Richard Fausset

LaPLACE, La. — The New York artist Dread Scott was standing in a tiny traffic island in this working-class suburb west of New Orleans on a recent afternoon near the EZ Stop convenience store. He had come to point out a single sentence on a historical marker, one unheeded by the truck drivers barreling down Airline Highway: “Major 1811 slave uprising organized here.”

“That’s the only marker anywhere in the United States, as far as I know,” Scott said, that mentions the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. He gestured toward one of the oncoming trucks, his voice shifting into a sardonic gear: “I’m pretty sure that guy didn’t read it.”

The remedy Scott is planning, for Nov. 8 and 9, is likely to be the most ambitious artwork thus far in his long career as a radical multidisciplinary artist: A large-scale re-enactment of the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which as many as 500 enslaved people of African descent marched toward New Orleans from the surrounding sugar plantations in an inspiring, but eventually doomed, effort to win their freedom.

“It was a really buried history that a lot of people didn’t know, and it needed to be known.” he said. “And these people were heroes.”

Scott, 54, first generated widespread notoriety in 1989 as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an installation that seemed to encourage viewers to tread on the American flag and led to efforts to amend federal law to make it a crime to display the flag on the ground. In his 27 years in New York he has become a fixture on the gallery scene with works that highlight the plight of the dispossessed and the injustices suffered by his fellow African-Americans.

Like the flag piece, which sent thousands of veterans and other protesters into the streets of Chicago, his planned Louisiana re-enactment, which will be documented by British filmmaker John Akomfrah, has already managed to seep beyond the art world and into the broader public imagination. Organizers expect 300 or more people of color — teachers, lawyers, artists, students, activists — to participate. Over two days, they will march 26 miles in period costumes, armed with prop machetes and muskets and chanting for their freedom.

Some will be on horseback. Some will carry flags. They will pass near oil refineries and subdivisions and trailer homes along the Mississippi River, creating anachronistic tableaus that Scott hopes will spur meditations on the modern-day meanings of oppression and crisis.

He hopes it will force people to think about who the real heroes were in the 19th-century South and encourage participants to reflect on their forebears’ bravery and sacrifice.

It already has. “It’s about the way my ancestors were reared — I’d like to see the way they experienced it,” said a re-enactor, Jackie Patterson, 60, an elementary school teacher who was standing in the hectic fitting rooms of the project’s costuming department on a recent afternoon. The costuming team had just transformed Patterson into a plausible 19th-century rebel with a simple skirt, a floral-print shawl and a coppery red tignon, the headwrap women of color wore during that period.

The re-enactors’ triumphant final march through the French Quarter on Saturday will reimagine the outcome of the actual rebellion, which was viciously suppressed and ended with some of the rebels’ heads on pikes.

“It’s just good for us,” said Dorthy Ray, 26, the project coordinator. “Returning to a historical narrative but at the same time moving forward. You get to camp out with black people, and walk for miles with nothing but black people.

“And it’s not because somebody died,” she added, “I feel like that hardly ever happens. It’s like we always get together for tragedy, but never just for celebration.”

Organizers say funding for the re-enactment has come from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute, as well as other institutional and individual donors.

So far, their plan has generated little pushback or controversy, although they are taking security seriously and coordinating with law enforcement across three parishes. (Scott asked that the exact route not be published for security reasons.) Karen Kaia Livers, a New Orleans actress charged with community outreach for the project, said she has received “100% support” from Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a white Republican who is Louisiana’s chief tourism official.

Nungesser’s office declined to comment for this article, but his quiet support is emblematic of a complex moment in the South as it confronts and recalibrates the story of its brutal racist past. Nungesser was so opposed to the recent removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans that he wrote to President Donald Trump, pleading for him to intervene. Yet his office is also in the process of planning a Civil Rights Trail across the state.

There is no question the re-enactment will contribute to the broader conversation about memorials and Southern history that was catalyzed by the 2015 massacre of nine African-American churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina. New Orleans removed some of its most high-profile Confederate monuments in 2017 after street protests in which hundreds of anti-racist activists confronted scores of alt-right defenders.

Today, the bases of a couple of statues remain — transformed, in a way, into knotty conceptual pieces themselves.

Scott’s idea for the project predates the Trump presidency; he has been planning it for more than six years. The re-enactment, he said, is not about slavery, but self-emancipation — “and people who had the boldest and most radical idea of freedom in the United States at that time.” Some believe the rebels wanted to seize all of Orleans Territory, which includes present-day New Orleans, and establish a state where human bondage was abolished. Scott said he wanted to show how everyday people had “resisted a brutal system of enslavement that everybody would think was unjust, and see this was the only way they could get free — and then they could draw conclusions about how people need to get free today.”

With a wide mohawk and spectacles, Scott, who was born Scott Tyler, speaks quickly and precisely, with a hint of accent from his native Chicago, where he grew up on the punk rock of the Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys, and found art-school inspiration in the original Dadaists and contemporary conceptual artists like Hans Haacke.

His previous pieces have addressed the victims of United States bombings abroad and police violence against people of color at home. As a self-proclaimed communist, he hopes his slave revolt re-enactment will show what radical solutions look like at a time when he believes the country, and the planet, need more than just incremental change.

“Their solution was to end slavery,” he said of the original rebels, “not to form a super PAC and see only if they could get whipped Monday through Friday.”

For the revolt project, he said, he found inspiration in the Soviets’ 1920 re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, which took place three years after the actual event, and “The Battle of Orgreave,” a film by the British artist Jeremy Deller that re-created a clash between striking miners and the police in 1984. He also looked to the African-American painter Jacob Lawrence and his depictions of heroes of the Haitian Revolution, which was a likely influence on the Louisiana rebels.

Not everyone is on board with the project. Malcolm Suber, a New Orleans activist who helped lead the movement to take down the Confederate statues, backed out of the re-enactment project, saying that the emphasis is too much of an “art piece” and “not on the organizing of the black community to resist ongoing racism and oppression.”

But Scott’s vision is being realized with the help of a small army of creative local citizens. Luther Gray, 67, a well-known drummer here, has been working out rhythms to accompany the re-enactors in battle formation. At a recent rehearsal, he and others hammered out a 6/8 beat on log drums inspired by the Haitian yanvalou rhythm. “It sounded like war, man,” Gray said.

The costume designer is Alison Parker, who has outfitted large Hollywood productions. Parker said she first looked to American art of the period but found it to be untrustworthy, slanted toward “propaganda” about “happy” people in bondage. She ended up relying on detailed descriptions of clothing culled from advertisements seeking the return of runaway slaves.

The story of the uprising had not been completely hidden. An activist named Albert Thrasher wrote a book on the topic that was locally published in 1995. Daniel Rasmussen wrote his Harvard undergraduate thesis about the revolt and turned it into the 2011 book “American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt.”

Still, Livers, the actress, said that she remembers finding “one little paragraph” about the uprising in a history book, and was inspired to write a play about it. In the late 1990s, she took the play to a majority-black summer camp in central Louisiana. When the camp’s black organizers learned about the nature of the play, she said, they were “shocked.” That, in turn, shocked her.

“To talk about the fact of being enslaved is uncomfortable,” she said.

But in recent months, Livers found a more enthusiastic buy-in as she introduced the idea to officials and community leaders in St. John the Baptist Parish, home of LaPlace, and St. Charles Parish, where much of the march will take place.

She found an ally in the Rev. Donald R. August Sr., 62, whose Rising Star Baptist Church is on land that was once the Andry plantation, where the revolt began. “There is a sense of uneasiness that can be felt by those who feel that this may stir some of the wrong emotions, and may stir some of the wrong responses,” said August, who plans to join the march, along with some church members. He felt it was more important to recover a history that many knew very little about. “We do Confederate re-enactments all the time,” he said.

The old plantation house is still intact and a short walk away from August’s church. It was recently purchased and restored, and will soon be the home of a museum that will honor the 1811 uprising, the Reconstruction era and the Creole jazz trombonist Edward Ory, known as Kid, who was born on the plantation in 1886 to mixed-race parents.

John McCusker, 56, Ory’s biographer, is leading the museum plan, part of a growing movement that seeks to use the old plantation homes along the River Road to tell the unvarnished truth about the African-American experience, rather than the moonlight-and-magnolias myth, as they have for many years.

McCusker, who is white, said that he has volunteered to play Manuel Andry, the plantation owner, who survived an ax attack at the beginning of the uprising. “I’ll be taking an ax for the team,” he said, grinning.

But McCusker was mostly serious about the playacting to come. His ancestors were sugar planters near the town of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, who once owned hundreds of slaves, a fact that he finds appalling.

“I told Dread,” he said, “that from my point of view, this is going to re-sanctify and cleanse the land.”

This article originally appeared in

(Surfacing)

An Artist's March to Freedom

By Thursday morning, the Category 2 storm was about 50 miles from Charleston, South Carolina, as it continues its creep up the East Coast, according to the National Hurricane Center. And while the eye of the storm has so far remained offshore, the center’s models show it could possibly make landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Friday.

Forecasters said storm surge waters could flood up to 8 feet in some areas.

Dorian’s rain bands were whipping cities from Savannah, Georgia, to Wilmington, North Carolina, and places along the coast could receive as much as 15 inches of rain before the storm departs. Approximately 360,000 South Carolinians have been evacuated from their homes. The storm has already knocked out power for about 200,000 customers in South Carolina, as well as 12,800 in Georgia.

The wind began howling and groaning in Charleston around 2 a.m., bending trees to its will, downing power lines and toppling trees.

By daybreak, it felt as though the storm had fully arrived. Streets were flooding, and local TV forecasters, urging people to remain in their homes, warned that the worst of the storm would be felt in Charleston through at least noon. Charleston County government officials ordered residents to stay off high-span bridges, given sustained winds of more than 30 mph. City government posted a running online tally of flooded and impassible streets.

“Remember, TURN AROUND, DON’T DROWN,” the Charleston Police tweeted.

Charleston has accrued deep hurricane experience in recent years, as well as deep scars — particularly from Hurricane Hugo, which hit the city hard in September 1989. At the time, computer storm tracking was not as sophisticated as it is today and social media did not exist. Many residents were caught unprepared as the storm toppled buildings or blew them away.

Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people in South Carolina, and damaged or destroyed more than 21,000 homes statewide. According to author Brian Hicks, it also marked a turning point in Charleston history. With many older, less steady buildings damaged beyond repair, Joe Riley, the mayor at the time, saw an opportunity with so many patches of blank canvas to fill in and helped revitalize the city.

At least two tornadoes had touched down in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, said Pat Dowling, the city’s public information officer.

One of the tornadoes was “pretty sizable,” he said, and though it damaged a couple of condominium buildings and a mobile home park near the intercoastal waterway, there were no injuries and everybody was safe.

The outer bands of Hurricane Dorian were also reaching north to Wilmington, North Carolina, slamming the area with heavy rain and winds — and causing at least one tornado.

Dorian’s center was far away, but its tropical-storm-force winds extended nearly 200 miles from its center, and its effects could be felt in Wilmington, a port city of about 122,000 on North Carolina’s southeastern coast. The National Weather Service’s local office warned that even if the eye avoids landfall, the city would experience winds equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane.

Thursday would be a day of “high risk for flash flooding in southeastern North Carolina, and we know too well that floodwaters can be deadly,” Gov. Roy Cooper said Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Cooper announced that an 85-year-old man in Columbus County had died after falling off a ladder while preparing for the storm.

Wilmington is under a storm surge warning through Sunday morning, and forecasters said water could rise between 4 and 7 feet in some areas. Many of the neighborhoods along Cape Fear River, which flows through the city toward Fayetteville, were expected to flood.

Officials in New Hanover County, which includes Wilmington, said a shelter at an elementary school had filled up but that two others still had room.

Wilmington is no stranger to hurricanes. Hurricane Florence dumped rain on the city and swelled its rivers in 2018, essentially cutting it off from the rest of the state. Residents lost electricity for several days.

And residents still recall the devastation from Hurricane Matthew in 2016, which turned streets into rivers and took many residents by surprise.

Category 2 Hurricane Dorian Pounds Carolinas

Hurricane Dorian was pounding much of the Carolina coast with heavy rain and strong winds Thursday, spawning small tornadoes and causing widespread power losses and flooding.

The storm had strengthened to Category 3 late Wednesday night, and by Thursday morning it was about 70 miles from Charleston, South Carolina, according to the National Hurricane Center. Its hurricane-force winds were extending as far as 60 miles from the center, with tropical-storm-force winds extending up to 195 miles.

Forecasters said storm surge waters could flood up to 8 feet in some areas. Streets in Charleston were already flooding on Thursday with rising seas and rainfall expected to inundate parts of the city.

Though the storm’s eye has remained offshore on its move up the East Coast, the National Hurricane Center’s models show it could possibly make landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Friday.

On Thursday, Dorian’s rain bands were whipping cities from Savannah, Georgia, to Wilmington, North Carolina, and places along the coast could receive as much as 15 inches of rain before the storm departs. Approximately 360,000 South Carolinians have been evacuated from their homes. The storm has already knocked out power for about 200,000 customers in South Carolina, as well as 12,800 in Georgia.

Local TV forecasters were warning that the worst of the storm would be felt in Charleston through at least noon, and urged people to remain in their homes. Charleston County government officials ordered residents to stay off high-span bridges, given sustained winds of more than 30 mph. City government posted a running online tally of flooded and impassible streets.

Hurricane Dorian Prompts Warnings of 8-Foot Storm Surge in Carolinas

Much of the Carolina coast was being pounded by heavy rain and strong winds from the outer bands of Hurricane Dorian on Thursday, as the storm continued to creep on its parallel path north along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

The other candidate was a white ex-congressman from Texas, barreling through South Carolina with an improvisational air of empathetic energy, and acknowledging that his whiteness had given him a leg up in life.

For Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, these recent swings through the South included an overlapping purpose: delivering messages that appeared tailored to black audiences in a region where black women, in particular, will likely be key decision-makers in the Democratic primaries.

But the separate appearances by Harris and O’Rourke also underscored that no single formula exists for winning over black female voters, who received the two candidates with a mix of enthusiasm and caution.

There are others vying for these voters’ attention. Sen. Elizabeth Warren., D-Mass., was in the Mississippi Delta earlier this month talking about affordable housing. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was in Florida, touting how she had been discussing 2020 strategy with Andrew Gillum, the African-American candidate who narrowly lost the Florida governor’s race in November. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has been a near-constant Southern presence the last couple of years, offering his endorsement and oratorical skills to a range of Democratic candidates.

This activity is a demonstration of the belief among 2020 contenders that the hearts and minds of black female voters are up for grabs in the Democratic primaries. Strong potential suitors are still weighing presidential bids, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams, the popular black Democrat from Georgia. For now, Harris, 54, is one of two major black Democratic candidates — along with Booker — and many southern black and liberal voters are excited by the idea of the first black woman president.

While Harris has drawn enthusiastic audiences, she has also faced some criticism that as a former prosecutor and California attorney general, parts of her criminal justice record were insufficiently progressive. And Harris, whose father is from Jamaica and whose mother is from India, has been the target of offensive online memes about her race that have sparked questions among some voters.

On Sunday, as Harris prepared to introduce herself at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, a former New York state corrections officer named Lamarr Robinson brought up both matters. He criticized Harris’ handling of a highly-publicized case of a black death-row inmate whose case was tainted by racism. And Robinson added, “She’s more east Indian than African-American.”

Amid the swelling voices of church’s choir and congregation, Harris emerged from the wings, joined by Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s second black female mayor.

“Let me show you how far we’ve come,” Ebenezer’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, declared from the pulpit. “Atlanta’s got a mayor named Keisha.” The crowd chuckled and cheered.

He added: “We’ve got a presidential candidate named Kamala.”

Warnock argued that Harris’ campaign was “the realization of our ancestors’ wildest dreams.” He spoke of the black trailblazers who had made it possible, from Fannie Lou Hamer, the voting rights activist, to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988.

Harris spoke briefly, telling the congregation that her parents had been civil rights activists in California. She lamented that babies were being “ripped from their parents” at the border and that black parents must still give “the talk” to their children about the racial bias in policing.

The reception at church was warm, but it was closer to ecstatic in the afternoon at the Morehouse College gym, where school officials estimated Harris drew a crowd of 3,000.

The audience was an energized, multicultural mix. Some, like Deliska Cooley, an elementary schoolteacher from Talladega County, Alabama, and her two teenage daughters, had already decided that Harris was their candidate. Cooley said online memes questioning Harris’ blackness were ludicrous.

“I’m a teacher. I have a rainbow in my classroom,” she said.

Her daughter Skyla Cooley, 17, a high school senior, said that she thought Harris was unfairly taking heat for simply being a tough prosecutor.

“We don’t want people not to be prosecuted — we want it to be fair across the board,” she said.

A few seats away, Naquila Gilchrist-Jalajel, 46, a small-business owner, said she had not made up her mind on a candidate; with so many of them, she said, she still had homework to do.

But Gilchrist-Jalajel, who was worried about health care, education and the shrinking middle class, said that she would definitely get out and canvass once she had chosen a candidate. Abrams’ campaign for governor, she said, had converted her from an observer to a participant.

Harris took the stage, strolling around comfortably as she spoke, more animated than she was in church. “What’s up Atlanta?” she said.

She talked about the goal of repealing the Republican tax cut and replacing it with one for the middle class. She talked about addressing climate change more vigorously, and making what she called “the largest federal investment in closing the teacher pay gap.”

Two days earlier, O’Rourke, 46, was driving himself around South Carolina in a minivan, trying to make the case to black voters that he was a white male politician they could trust.

His first stop Friday was in Rock Hill, where he toured the site of the 1961 sit-in staged by a group of African-American civil rights protesters known as the Friendship Nine.

In the afternoon, he was speaking to a modest-sized crowd at South Carolina State University, a historically black campus in Orangeburg. Standing outside of the student center, clutching a microphone and with sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up, O’Rourke railed against an economy “that works too well for too few,” and a “prison industrial complex” that disproportionately affects people of color.

When the mike was passed around for audience questions, the first comment came from a retired nurse, an African-American woman who was worried that the Democrats were presenting too many choices to voters, and thus diluting their power. She wanted to win in 2020.

“As a 63-year-old middle class female, I want to make a note to the Democrats,” she said. “It is getting to be too much. We are getting too divided. Divided we will fall. Together we will stand.”

Later, O’Rourke spoke of the historic injustices perpetrated against black people, from slavery to racist “redlining” that denied them home loans.

“I’m a white man who’s had a privilege in my life; I’m not enduring any one of those things that I’ve just described,” he said. “But I’ve listened to those who have.”

Watching in the back of the crowd were Kadara and Kaywon Nelson, a black couple in their 30s, who had come out to learn more about O’Rourke. They were anti-Trump, but otherwise undecided. The biggest issue for Kadara Nelson, the campus safety compliance officer, was the cost of health care.

“And student loan debt,” said Kaywon Nelson, who works for a pharmaceutical company. “I don’t care about the wall.”

They both said a candidate who could address the country’s issues was more important than finding one who represented their race. Kaywon Nelson made reference to the political themes of the first Obama candidacy.

“I think we’re past that,” he said. “The message has got to be a little stronger, because ‘hope’ hasn’t gotten us much.”

After the presentation, Dr. Tamara J. Jackson, the vice president of student affairs at South Carolina State, said she liked what she heard — particularly O’Rourke’s emphasis on gay rights and ensuring HBCU funding.

She was also impressed, she said, with Booker and Harris.

“I’d like to see a black female as president,” she said, “But I’m not sure America is ready.”

She added: “I pray that I’m wrong about that.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/us/politics/black-women-voting-south.html" id="bce34102-b12b-3849-a848-868c684afd7e">The New York Times</a>.

In 2020 Southern Primaries, Victory for Democrats Begins with Black Women

ATLANTA — One presidential candidate was a black female senator from California, speaking with subdued precision and being received like distant kin at what used to be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Atlanta.

But in recent days, Duke, which has labored to turn around its reputation as a privileged cloister, has brought the plan to a shrieking halt. It unilaterally rejected the proposed light-rail route, which would have cut across its property. And the resulting moral outrage has felt strong enough to power a train.

Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., said he was “appalled” by the university’s decision. Wib Gulley, a former mayor of Durham, compared it to the moment when Duke called in the police “to gas and beat students” amid civil rights protests in 1969.

And Kevin Primus, a former manager of the Duke men’s basketball team, said the rejection of the light-rail plan justified the school’s reputation among some African-Americans like him, who still occasionally refer to it as “the plantation.”

“You have poor and working-class black people who would like to get to better employment in another location, and a whole community collaborating to make this happen, and you have Duke with veto power,” said Primus, 45, a member of a local transit and affordable housing group headed by Gulley.

So goes one of the more bitter and impassioned transportation battles in a country that appears to be of two minds about rail transit and its future role in a culture largely dominated by cars. While some American cities, like Seattle, Denver and Los Angeles, have embraced new transit plans that make extensive use of trains, other recent efforts have been stymied by clumsy politics, high price tags, and resistance of both the strictly ideological and the not-in-my-backyard varieties.

Last May, voters in the increasingly congested city of Nashville voted down a $5.2 billion transit plan that would have included light rail. And California has struggled to realize its ambitions for a high-speed train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite statewide Democratic Party hegemony.

In the South, another closely watched decision on rail transit will come Tuesday, when voters in the populous Atlanta suburbs of Gwinnett County — a former Republican stronghold that is trending Democratic — will decide whether to tax themselves to expand MARTA, the regional rail and transit system, into the county for the first time. Similar plans have been rejected by Gwinnett voters in the past.

Duke officials have said they are not opposed to light rail in general, only to this specific project. But the school’s liberal critics, many of them proud Duke graduates, sounded almost betrayed by the university’s opposition, seeing it as anathema to Duke’s call to “use knowledge in the service of society.”

How, these critics wondered, could one of the world’s greatest universities — one that produced so many of the liberal intelligentsia who run the region — be so dead set against a big, bold, green idea like a light-rail line?

Advocates for the train insist that the proposed 17.7-mile service could combat gridlock by linking Durham and Chapel Hill, home to the University of North Carolina, and would provide access to three major hospitals, as well as the historically black North Carolina Central University in Durham.

They also envision the train as a social justice engine, offering cheap, reliable transportation to the working people who scrape by, cooking and cleaning for the legions of college students in the Research Triangle, the area that includes the two college towns and Raleigh, the state capital.

Indeed, in recent days, as the regional transit authority, GoTriangle, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Duke to donate land for the project, proponents emphasized the history of town-gown tensions between working people in Durham County — a majority-nonwhite community where 27 percent of children live in poverty — and an elite private institution that did not admit a black student until the early 1960s.

“Given the long history of fraught relations between many low-income Durham residents and Duke University, supporting the project would be a brilliant way for Duke to reassert its goodwill to the community,” said a letter to Vincent Price, president of the university, that was signed by more than two dozen members of the university’s Nicholas School of the Environment faculty.

But Duke officials are adamant that their objections to the project are serious and insurmountable. They said construction vibration and electromagnetic interference from the trains might affect sensitive research equipment at Duke’s sprawling medical campus, which the train line would skirt. And they are concerned about the project’s impact on the underground utilities that serve the medical center — and the threat of new lawsuits.

In their official rejection, administrators said the project, as proposed, would “jeopardize community health, public safety and the future viability of our enterprise."

At a packed campus meeting recently, most people in the audience appeared to be in favor of the train, snapping their fingers in assent as speakers questioned Duke’s wisdom. Drew Shindell, an earth science professor, noted that taxpayers in Durham and Orange counties had approved a transit sales tax and that the train had the support of the major local government bodies.

Outside the meeting, Claire Wang, 20, an environmental studies major, Rhodes scholar and co-president of the Duke Climate Coalition, was passing out an information sheet. If Duke killed the plan, she said, it could thwart Durham officials’ broader progressive vision for a growing and rapidly gentrifying city.

“Many of the city plans surrounding sustainable development, poverty alleviation, and affordable housing are all centered on this light-rail project,” she said.

Duke officials bristled at suggestions that the school is insensitive to the needs of its neighbors. They pointed to an increasingly diverse student body, the university’s embrace of a $15 minimum wage, and major programs supporting Durham’s neighborhoods, public schools and public health.

Still, some critics wondered whether Duke was using its stated concerns as an excuse for other, hidden worries about the train. Like many rail projects before it, this one is imperfect and there are a number of opponents besides the university.

The proposed line would not go to the regional airport, for example, nor to Raleigh, although there are future plans for a heavy-rail connection to the capital. The cost of the light-rail line — to be borne by local, state and federal taxpayers — has ballooned beyond $3 billion.

John Morris, a member of a Chapel Hill residents’ group that opposes the train, said that new buses would be cheaper, and quicker to put in place.

“This light-rail project won’t even be on the ground for 10 years and is gobbling up the lion’s share of our dedicated sales tax revenue that would be used for transit,” he said.

Duke’s firm rejection has put the future of the entire project in limbo. The transit authority could choose a different route for the train, which would probably necessitate years of new planning and review, or it could stick to the current route and take the Duke property it needs by eminent domain.

Mark-Anthony Middleton, a Durham City Council member who is African-American, is among those who think the transit authority should consider the eminent domain option, calling it “the unsexy part of the work of racial equality.” A big selling point for the project, he said, was that it would serve predominantly black Durham neighborhoods that were badly hobbled in decades past by urban renewal projects and highway construction.

It is not a question of punishing Duke, said Middleton, who said that he, like many others, hold Duke degrees.

“Duke created this problem in many ways,” he said. “They created the voices and thinkers that are leading this pushback against them.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/duke-durham-light-rail-chapel-hill.html" id="9b033de6-f7e0-34ab-a3bb-e5cd3ced2883">The New York Times</a>.

Durham Dreamed of a Transit Line. Duke University All but Killed It.

DURHAM, N.C. — Political leaders in one of the most progressive parts of the South have dreamed for two decades about an ambitious plan for a transit line connecting Durham, the home of Duke University, with nearby Chapel Hill. Funds were pledged and renderings were drawn.

But something far less festive was unfolding. On the asphalt, a few feet from the taco truck, bright yellow cartons overflowed with knives and sharpening tools, used to debone chickens, left behind by 99 workers who were swept up in a massive federal immigration raid at the plant Wednesday morning.

Many of the people who flocked to the parking lot Friday were relatives of the detained. They had come to claim the tools or drive away some of the dozens of abandoned cars. Others were workers who were documented, or simply not working the Wednesday morning shift when the raid occurred.

Friday was also payday, and the only thing open in the chicken plant was the office that cut the paychecks.

Mostly, people wanted to know what would happen next, when they could return to work and whether the doors that this chicken processing plant had opened for them would close. The raid had been part of a sweeping crackdown across Mississippi at seven work sites, the largest single-state operation of its kind in recent memory,

“Look, I have faith that I’m going to survive, but not 100%” said Betzabeth Carachure Hernandez, the taco vendor, who has parked her truck in the chicken plant lot for 15 years. “Not if most of the Latinos don’t come back.”

In the public imagination, the mythos and moral failures of this state are wrapped up in cotton. In reality, modern Mississippi is a poultry state, accounting for nearly $3 billion of the state’s $7.7 billion agriculture industry in 2017, compared with $623 million for cotton, according to Mississippi State University’s extension service.

Over the last decade or so, in small country cities like Morton, population 3,500, it has been Hispanic workers, many of them living here illegally, who have been most willing to deal with the blood and guts and stench of the business.

They came to Morton to work at PH Food, or to work at the big Koch Foods chicken plant up Highway 80, which spreads its scent around town with the shifting breeze — the smell of dead things not yet rotten. Hispanics made up 13% of the population in 2000 and now account for about a quarter of it.

The numbers are in line with the wave of Latino immigration that has transformed the southern United States. Between 2008 and 2018, the South saw an increase of 33% in its Latino population, more than any other region.

Morton is in Scott County, east of Jackson, historically in the heart of cotton country. Nine lynchings of black residents took place here between 1877 and 1950.

Today, Morton is a mash-up town not unlike like many other small Southern cities. There are signs for boiled peanuts and Envios de dinero — money transfers overseas. There’s a Sonic Drive-In, Maria’s Mercado, a Pizza Hut. A Chinese food place on Fourth Street has signs for English lessons and Spanish lessons. A bilingual sign at City Hall — “Here in — aqui en — Morton” — beckons residents to a circus in town this weekend.

But the raids across the state now have scores of families wondering where they belong, which members might stay and who might be forced to leave. In a store Friday morning, a 36-year-old woman named Juana — who like many unauthorized immigrants declined to give her last name because she feared being targeted by authorities — clutched a bouquet of cilantro, trailed by her 2-year-old daughter, Emily.

Her husband had been picked up Wednesday, she said. He talked to her on the phone Thursday. He was going to be deported, he said.

“It’s horrible. I’m afraid. I’ve lost him,” she said in Spanish. She motioned to her little girl, in pigtails and wearing a shirt that declared, in English, “I’m a princess worth waiting for.”

“She is going to be without her father,” Juana said.

Emily, the little girl, was born in the United States. Juana said it made sense for the two of them to try to stay and make it in America.

“I don’t want to go back” to Guatemala, she said. “There’s violence everywhere.”

In the PH Food parking lot, a Mexican man named Omar, 39, had come for his wife’s tools. She was apprehended Wednesday and transferred to a detention center in Louisiana.

He said he would try to get a lawyer. His wife does not have a criminal record, he said, so he thinks she might have a good chance of being released. And besides, he said, their life is not in Pachuca, the old mining town in south-central Mexico where he grew up and left years ago. It was here in Morton, the only world they know, where they had a house — “paid off,” he said proudly — and raised three American-born children, ages 11, 9 and 6.

On Friday, pallets were stacked high with packing materials and high-grade sodium phosphate inside the chicken processing plant, but the chicken lines were not running.

A supervisor named Jorge Mazariegos took a call on his cellphone. “Monday morning, I’m open, six o’clock, day shift,” he said.

Mazariegos did not think there were enough workers to bring the chicken plant up to full capacity. Perhaps 30%, he said. He did not know what the future might hold.

“I think people are going to leave this state out of fear,” he said — but not necessarily return to Latin America. “They’ll go to Atlanta, or Memphis.”

Beyond the Hispanic community, it was easy to find an alloy of emotions. People said they were empathetic. But they also said they wanted immigrants to stop violating federal immigration law.

“I kind of hate to see it,” said Gerald Neil, a 61-year-old ponytailed bass player and a fan of President Donald Trump. He said he worked with Hispanics and he hated to see families torn apart. “But it comes down to, ‘Are we going to be a nation of laws or not?’”

At a Subway sandwich shop on Highway 80, Markhenry Brauch, 54, of Wheatland, Missouri, said he had been coming to town as a trucker for two years, hauling in chicken feed and hauling out chicken meal.

“At first I got scared,” he said — not so much for the detained people but for the entire industry, from the chicken growers to the millworkers who make the feed. But he was relieved to see that the Koch plant was operational Friday morning.

Mississippi’s immigrant rights infrastructure is as weak as its chicken industry is strong, and this week, activists and lawyers were pouring in from around the Southeast and beyond to offer expertise, representation and succor.

But there has always been an informal network here of Americans looking out for noncitizens during hard times. Sara Ramos, 42, a homemaker, had driven down to Jena, Louisiana, to bail out a family friend in detention there. Her son had sent her links to the news that Koch Foods would be hosting a job fair Monday in Forest, Mississippi, about 11 miles east of Morton, where many workers were swept up in the raids.

Ramos huffed. “I want to see how many American citizens are going to want to take those jobs,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/ice-raids-mississippi.html" id="d9edd604-22b2-3f23-ada9-677eb4fadccf">The New York Times</a>.

After ICE Raids, the Parking Lot Was Crowded, but No One Was There to Work

MORTON, Miss. — From a distance Friday morning, the parking lot of PH Food could have been hosting a flea market. Scores of vehicles were haphazardly parked, and a throng of people milled around. A woman sold tacos al pastor and tacos de asada from the back of a food truck.

And yet Lutz, a 71-year-old internist, is not in the least bit worried about any of it surfacing to embarrass him.

“I figure that since every black person of any prominence I knew was also in that parade” — and also in blackface, he said — “then I was in pretty good company.”

That parade was Zulu, famously staged each carnival morning by the historically African-American philanthropic and social club of the same name. Zulu’s paraders, mostly black but some of them white, wear blackface and grass skirts, a tradition that stems from a 1909 visit that club members made to a theater performance in which black people in blackface portrayed members of the southern African ethnic group.

This month, the revelation that Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia and other white public figures once wore blackface has opened a conversation among New Orleanians about Zulu’s very different blackface tradition — about what it means, who should be allowed to participate, and whether it should continue.

The debate is as intense now as at any moment since midcentury, when some embarrassed black leaders urged the group to give up its costumes. In 1956, Clarence Laws, a former field secretary for the NAACP, called the parade “degrading and depressing,” and “perpetuating a stereotype which self-respecting Negroes detest.”

More than 60 years later, the tradition remains distasteful to some New Orleanians. “It’s always made me cringe,” wrote Jarvis DeBerry, a columnist with the Times-Picayune newspaper, earlier this month on Twitter. “That said, they swear it’s satire.”

Kim Coleman, 29, who like DeBerry is African-American, said this week that she no longer attended Zulu’s parade because of the sight of white people in blackface. “I find that disgusting,” said Coleman, curator of the city’s McKenna Museum of African-American Art.

This particular, and peculiar, blackface debate is at once familiar and different, whirled into some other thing by the complicated semiotic daiquiri machine that is New Orleans — and by the taboo-busting spirit of its carnival season. The pre-Lenten celebration of Mardi Gras, which this year falls on March 5, is a party that has long exposed the city’s serious social divisions, with its parading groups, or krewes, largely hewing to divides between black and white, suburbanite and city-dweller, old money and new.

But Mardi Gras is also about a radical suspension of seriousness. It was in that spirit that Sylvester Francis, 72, founder of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, which displays Mardi Gras Indian suits and other exuberant expressions of black Mardi Gras traditions, defended Zulu this week.

“It’s carnival. Do what you wanna. Be what you wanna,” said Francis, who is black.

“Even the governor,” he added, referring to Northam, “if he wants to wear blackface that one day, nobody would care.”

It was an intentional exaggeration, much like the Zulu costumes themselves. Members of the group and outsiders alike offer various opinions on their meaning and intent. In an interview Wednesday, Zulu’s historian emeritus, Clarence A. Becknell Sr., said the early paraders wore blackface because they were too poor to wear masks. “These people were laborers who started this organization — they couldn’t afford anything,” he said. “And blackface meant nothing.”

In a statement he issued Wednesday, Becknell urged people to not compare or conflate blackface with Zulu’s use of black makeup, calling the latter a way for the group to honor its African ancestry and the “continent’s most fierce warriors.”

There are other theories. Kim Vaz-Deville, an associate dean at Xavier University of Louisiana who has studied carnival, said that Zulu’s use of the black men wearing blackface is a satirical weapon subtly wielded against an exclusionary white society in the midst of the annual grand debauch.

Vaz-Deville said that it became unsafe for black residents to protest their condition after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that enshrined separate but equal accommodations for the races. (The case had been sparked by black New Orleanians testing segregated rail cars). Zulu, she argued, was a sendup of the whites-only carnival krewes that mimicked European royalty while upholding the segregated social order. Early kings wore a lard can for a crown and a banana stalk for a scepter.

“One of the ways that we found that people resist is through satire and irony and parody when they’re in oppressive situations, because it gives the cover of, ‘I’m making fun of you, but this is just a big joke in case you get angry,'” Vaz-Deville said. “They blackened their already-dark skin to say, ‘You white people are putting on white powder and coming from some mythical European space, so in the same way we’re going to darken our faces even more and say we come from a magical mystical place in Africa.”

Either way, the eventual inclusion of white people in Zulu, which Becknell said began in the late 1970s, amped up the complication.

For years, a New Orleanian who saw a white man in blackface on a Zulu float was likely to assume that the rider was either a member or an invited guest of a person of color. Instead of a boorish racist, that white person was likely to be perceived as a racial progressive, one who openly celebrated integration.

So it is with Lutz, who for 13 years served as the city health director and forged lasting friendships with black colleagues, one of whom sponsored him for membership in the mid-1980s. He is probably one of about 10 white men, out of 525 regular members, said Zulu’s president, Elroy James.

Earlier this week, Lutz stopped by the member’s lounge of Zulu Social Aid &amp; Pleasure Club on North Broad Street, the only white face in a crowd of about 30 men. (The club is all-male, but women are involved in a number of its activities.)

He was immediately greeted with warm pats on the back and cries of “Doc!”

In a city over-blessed with good places to have a drink, the members-only Zulu lounge is among the best of them. There was a kind of eased-back, space-age funk on the sound system, the ambience was inviting and cheerful, and the back wall exploded with vibrant photos of Zulu kings past in spectacular glittering costumes. Some were in black face and some were not. Among them was Louis Armstrong, who reigned in 1949.

Most members hewed strictly to rules forbidding them to talk publicly about club business without the consent of the president. But a number of them said the blackface masking was purely positive — a way to honor tradition and the working men, locked out of white Mardi Gras, who had invented the practice long ago.

Later in the week in an interview, state Sen. Troy Carter, a Zulu member for two decades, said that the club’s blackface was in the spirit of African and Native American peoples who painted their faces as a matter of ritual or self-expression. “We’re paying homage to the original Zulu tribes of Africa,” he said.

But black paint on white faces has proved explosive when perceived beyond the membrane of New Orleans.

Coleman, the museum curator, said that her social media feeds had been blowing up with fresh debate over Zulu since Northam’s scandal. She used to attend the Zulu parade every year as a child, she said, but soured on it as she grew older and began questioning the world of New Orleans and her place in it.

She no longer attends. If white people ride on the floats, she said, they should wear a different uniform, no matter their views on race: It was “demeaning,” she said, to have to watch “a white man in black face throwing out coconuts,” a reference to the shaved and painted coconuts that are Zulu’s signature throw, and the most prized of the Mardi Gras loot that rains down from float-riders to spectators. (The coconuts are actually handed, not thrown, for insurance and safety reasons.)

Other black New Orleanians this week said they were as uncomfortable with Zulu’s presentation as the critics of the 1950s and ‘60s. But they were reluctant to speak about it openly. The club, once the province of the working class, is today also stocked with local power brokers, doctors and lawyers, and generations of locals of all races find it difficult to conceive of Mardi Gras day without the spectacle Zulu provides.

It also remains a true social-aid organization, funding toy drives, food drives and scholarship programs.

Vaz-Deville predicted that the new debates would have little affect on the club, whose king proclaims each year that citizens shall endeavor to make merry and “not confuse Mardi Gras with other issues.”

“I think Zulu’s going to party like Zulu always parties,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/us/zulu-parade-new-orleans.html" id="277ec07b-e197-376a-a0d5-7e4008170a1c">The New York Times</a>.

A Black Group Says Mardi Gras Blackface Honors Tradition. Others Call It 'Disgusting.'

NEW ORLEANS — F. Brobson Lutz Jr. is one of those prominent Southern white men who once made a public appearance in blackface. It was at a big Mardi Gras parade years ago, and he knows there is photographic evidence.

Richard Fausset

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