Voices

It’s our last issue before the primary election— that’s Tuesday, March 3—so we’ll turn over this space to critics of our endorsements.

voices

No Rest for the Dead Even in the grave, Black people aren’t immune to the struggle in Durham.

BY ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS @alexispauline

First up, ROBIN KIRK argues for keeping Steve Unruhe on the Durham County Board of Education: “Steve has deep experience working to better our schools as a teacher and adviser (to the Riverside Pirates’ Hook, which my son wrote for). As an elected official, he and his fellow board members have made huge strides in improving our ever-changing schools for all children, including by promoting more cultural awareness and ESL support, better pay and teacher support, and changes in disciplinary policies to ensure more kids get help and stay in school. For me, Steve has the teaching experience and proven leadership ability to continue that vital work.”

In that race—we endorsed Alexandra Valladares— DONNA KING is upset that we didn’t mention Paula Januzzi-Godfrey, whom she describes as perhaps “the most qualified candidate ever to run for the Durham school board. Her platform is progressive and ambitious, and her professional history as a parent, teacher, instructional coach, mentor teacher, and in so many other roles across many schools and settings in Durham would make her a real voice for the people ‘on the ground’—especially in our most challenged schools.”

Several writers pushed back against our recommendation of Amy Fowler over Mark Marcoplos for Orange County commissioner. Among them, BARRY JACOBS: “You suggest someone ‘a little more skeptical’ than Marcoplos might have better served the county’s fiscal interests in working to advance light rail. Yet you have heartily endorsed without similar qualification both an incumbent Durham County commissioner and a mayor far more vociferous in supporting GoTriangle’s plans. You question the expenditure of a large chunk of county funds to address climate change and criticize the lack of a predetermined plan that accommodates public input. Then you turn around and praise a challenger for embracing collaborative decision-making. You also criticize the climate change expenditure in a county ‘already among the highest-taxed counties in the state.’ Yet you endorse a pair of challengers from a Board of Education that perpetually complains it is starved for funds and can’t tame its capital needs or close a huge, persistent achievement gap.”

WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD? indyweek.com backtalk@indyweek.com @IndependentWeekly @indyweek

When it rains, it floods—at least in Beechwood Cemetery.

Water clouds the names on the once-flat headstones in the section reserved for African American veterans of foreign wars. The metal rusts. In some cases, the careful symmetry of those who wore uniforms is interrupted by headstones now crooked with the weight of history, although their stone inscriptions say they were placed not long ago.

We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of Beechwood Cemetery, founded in 1923 as a public repository for the segregated dead.

What does that mean? In addition to being a contemporary burial site, Beechwood is where Black people go when they are evicted from what would have been their final homes. That was the original purpose of Beechwood, and generations of ancestors ended up here when they were uprooted from the historic Wolf Den Cemetery, also known as Violet Park, now a parking lot. (If you walk around the perimeter of the new, smooth parking lot, you’ll see headstones and markers intertwined with the roots of the trees.) Beechwood is where you went if you were exhumed from the historic Geer Cemetery because the city deemed it overcrowded, and it was one of the repositories for over a thousand graves moved from the Crest Street neighborhood to make room for Highway 147. A couple of months ago, I wrote that the cars driving along 147 were driving through ghosts. I didn’t know they were literally driving over the soil of displaced graves. How can we think differently about this moment of rapid development and shifting earth? What if we acknowledge that the displacement of Black people in Durham is not new, nor is it limited to the living.

Even in death, Black people have not been able to rest without a fight.

Durham let the city’s Black dead wait half a century before creating a public cemetery. First, Maplewood Cemetery was established in 1872 for Durham’s white deceased. And as Pauli Murray writes in Proud Shoes, the rifle of a Confederate memorial pointed directly out of that cemetery toward the back of her grandfather’s house, where she grew up. But again, we can’t only look above ground. More than a hundred years ago, Murray’s grandfather, a Union Civil War veteran, started complaining to the city that drainage pipes flowed directly onto his property, eroding the foundation of his house. The city ignored him. The water flowing through the decomposed remains of the Confederate dead threatened Black housing. So when it rains, it pours. Over a hundred years later, thanks to the work of the Pauli Murray Project, the drainage flow has finally been shifted. Can you imagine the current city government making a developer wait a hundred years for infrastruc ture changes—or even one?

Documentary artist Anthony Patterson grew up in the Crest Street neighborhood, one of the few communities able to mitigate the impact of 147 on their lives. Patterson’s research has shown that his community has existed for about as long as Durham has been incorporated. When he was growing up in the wake of highway construction, people would say that he and the other children were playing on the site of unmarked graves.

His mother was involved in keeping track of who was where when the highway displaced what Patterson’s grandfather says was the central burial ground for Black people on the west side. The Crest Street organizers sought to preserve New Bethel Baptist Church (which recently celebrated 140 years) and to continue to attend to those graves as best they could.

New Bethel continues to be a site of progressive com munity building. And across the highway in New Bethel Memorial Gardens, you can see generations: headstones put up just this year, worn headstones that are not engraved but are beautifully embedded with small white stones, and those markers engraved without birthdates, signs of those ancestors who society suggests were not born but were instead made in the crucible of slavery.

By contrast, on the other side of the tree line is an abandoned white cemetery where large headstones with some of the city’s most prominent slaveholding names are overgrown with thorns, untended for decades.

In this moment, when progress seems to flood in one direction, and Durham can’t help but be carried away, we should ask the Patterson family, the New Bethel community, the people who insisted on access to each other, to loved ones living and dead, how they held tight to one another’s hands and stayed rooted in shifting ground.

I, for one, had to pay my respects in that welltended garden. W Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.