A Historically Bad Day For North Carolina

[donbosco]

#OTD (May 6) 1972, North Carolina broke my 14 year old heart and sadly showed its true face, a face that has been on display across generations as evidenced by the presidential tallies of 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Native Son candidate for the nomination of the Democratic Party Terry Sanford lost to the Racist Alabaman George Wallace in the state’s first ever presidential primary. The Democratic front-runners McGovern and Humphrey did not even participate in the N.C. contest.

No doubt there are nuances to be explored here but fundamentally this is where NC turned most directly into The Darkness. Note that this was also the day that Jesse Helms took the GOP nomination to run for the U.S. Senate.

 

[05C40]

That was the very first election I ever voted in. I was a 17 year old HS senior and could vote because I would be 18 before the November election. My high school had registration events. The primary polling place was my high school. Terry Sandford was the candidate trying to drag us forward. George Wallace was the candidate trying to drag us back.

Everytime something happens that might nudge NC forward, the conservatives start shouting about how awful it is and drag us back.
- Integrated schools - Hell No! If we give blacks a better education, who's going to dig the ditches?
- Integration - Hell No! If we let the blacks use our water fountains, the white women who use those fountains will start giving birth to black children.
- New, higher paying jobs - Hell No! You'll cripple the textile and furniture industries.
- Keep funding the universities - Hell No! It'll just breed more know-it-all liberals.
- Incentives for movie filming - Hell No! We don't need a bunch of high paying union jobs giving workers unrealistic expectations. And besides the Cathy Family, a/k/a Chick-Fil-A, paid us to end those incentives because they were interfering with the incentives being passed out in Georgia.
- Do anything that might educate people about smoking - Hell no! Why do you hate Eastern NC?
- Point out that textiles, furniture, and tobacco are dying industries because textiles and furniture are about to get crushed by Asian imports and tobacco literally kills people - Hell no! Why do you hate the working class in North Carolina?
ETA - Start enforcing environmental laws about industries just dumping toxic waste into our rivers. Hell no! Why do you want to run every good paying job that doesn't require a college education out of North Carolina? Just last week when I was eating at the Angus Barn with DuPont executives, they assured me those chemicals were harmless. Do you think you know more about the toxicity of chemicals than a man with a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT?

It just makes me sick. But, I keep coming back to North Carolina like someone coming back to their parents' graves, knowing they are gone, but still wanting to be with them.

 

[donbosco]

A friend who was thinking back on this time in their life sent this to me: "I moved to Wilmington in The fall
of 1969, I graduated from John T Hoggard high school in 1970. I moved there from Southwest VA. I had viewed the sixties and all of that turmoil on a black and white TV, in my beloved mountains. Wilmington was a racist hell hole. I was stunned by the poverty of the large black community. Many didn’t even have running water, there weren’t paved streets, there was a large ghetto. To implement desegregation, they closed the black high school with a proud tradition and they split the black kids between the two high schools. Violence broke out my first day in school. It erupted because they called all the seniors into the gym and told them there was no room for graduation there and they advised them that there were two choices. We could graduate from the rival school, or we could graduate from the closed black school. I can never express the horror that emerged. White students dressed in the fanciest clothes I had ever seen, went up to a microphone saying over and over, “My daddy would never let me graduate from that N-school.” The black students sat in silence. The violence started as we were leaving the gym and it never stopped my senior year. Over and over again the choices that the school administration and board made were completely racist. Like picking all white cheerleaders and giving every opportunity to white students over black ones. Every single time these things happened, there would be beatings and violent rioting in the school. We would be locked in our classrooms to try to protect us. I could never have believed that people could act this way, in spite of seeing the protests and activities to try and obtain racial justice in the 60s on that black and white TV. Wilmington was in color, the color of racism, blood, and violence. Violence continued in Wilmington during those years. The National Guard finally called in at one point. Benjamin Chavez was sent to prison. I worked at Duke and when they allowed him to go to school there I used to see him on campus. Thanks to a former classmate of mine at UNC who is a wonderful writer and journalist, we now know Wilmington was the scene a of a terrible massacre of black people after the Civil War. Believe me, I was not surprised."

 

[donbosco]

1970-71 is pretty much when Brown v BOE really (finally?) began to be implemented in NC. It was, at least to my reading and experience, an action far more opposed in urban than rural areas. In some places, Wilmington for example, the ham-fisted and resentful ways desegregation was imposed irritated everyone, even some African Americans who lost neighborhood schools that had become important parts of communities.

It was the events mentioned by my friend above that led to the whole Wilmington 10 case.

 

[donbosco]

And then eventually...in 1990 when Jesse Helms would go up against Harvey Gantt we'd get the "White Hands" ad. Carter Wrenn ought to be ashamed of himself.