Barry Yeoman reflects on Alamance County
A Q&A with the writer, along with some thoughts on Durham's mayoral election, Texas, abortion, Biden's child care program and more.
As abortion rights proponents have taken to the streets in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overruling of 50 years of precedent for Texas women, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Alamance County, North Carolina.
As in Alamance, what’s happening in Texas is a look at how a system that wraps itself in the language of fairness and process obscures a too often hidden anti-democratic playbook. Others, of course, have had the same observation. When an abortion rights' activist spent several sessions in the Texas legislature to advocate for women, she came away astounded at how the sausage was made.
"It was fascinating but also deeply painful as an outsider to electoral politics to see how undemocratic democracy really is," a Texas ob-gyn told The New Republic. "Democracy feels dead to me because we only do it in the dark. … It’s about procedures, and deals, who knows who, and agreements that some people made that you didn’t even know."
Sometimes, though, things don't go according to plan. The people start getting in the way of the power brokers.
Several months ago, I interviewed the writer Barry Yeoman about the momentous events in Alamance County in 2020, which resonate to this day and haven’t been fully sorted out. In October 2020, as the state and the rest of the world grappled with the murder of George Floyd at the knee of a police officer, scores of protesters were jailed when police arrested dozens as they marched to the polls. A prominent pastor was arrested. Several were jailed at a public meeting of the Board of Commissioners when they sought to speak up about their mistreatment.
Barry Yeoman, courtesy of the writer.
Yeoman, who has written about all manner of North Carolina life and politics from his perch in Durham, began reporting. He made sense of Graham’s place in the overarching narrative in the wake of George Floyd’s murder for the The Baffler, writing:
If you were looking for a city that embodies the fault lines running through twenty-first-century America, you could come no closer than Graham, where in 2020 a homegrown racial justice movement percolated up through the most unforgiving terrain and then persisted through months of escalating government repression.
The tensions are not obvious from the streetscape, which on first blush looks idyllic. Downtown Graham welcomes visitors with a mural that says, “Love Always Wins.” There’s a movie theater, two craft brewery taprooms, and a stylish secondhand clothing store. Traditional small-town markers abound, like a soda shop across from the courthouse that sells banana splits and $5.99 cheese dog specials. No surprise that the Alamance County seat evokes comparisons to Mayberry, the fictional mid-twentieth-century North Carolina town.
But that comparison slices both ways. “It feels like the 1950s,” said Sylvester Allen Jr., a thirty-five-year-old Black and Native American actor-musician who grew up in the area and still lives in Graham. “It’s as if I was living in the 1950s, and I was frozen, and I came back. Everything else has changed but Alamance County.”
One difference: the region in the 1950s hummed with manufacturing jobs. Burlington, the larger city abutting Graham, called itself the “Hosiery Capital of the South.” That reputation faded in the late twentieth century as mills closed and companies sought cheaper labor, bolstered by bipartisan policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The closures had a cratering effect, and not just on the economy. “Post-NAFTA, communities like Alamance County felt like they lost their political home,” said Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, a staffer at Down Home North Carolina, which organizes rural and small-town residents around issues like wages and health care. “A bit of a vacuum was created, where if you didn’t have either major political party coming in and learning from local folks, then these communities are left up for grabs as far as finding their political narrative. . . . If we don’t organize there, somebody else will, and that somebody else is a far-right component.”
In 2002, nearly a decade after NAFTA’s signing, Alamance voters elected a sheriff who remains a hero to the far right: Republican Terry S. Johnson, the county’s preeminent political figure. The veteran of a half-century in law enforcement, Johnson compares himself to the fictional Mayberry Sheriff Andy Taylor. But the latter, played by Andy Griffith, didn’t refer to his adversaries as “Antifa” or instruct his deputies, as federal prosecutors alleged, to “go out there and get me some of those taco eaters.”
With apologies that this took so long to be published — my list of to-dos, life and work events aren’t important here but you get the picture — in an accidental way it feels serendipitous to be thinking and writing about this again now. The events in Alamance ripped a fissure in the democratic fabric that allowed us to see battles that are either hidden or never allowed to take place in the first place but shape our lives and public policy nonetheless.
Yeoman was drawn to Alamance because it was “the kind of chasm that was opening up all over America,” he explained. Among the lessons: “political power has muscle even when there is some breaks put on it by the courts.”
Yeoman spent weeks in and out of Alamance, constructing narratives and reporting for The Baffler, The Assembly and the Washington Post. The Assembly’s story covered something of the aftermath of the crackdown on Black Lives Matter and other activists, when Ricky Hurtado managed to win an area seat in the state House. Yeoman covered in some depth the role of the Democratic Party in that race in which they were hardly encouraging of Hurtado or his fresh playbook. “They told him that in this politically charged environment where President Donald Trump is making immigration a hot button issue we are afraid that you’re in the crosshairs. ... we don’t think we can win your race. There was nothing subtle about this,” Yeoman told me.
I think you’ll find, as I did, that looking back on this interview as we think about the state of democracy and journalism is as prescient as ever.
Our Q&A has been edited for space and clarity.
What did you know about Alamance County before spending time there?
BY: My experience with Alamance was pretty limited. I’ve lived in Durahm for more than 30 years, I knew it was one of the historic manufacturing cities in North Carolina. Alamance is right at the top of that list. Confederate activity there started around 2015. Episodically these news blips would pass by my radar - like when Terry Johnson referred to Mexicans as child-abusing alcoholics. But I never really put together that post industrial contraction and the surge of right wing activity until 2020.
And last year it really came on my radar - with the lawsuit [since settled] over protest limits. That felt like something larger than one county's debate over free speech. It was a microcosm of a larger conversation we were having as a country about dissent and how the justifiable rage over police killings of Black Americans … so I pitched that specific idea to the Washington Post and they were interested.
So last summer I wrote a story about the lawsuit and I happened to be in Graham when protesters were arrested for standing too close to the Confederate monument. That’s when I really started wondering if there was an even larger story.
As I began talking to people in these newly energized activist movements, what seemed increasingly clear is that the loss of manufacturing jobs, the in-migration of Latin American immigrants and the permission structure that Donald Trump and, before him, Sheriff Johnson had created had led to this really venal neo Confederate movement that had if not the blessing of the powers that be at least the non-interference of them. And given what was happening nationally it seemed like this was the emblem of the kind of chasm that was opening up all over America. Just … more obvious.
It seemed like there was a larger story that could be told in a small place. Then I just spent the next several months hanging out in Alamance and going to all these smaller protests and watching things unfold and talking with activists.
The weekend before election day - the Washington Post had hired a bunch of reporters around the country and I decided on this march to the polls that I’ve covered every election might be a nice piece of color.
I wasn’t thinking this would be anything. The notion these Black Lives Matter activists … were in this very divided county might make a nice scene in somebody else’s story. And of course we know what happened seemingly out of the blue. Suddenly it was a national story.
I can’t tell you how many stories I published in the next 36 hours but it was a lot. So suddenly all eyes were on Alamance. This was an election that by and large was free of the kind of voting-week strife that everybody feared except for Graham, North Carolina and a handful of other places.
What do you remember from the protest and how things escalated?
BY: I was not in a position I could see the escalation. I can tell you the entire lead up seemed completely peaceful. There was a police escort. Reverend Drumwright explicitly told the marchers that this was going to be peaceful. There was absolutely no sign of any tension up until and including the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that people kneeled and sat and laid in the road in front of the monument.
I don’t even think the official account suggested there was any aggressive provocation from the marchers - the first spraying seemed like it was entirely that the police said that people should clear the road and people were not clearing the road and traffic was backing up. They were afraid this would impede access to drivers through the early voting site and they began spraying.
I was not even aware of the spraying until people had gotten sprayed. I had not actually seen it. That said I have now watched the videos frame by frame multiple times. I did not see protestors reacting violently. And I did see a lot of really aggressive police activity. For example, there is a video of Ian Baltutis, the mayor of Burlington, who a lot of people had turned to as someone with power seeking advice.
He used his mayoral base to go up to some Graham police officers and …and rather than treating him like an elected official, they yelled at him to start walking back to Burlington. And pointed him in a direction of a crowd of pepper spray. Fortunately there was a videographer who filmed that moment. [The mayor told the Burlington Times-News, “They started pepper spraying everyone, including a couple of kids — small children.”]
And so in the fog of war you cant parse out every action in real time but when in the fog of war everybody has a cellphone camera, you can go back later and go look at the video frame by frame which is what I did.
Will there be any accountability for what happened there and can you give a sense of whether there’s political will in Alamance for any kind of reckoning?
BY: It is the big question mark. I do think that the legal system and the political system kind of work hand in hand sometimes in sync and sometimes at cross purposes. So for example when we look at the earlier lawsuit about protest limits, that lawsuit [about a city ordinance the ACLU contended in April was being used to illegally shut down protests] had just been settled …and yet the limits of free speech had been curtailed.
That said, the piling on of blowback has continued. Whether it was the woman who was escorted out of the Board of Commissioners meeting trying to talk to them directly … or the pepper spraying, or the arrest of Reverend Drumwright on felony charges, or the release by the Sheriff's Office of out of context recordings of a community meeting, signal to me that political power has muscle even when there is some breaks put on it by the courts. [Ed. Note: Drumwright was convicted on two charges related to the protest; I confirmed with his attorney, Jason Keith, that Alamance’s court calendar is correct in showing that appeal hearings are scheduled in January].
Alamance is a county that has a lot of people who are very sympathetic to Sheriff Johnson. What remains to be seen is how changing demographics affect things.
We saw the election of Ricky Hurtado. We see a demographic shift happening in the larger towns and cities while the rural areas remain dark red and very conservative. And how that shakes down over time, I don’t know. I don’t know if there will be enough of a demographic shift to send a clear message to the political powers that be or how long it will take.
Given the stark divide in the town - and like you say, that it’s not clear there what the end of that divide looks like - does journalism have a role to play in bridging that broader urban-rural divide?
BY: I think at the local level there is such a role. And I think that with the movement toward solutions journalism and toward community journalism we are at a moment that we are re-envisioning the possibilities. I don’t think it is incumbent on every journalist to try to be a peacemaker. I don’t see that as my job. I see it as my job of telling stories … telling stories of people that are not often told.
But it does feel like we’re moving into an era where the definition of journalism is up for grabs. And especially given how divided we become, we’re not only divided our opinions but divided by our set of facts. Where local journalism can play a role in fostering conversation, that seems like it can only be a good thing.
We should be cautious as using urban-rural as a proxy for ideology. There are lots of rural progressive activist movements and lots of Black and Latino rural southerners who have been vocal about issues of economic equity and environmental justice and whose ideology is far from conservative.
Moving to your story on Ricky Hurtado, I think the parts that floored me was the role - even, perhaps, the racist role - the Democratic Party played in Hurtado’s campaign. How did that storyline develop?
BY: What was interesting about how I researched and wrote and revised that story was the role of the Democratic Party was not as prominent in the first draft of the story. And when my editor [The Assembly’s Kyle Villemain] pulled out that thread he urged me to do more interviewing to that point. And what struck me when I spoke with both [Rep.] Graig Meyer and Morgan Jackson is that neither of them shied away from this. And particularly what Morgan Jackson, who is one of the leading strategists in the state and the chief adviser to Governor Cooper, is that the state's Democratic leaders have profiles in their mind of what the ideal candidate is in certain districts. In a pretty conservative district they are looking for the white moderate who won’t scare off other moderates and even peel off some Republican votes. That this was not Ricky Hurtado’s qualification or his skills — this was about the limits to what voters in Sheriff's Johnson county might be reasonably expected to support. And they made that very clear to Hurtado and his campaign manager.
They told him that in this politically charged environment where President Donald Trump is making immigration a hot button issue we are afraid that you’re in the crosshairs. ... we don’t think we can win your race. There was nothing subtle about this.
I feel like if a Republicans said similar things, Democrats would use it to attack the party as racist.
BY: I don’t want to defend state Democrats here. But if I were to defend them it would be by saying they were mirroring voters attitudes but that they themselves don’t have those attitudes. In North Carolina … there has also been precious little campaigning of the type Ricky Hurtado has done. It’s not like Hurtado was a Latino candidate who was doing things as they’re always done, he was taking a whole other strategy. He was canvassing in January of 2020, which is virtually unheard of. And then he pivoted when the pandemic started to the role of community servant. Which again is completely off script from the standpoint of the state Democratic Party. There was no precedent for even guessing what this would mean if you’re a state level strategist or pundit.
Now what I was hearing from grassroots activists … they know their communities. They knew how well it would play. I keep coming back to what Irene Godinez said about the lesson that this sends when white people get out of the way, including progressive white people, and let the people who are most impacted by the issues, who have the most at stake start calling the shots in terms of strategy. That is a powerful statement. And it is a statement that stuck with me and sat on my shoulder the entire time I was writing the story.
What did you learn from some of the organizers you met overall maybe that didn’t make it exactly in the stories you were covering?
BY: What struck me in Alamance was the diversity of organizers I interviewed not just in terms of demographics but in terms of worldview, in terms of priorities. What they do the other 23 hours a a day when they’re not being organizers.
[Activist] Juan Miranda basically said we don’t have the luxury of finding allies among people who are just like us. We just have to know we have a common purpose in working in a coalition.
I live in Durham where the left is like the Baptist Church. And in a place like Durham you can afford that because the right won’t seize power. If the left splinters in Alamance, the right will seize power. So what I see in Alamance is people working very hard to stay in conversation with people who are very different from themselves. And not necessarily having the beautiful harmony of voices singing kumbaya but rather having the practical resolution that ‘we are going to do this’ — even if after the meeting we don’t go out and have a beer together.
Enraging and/or inspiring
It’s easy to forget that what often gets painted as toxic policy when it comes from the left often has broad consensus among Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike. The debate in Washington, D.C., has rarely reflected reality but it is an echo chamber getting more divorced from it every day. In a recent piece, David French did a nice job of encapsulating that sentiment noting a new poll that showed “Trump voters expressed support for most elements of the Biden infrastructure and reconciliation plan.”
And while he isn’t the first to sound the alarm, his expression of why there is a “whiff of Civil War in the air” is worth considering. French cites a column from the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan and writes:
He says, “Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities.” Yes, absolutely. In fact, it’s that normalcy in all other areas of their lives that blinds them to their increasingly dangerous and radical politics. They think, “I’m a completely normal person, a responsible citizen who never protests anything, and even I can see the existential threat of the left. You can’t? What’s wrong with you?”
Moreover, they are absolutely, positively, pass-a-polygraph convinced that they’re saving democracy, not destroying it. All of the state election reforms? They’re motivated to make sure that no one can “steal” an election again. Even if they’re not convinced of the Kraken-style massive fraud theory, they’re convinced that the 2020 election was “rigged” by Big Tech and Democrats colluding to change the rules and then suppress Trumpist speech (never mind that virtually every act of Twitter censorship only worked to amplify the censored speech, making it a topic of endless conversation on right-wing media).
The cycle works a bit like this. Malice and disdain makes a person vulnerable to misinformation. Misinformation then builds more malice and disdain and enhances the commercial demand for, you guessed it, more misinformation. Rinse and repeat until entire media empires exist to supply that demand.
Moreover, there are different kinds of misinformation. There’s of course blunt, direct lying, which is rampant online. But there’s also deception by omission (a news diet that consistently feeds a person with news only of the excesses of the other side) and by exaggeration and hyperbole.
…
There’s something else that’s going on. With rising hatred, I’m seeing a rise in a purely destructive spirit, especially on the right. “The fight” becomes everything. The destruction of the “elite” is the object. There’s a famous French Revolution-era maxim that declares that one does not make an omelet without breaking eggs. That maxim has served as a shorthand warning against Utopianism ever since.
But what if there’s not even an omelet? What if the movement is simply about breaking eggs? What if “fighting” isn’t a means to an end, but rather the end itself?
The NYT comes to Greensboro
The bill President Biden is trying to push through Congress and past two particular Democratic senators has broad bipartisan policy in it. Some of it helps get at just how fucked up things are in America, where, as one Greensboro childcare center worker and part-time Starbucks employee put it in the New York Times’ story recently in Greensboro: “I make $10 an hour to shape the future of children but make $15 an hour to hand someone a cup of coffee.”
The bill has common-sense reform in it along with funding to begin to correct that imbalance. But what caught my eye was some parents — spending more than their mortgage on their kids’ daycare — had to say about it:
She and her husband, Matt, who work at the same insurance firm, have three children in care and pay about $34,000 a year. “Basically, my paycheck goes to pay for child care,” she said.
Still, she warned subsidies could lead to higher taxes. “If we were not financially stable, we would be all for that,” she said. “But I always think that if we’re getting help, the money has to come from somewhere.”
Ms. Lolley knew nothing of the plan until a reporter described it and reacted with enthusiasm tinged with concern. She praised the potential financial relief and the “wonderful” help for teachers, whom she called devoted and “very underpaid.”
But she also noted that federal money often brings federal rules.
“If it would make things worse for the school in any way,” she said, “I personally would rather stretch to keep paying the bills.”
Durham doesn’t have a real mayoral race
I’m the only person who cares about this but … here goes.
In Durham, the second place loser of the non-partisan mayoral primary, Javiera Caballero, dropped out of the race and conceded to retired judge Elaine O’Neal even though just 10 percent of registered voters showed up for the October 5 primary. O’Neal took 68 percent of the vote.
It would have been good for Durham to see a debate play out about the future of public safety here and where the candidates stand not on the platitudes but on the specifics. As journalist Jeffrey Billman pointed out, a campaign flyer dropped during the campaign that intoned in bold letters: “Don’t Defund the Police.”
The flyer drew an implicit comparison. Caballero, a member of City Council, and others have called for moving up to 15 positions to a new department ostensibly so some 911 calls generally involving non-violent mental health issues can be responded to by a person without a gun. This has been characterized as a pilot program — hardly a sea change.
And then there’s this, the actual police funding numbers. The flyer from the group Friends of Durham makes it seem like there’s some sort of crisis at hand with Caballero and the current City Council when it comes to funding the police. In fact, things are going in the other direction, according to the city budget:
I’m relatively new around here and there is much to divine on this topic, especially in Durham. And so while I hadn’t yet made up my mind for the general election, I worry about a mayor who runs on an implicitly negative framing of this critical issue in a way that is divorced from reality. We’ll see how this debate proceeds with a new mayor in town.
Ed Note: Yeoman pointed out to me after publication that Friends of Durham dropped the flyer in question — O’Neal and others didn’t authorize it. I have edited to reflect that on the web. In a questionnaire with the Indy, O’Neal didn’t directly answer when asked if she supported the Community Safety Department.