Few states are as officially anti-union as North Carolina. (In fact, Wikipedia reports that only ONE state has a lower percentage of unionized workers: SOUTH Carolina.)
But if there’s some way to make it even harder for NC workers to unionize than it already is, our legislature is all over it. Especially if the workers are in agriculture, toiling in the fields under the hot summer sun.
And even MORE especially if these workers are Latino. . . .
Have any news media mentioned in your hearing that southeast North Carolina, in the wake of Florence, is due not only for “major hurricane flooding” post-Flo, but along with it will face a Great Brown Wave of toxic, stinking liquid Pig Poop (& Pee).
Down here, they have mentioned it. Like yesterday.
Yes, that region of NC is the second largest center of industrial hog raising in the country (looking at YOU, Iowa). The NC industry is 8 million hogs strong, and it features, in Smithfield Packing, the biggest hog slaughterhouse in the world.
Too many media people around this past week’s supreme Court hearings wasted their energy doing horse race and atmosphere coverage. Political sportscasters, I call them; and pretty bush league at that.
Their frame was: the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (hereafter “K“) is a done deal, so all that matters is the hullabaloo, that and the shadow horse race preview of the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Which meant excessive attention to whether aspirants Kamala Harris or Cory Booker managed to draw some blood and get a boost from a bombshell revelation.
Senators Cory Booker,left, and Kamala Harris, right, peering over the parapet.
But the pair, it was reported, didn’t bring any real ordnance, and neither came out with a 2020 home run. That’s true enough, and for the media political sportscasters, this was all that mattered. And that’s utterly mistaken. Continue reading Kavanaugh Wrap-Up: The Wheat from the Chaff→
As a journalist, I mostly have the “Quaker beat” to myself: Friends are a tiny sect, known mostly for being “quaint,” the inventors of oatmeal, riders in buggies, and extinct. (Never mind that the last three are not true; they’re still what we’re “known” for, by many in what the elders used to call “the world,” when such folk bother to think about us at all.) So when I report on Quaker stuff, it’s rare that I have to compete with “normal” reporters.
But sometimes I get scooped; and that happened again today, and in no less an outlet than the New York Times. (But hey, if you’re gonna get scooped, it might as well be by the best.)
And why would the Times bother with us? If you don’t already know, think for a minute: The Times’ base constituency is the affluent (and up) of the nation’s largest city. And what artifact of Quakerism are such moneyed folk most likely to bump into? (Hint: nothing to do with oatmeal.) Continue reading Another “Quaker” School Makes Waves→
Unless you’re a bear for punishment, you could have skipped most of the first day of hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, settling for the highlights on TV or in text. But then you would have missed the high point, a stunning tour de force of truth-telling from an overlooked member.
For opening entertainment, there were shouting protesters, soon removed, with reportedly70 arrests. Other protesters paced somberly outside in costumes from The Handmaid’s Tale.
The specter of Gilead at the hearing.
Democratic Senators on the Judiciary committee loudly (but futilely) protested the orchestrated coverup of the vast majority of documents from his time working for George W. Bush, from which (I strongly suspect), Kavanaugh is still trying to wash the blood of the tortured innocent from his hands.
I don’t know why Senator Sheldon Whitehouseof Rhode Island isn’t better known. Maybe it’s Rhode island’s mini-size (at barely 1200 square miles, it makes Vermont — 8 times as large– look huge; or maybe its due to the state’s mostly Democratic voting record.) Perhaps it’s because he is not running for president.
Whatever; Whitehouse was a prosecutor and state attorney general before he came to Washington. He knows how to make a case succinctly and trenchantly. Further, this time he did a bunch of relevant homework.
(NOTE: Friend William Bartram, traveling by canoe alone, somewhere in Florida, circa 1773. Considering the dangers he faced here, I ponder on the fact that this was still what he most wanted to do, what he felt was his leading. (A relatively long read, 4400 words. I have divided some of his long sentences & longer paragraphs, for modern readers. The spelling is original.)
BARTRAM: THE evening was temperately cool and calm. The crocodiles began to roar and appear in uncommon numbers along the shores and in the river. I fixed my camp in an open plain, near the utmost projection of the promontory, under the shelter of a large Live Oak, which stood on the highest part of the ground and but a few yards from my boat. Continue reading A Quaker “Walks Cheerfully,” Up To His A** In Alligators: A Final “Dog Days” Journey→
“It has been fashionable for a while now to place McCain somehow above politics; the “maverick” thing was based on a sparse list of examples. There was the campaign finance law that he championed with Russ Feingold, a law that lies now in ruins because of judges for whom John McCain loyally voted. He campaigned vigorously to give the president a line-item veto until a Supreme Court led by William Rehnquist explained forcefully that such a measure was hilariously unconstitutional. He thoroughly supported Reagan’s adventurism in Central America, was a protege of Henry Kissinger, got snagged in the Keating 5 corruption and became a campaign-finance reformer only after skating on that episode more cleanly than the other four miscreants, one of whom was John Glenn. He was a reliable Republican vote on every nomination and every policy that evidenced the Republican Party’s slow slide into madness and chaos and he was unable and not a talented enough politician to stop it.
We don’t have a picture of John Jeffress, at least I haven’t found one. Same for personal background: where he was from, when he was born. We only have a report about his end, which came on this date, august 25, 98 years ago.
This report was published in several papers on August 26, 2018:
Sheriff Storey and Jeffress were in Graham NC, the seat of Alamance County. When they turned toward the courthouse, they passed near this Confederate memorial, 30 feet high including the statue on the top, which had already been standing for six years.
On the monument’s south face: “ON FAME’S ETERNAL CAMPING GROUND, THEIR SILENT TENTS ARE SPREAD, AND GLORY GUARDS, WITH SOLEMN ROUND, THE BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD.”
At this point, the crowd made its move:
In the version of this report published in the Charlotte NC News, additional details were included:
Sheriff Story [sic] and his six assistants started with Jeffress to the courthouse one block away. Arriving at the spot where Ray was killed, a mob formed around the Officers and their prisoner. There was a sudden surge forward and in the twinkling of an eye, according to the sheriff, the prisoner had been taken from the officers and was placed in an automobile and rushed away. There was not a shot fired: not even a gun drawn during the minute scuffle between the mob and officers.
A photo published in 1964, when Storey died.
Sheriff Story said tonight that resistance would have been folly as the mob was made up of between 25 and 50 determined men. There were at least 150 additional men nearby whose sympathies were with the mob, he stated tonight. Answering a. direct question, Sheriff Story declared that he did not know anyone in the mob. The man who led the mob and took the prisoner away, the sheriff said, must have just moved into the county and was not known to him.
There were no arrests or prosecutions after this killing. And there is no memorial to John Jeffress in Alamance County. There was none anywhere — until this spring. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative opened what it called the National Memorial for Peace & Justice.
In this unique structure, there are 800 pillars, one for each county where the founders could verify a lynching. Names of the know victims are engraved on the pillars.
That, of course, includes Alamance County, NC. and on the Alamance pillar, there is one name:
The fact that we know this much (or this little) about John Jeffress is because in those years, a century and more ago, the young (and often denounced as “radical”) NAACP was compiling a record. It often hung this flag outside its New York office:
The Equal Justice Initiative, sponsors of the Montgomery Memorial, is encouraging persons elsewhere to remember these “erased” crimes.
The Charlotte News editor, whoever it was, gets a bit of credit with their account:
“The crime for which the young negro was put to death is, alleged to have been committed at 10 o’clock yesterday morning, near the child’s home. Cries of her mother, it is said, caused the negro to run, leaving the little girl without serious injury.”
At least he said “alleged.” This entire affair began about 10 AM, and was over by shortly after 3 PM. Jeffress was on his way to be arraigned, formally charged, when he was snatched and then killed. No arraignment, no trial, no evidence, no defense, nothing.
Is all this far in the past, better left alone? I snapped the photo below outside a McDonalds in Graham a few months ago.
I don’t have a bumpersticker for John Jeffress. But I can contribute this remembrance.
A sculpture at the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, Montgomery, Alabama.
Human & Animal Hunting
From Bartram’s Travels, by William Bartram, 1791:
I AM sensible that the general opinion of philosophers, has distinguished the moral system of the brute creature from that of mankind, by an epithet whichimplies a mere mechanical impulse, which leads and impels them to necessary action without any premeditated design or contrivance, this we term instinct which faculty we suppose to be inferior to reason in man.
A Quaker
“It has been fashionable for a while now to place McCain somehow above politics; the “maverick” thing was based on a sparse list of examples. There was the campaign finance law that he championed with Russ Feingold, a law that lies now in ruins because of judges for whom John McCain loyally voted. He campaigned vigorously to give the president a line-item veto until a Supreme Court led by William Rehnquist explained forcefully that such a measure was hilariously unconstitutional. He thoroughly supported Reagan’s adventurism in Central America, was a protege of Henry Kissinger, got snagged in the Keating 5 corruption and became a campaign-finance reformer only after skating on that episode more cleanly than the other four miscreants, one of whom was John Glenn. He was a reliable Republican vote on every nomination and every policy that evidenced the Republican Party’s slow slide into madness and chaos and he was unable and not a talented enough politician to stop it.
