North Carolina Open Thread

NORTH CAROLINA OPEN THREAD for Sunday, September 1, 2019

224th Weekly Edition

This is a weekly feature of North Carolina Blue. We hope this regular platform gives readers interested in North Carolina politics a place to share their knowledge, insight and inspiration as we work on taking back our state from some of the most extreme Republicans in the nation. Please join us every week as we try to Connect, Unite, Act with our North Carolina Daily Kos community. You can also join the discussion in four other weekly State Open Threads.

Colorado: Mondays, 7:00 PM Mountain Michigan: Wednesdays, 6:00 PM Eastern North Carolina: Sundays, 1:00 PM Eastern Missouri: Wednesday Evenings Kansas: Monday Evenings

You can help by adding anything from North Carolina that you would like to highlight, just kosmail me or email at randalltdkos at gmail. Twitter: @randallt

Please jump the fold for recent stories of interest. Thanks for reading and contributing, have a great week!

Gov. Cooper shared the following statement on his veto of House Bill 370:

"This legislation is simply about scoring partisan political points and using fear to divide North Carolina. As the former top law enforcement officer of our state, I know that current law allows the state to jail and prosecute dangerous criminals regardless of immigration status. This bill, in addition to being unconstitutional, weakens law enforcement in North Carolina by mandating sheriffs to do the job of federal agents, using local resources that could hurt their ability to protect their counties. Finally, to elevate their partisan political pandering, the legislature has made a sheriff’s violation of this new immigration duty as the only specifically named duty violation that can result in a sheriff’s removal from office."

A year ago this month, students and activists toppled “Silent Sam,” the Confederate statue that stood on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill for more than a century.

Now community members and students of North Carolina’s flagship university are taking aim at what they call another historical eyesore: campus buildings named for slave owners and avowed white supremacists.

The school currently has a self-imposed moratorium on renaming buildings, but this week, university and UNC system leaders suggested that it is possible, and even likely, that the issue will be revisited.

There was a time in the United States not that many years ago in which K-12 public education was taken as a given – something as fundamental to the health and wellbeing of society as drinking water and law enforcement and public roads.

It may not have always lived up to this ideal (particularly in places where the great evil of racial discrimination and segregation held sway), but it’s fair to say that the American public school classroom was widely understood to be the glue that brought our broadly middle class society together and moved it into the future, the unifying institution that inculcated the fundamental civic values of democracy, and the place where society combated ignorance and superstition and prepared members of the next generation to build a better world.

Tragically, this began to change in the latter part of the 20th Century. In her powerful 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Duke University historian Nancy MacLean makes a compelling argument that the advent of racial integration – and, in particular, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education) – helped spur a conservative resistance movement that served to undermine the general consensus about public education.

A young Black man is accused of killing two white people. White community members begin making baldly racist calls for the suspect to be hanged, shot or otherwise “taken care of” by a gang of vigilantes. The county prosecutor quickly assures the public he will seek the death penalty.

The threats of lynching continue. Even the defense attorneys receive death threats. Yet, the judge refuses to move the trial to another county. When the trial starts, the Black defendant’s family is forced to sit in the back of the courtroom. The prosecutor strikes every last Black person from the jury pool. An all-white jury quickly sentences the defendant to death.

You probably think I’m telling a story from the 1940s. But this happened in 2010 in Iredell County, North Carolina. The defendant was Andrew Ramseur, and I was one of his lawyers.

This week, Andrew’s case will be heard in the North Carolina Supreme Court. He’s one of six death row prisoners arguing under the state’s Racial Justice Act for their right to present evidence that racial bias was a significant factor in their sentences.

Special thanks to NC Policy Watch this week!

Thanks again, see you next week and Happy Labor Day!