Tag Archives: north carolina

The Fusion Party in North Carolina

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

I’m reading on how the Fusion Party in North Carolina brought together liberal Black Republicans and progressive, pro-labor White Populists against the planter elite-dominated Democrats for a short, amazing period before Democrats used “white supremacy” and violence to split the working class vote.

I think that this coalition approach might work in this era: progressive Berniecrats and liberal Democrats who respect each other’s autonomy without taking over each other.

The Democrats won’t fit all progressives, and many progressives who are focused on class issues will see the Democrats as a constraint. Both should be respected as separate parties, and we should negotiate a coalition between the two on good faith.

But this can’t be negotiated under the Democratic tent. The Democrats will have to come to the table, and not assume that they are the only legitimate party in this country.

Maybe we need the Fusion Party to come back to the South, and be the bridge to unite these groups in ways that the Dems in the South will be prevented from doing for the next several decades.

 

Segregation in the South – The Atlantic

Politics, Uncategorized,

This is sad reading, especially about third party politics in the South.

This is, unfortunately, not a surprising account of North Carolina, or of the South more generally. The South of the 1950s was the land of fire hoses aimed at black people who dared protest Jim Crow laws. Today, schools in the South are almost as segregated as they were when Sevone Rhymes was a child. Southern cities including Charlotte are facing racial tensions over the shootings of black men by white policemen, which, in Charlotte’s case, led to massive protests and riots.

But what few people know is that the South wasn’t always so segregated. During a brief window of time between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, black and white people lived next to each other in Southern cities, creating what the historian Tom Hanchett describes as a “salt-and-pepper” pattern. They were not integrated in a meaningful sense: Divisions existed, but “in a lot of Southern cities, segregation hadn’t been fully imposed—there were neighborhoods where blacks and whites were living nearby,” said Eric Foner, a Columbia historian and expert on Reconstruction. Walk around in the Atlanta or the Charlotte of the late 1800s, and you might see black people in restaurants, hotels, the theater, Foner said. Two decades later, such things were not allowed.

via Segregation in the South – The Atlantic

Reading Vann Newkirk’s Atlantic piece on how North Carolina’s Moral Monday “identity politics” coalition helped defeat McCrory, and then reading an alt-weekly editor’s comment underneath the article saying that McCrory was more defeated by those outside of the Moral Monday coalition who were disgusted by McCrory’s bullshit but not disgusted enough by Trump, I don’t know who to believe.

I dunno, maybe it’s a combination of BOTH? #IdentityPolitics #p2

McEwen believes — and has often been able to prove or link together — deliberate attempts by rightwing groups to twist facts, mischaracterize scientific studies and malign LGBT people in the process.

“They say they are standing on God’s principles and God’s law,” he said. “Okay, if you’re doing that, why do you have to lie? Why do you have to do all these other things?”

Exposing the right’s hypocrisy and their intentional efforts at discrimination defines nearly all of McEwen’s passion and citizen journalism. He’s challenged some of the biggest names on the right, and even got one to admit the truth, he said.

“I had a conversation with Robert Knight,” McEwen recalled of the man who has worked with Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council, two of the nation’s largest anti-LGBT groups. “I asked him about how he used junk science. He said, ‘Yeah, we use it. So what?’”

via McEwen has a watchful eye | QNotes.

Flip Benham: one of many wastes of talent.

With gay marriage now legal in North Carolina, it was only a matter of time before Flip Benham of Operation Save America started crashing wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.

The North Carolina-based pastor, who is the father of Religious Right activists David and Jason Benham, reportedly disrupted several weddings at the Mecklenburg County and Courts Office in Charlotte last week.

Benham’s group, which in July disrupted a memorial service at a Unitarian Universalist congregation in New Orleans, “interrupted several couples’ weddings as supporters held up a large rainbow flag to block his view,” according to the North Carolina LGBT publication Q Notes. “Another protester waved a bible in the air as he screamed several profanities and vulgarities.”

via Flip Benham Crashes Gay Weddings In North Carolina | Right Wing Watch.