Note: I wrote this a long time ago but am finally getting around to posting. Thanks to Anne, Monica and Daniel for taking a look-see and adding many facts. Note on this note: not normal journalistic practice to have sources look before you post, but this is my personal blog and also I wrote this post before any kind of journalism training.
On the last morning of our weekend in Durham grappling with racism (parts 1 and 2 here and also part 4), we had breakfast with our innkeepers, Monica and Daniel, and another guest, Anne, who was part of the organizing committee for the Vigil Commemoration as was one of many alumni who arrived at Duke after the Vigil but whose activism was inspired by the events of 1968. The conversation was far-ranging, as the previous posts have been, so I’ll try to split this post up into reasonable chunks: student protesters, police relations, and black business owners.
On Protesters
Spouse and I were chatting about reparations and the workshop from part 2, and Anne asked us if we’d seen the protest from the day before. We hadn’t gone because it sounded really boring- a “state of the university” address from the new president of Duke, Vincent Price- but it seems like we missed out on some excitement- long video at the student newspaper here, short video at the Raleigh News&Observer (my summer home!) here. At least 12, up to 15 minutes of student protesters interrupted the president’s address with megaphones, which as Anne pointed out wryly, “do not mix well with hearing aids”. The students also handed out a double sided manifesto of demands, neatly listed here. “Succinct is better,” said Anne, who suggested fewer demands read from the stage might have been more effective. There’s definite irony in this quote from a Duke Chronicle article, by a student who was asked to be part of those afternoon workshops/panels:
“We felt that you don’t honor activism with panels and things that keep it firmly in the past as an artifact,” Nuzzolillo said. “It’s something that’s viable and visible and present now and in the future.”
Per Anne, among the workshops was one on current organizing involving students from Durham, UNC, and Duke. Among the half-dozen or more Duke activists recommended for the panel, several had conflicts and two dropped out at the last minute—it turns out they were the protesters!
While alumni commemorating the Vigil voiced support afterward for the student protest, a number of alumni—presumably, Anne said, those who weren’t part of the sit-in 50 years ago—turned their back on the students, some of whom were quoted in the paper later as being surprised/hurt by the lack of support for their protest, especially given that it was 50th anniversary of an effective and historic student protest.
I think this is the nature of news and gatekeeping, and I’ll have to think about it this summer—some reports make it sound like these college snowflakes have totally unreasonable demands and unreasonable expectations for no consequences of their protests. Perhaps we have done students a disservice in this country by how we teach history, if someone thinks they can stage a large protest against a huge establishment and *not* have any consequences.
That said, there actually were no consequences or disciplinary actions taken against the students though there was a lot of uproar and sound and fury at the suggestion that there might be. So I guess the students won out anyway.
Personally I’m sympathetic to the protesters, especially after the events that happened in the week after their protest. This is one of their demands:
- Create and enforce a standardized set of consequences for acts of hate and bias on campus.
And in response to this news item about a hate speech incident on campus involving racist graffiti at a student apartment complex, the vice president of student affairs tweeted:
To those who believe that colleges and universities should prohibit hate speech, I encourage you to read this: https://t.co/dB5FfezKUZ
Freedom of expression protects the oppressed far more than the oppressors.
— Larry Moneta (@Dukestuaff) April 27, 2018
[Larry Moneta deleted his twitter in the time between me writing and posting this blog post]
So if this is the environment around Duke, no wonder the student protesters went a little overboard. If no one listens when you’re talking at a normal voice, of course you’re going to yell to be heard. On a side note, in the course of writing this blog post I’ve been quite impressed with the Duke Chronicle! Here’s a follow-up article about the responses to the tweet.
“I don’t have a plan for a major initiative,” Moneta said. “You want to be careful—you want to react appropriately and not just run around to do things that have no meaning. I think we need to just sit back and think about what is going on that a few people would feel like that was a good way to behave.”
Moneta also added that he doesn’t think the incidents reflect Duke’s student body.
On Policing
At this point you’d be hard-pressed to find an American who doesn’t think that there’s an issue with relations between the public and the police. Daniel is a police officer in Durham and had recently gone to Mexico City with three other coworkers as part of a program of the Durham Police Department to understand their community. He told us that the police had set up a day for several undocumented immigrants to come into the station and talk about their lives, which would have been a first step toward building stronger relationships with the police and the community they serve. But the day before the scheduled event, ICE raided several locations in Durham. None of the scheduled speakers came to the police department on the planned day, since they were reasonably afraid of getting deported. Your daily reminder that ICE sucks.
This reminded me of a low-cost initiative pushed by the Austin Police Department (which we recall also had issues; this links to the 2016 traffic stop of the black teacher). They did “Coffee with a Cop” about quarterly, when you could go to McDonald’s and get free coffee and meet your local police officers. I went with my neighbor and her five year old to one event, which was pretty packed—we met the captain in charge of our area, and an officer who had two little girls around my neighbor’s age. I asked her about what she told her daughters about guns, and she emphasized safety to them and told them if they ever saw one out, to go find an adult. Of course she kept her own guns locked up (this was Texas so pretty much everyone had guns).
On Racism
Monica and Daniel are pillars of the community. There’s an old N&O article about when the opened their B&B in 1997 (I can’t find it), and how they were only the 26th (ish) black innkeepers in America. Google tells me there’s around 11,000 B&Bs in the US. There are fifteen inns listed on the African American Association of Innkeepers International. Even if there are ten times as many inns owned by black people as there are on the website, it’s still a very, very small percentage of the inns in America.
Eventually Monica became the president of the North Carolina Bed and Breakfast Inns Association, a post she held for five years. They told us about opening the inn, and how the furniture salesman obviously didn’t believe that they were opening an inn, as he visited the inn to “make sure the furniture would fit” before selling it to them. Anne recalls how Monica told us that one guest walked into the inn, an 8,000-square-foot Colonial Revival home built in the last century by a Liggett & Myers tobacco executive, and refused to stay when she discovered it was owned by African Americans. Another guest asked Daniel to wash his car when he saw the inn owner in the parking lot washing his own car. In the years since, Monica has been to plenty of conferences and associations, and told us that folks have stopped asking her who she works for and have accepted that black innkeepers exist. Of the over 17,000 inns in the U.S., less than 1% are owned by black people. I don’t remember the other stories they told us (note to self, Yen, blog immediately!) but we all know there was racism.
Baking and Math 
As a member of the Class of 1968 who helped organize the Duke Vigil and the 50th reunion I am sharing your comments with the list we have of active grads who supported the vigil and help putt together all the activities in April.
Margaret Small
Thank you very much Margaret!