North Carolina’s HBCU students are leaders in building a democracy for all

By
February 19, 2021
In Commentary, What's Race Got To Do With It?

RALEIGH – One of the crown jewels of North Carolina is our world-class system of higher education. Among these stellar institutions are our Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

We are one of the top states for HBCU enrollment, with 10 schools serving 40,000 students. These HBCUs are essential to the strength of North Carolina, producing outstanding engineers, attorneys, educators, artists, entrepreneurs and leaders who help shape the destiny of our country.

As we celebrate Black History Month, we recall the rich legacy of brave student activists, of past and present, at North Carolina’s HBCUs who have played a crucial part in the civil rights and Black Lives Matter movements, championing equality and justice for all.

An early example came in February of 1960, when four freshmen at NC A&T State University sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro to defy segregation. Their courageous act sparked a student-led, nationwide sit-in movement that challenged the evils of white supremacy.

That same year, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded on the campus of another North Carolina HBCU, Shaw University in Raleigh. The organization would play a central role in engaging young people in the cause of civil rights.

In these and countless other examples, HBCU students have changed the course of history. The torch is now in the hands of today’s generation. We wish the battle against systemic racism and oppression were things of the past, but we know they are not. We’ve seen repeated attempts at voter suppression in recent years, and new threats loom.

In 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a core part of the Voting Rights Act, the Republican-controlled NC General Assembly rammed through a bill that rolled back voting access in our state. A federal judge later noted that the proposal targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” Thanks to a broad coalition of grassroots advocacy groups, students and everyday people standing up and fighting back, that voter suppression scheme was overturned in court.

In 2016, the GOP-led legislature once again gerrymandered our state’s voting maps. In doing so, lawmakers split the campus of NC A&T State University – the nation’s largest HBCU – into two different congressional districts, fracturing the voting power of that predominantly Black community. Students at NC A&T spoke out, organized and joined the effort to strike down the discriminatory district lines. In 2019, a state court case resulted in the maps being redrawn, and the NC A&T campus was reunited into a single congressional district.

Time and again, HBCU students have been at the forefront of defending democracy, but the work is not done. The former president and his most radical supporters continue to spread destructive lies about the 2020 election as a pretense to undercut ballot access for Black and brown Americans.

Michael Spencer

We must act now to protect voting rights and our Constitution. In North Carolina, we must demand that legislators reject efforts to enact barriers to the ballot box.

At the federal level, Congress should immediately pass the For the People Act. This is a transformative and comprehensive bill that addresses voting rights and election administration, money in politics, government transparency and ethics. The For the People Act includes provisions for automatic voter registration, strengthening ballot access and establishing independent redistricting commissions to end racial and partisan gerrymandering.

The eyes of history are upon us. We must carry on the legacy of standing against suppression and pursuing justice. Together, we can build a democracy that so many dreamed of and worked for – a democracy for us all.

Michael Spencer is the College Outreach Program Manager with Common Cause NC, a nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy.

Legacy of white supremacy continues to create barriers for workers, especially during COVID-19

By
February 8, 2021
In COVID-19, NC Budget and Tax Center, What's Race Got To Do With It?

Black History Month could just as easily be called “American present February.” Nothing in the U.S. is ancient history. Someone who will graduate college this year at age 23 has been alive for nearly 10% of U.S. history, and anyone lucky enough to reach 80 has personally witnessed one-third of the American experience. The presence of the past is particularly plain to see during COVID-19. The mold of the past year was shaped by generations of social and economic policy that layered the burden of COVID-19 most heavily on communities of color.

As a small part of reckoning with our history and celebrating the lives of Black people who have struggled for justice, we’re releasing a few resources over the next few weeks that can be food for thought and reflection.

An overview of what each includes is provided below, but here’s how to skip straight to the resources themselves:

Read more

UNC-Chapel Hill halts diversity hiring program due to budget concerns

By
January 26, 2021
In COVID-19, Education, Higher Ed, News, race, What's Race Got To Do With It?

As UNC-Chapel Hill eyes its budgets due to the financial hit of COVID-19, one of the early casualties is its minority hiring program VITAE (Valuing Inclusion to Attain Excellence).

The program seeks to “attract accomplished and talented new faculty members from underrepresented and other groups for tenure track or tenured appointments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

There was faculty concern when word got around that the program had been halted. But that isn’t intended to be permanent, university Provost Bob Blouin told a meeting of the Faculty Executive Committee on Monday.

“As my office also is having to wrestle with the budget challenges, I have in talking to [UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz]…we decided just as we put so many other hiring initiatives on pause until we have a better idea of the financial ramifications, I put that program on pause,” Blouin said.

UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Bob Blouin speaks to the school’s Faculty Executive Committee Monday.

According to UNC-Chapel Hill, the VITAE program is part of the campus’ effort to create a more diverse faculty.  Hires “may include individuals who grew up in economically disadvantaged circumstances, individuals with substantial professional experience working with minority and economically disadvantaged populations; individuals doing significant research on issues that disproportionately affect minority and disadvantaged populations; and individuals whose teaching or research specialty is in a field that is currently underrepresented in the University faculty.”

The program provides “up to full-salary for a period of up to 4 years at the discretion of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost,” but only $100,000 per year is available through the program. The university expects the unit into which the employee is hired to assume the full cost after an initial four year period.

The names of those hired through the program are kept confidential “so as to create a climate of equity among the faculty.”

Blouin said the decision to pause the program isn’t ideological or a reflection of the university’s commitment to diversity.

“I need to be sure we have the resources to support those hires,” Blouin said.

“This is a temporary issue,” Blouin said. “I want to be very clear — this is not an attempt on the part of South Building walking away from our VITAE hiring program. It’s been a critical program for us as a university, to contribute toward the diversification of this university. It’s just for a few months. We have to take a break and not make any additional financial commitments out of the provost’s office until we have a much clearer view of where we stand. Then it is my hope that we will start that up sooner than later.”

Programs like VITAE are part of the UNC System’s overall diversity efforts.

In November, the UNC System offered a first look at the work of its Racial Equity Task Force — results from online surveys of students, faculty and staff as well as information from virtual town halls.

At its first meeting the task force heard a report on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion survey results that found the system falling below its benchmarks. In fact, the results were worse than those from 2018.

The UNC System has specifically set a goal to improve “equity in hiring, promotions, tenure and compensation.”

In last year’s round of surveys, more than four in 10 faculty and staff members said they feel opportunities for leadership roles, tenure track or promotions are, at best, “only sometimes” equitable.

The same surveys found that more than half of faculty and 41 percent of staff would describe the UNC System leadership as not very or at all committed to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive system.

 

“Recruiting and retaining diverse faculty & staff” and “investigating & correcting inequities in tenure, promotions and compensation” were both top three priorities for faculty and staff, according to the surveys.

UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees votes to remove white supremacist names from buildings

By
July 29, 2020
In Education, Higher Ed, race, What's Race Got To Do With It?

The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted Wednesday to remove the names of three white supremacists from buildings on the school’s campus.

The names of Charles B. Aycock, Julian S. Carr and Josephus Daniels will all be removed from the buildings that have long held their names, beginning Wednesday afternoon.

“Aycock, Daniels, and Carr led the Democratic Party’s white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900,” the school’s Commission on History, Race & A Way Forward wrote in its resolution on the issue. “Aycock was a key strategist in both campaigns and ran as the party’s gubernatorial candidate in 1900; Daniels, editor and publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer, served as chief propagandist; and Carr, a Durham industrialist and leader of the United Confederate Veterans in North Carolina, provided financial backing.”

“Together, they fought to disenfranchise black men and to establish the regime of Jim Crow,” the commission wrote. “Which for more than half a century denied black North Carolinians equal justice and the fundamental rights of citizenship

The name of Thomas Ruffin Sr. will also be removed from a building on campus. Ruffin Sr. was a North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice. Known as a particularly cruel enslaver, he used his legal position to ignore legal precedents and grant more power to his fellow enslavers and expand their ability to brutalize enslaved people.

“His ruling in State v. Mann is known as ’the coldest and starkest defense of the physical violence inherent in slavery that ever appeared in an American judicial opinion,’” the Commission on History, Race & A Way Forward wrote in describing his legacy.

A portrait of Ruffin Sr. was recently removed from the historic Orange County Courthouse in Hillsborough.

But the building named for him at UNC will still carry the Ruffin name. It was also named for his son, Thomas Ruffin Jr. The trustees found that there wasn’t enough evidence about Ruffin’s son to remove his name, but signs on inside and outside the building will make clear it is named for Thomas Ruffin Jr.

Thomas Ruffin Sr.

Students and faculty quickly criticized that decision, pointing out that historical evidence indicates Thomas Ruffin Jr.  — a Confederate officer and one-term legislator —  also held white supremacist views. He publicly argued for amnesty for Ku Klux Klan members charged with murder in Alamance County in 1873.

Charles B. Aycock was a prominent UNC alumnus and governor of North Carolina whose political career was built on white supremacist rhetoric. Other schools, including UNC-Greensboro, have already removed his name from buildings.

Julian Carr, a wealthy industrialist and UNC trustee, was also Ku Klux Klan member who publicly bragged about beating a black woman during his speech at the dedication of the Silent Sam Confederate monument in 1913. That statue was toppled by protesters in 2018.

Josephus Daniels

Josephus Daniels was publisher of The News & Observer, a position he used to promote white supremacist policies and stoke violence against Black communities in North Carolina. A statue of Daniels was recently removed from Nash Square in downtown Raleigh, where it stood across from the former News & Observer building.

Speaking at Wednesday’s board meeting, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said continuing to honor Aycock, Carr and Daniels threatened the integrity of the university and its goal of creating a diverse, inclusive community.

The men’s views and actions did not merely reflect a different time, Guskiewicz said.

“The actions of these individuals were egregious even for their time,” Guskiewicz said. “and their conduct was central to their careers and lives as a whole. There is no evidence their views moderated or changed in their lifetimes and the accounts of their behavior are supported by documentary evidence.”

New permanent names for the buildings have not yet been announced.

The Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward will continue its work.

“We believe that other names on the landscape warrant action,” the commission wrote in its resolution. “We will make additional recommendations based on archival research and engagement with stakeholders on campus and in the broader community.”

Experts: “There has to be a shift in how society functions” in wake of pandemic recovery, racial justice movements

By
July 28, 2020
In COVID-19, Housing, News, Policing, public health, race, What's Race Got To Do With It?

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the U.S. economy — shuttering businesses, eliminating jobs and disrupting everything from education to the nation’s food supply chain. But it has been most devastating to Black Americans, who already face a host of historical economic and social disparities that have been highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement even as the country continues to struggle with the worsening pandemic.

On Tuesday a panel of experts gathered by UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, its Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Institute of African American Research held a virtual discussion of the problems disproportionately facing Black people in the current environment — and possible solutions.

“Talk about us living in a very, very unique time,” said Majestic Lane, deputy chief of staff and chief equity officer for the city of Pittsburgh. “We’re living in essentially 1928, 1918 and 1968 all in the same year, which has never quite happened. How we respond to it is really important. For us, in looking at what’s happening in our community, what’s happened in terms of social unrest as a result of state sanctioned violence and what’s happening as a result of COVID and the impacts of the pandemic really are two sides of the same coin.”

Majestic Lane

The American system disrupted by both the pandemic and mass protests over police violence against Black people was designed to work exactly the way it was working, Lane said. In charting a ‘new normal’ the goal should not be to reconstruct that system, he said, but to address long-standing problems in a system that chose winners and losers based on a legacy of racist ideas and practices.

“There has to be a shift in how society functions,” Lane said.

In Pittsburgh, that’s meant examining very basic assumptions about policing, Lane said. The idea that not every 911 call means police should be sent to the scene may be new to some people, he said. But for those who understand how racist policies in everything from education and banking to health care can see how bringing police into over-policed communities every time there is something like a family argument will likely make situations more dangerous.

In the 2021 budget in Pittsburgh, the city is creating an office of Community Health and Safety. Working with non-profits, the community will work to minimize the presence of police in situations where trained social workers, psychologists or addiction specialists might be a better fit. People in the community who are already trusted and invested will also be utilized in getting to the roots of violent incidents, Lane said.

But there are broader structural challenges as well, Lane said — and they’ve been made even more apparent by the pandemic.

Black people in America have been systemically shut out of the building and maintaining of wealth since before the beginnings of the Republic, said Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president with the Center for Responsible Lending. The current health and financial crises are making that more apparent, she said — and call for a response that takes that into account.

Nikitra Bailey

“Our nation is facing a reckoning over structural racism,” Bailey said. “The inequality it has produced is being exacerbated by the coronavirus. The COVID-19 pandemic is both a profound public health crisis and an equally profound economic crisis. The virus has devastated families across the nation and has fallen disproportionately on Black families.”

“Systemic discrimination in the housing sector left Black families more vulnerable going into the 2008 housing crisis,” Bailey said. “And that crisis and the response to it left them worse off. This crisis has likewise hit Black families hardest again. And the response so far is not equitable nor is it sufficient.”

The COVID-19 crisis threatens to become a foreclosure crisis in which the Black community has not had the same opportunity to build up home ownership and home equity, Bailey said. They didn’t have the same economic cushion many white families did at the beginning of the pandemic.  That’s due to historical inequities, like Black families being shut out of New Deal programs that gave access to federally supported credit. Those programs led to an explosion of white homeownership, a swelling middle class and generational wealth for white families. Only about 2 percent of the loans available in that period benefitted Black families, she said.

Black families were making ground after the historic homeownership lows of the Great Recession, Bailey said — with Black homeownership reaching 44 percent. But the current COVID-related economic crisis means a tightening in the mortgage market that is requiring much higher down payments and higher credit scores for families to qualify for loans. That threatens to erase the gains of Black homeowners in the country, Bailey said.

Because of the historic and current-day process of racial redlining, most Black communities don’t have as much home equity, Bailey said — something many white homeowners can use to withstand tough economic periods.

For Black homeowners and Black renters (a disproportionately large population), the pandemic is leading to greater dangers.

“There are reports that one in five renters are saying they missed or deferred a rental payment in June, “We know 31 percent of Black renters are reporting this as well, which is twice the rate of white renters. And 13 percent of homeowners overall are saying they’ve needed to defer a mortgage payment and again 23 percent said they missed or deferred their payment, which is twice the rate of white homeowners.”

Congress needs to react accordingly, Bailey said. The CARES act had a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, she said, but that expired last week. With around 23 million families likely to fall behind on their rent, Black families will be hardest hit.

Housing is an important pillar of the overall economy, Bailey said — critical not just to those who are most impacted, but to the entire nation.

“We need the House’s bill, the HEROES act, to be passed in the Senate and we need the President to sign it immediately,” Bailey said. “There is $100 billion of rental assistance in the HEROES act. If that legislation moves, we know that this crisis can be averted. We also need the HEROES provisions around homeownership protection. There’s $75 billion in homeownership protections. We also need those protections to be enacted.”

But beyond those immediate treatments for immediate ills, Bailey said, there needs to be movement on longstanding inequities and systemic racism.

“What we need is a federally guaranteed restorative justice program,” Bailey said, whereby Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac take proactive action to increase Black homeownership and we enforce fair housing and fair lending laws already on the books.

“We have really effective tools in place,” Bailey said. “If we use them we can root out that discrimination that is dragging down the economy overall.”

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