Comfort Food Eastern North Carolina – 2007 The large sign in the lawn in front of the old red brick building read: “U.S. MARINE CORPS, CAMP ELIZABETH BRIG. NO PHOTOGRAPHS ALLOWED.” I stopped the car right in front of it, rolled down the window, slipped the digital camera from my pocket and took a couple … Continue reading More Resistance Vacation Reading: Comfort Food – A Story
George Moses Horton: A Biographical Sketch & several poems; from local sources George Moses Horton George Moses Horton (1797-1893) could rightly be called North Carolina’s first professional poet. Born enslaved by Chatham County yeoman farmer William Horton, young George Moses Horton loved the rhyming sounds of hymns, and yearned to be able to … Continue reading More Juneteenth: A Remarkable, Neglected Black Carolina Poet
2025 has been a tough year for small colleges in the Carolinas. Two have closed, a third is in what looks like death throes, and then there’s a fourth on the brink, which we’ll get to in a minute. Down and out are St. Andrews, in Laurinburg, a hundred miles southwest of Raleigh in Scotland … Continue reading Guilford College: On the Brink
A year ago last Saturday, the Friends Meeting I’m part of took a big step, for us: we rented a booth at the Alamance Pride Festival, held in a large park in downtown Burlington NC. Outwardly, our booth was not particularly eye-catching. Amid the fluttering of a thousand floating rainbows, the yellow table banner we … Continue reading The Shadow at the Pride Festival
Burlington is in North Carolina’s Alamance County, once notorious as a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan back in the day, Neo-Confederates now. A 35-foot statue of a rebel soldier still guards the county courthouse, and the monument itself is surrounded by a thick wrought iron fence and plenty of Don’t-Tread-On-Me attitude. The county … Continue reading A Quaker Doing His Incognito Bit in North Carolina Politics