Yearbook photos can become embarrassments

The college yearbooks that got Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in hot water could snare thousands of other men (and, perhaps, women). Looking back at these 30-year-old or older yearbooks shows attitudes and culture have changed. What once was just silly fun is now viewed as reprehensible and unpardonable.

Northam's medical school yearbook included a page dedicated to him that shows someone dressed in a Ku Klux Klan-style white hood and another man wearing blackface makeup and tattered clothing. In 1984, when the yearbook was published, people must have just laughed it off. Northam is not laughing now; he is under intense pressure to resign as governor.

I could not recall seeing any yearbook pictures from my college years (more than a decade earlier than Northam's) that were so obviously racist. Perhaps slave/master costumes became fashionable sometime later. I did look through a couple of my old college yearbooks to see what shenanigans the fraternities were up to nearly 50 years ago. 

The 1968 and 1970 Yackety Yack yearbooks of UNC-Chapel Hill exhibited no shameful racial attitudes in their posed fraternity photos but did show plenty of lack of poor taste.

Beta Theta Pi had its members pose all over a railroad trestle wearing a variety of costumes. Three carried rifles or shotguns. Some wore military clothes or caps. One man wore bib overalls and held a gun to his head. Like racist attitudes, joking about suicide is no longer excusable.

Chi Phi posed its brothers as a chain gang in 1968. Most of them wore work clothes (or less) and stood in a roadside ditch that was under construction. Two brothers were dressed as prison guards and brandished a rifle and a shotgun.

Kappa Zeta won the humor prize (maybe) with the suit-and-tie frat boys lined up in single file behind one brother seated on a toilet in the middle of a field while two others stood beside the seated brother holding his coat and toilet paper. The last guy in line is bending over, one hand over his eyes to see how long the line is.

Lambda Chi Alpha held a mock burial with most members in formal wear while one brother lay in front of them, covered by a Confederate battle flag and holding a flower. No one was in blackface or Klan outfits.

Phi Delta Theta got a jump on colleges' worries about binge drinking. The Phi Delts posed outside an ABC store brandishing large boxes of booze, one rifle, a bow-and-arrow and other silly things. 

Pi Delta Phi's photo portrays a lynching, but it's not a racial lynching. The photo shows one brother on a horse with a noose around his neck while several in the crowd brandish rifles and three brothers are high in the tree holding the rope. A woman off to the side appears to be pregnant, so I guess this is supposed to represent a shotgun wedding. Offensive but not reprehensible, I guess.

Delta Delta Delta, a sorority, displayed the only Confederate symbols other than Lambda Chi's burial pall. The Tri-Delt members posed at the edge of a small pond and carried a variety of gear — fishing nets, a teddy bear, a dart board and a fishing pole. Two of the sisters held small Confederate battle flags. If there was a commentary or message to this, I can't discern it.

The 1970 Yackety Yack showed two fraternities posing as they hold a number in front of each brother. I didn't get it at first but then realized that draft numbers were assigned in 1969. They were all showing their draft numbers. Beta Theta Pi displayed their numbers without commentary, but Tau Epsilon Phi made the message clearer. The TEPs were all lined up with their numbers, waiting to get their heads chopped off by the executioner at the end of the line.

Northam has tried to wriggle out of the embarrassing spot he put himself in 35 years ago, but he may be forced out of politics by a foolish judgment from long ago. Most people are outraged or at least cringe at pictures like the ones from Northam's yearbook, but blackface has not always been so unacceptable. "Holiday Inn," one of the most memorable and beloved of Christmas movies (1942), includes a scene where Bing Crosby daubs on blackface makeup to do a Lincoln's birthday tribute in which blackfaced actors sing the praises of "Abraham." I still watch this movie, which is much better than the follow-up, "White Christmas," but I can no longer watch the blackface scene. I skip that cringe-worthy scene each time.

Whether you want to go into politics or not, it would be wise to think carefully about what a future generation will think of your humor and not just what the current audience thinks.

Integration, civil rights came slowly to South

In last week’s column I wrote about Federal District Court Judge Waites Waring and his efforts to bring justice to African-American teachers and students in South Carolina from the 1940s to the 1960s.

            The book set me to thinking about the history I remember from that era as the South dealt with the Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate schools. That mandate took decades to take full effect, and some would say that racial segregation still exists in public schools.

            When my classmates and I entered the N.C. public school system in 1955, we did not think there was anything unusual in the existence of some public schools being designated for white children and some being designated for black children. It was simply how the world existed. But in 1954 the Supreme Court had found school segregation to be unconstitutional, and gradual movements toward desegregation began (not with the court’s requirement for “all deliberate speed”). I was in high school, in a consolidated, countywide high school, when African-American students and teachers first appeared in my classrooms.

            Southerners determined to keep school segregation in place declared “massive resistance” to any effort to force full integration. Anson County, where I grew up, saw a mandate to make schools for black students better, at least on a par with the white schools, so county officials built a new, consolidated black high school that was to open the year after I graduated from the white high school that was only six years old. Federal officials declared the two segregated high schools illegal. Local officials countered with a plan to send all male students to one high school and all girls to the other school. The feds rejected that plan, too, and my younger sister graduated from the new, fully integrated high school.

            When my family moved to Wilson in 1980, we were impressed with the desegregation solution that was in place here. Former white schools were paired with former black schools so that all students, black and white, would spend four years in their “home school” and then be bused to the paired school outside their racially identifiable neighborhoods.

            This plan gave Wilson a great advantage compared to neighboring Nash and Wayne counties, which still had separate city and county school systems with obvious racial imbalances. Wilson County, thanks to young attorney Jim Hunt and others, had merged city and county schools in the 1970s. This single system made Wilson more attractive for industry.

            Wilson’s desegregation solution did not last very long. Changing residential patterns created school populations with large black majorities in several schools.

          A 50-member citizen task force was ordered to come up with a new, practical and federally acceptable integration plan. The task force worked hard for two years, trying to find a way to evenly balance racial populations in all schools. In a county with a few densely populated areas and some very rural areas, it was extremely difficult to bring about the preferred balance at all schools. Then the Board of Education threw out both plans the task force had recommended. Meanwhile, the federal court that had been overseeing the school system’s compliance with integration law decided the system had attained “unitary” status and ended its oversight.

            When the school board adopted a new neighborhood-based school attendance plan, some black members of the board voted for the plan, even though the plan made no effort to racially balance school populations. Most parents, black and white, have quietly accepted the neighborhood plan.

            The latest concern for public schools and their students is competition from private and charter schools, as well as home schools. Public school systems are losing students and money to the new options, as this newspaper has reported. Change is nothing new for school systems that have been reforming for more than 70 years.

This column first appeared in The Wilson Times.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor of The Wilson Daily Times for 29 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

           

           

Mob triumphs over silent statue

The mob rules. Long live the mob.

Last night, 200 or more people gathered around the "Silent Sam" statue in Chapel Hill and succeeded in toppling and destroying the statue memorializing the University of North Carolina students who served and died in the Civil War.

For several years, the statue had been a rallying point for protesters who claimed the statue was not a memorial to former students who died in America's most tragic war, disregarding the inscription on the statue's pedestal and the clear intent of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who funded the memorial. Protesters asserted that the statue was intended to perpetuate white supremacy, although white supremacy was not at issue in the Civil War. White supremacy was part of the culture of 19th century America and Europe. Although a speaker at the monument's dedication added inappropriate racist comments, his words did not change the reason for the memorial.

I addressed the historical background of the statue in a blog post from a year ago.

What happened last night on a once-peaceful quadrangle of the historic UNC campus had been brewing for at least a year. A year ago, another, smaller mob attacked a Confederate memorial in Durham. While law enforcement officers watched disinterestedly, vandals climbed the statue of an anonymous soldier, attached ropes and pulled it to the ground. Although numerous witnesses, including the do-nothing law officers, and video of the event would have made prosecution an open-and-shut case, Durham prosecutors, through malfeasance or incompetence, failed to get even one conviction. That non-prosecution has provided a green light for vandals, socialists and anarchists.

Monday night's mob was well-equipped with banners that would shield their vandalism from view and with smoke bombs to obscure illegal acts. This was a well-planned operation in clear violation of numerous laws, including destruction of public property. Police mostly watched from a distance.

Silent Sam stood for a century without doing harm to anyone (see Andrew Young's comments from my Aug. 23, 2017, post), but protesters assigned to this inanimate object the burdens of centuries of immorality and wrongdoing. Toppling this statue will not put an end to injustice or unfairness in society. It will jeopardize the rule of law.

What traditional artifact will be next? Chapel Hill's cemetery contains the graves of slave owners, white supremacists and unenlightened Euro-Americans. Their gravestones will be easier to knock down than Silent Sam's statue. The town of Carrboro is named for Julian Carr, who made the offensive racist remarks at the statue's dedication. Should all town signs be removed? Must the town's name be changed?

Who's next? Most American presidents prior to the Civil War owned slaves. Most who didn't own slaves did not consider African Americans their equals. Must all those public officials be disparaged and stricken because 21st century morality differs from the morality as they understood it?

Long before Silent Sam became a flashpoint for civil rights and racial equality, his bronze visage was a remembrance of UNC students who died in the Civil War. His statue was erected by descendants still mourning the deaths of their loved ones and the economic devastation of their entire region. If that memorial is to be removed or hidden, the decision to take that action should be made in an open, rational and democratic process.

The door to mob rule, once opened, is not easily closed.

Racist attitudes and deliveries

Hooray for Lowe's Home Improvement Stores! The North Carolina-based chain fired three managers after they acquiesced to a customer's request that only white delivery personnel should deliver her purchase to her home. A veteran African-American delivery man was pulled from the delivery route to satisfy the racist customer. When this narrative exploded beyond the store's walls, Lowe's supervisors took immediate action, firing the managers who allowed a customer to veto a black employee and who, by their actions, endorsed racism.

Prompt action by higher ups in the organization prevented the extension of racial prejudice in the appliance delivery business and saved the reputation of Lowe's. Kudos also to Alex Brooks, the white partner on the delivery team with Marcus Bradley, who had been pulled from his delivery job because his skin was too dark. Brooks, hearing of the injustice, refused to deliver to the racist customer without his black teammate.

All of this took place in Danville, Va., a city where I lived and worked for more than two years in the late 1970s. There was racism there almost 40 years ago, as there was in just about anyplace you name, but I never saw such flagrant exercise of racial prejudice as happened this week. Danville claims to be the "Last Capital of the Confederacy" because Jefferson Davis fled to Danville after Richmond fell to federal troops in 1865. He didn't stay long. The Confederate president was eventually captured by federal troops in Georgia.

I never thought that brief moment as home to what was left of the Confederate government made Danville any more racist than other areas of the South. Even 40 years ago, I would have been shocked by a customer saying she would not accept a delivery by a black man. That attitude should not be tolerated.

Given that demand, the delivery manager should have said, "Ma'am, our black delivery driver will deliver your refrigerator, and if you don't like his presence, he will bring the refrigerator back to the store, and we'll sell it to someone else, but you're still going to be charged for it. And, by the way, we're not going to deliver the white refrigerator you picked out. You'll get a black one instead. Just as a reminder."

Even free speech has consequences

No doubt, the sports and entertainment world is a better place without the execrable rantings of Donald Sterling, the Los Angeles Clippers owner who is now banned for life by the National Basketball Association.

When a secretly recorded audio of Sterling's disparaging and repugnant remarks about African-Americans became public, the reaction seemed universal: He should be shunned and silenced. Racist remarks will quickly clear a room or ruin a conversation, but the mega-attention and instantaneous transmission of today's information makes those revolting remarks of a man most of us had never heard of the Big News of the Day. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver swiftly issued a lifetime ban on Sterling and fined him the maximum amount within his authority, and he strongly suggested that Sterling should be forced to sell his team.

I have heard no dissenting voices in reaction to these events, and I should not be surprised. Speaking up for a racist is no less respectable than speaking up for a child molester, and I can't think of any words that would defend Sterling's bigotry and hatred. Nevertheless, is taking away a person's right to express his opinion in a private conversation any worse than disrespecting others because of their color or race?

As repugnant as Sterling's opinions are, if the purloined audiotape is credible, he has not expressed support for racist policies or violence. The tapes show only that he objected to his girlfriend's choice of friends, based on their race. That's an attitude America has shunned and forbidden as we have purposely steered away from the racial attitudes of past generations.

This is a country, it should be remembered, that allowed neo-Nazis to march through a Jewish neighborhood (that included some Holocaust survivors), demonstrating a hatred far more severe and violent than anything Sterling expressed. Does freedom of expression allow stupid people to say offensive things? Does freedom of thought allow people to hold opinions that are repugnant to the vast majority of Americans?

I would answer yes to those two questions, but I would also assert that words have consequences, and even protected speech might be costly to the speaker. Politicians get into trouble by using the wrong words in unrehearsed remarks and then face costly repercussions even though they might not have meant how the words were taken. They have the freedom to say those things, but they suffer the consequences.

Donald Sterling is facing the consequences of his unedited, private speech. Americans can rejoice in his punishment but should not celebrate too much. When free speech and free thought expressed in private conversations are penalized, we all are vulnerable.

Fifty years ago, racism ruled America

I was in a meeting earlier this week with a group of about a dozen people I didn't know. The group leader was decrying the consequences of the Great Recession, which has caused a big increase in requests for help from nonprofits, increased stress on families and an uptick in the homeless population. Along with everyone else, I could only nod my head in agreement. Then she said something that floored me: "I think racism is worse today than it has ever been!"

I started to raise my hand and ask, "Where are you from?" The woman leading the group appeared to be about my age, maybe a little older. Surely, she should be able to remember what it was like 50 years ago, when black North Carolinians could not eat in a restaurant where whites ate, could not sleep in a motel where whites slept, could not attend schools white children attended, could not live in a neighborhood where whites lived, often could not vote in elections, could not drink from water fountains or use the bathrooms used by whites, and would not even be considered for decent jobs. Fifty years ago, none of the eight or 10 African-American women gathered in that room could have held the executive and managerial positions they hold today. The meeting they were attending, in which whites and blacks discussed issues on an equal footing, could not have happened then. If you think racism is worse today than it was 50 years ago, you have a serious memory problem.

That's not to say that racism has been eradicated. Like other forms of evil, it keeps poking its ugly head out of its manure pile only to be beaten back again. Racial prejudice is probably as old as that prehistoric time when humans first differentiated themselves by skin color and other distinguishing features. Racism will continue to plague the human condition from time to time, but its days of ordering society and building senseless barriers are over, at least in this country.

Fifty years after a federal law made it possible for African-Americans to vote unimpeded in this nation, we elected an African-American president. That is an extraordinary achievement! Like other presidents, this one is assailed by critics, and a few of those critics may be motivated, at least in part, by racism, but it is political doctrine, not race, that is the primary divisive force today.

Anyone who remembers the 1960s and before can testify to the lunacy of claims that racism is worse today than ever before. America should proudly proclaim its victory over the evil forces of entrenched racism and never forget how bad, how ridiculous, society was before the civil rights era.

Not all disrespect is based in racism

American political debate is in danger on two fronts. On one, the level of civility and mutual respect has deteriorated to the point that congressional "town hall" meetings become shouting matches and a member of Congress calls out "you lie" during a presidential address. On the other, some commentators assert that any criticism of America's first African-American president is motivated by racism. Former President Jimmy Carter, who says his upbringing in Georgia has taught him to recognize racism when he sees it, is the latest to see racism behind critics of President Obama.

For defenders of this president, who carefully avoided racial politics in his presidential campaign, the racism card is an odd assertion. No one doubts that there are some lingering racists in this country who oppose Obama first and foremost because of his color. But that doesn't make all of his critics racist. Obama's risky positions on health care, missile defense, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, immigration, the federal deficit and other controversial matters will attract critics who disagree with him. To suggest that all of those criticisms are founded in racial discrimination belittles the genuine policy disagreements that roil American politics. Rep. Joe Wilson's "you lie" shout-out was uncouth, disrespectful, uncivil, undisciplined and embarrassing, but I've seen no reason to blame Wilson's lack of manners on racism, unless you believe that being from South Carolina or being a Republican is indisputable proof of racist beliefs.

"Racism" is a harsh epithet, almost the equal of "child molester," that shouldn't be weakened by overuse or misuse. To ascribe any policy differences with this president to racism diminishes the meaning and venality of the word.

Harsh criticism of presidents and their policies is not a new phenomenon. Critics of George W. Bush went beyond critiques of his disastrous policies and got personal. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Bush a "liar" and a "loser." Disrespectful? Yes. Venal? Yes. Racist? No. Bill Clinton also attracted a coterie of venal critics of his personal life and family. George H.W. Bush's critics portrayed him as a rich, smiling idiot. From the time he was California governor, Ronald Reagan faced harsh criticism who belittled him as a petty actor and then criticized his acting. Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for his "homely" children and his rural pastimes. Franklin Roosevelt called out his critics when, he said, they had even begun criticizing "my little dog Fala." None of these criticisms, as harsh and hateful as they were, were based in racism.

Obama, like his predecessors, will face harsh, unfair criticism. Critics will be unkind, disrespectful and uncivil, but we should be careful about blaming bad manners on racism.

Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, who might have been the first African-American president if he had wanted it, had this to say in a New York Times interview: “The issue there is not race, it’s civility. This is not to say that we are suddenly racially pure, but constantly talking about it and reducing everything to black versus white is not helpful to the cause of restoring civility to our public dialogue.”