulated mission? ity during this period. If artists are like me I think that the answer is kind of in the and other musicians I know, they have just method and that is rooted in freedom. wanted to play. I did a livestreaming Face- Giving people the freedom to create and book thing with Nnenna Freelon on Mon- the space to create, I believe, empowers day. First gig I’ve done in three months. Just people to create. For those who are motito play with another person after being in a vated to create something that is meant space where I couldn’t perform with anoth- to address racism, I think the best thing er person, to experience that energy of a we can do is encourage them to create live person again, was just was so filling and say, “We are united as an anti-racand inspiring. ist people.” Simply being vocal and being So just imagine what it’s going to be like obvious and being deliberate about counwhen you put five musicians on stage, or tering negative forces. I think that one you put a group of dancers on stage again, element of that is inspiring people to creand they get to move the way that they’re ate and enjoy art. used to moving, and the singers get to sing I don’t like to think of myself as a Black the way that they’re singing. Just imagine man in America, but here lately, I have to what that’s going to be. I think the other think about it because the world makes me. side of this pandemic will be a rich period But even so, with this opportunity, I just to enjoy what people have been creating want to remind people that we are men and while we’ve been in this space. women and transgender people. I hope that we get away from labels. But if you and I We are in this moment of the aftermath both walk out the door, and somebody were of the murder of George Floyd and the to look at you and describe you, they’re not uprising in support of Black lives, which going to say you’re white. But when they has focused attention on the role of race describe me, the first thing they’re going and policing in society. These are huge, to say is I’m Black. And I just hope to get complicated issues. How do you see arts, to a place where that is something that at Duke and more broadly, helping us we notice, but it’s not dispositive. It doesn’t change the conversation. I would love to live navigate them?

In this moment, I am thinking about the in a world and inspire people who similararts as a matter of expression and a vehi- ly want to live in a world where we moved cle for unity. When we set out to expe- that needle. W

M U SIC

The Devil’s Interval The unsettling power of the tritone in XOXOK’s meditation on the specter of police violence

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

“I

t wants to go somewhere,” Gerald Moshell told NPR in 2017. “It wants to settle either here, or [there]. You don’t know where it’ll go, but it can’t stop where it is.”

Moshell was talking about the tritone, the famously unsettling “devil’s interval,” which 29-year-old Carrboro musician Keenan Jenkins deploys to devastating double effect in “Right On,” a turning point for his atmospheric soul project XOXOK. The spaces between those three whole tones are like the spaces between the murders of Black men by the state—regular and terrible and inexorable. Moshell was talking about musicology, but he might have been describing the state of the nation, as well.

When we premiered “Right On,” I pegged it as the best local song of the year and wanted to learn more about it. Jenkins wrote it in 2016, after the death of Philando Castile. It took him four years to record and release it—on May 20, five days before the death of George Floyd. But there’s no such thing as prescience when an injustice is evergreen. The devil’s interval, indeed.

INDY: Walk me back to when you created “Right On.” KEENAN JENKINS: It was a long process.

I’m not a “sit down in one session, write a song” kind of guy. I really wish I was. That would be very convenient.

The lyrics came first, after Philando Castile was killed in 2016. That happened the day after I defended my dissertation [at UNC]. A week or two later, I was driving to the gym on campus and listening to a podcast, NPR’s Code Switch, where they talk about race. They had an episode where they said, “We’re paid to talk about this stuff, but we have no words right now.”

Every time one of these shootings happened I’d think, man, that could be me,

to me, oh, how prescient that you released it this time. And I just want to respond to them like, nope, not really. I could have released this at any time, and it would have been a relevant song. I so desperately wish that it was outdated. It feels selfish to think about my song being attached to these events. Every single one of these shootings adds another layer of stress for me and most or all people of color.

I’m leery of creating the impression that “Right On” is a protest song or pedagogy for white people. It’s also so personal and bottles that experience you had, driving down the road, thinking of your dad.

XOXOK

PHOTO BY AREON MOBASHER

which was awful enough. But for some reason, that day, I thought, wow, that could be my dad next, and I just pulled over to the side of the road and started bawling.

I don’t know why I thought about my dad.

That’s where the song came from—that moment and thought process, along with the fact that I’d just gotten my PhD, and people might think I’m protected from this stuff, but I’m not.

The music itself, part of it came from learning about music theory. I was learning about tritones, which is a very jarring sound. I’d learned about them and forgotten many times before, so I said, I’m going to learn about them again and put them in a song where I can remember.

The song is nice and melodic until it gets to that part where I say, “Just ‘cause I’ve got a PhD don’t mean they won’t light me right on up,” and that’s where I put that jarring tritone.

“Right On” sounds a lot different from your debut EP, Worthy.

That’s very intentional. Worthy was the stuff I’d been thinking about since college.

I implemented that vision and I’m proud of it, and now I don’t want to do it again.

It was very wandering stuff that might not have a hook or a bridge. I said, let me see if I can do this thing other people are doing, writing a song with a verse and a chorus, how about that? On Worthy, I was trying to show off my guitar-ing and theory. I’m not a shredder, but I was proud of all the things I could do on the guitar. I tried to make “Right On” less guitar-centric, focused more on the lyrics and feeling of the song.

Tell me about the timing of the release of “Right On.”

I wanted to put out something a year after Worthy and didn’t have enough material ready to record a full album yet. But I had a couple of singles. A few people have said

It definitely is a very personal song. I think the reason it resonates is that either people can relate to the fear that they or someone they love could be next, or—white people specifically who talk to me about it, it’s not like they’re texting that they didn’t know racism exists, but maybe they feel more like this wouldn’t happen to their friend.

It’s a reminder, to both myself and people who see me as their friend: George Floyd was someone’s friend. Philando Castile was someone’s friend. I hope that is what resonates beyond the personal feeling for me.

What’s next?

“Right On” is the most explicit song I’ve released, and not because of the F word, but because I’m not really cloaking things in metaphor, which is a little scary. I usually don’t even talk about what my songs are about. This has given me a bit of encouragement to continue doing that, to not cloak things in metaphor so much. It’s been encouraging to know I can do that and still make a good song. I have a second single I’d planned to release in a couple of weeks, but you know, I’m reading the room—the room being America. W INDYweek.com

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PAGE

ASHLEIGH BRYANT PHILLIPS: SLEEPOVERS

Hub City Press; June 16

Small Mercies Ashleigh Bryant Phillips leavens frank stories of rural poverty with tenderness

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

A

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

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shleigh Bryant Phillips’s debut short story collection, Sleepovers, is a lime green volume with the friendly heft of a church hymnal. The stories you’ll find in it, though, are far more gripping reckonings of sin, grace, and place than any song about the Blood of Jesus. Bryant is a gifted, luminous storyteller and a force to be reckoned with. Every story feels like a dark family secret, like something that must be quietly and urgently retold.

Sleepovers was published after Lauren Groff chose it last year as the winner of the Michael C. Curtis Short Story Book Prize. Bryant is a graduate of Meredith College in Raleigh and UNC-Wilmington’s fiction MFA program and has had stories published in The Oxford American and the Paris Review, winning praise from the likes of Clyde Edgerton, Scott McClanahan, and Amanda Petrusich.

There’s a tender choral quality to Bryant’s characters, all of whom are drawn from her corner of the rural South. They include a wary mattress salesman, a pool custodian obsessed with her dead horse, and a little girl named Shania whose parents, enviably, own a water bed. Settings include a jacuzzi at Myrtle Beach, the local Duck Thru gas station, and the big-box store—if Flannery O’Connor’s South was Christ-haunted, Ashleigh Bryant Phillip’s South is Walmart-haunted.

Phillips’s sentences bridge the distance between deadpan and lyrical, such as this one from “The Virgin”: “Before Weston left me, he put me in handcuffs and held my head underwater in the bathtub. I would have done anything for him. I pass fields and then fields turn to nice houses and traffic.”

You’ll find plenty of fields in these stories, and in those fields (often a bright soybean green) there are a lot of horses. It’s an animal that Bryant’s characters routinely dream about or sketch to find hope—which is good because hope seems in short supply from the outside world.

Bryant grew up in Woodland, North Carolina, a town with no stoplight and just over 600 residents. It’s in a northeastern part of the state where opportunities have dried up. As a setting, it’s fertile ground for searching characters who are just trying to make it through another day.

None of these characters are perfect: There is a whole lot of sadness and violence in these pages, sometimes startlingly so.

Perspective shifts dramatically—between men and women, adults and children—but it’d be difficult to miss the fact that, between these shifts, most violence arises from abuses of power and is suffered by women.

Bryant is a loving documentarian of the details of rural life (feral cats, Little Debbie’s, and prayer lists) but she is also a devoted witness to rural poverty and its systematic causes. In a rare turn

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips: Sleepovers

PHOTO BY MISSY MALOUFF

for regional fiction, her witnessing of problems does not give way to fetishizing them.

In “Lorene,” a lonely teenager goes to visit her sister’s family in Rocky Mount. Her brother-in-law gives her a camera and the world lights up, briefly, as she notices “how in the late afternoon the camellias hung with heavy blossoms and the holly bush reached through the fence.” You can sense the dark turn things will take with the brother-in-law.

In “An Unspoken,” a woman comforts a troubled young neighbor that she tried to help raise, even after she’s horrified to catch a glimpse through the kitchen window of him raping his dog. In one of the more phantasmagoric stories, “The Virgin,” a woman shelters in a nursing home after she gets a flat tire in the rain. Hungry for acceptance and missing her abusive ex-boyfriend, she announces to the group of residents that she’s a virgin.

Between the dark subjects and Bryant’s convincing ear for regional dialect, her closest literary predecessors are probably Carson McCullers and Larry Brown. I also was reminded of the Delta poet Frank Stanford, whose talent lay in an attentive, stuttering specificity. A Stanford poem often ends like a slammed door. Bryant’s stories do, too; there’s rarely overt resolution. Often, a character will state a terrible loss as matter-of-factly as a lunch order before carrying on.

These stories announce the arrival of an important new voice in Southern fiction who knows just how to sneak small mercies in.

You’ll find hope sizzling up in Mountain Dew cans or appearing as suddenly as a horse in a field. All you have to do is wait. W

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From civil rights to gun control, John Lewis has stood on the frontier of justice

BY GLENN MCDONALD arts@indyweek.com

R

ep. John Lewis of Georgia, a tireless legislator and a hero of the civil rights movement, is the subject of director Dawn Porter’s excellent documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble, which takes its name from one of Lewis’s famous exhortations.

In fact, it’s the first thing we hear in the new film: “Speak up, speak out, and get in what I call good trouble,” Lewis says. “Necessary trouble. Do what’s right.”

Lewis has been fighting the good fights— plural—for more than 50 years, and once again his words speak directly to our times.

The film feels like a vitamin B12 shot of pure, uncut hope.

Lewis, currently serving his 17th term in the U.S. House of Representatives at age 80, has become a national institution—the conscience of Congress.

He’s seen it all. The son of Alabama sharecroppers, he was the youngest speak-

er at the 1963 March on Washington. In his government career he’s advanced critical legislation on civil rights, environmental protections, fair wages—it’s a long list to which Lewis is adding items to this day.

In 2016, he led the House sit-in demanding action on gun control after 49 people were gunned down at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Porter uses a flashback structure to highlight the undeniable parallels between the time of the civil rights movement and today.

It’s the film’s core strength, imbuing it with a terrible urgency, particularly in the passages concerning voter suppression. Archival clips and contemporary verité scenes are seasoned with commentary from admirers including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, and Stacey Abrams.

The film’s local theatrical release has been scuttled by the Covid-19 crisis, but you can see it online starting July 3, and thanks to an innovative distribution program from Magnolia Pictures, you can still support your local indie theater while doing so. Visit magnoliapictures.com/virtualcinema to find out how to share a portion of digital rental revenue with The Chelsea Theater in Chapel Hill. W

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E TC.

Milk Before Cereal The N.C. State-bred app Yaheard is a home for hot takes and not-so-great debates BY MARY KING backtalk@indyweek.com

W

hen you tap one of the profile pictures that sprawl across the landing page of the app called Yaheard, you never know what sort of hot take or thought-provoking inquiry might pop up on your screen: “Why are people refusing to cancel Kanye?”

“Do you believe that a mindset can get you anywhere?”

“On god the milk go BEFORE the cereal. ” The app allows you a few seconds to digest whatever prompt it displays before it whisks you into a front-row seat for a lively discussion. With their phone cameras on selfie mode, two users take turns debating the prompt through short videos. Once the debaters have volleyed back and forth several times, it’s your turn to cast your vote for either of the arguments. You’re then free to scroll along and view the next debate on your feed, or perhaps to ignite a debate of your own.

Bright, playful, and user-friendly, Yaheard has come a long way since its N.C. State-alum founders rolled out the first version on the Apple App Store in 2016. As one of the founders, Marcus Spruill, puts it, it’s “a social network that takes debating to the next level.”

Yaheard does just about everything you’d expect a social network to do. It has customizable profiles, an endless feed, direct messages, news articles, a robust notifications tab, and hashtags. But unlike most discussion-based platforms, in which debates play out over text or images, Yaheard offers users the chance to engage one-on-one, face-to-face. Spruill says it’s this feature that sets the app apart.

“I think just having that face-to-face conversation— and you know exactly who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about—will help people to learn but then also to understand where someone else is coming from and their point of view,” Spruill says.

Yaheard is the brainchild of Joshua Puente, who thought up the concept while watching the ESPN sports-debate show First Take as an engineering student at N.C. State. Puente pitched the app to fellow students Spruill, Robert Dates, and DomiNick Downing.

They went on to clinch a win at the N.C. State Wolf Tank entrepreneurship competition. After graduating, 32

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From left: DomiNick Downing, Marcus Spruill, and Robert Dates

they kept up Yaheard as a side hustle while establishing full-time careers in the tech industry.

“I think that’s been a great learning experience for us,” Spruill says. “All of us were able to bring something that we do from our 9-to-5 roles into the company, whether it’s coding or marketing or advertising. And I think that’s really helped us to get to where we’re at today.”

Yaheard’s user count stands at more than 800, up from the 200 users it had during a beta test in January. Spruill says it has successfully attracted its target demographic of younger folks, especially in high school and college.

Users tend to discover it through the ads the company runs on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Yaheard also provides consulting services for other entrepreneurs and reinvests those profits into the app.

For now, Yaheard has no set rules to regulate debating, but users can report content to the team for review.

As other social networks have demonstrated, minimally moderated forums are bound to attract trolls. In order to promote accountability, the latest redesign of the app allows for less anonymity, Dates says.

User Jasmine Cazares—whom the INDY interviewed over Yaheard’s direct messaging feature—says she checks the app daily.

“I use Yaheard because I hear back from more people than I would on Twitter,” she says.

Dates says the term “Yaheard” embodies the practice of debating with others.

“When we say Yaheard, it’s like, ‘Oh, I connect with you,’” he says. “Its real origin is just pop culture.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF YAHEARD

Pop culture certainly fuels the app. Dates says the subjects that trend on Yaheard mirror those trending on Twitter: TV shows, celebrities, dating, politics, current events. Quips and laughter abound.

But it can also serve as a space to speak about grave realities. Last week, topics up for discussion included, “The current police system is racist and oppresses Black people based on the color of their skin” and “ALM takes away the purpose of BLM. Your life matters but you will most likely never experience the level of disrespect and racism black people will.”

All too often, Spruill says, it’s not until a high-profile tragedy like George Floyd’s murder takes place that society will openly discuss issues like racism and police brutality. But racial minorities, of which the Yaheard team consists entirely, don’t have the privilege of putting off these conversations.

“This is something we live daily,” Spruill says, “and we believe it is time for there to be a social network that facilitates and advances these conversations to produce positive change on a regular basis.”

But even when Yaheard is just silly or funny—which it more often is—Spruill believes in the power of conversations, however trivial, to inspire understanding and changes of opinion.

“You can learn from someone else and understand someone else’s point of view because there’s an opportunity for everyone to think of something differently than you or I will,” he says. W

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Biostatistician II Coatings manufacturer PPD Development, L.P. seeks a Biostatistician II in Morrisville, NC to perform management functions relating to the administrative and scientific activities of team members across multiple complex projects.

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this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box.

The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered.

Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

42-7806

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages.”

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com 7.01.20

solution to last week’s puzzle

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com

July 1, 2020

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