As I write this it has been 212 years since the birth of Abraham Lincoln. I knew great grandparents who were alive when he was alive, but all the current residents of Trinity View have lived through a period of change in black-white relations that has been, arguably, even more significant than the Civil War.
It’s Black History Month, and I’m going to look at some of my own experiences in watching that history of change.
In college, I was a controversial columnist for the student newspaper on various subjects, but issues of racism were dominant in my all white college, and I was determined to save the world from racism.
Today, I’ll cover mostly local government, but also a little religion, and a little Pepsi Cola, focusing on how things took a different direction in those verdant days.
In 1965, I was working in community action in the East Coast town of New Bern, the site of Tryon Palace, the colonial capital of North Carolina, and the center of slave trading in the state. The Ku Klux Klan was rampant and operated quite openly there.
There were two small churches of my sect in this town, one for white people and one for black people. The bishop who assigned pastors sent an African American to the white church, the first known such assignment in North Carolina, occurring just about the same time I arrived.
He had a brief uprising in his parish, but his main problem was keeping the metal cross at the top of his welcome sign up straight. Apparently, every night someone would bend it down, and he would reverse it the next day.
He and I became friends and consoled each other in our trials and tribulations. I occasionally attended the black church which in turn shocked some of its congregants. They were even more shocked when I brought along a young black female who was among my volunteers.
Neither race was comfortable with the changes that were happening. Father Thomas Hadden was the first African American Catholic priest in North Carolina, and only six years a priest, he was rightfully concerned with his new assignment, but he was eventually well-received and survived 9 years there overseeing the successful consolidation of the two parishes. In 1972, in another venue for each of us, he baptized my son Abraham.
Among my responsibilities in New Bern were various programs related to resolving poverty, with a large focus on improving black lives, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Office of Economic Opportunity.
I and my fellow employees were not always well received. This was the era Lyndon Johnson had just signed the Civil Rights Act which allowed inter-racial dining. When one of my co-workers and I ate at the local Holiday Inn restaurant, a note was left under my windshield, “The Klan was watching you.”
There was a shooting into a group of college volunteers for which I had some oversight responsibility; there was a gathering I had at my apartment that included folks of mixed-color skin and the always watchful Klan burned a burlap wrapped and kerosene cross in my front yard.
The local news made note of this, and I was fired for bringing discredit to our work. I contacted the governor’s office since I had been active in his campaign. A state trooper was dispatched who gave me advice which was taken; I packed my bags loaded all my earthly possessions in my car and left town.
Times did change, Lee Morgan, the husband of that woman who was with me for the 1965 Klan-noticed meal was elected to the first of his three terms as mayor of New Bern in 1977.
Further down the road, after joining the United States Army, two years of graduate education at one of the top schools in the U.S. in the field of public finance and administration, and a position as the N.C. State Coordinator of Housing and Urban Programs, I was invited to Chapel Hill to become city finance director in the administration of Howard Lee, who had been elected the first black mayor of a white majority southern city since Reconstruction.
I was able to help Mayor Lee, who had been born on a sharecropper’s farm in Georgia, fill one of his major campaign promises, starting a much-needed municipal bus system in this university town. He was successful and re-elected two times. It was also fun to have UNC basketball coach Dean Smith bringing basketball recruits to city hall to show off our black mayor. When I arrived in Chapel Hill, Dean’s first black athlete, Charlie Scott had just completed his degree, the first in a long line of outstanding recruits that included Michael Jordan.
In my previously mentioned graduate work in public administration, there were no African Americans and no women. The change was coming quite rapidly. The county manager of Orange County, which included Chapel Hill, had seen his county elections affected by the progressive movement that elected Mayor Lee, and he wanted a more progressive staff.
He asked me to move on and become the assistant manager and finance director of the county. Shortly after my arrival the new county commission elected its first female chairman and the following year one of the first black chairman of a white-majority county in the state, Richard Whitted. The only county employee outside of social services when I arrived was a black man who polished the brass staircase. I hired and mentored the first black professionals in the county including a young man who ultimately moved up to the position of County Finance Director. I also encouraged the sheriff to hire his first black deputy.
Some 10 years later, the City of Richmond, Virginia, had just become a black majority city and selected its first black mayor, Henry Marsh. Mayor Marsh had started his schooling in a one room schoolhouse, grades 1 through 7, eventually continuing to Howard University Law School and a distinguished career as a civil rights lawyer.
Richmond, the capital city of its state, made so at the urging of Thomas Jefferson, and later the capital of the Confederacy had never had a senior black official. The mayor’s position in most cities is comparable to the corporate chairman of the board, and the board would hire a Chief Executive Officer (CEO). This new administration hired its first black city manager, the CEO, who in turn hired me to be his chief financial officer.
This time the problems were more stressful than Chapel Hill. The remaining white power structure was not adjusting well to losing. The Civil War was bad enough. At the same time, the new black structure was adamant that it was their turn.
If you see current media reporting about major statues in Richmond, like Robert E. Lee, you know this controversy has not yet settled. Richmond has had one white mayor since then 30 years ago, the remarkable Tim Kaine, who then became governor, senator, and a candidate for vice president.
Another more permanent member in that black congregation I mentioned at the start was a very attractive lady, Levonia Frazier, Pepsi Cola’s first advertising model of color. A lovely model befitting the image that Pepsi wanted to portray of middle-class black people enjoying their cola. I doubt that her ads in the 1940s appeared anywhere in the South.
Nevertheless, Pepsi had a more progressive corporate management than Atlanta-based Coca Cola and decided to heavily court black consumers, so, even before Michael Jackson, Pepsi has always been a favorite in the African American community.
Did you know New Bern was the birthplace of Pepsi? Yes, but it was long gone from there by the time its first black model came to New Bern where she lived out her life.
While I didn’t stifle racism, I do feel that I was an agent of change making the paths easier for some to handle their racism.
One regret I have at this point in my life is that I still live in a community that can only be described as a white enclave, but I may be an optimist, and I do believe times are changing.
