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Truth and Hope Tour:
Tour of NC's poverty areas goes to Scotland Neck
By MARTHA WAGGONER, Associated Press
SCOTLAND NECK, N.C. - The poverty is so acute that it hurts, says Marcellus Brown.
Brown, 43, has lived in Scotland Neck for about 30 years. He doesn't have a steady job, but he wants one. To apply for unemployment, he has to get a ride to Roanoke Rapids, about 30 miles north. To look for a job, he typically tries to get a lift to Tarboro (20 miles) or Rocky Mount (30 miles).
So it hurts when politicians ignore the poor or say they're lazy, he told the head of the state chapter of National Association for the Advancement of Colored people during a tour of poverty-stricken areas to his hometown in northeastern North Carolina.
"You can walk across the street, and you don't see none of this from the other side of town," he told the Rev. William Barber on Friday. "I mean, you don't see trees still here from the hurricane, abandoned warehouses. You don't see that."
The invisibility on the national level and from fellow townspeople hurts, he said. "It hurts because this is our home. This is what we have. When you go across town, you see the different environment," he said, referring to the wealthier, mostly white part of town.
"That's like five minutes away. And that's still Scotland Neck."
The two-day Poverty and Hope Tour led by the NAACP and other groups was meant to put faces on numbers of poor who live in in northeastern North Carolina. Participants met more than 1,000 people during stops in six places during two days on the road. The tour will go to other rural communities and inner-city neighborhoods later this year, Barber has said.
Education and housing were the other main issues that residents mentioned as they ran up to Barber on the street. Joining him were representatives of the N.C Justice Center; the N.C. Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at North Carolina Central University in Durham.
In Scotland Neck, population about 2,000, the participants saw for themselves a community where almost 50 percent of residents live below the federal poverty level and unemployment is almost 13 percent, compared to a statewide figure of 9.5 percent as recently as November. Almost 70 percent of the people who live there are black, but that's not reflected in the town council, which has one black among its five members, or the police department, which has no full-time black officers among the eight who work there.
Scotland Neck is named for the Scots who settled it in 1722 and its location in the neck of the Roanoke River. It's part of Halifax County, which was one of the state's largest slave-holding counties. A Census count from 1860 shows that Halifax was one of 19 counties with black majorities - its population of more than 19,000 included more than 10,000 slaves and more 2,000 free blacks. Whites numbered about 6,600 and made up 34 percent of the population.
"As long as it's ignored and it's invisible, nobody will take it seriously," Barber said as he walked through a neighborhood with abandoned houses with giant trees felled in August by Hurricane Irene still on the ground. "Maybe if we can drive home this issue, maybe we can put a light on poverty and all of its ugliness, and it will create a different kind of conversation and the possibility to make some real substantive change."
The town's mayor is 85-year-old Leonard Bunting, who took office last month after defeating the town's first black mayor, James Mills. He says he's excited about the town's future - one restaurant recently opened, as did a hardware store and another restaurant is in the works. Other changes are in the works, but he has to stay mum on those for now.
Race relations in the town are great, he says. "There are a few people who would like to have a problem," he said. "But the majority of whites and the majority of blacks will tell you that we have no problem."
Even the death of a 61-year-old black man who was shocked by police with a stun gun hasn't upset that balance, he says. Roger Anthony died Nov. 22, a day after he was stunned.
The State Bureau of Investigation is looking into Anthony's death. Police Chief Joe Williams said Friday that the officer has since resigned.
"We've got a few people who would like for it to (cause problems), but that's not the case," Bunting said of Anthony's death. " ... This is a good little town. It's a country town. We have a lot of people coming back here to retire, both black and white."
Other local leaders don't see the town quite the same way. James Mills, the former mayor, and David Harvey, head of the Halifax County chapter of the NAACP, say many of the homes on the east - or black - side of town wouldn't be inhabitable if they were inspected. But the inhabitants can't complain because then they wouldn't have anywhere to live.
And the county continues to have three school districts that Barber and some groups say should be unified.
A study by the UNC Center for Civil Rights and released last year said the system that includes Halifax County Public Schools, Weldon City Schools and the Roanoke Rapids Graded School District remains one of the most segregated systems in the state. The county is 39 percent white, while nearly 100 percent of students at Halifax County and Weldon City schools are non-white. The Roanoke Rapids district is more than 70 percent white.
The report, released last May, said Halifax County and Weldon City schools have some of the lowest-performing schools in the state, along with high teacher turnover rates.
Paying for three of everything, including bus systems and superintendents, makes little sense, Barber said, and the set-up is rooted in the history of segregation.
That history is part of what the state must transform, he said.
"But you can't move beyond it until you own it and you deal with it," he said. "Once we tell the truth, then we can move forward with the transformation."
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In six poor rural counties the rates range from 21% to 26%. Among blacks, poverty rates approach 40% in parts of those counties. Statewide, the poverty rate is 17. 4%, the nation's 12th highest.
The state's NAACP, seeking to put a human face on what it calls "bloodless statistics," mounted a Truth and Hope Tour of Poverty through the six counties Thursday and Friday. More than 60 volunteers from the civil rights group and several other nonprofits piled onto a bus to hear local residents describe what poverty looks like and feels like.
"It's no sin to be poor," the Rev. William Barber told residents of tiny Roper, N.C. "But it is a sin to allow entrenched and systemic poverty in the richest nation on Earth."
For two days, residents stood up in churches, town halls and community centers in the six counties to lay out the full dimensions of lives circumscribed by poverty.
In Beaufort County, Charlette Blackwell Clark told of trying and failing to raise enough cash to remove a tree that had collapsed on her mobile home, crushing the roof. She's a member of what demographers call the working poor. She cleans neighbors' homes for cash; her husband, Noah, is a trash collector. Between them, they barely earn enough to survive day to day -- they can't pay $2,000 to remove a tree.
In Roper, town clerk Dorenda Gatling told of reluctantly cutting off town water service to friends and neighbors unable to pay their bills -- most of them low-wage workers or elderly people on fixed incomes. It pains her, Gatling said, because she has endured unemployment and hand-to-mouth living herself. But because the town itself is strapped for cash, she said, she had no choice but to "aggressively collect."
In Elizabeth City, the Rev. Tony Rice welcomed the tour to the cramped homeless shelter he runs. It's the only men's shelter within 100 miles, he said. It can accommodate just seven men a night. With the county's homeless rate rising along with the poverty rate (23%), there are more than a thousand homeless people seeking shelter in the city every night.
Gene Nichol, director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, listened to dozens of people pour out their life stories. Poverty is far more than cold statistics, he told one gathering, "it lives in wounds to the human heart," he said.
And federal poverty statistics tell only part of the story, tour leaders insisted. The federal poverty earnings threshold of $22,113 per year for a family of four is too low; families earning more than that amount also live in poverty, they said.
In Halifax County in northeastern North Carolina, for instance, the federal poverty rate is 26.2%. But a working family of four actually needs $46,120 a year to afford basic living expenses in the county, according to the N.C. Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group.
In Scotland Neck, a poverty-stricken northeastern North Carolina town that is 70% black, James Mills took the tour on a walk through the black part of a town he says is largely segregated by race.
Mills served two terms as the town's first black mayor. He was voted out of office last fall.
Mills pointed out ramshackle homes and trailers occupied by blacks, and the ruins of abandoned houses along potholed streets. Then he suggested that tour members drive through the predominantly white side of town, where he said roads are well paved and public services are far better.
As Mills spoke, a backhoe raised a racket while removing a large tree that had fallen onto a small house last summer. Mills said he had tried for months as mayor to get the city to remove the tree but was told that no facilities were available.
"Today, with y'all due to show up on your tour," the deposed mayor told the poverty tour, "it looks like the city decided it could find the energy and the facilities to clear out that tree."
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Immediate Release
19 December 2011
Contact: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137
Mrs. Amina J. Turner, Executive Director, 919-682-4700
Atty. Al McSurely, Communications Chair, lawyers@mcsurely.com
WE HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO THIS SEASON
Statement of the NC NAACP State Conference
The North Carolina State Conference of over 120 Adult and Youth Branches is focused on its century-old mission to create a society of justice and opportunity often marred by injustice, racial inequality and oppression. In this season of peace and love, former Wake School Board Chairperson Ron Margiotta has attacked the Wake County District Attorney's office for suggesting mediation in the 18-month-old cases stemming from acts of conscience of 30 people. Mr. Margiotta has no authority over these matters.
Regardless of how the court adjudicates and the disposition of these cases, the NAACP and its allies have better things to do than respond to Mr. Margiotta's bitterness during this Christmas season.
We are continuing our work to push and fight for high-quality, constitutional, well-funded diverse public education across the state and nation.
We are hard at work defending voting rights standing for freedom, and ensuring that we expand participation in our democracy.
We are hard at work on our Annual No Room in the Inn Service on Christmas Eve Day, in solidarity with our Latino neighbors and friends.
We are hard at work on our Truth and Hope Poverty Tour to highlight the structural and exigent poverty that plagues much of our state.
We are hard at work with our allies to fight the far-right's cynical attempt to codify discrimination in the noble pages of our state constitution by attempting to roll back the rights of gay people and their children.
And we are hard at work mobilizing thousands for our 6th Annual Historic Thousands on Jones Street People's Assembly Coalition made up of more than 110 progressive organizations that will convene on February 11th, the 103rd birthday of the NAACP.
Sorry, Mr. Margiotta. We have better things to do than to dignify your attacks on the Wake County District Attorney.
The NAACP is here for the long haul. We work daily, on a volunteer basis, for all our children . . .for all the poor . . . for all the elderly and the sick and the hungry.
Furthermore, standing firmly on the legacy of those who have come before us, we will pray for Mr. Margiotta because we are instructed by the moral text of sacred scripture to pray even for those who attempt to malign or distort our work.
Matthew 5:44
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
Matthew 5:11
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
We ask all our members and allies to pray for you and your family during these days of grace and redemption, and wish you and your family a season of love and joy.
Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.
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Download Legislative Racism, Classim and Regression_Final
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 28, 2011
For More Information: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137
Amina J. Turner, Executive Director, 919-682-4700
Jennifer Marsh, Legal Redress Coordinator, 919-682-4700
A Strange Spirit:
Legislative Racism, Classism and Regression Rather Than an Agenda of Legislative Progress and Prosperity for All North Carolinians
Statement by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II
President, North Carolina NAACP
The General Assembly is required by law to follow the North Carolina Constitution which states in Article 1, Section 2 "all political power is vested in and derived from the people...and is instituted solely for the good of the whole." They should be upholding Article 1, Section 19 of the North Carolina Constitution, which ensures "no person shall be denied equal protection of the laws; nor shall any person be subjected to discrimination by the State because of race, color, religion, or national origin." The Constitution calls us to a higher place where a "divide and conquer" strategy has no place.
Despite the noble call of our Constitution there is a strange spirit in the halls of the North Carolina General Assembly. The NC General Assembly reconvened last night with two major agenda items: to repeal the Racial Justice Act and pass a Voter Photo ID law that, if accomplished, would have a disparate impact on African Americans, the elderly and other minorities.
These efforts point to an extremist agenda that can be called nothing less than Legislative Racism, Classism and Regression rather than an agenda of Legislative Progress and Prosperity for all North Carolinians.
To be clear, racism and classism are not only overt actions or even the personal feelings and intentions among individual legislators. But to place into public policy an agenda that you know will have a deep and disparate impact on minorities and the poor is Legislative Racism, Classism and Regression.
It is Legislative Racism, Classism and Regression when a southern Legislature chooses to fight against the Racial Justice Act, which gives the courts an opportunity to review more information to ensure race is not a factor in anyone's death sentence. We know from our bloody history that the only place where people are not concerned whether someone is being executed because of their race is the lynching tree. At the lynching tree, the mob doesn't want to know more information about the circumstances of the defendant's trial and crime.
It is Legislative Racism, Classism and Regression when a state wants fewer people to vote. A voter photo ID requirement could impact close to a million North Carolinians. Twelve percent of African American voters lack an ID, while only 6.7% of white voters lack an ID. African American voters make up 27% of the 555,000 North Carolina voters who have no ID at all. Nearly a third of our elderly, to whom we owe so much do not have an ID. Many of them can remember a time when people died so that African Americans and other minorities could vote.
It is Legislative Racism when our General Assembly uses high-paid, out-of-state consultants to create redistricting maps that pick apart black communities block-by-block, person-by-person to ensure their political prosperity at the expense of the power of the African American vote.
It is Legislative Regression and Racism when the General Assembly passes a budget making the largest cuts to education in the history of our state. $1.25 billion has been cut. We are now sadly 49th in the nation for per pupil spending. The cuts will have a disparate impact on African Americans and other minorities who depend on public education as the primary way out of the indignity of poverty.
It is Legislative Regression when the General Assembly attempts to codify discrimination into the very heart and framework of our Constitution. Without any public comment, they placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot that is a direct attack on our LGBT sisters and brothers and their families, and set the stage for the first constitutional amendment in the history of North Carolina that would narrow protections rather than expand protections to all persons, and to remedy past injustices.
It is Legislative Racism and Classism when a General Assembly passes a budget that violates the constitutional rights of poor and minority four-year-old children in North Carolina. Our General Assembly severely cut pre-kindergarten programs this year--143 years after Blacks and Whites came together in Raleigh to create a constitution guaranteeing a sound, basic, public education for all North Carolinians.
It is Legislative Classism and Regression when the General Assembly tries to withhold federal unemployment benefits to over 45,000 North Carolinians, money that they had no right to deny from hard working families.
It is Legislative Racism, Classism and Regression when the General Assembly passes a budget that cuts 15.5% from the University of North Carolina system, which will have a devastating impact on minority, poor, and first generation college students. Across the UNC system, and in particular at HBCU's and other under-financed institutions, students are already desperately trying to figure out how to stay in school--if they haven't dropped out already.
It is Legislative Racism and Classism when the General Assembly slashes funding to the Indigent Defense Services and underpays public defenders, who are often the only hope for young black men and women to escape an often unequal and unfair criminal justice system.
What is tragic about the Racist, Classist and Regressive Legislative Agenda of the current leadership in the General Assembly is that, amidst their attempts to take us backwards, they ignore the crisis of unemployment and poverty in North Carolina, and in particular in the African American and Latino communities who have been in crisis long before the current recession hit other segments of the community.
We will not be discouraged, but will push forward. We will continue to fight until we study Regression, Classism and Racism no more.
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Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.
Download 11.30.11_Final Statement on Senate's Vote to Repeal the RJA_PDF
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 29, 2011
For More Information: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137
Amina J. Turner, Executive Director, 919-682-4700
Jennifer Marsh, Legal Redress Coordinator, 919-682-4700
Shame Fills the People's House
(DURHAM)- As expected, the North Carolina Senate voted yesterday to repeal the historic Racial Justice Act. The Act was passed only two years ago to begin the difficult task of eliminating race discrimination from N.C.'s criminal justice system. The Racial Justice Act Repeal Bill now sits on the Governor's desk. The North Carolina NAACP and its 110+ partners in the Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ) People's Assembly are hopeful she will veto the Repeal the RJA Bill. We believe the Racial Justice Act she signed and celebrated two years ago should be given a chance to begin its work.
The Conference of 44 Elected District Attorneys provided the impetus to destroy the RJA. First they wrote a letter "on behalf of 44 District Attorneys" (actually only 42, since the two Black D.A.'s distanced themselves from the Repeal the RJA agenda) that contained wild distortions of the truth. Yesterday they organized victims of horrendous murders to come to the Senate microphone to repeat the horror they had suffered. Many of us in the NAACP could tell similar stories, and other victims' families spoke in favor of the RJA yesterday, as they have in the past. This has nothing to do with the ethical duty of the District Attorneys to be "ministers of justice" and to uphold the Constitution, which bans race discrimination in State actions.
The NC NAACP asked the D.A.'s to disassociate themselves from the gross distortions written on their behalf two weeks ago. And we have made a public records request for the documents of this state agency referring to the drafting and dissemination of the distorted letter.
Yesterday, the Senate leadership allowed the DA's shameful shepherding of the families of murder victims to the microphone to speak against a law that will bring closer the day of real justice. The NAACP would never make light of the heartbreaking experiences of murder victims' families. Our community has experienced more than its share of these experiences. However, when the leaders of the Conference of District Attorneys spend taxpayer's money to travel to Raleigh and manipulate the pain of victims' families for their agenda to take North Carolina backwards, the NC NAACP and all North Carolinians have a responsibility to say: Shame! Shame!
Ms. Susan Doyle, Mr. Ben David and Ms. Peg Dorer, the President, President-elect and Executive Director, respectively, of the NC Conference of District Attorneys, must open their files and e-mails, and explain to the taxpayers how the 42 White D.A's stooped to support shameful misrepresentations in their letter, and their shameful use of the families' sorrow to achieve the far right's objectives to take us back to the days of Jim Crow. North Carolina knows from its bloody history that the only place where people are not concerned whether someone is being executed because of their race is at the base of the lynching tree. At the lynching tree, the mob doesn't want to know more information about the circumstances of the defendant's trial and crime.
The Racial Justice Act is not a "fishing expedition" as Republican leader Paul "Skip" Stam called it. The Act provides the courts with a tool to ensure race did not play a role in any death sentence. To deny the courts this tool to measure the impact of racial bias on a death penalty trial is akin to denying a doctor the ability to measure a patient's blood pressure to diagnose her patient's condition. Racial bias is a fact that we ignore at our own peril.
Defendants with White victims are 2.6 times more likely to receive the death penalty than if their victims are African-American. Potential African-American jurors are dismissed from juries at over twice the rate of their White counterparts. Thirty-one defendants on death row were sentenced by all-White juries. And 38 more defendants were sentenced to death by juries with only one person of color. The Racial Justice Act provides access to these statewide facts, in addition to the facts of local and regional courts. These patterns of racial bias are not coincidental. The Racial Justice Act includes the use of numerical facts to show the larger scope of how racism plagues the death penalty system. This self-perpetuating system is intact and powerful. It goes way beyond acts of overt racism, such as when a prosecutor refers to the defendant with the n-word, or wears a "noose" pin while giving his closing argument. The use of these numerical facts, or statistics, is an unbiased way to show intentional or unintentional bias.
The use of these numerical facts does not ensure a defendant who files an appeal under the Racial Justice Act will automatically have his or her sentence changed to life in prison without parole. Judges will review each case. If the claims are without merit, the court will dismiss them. Only if the claims prove that racial bias played a part in the defendant's receiving a death sentence will they receive relief of life in prison without parole under the Racial Justice Act. Not a single person will ever be released from prison under the Racial Justice Act. Neither does it nullify the application of the death penalty.
The Racial Justice Act revealed what the Racial Justice Movement argued all along: Racism hurts White people too. If a White person is more likely to be sentenced to death because he or she murdered a White person instead of a person of color, the Act gives the courts the opportunity to correct that disparity. Whether Black, Latino, White, Asian or Native American, all persons' right to an impartial jury of his or her peers requires a cross-section of our communities. The Michigan State study shows that this right is being systematically violated by the disproportionate percentage of minorities ejected from jury service. Make no mistake about it, the crowd that is upset because White men on death row are filing claims under the Act would be screaming reverse racism if they were not permitted to do so.
We know with seven men having been exonerated from death row in North Carolina, five African-Americans, one Latino and one European-American, we have living proof that the system is flawed. Two years ago, pro-death penalty and anti-death penalty proponents, victims' families and exonerees all came together to pass the Racial Justice Act because they wanted to see a fair justice system instead of a biased one.
We urge the Governor to protect the Racial Justice Act in its entirety and veto Senate Bill 9.
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Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.
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Download Complaint Exec Summary 11 4 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 2, 2011
More Information:
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President, 919-394-8137 Mrs. Amina Turner, Executive Director, 919-682-4700 Atty. Jennifer Marsh, Legal Redress Coordinator, 919-682-4700 Atty. Irv Joyner, Legal Redress Chair, 919-530-6293 Atty. Al McSurely, Communications Chair, lawyers@mcsurely.com
DURHAM - Yesterday, after it spent 60 days looking at a cleverly designed scheme to resegregate voters in North Carolina, the U.S. Department of Justice informed us that the U.S. Attorney General did not "interpose any objection" to the scheme. The next sentence in the letter said, "However, we note that Section 5 expressly provides that the failure of the Attorney General to object [to a redistricting scheme] does not bar subsequent litigation (our emphasis) to enjoin the enforcement of the changes."
That's exactly what we shall do this Friday morning at 10:00 a.m. in Wake County Superior Court. We are honored to be co-plaintiffs with the League of Women Voters, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and Democracy, NC -- organizations that have had their hands on the Plow of Democracy for a long time -- as we file a lawsuit asking our North Carolina courts to stop this cleverly disguised race-based scheme.
We shall sue the leaders of the NC House and Senate, Thom Tillis and Phil Berger. They paid good taxpayer money to outside consultants to develop a scheme to resegregate minority voters and dilute our voting power.
These consultants know that blatant Jim Crow acts are illegal, so they came up with their James Crow schemes instead. Jim Crow used blunt tools. James Crow uses surgical tools to cut out the heart of black political power. James Crow uses high-tech, clever consultants to pick apart black communities block by block and increase the prosperity of a few Americans by trying to divide, segregate, and fool the rest of us.
We also name the State of North Carolina and the State Board of Elections as defendants in our lawsuit, since they are charged with carrying out this race-based plan.
We welcome the media to join us at the Wake County Courthouse at 10:00 a.m., Friday morning, November 4, 2011, where our attorneys from Southern Coalition for Social Justice will distribute copies of our filed complaint. A news conference will follow.
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