Ms. Hazel’s Last July 4th — 2023: Her Flags & The Prayer Line
Ms. Hazeltine Umstead, with hammer & flags, July 2023.
I lived next door to Ms. Hazeline Umstead for twelve years. She was remarkable in many ways: she had grown up in this neighborhood; had returned to it after several years in New York City.
She was meticulous about her lawn (and doggedly patient with the unruly wildlife habitat we were making next door), and her blonde wigs.
She was in church every Sunday, and started most mornings on a telephone prayer line with several other believers, calling for divine protection and help for a continuing roster of those in need (I was on the list more than once).
But I think the thing she loved most was giving parties, marking her birthdays and holidays: she also had oversized blow-up yard figures for Christmas and especially Valentine’s Day. Each year in late summer she ordered loads of delectable local soul food for a free banquet for a huge crowd of local police.
2020-Covid. When this sign disappeared from her yard, she hand-painted another one.
Among these celebrations, July 4th was special. I could tell that because she spent at least a full day on her hands and knees, using a hammer to pound close to fifty American flags in the grass, on both sides of her driveway to the curb, plus the sidewalk to her porch, and here and there among her menagerie of lawn animals, and under the big flag that hung from the corner of her roof year-round.
I often pondered what had shaped this annual devotion. When she was a schoolgirl, around the corner on Lakewood, the street was a dirt road, the city and its schools were rigidly segregated; her mother and other elders were unable to vote. Durham had a large Klan chapter.
But she lived to see the street paved, the schools opened up (somewhat at least), the Klan dwindle, relatives serve in the military. She not only cast ballots religiously, but was twice able to vote for Obama (his photo was enshrined on her wall) and we lamented together the rise of Obama’s successor.
When these photos were taken, in 2023, we were again lamenting the prospect of that successor’s return. And Ms. Hazel was daily waging (and slowly losing) the most intense struggle of the years I knew her: against aging and its burgeoning disabilities.
She disliked doctors, medicines, pain —and even more hated having to ask for help. I would gladly have put in a batch of the flags. But I also knew she would have been affronted by the offer, with its unmistakable implication of weakness and need: she had set up these flags for I don’t know how many years before I turned up. It was her ritual, and if it took all day and night, she would erect it just so, and the only help she needed or would accept was that of her beloved Jesus.
So I watched from my side, and recorded her labor. One reason was that I feared this could be the last time she would get to do it. With her game legs, it was slow going.
But as she finished the driveway rows and practically crawled up the sidewalk with its concrete steps, painstakingly planting more slender wood posts, a different thought came: in good health or in decline, for reasons I could mostly just guess at, Ms. Hazel was the most patriotic American in our neighborhood.
It wasn’t a contest. A glance up and down the otherwise flag-free block confirmed it. We took America for granted; but despite its failings, which she knew all too well and did not excuse, Ms. Hazel did not.
Finally she arrived at the finish, and sat, worn out, on the top step of her porch, surveying the array. I imagined she was also reflecting on the strains loose and rising in the country, beyond what she could see, or feel.
Maybe that’s just my projection, but we had spoken often of these things. There was plenty threatening her country then, and now.
I was right about one thing. This was her last time: in October, the strokes came. She was carried from the house to hospitals and a rehab center, unable to speak. Ms. Hazel died there in February 2024.
A relative lives there now. The large flag at the corner of the roof flies solo. Most of her lawn menagerie has scattered.
But I think of her often, especially today. I wonder: if it’s really heaven, it must have a large green yard just for her, where she can work daily in perfect weather, with no aches or pains. And does she still take time to join that prayer line there?
If so, Ms. Hazel, please add me back onto the list. Along with all the rest of what moved you to plant those flags.
This “billboard” is meant to be the first of a series in the runup to the June 14 “NO KINGS” protests.
The strategy of the series is to widen the gap between Trump-Hegseth (TH) and many troops, and remind them (and others watching) that their oath is to defund the Constitution (not a wannabe monarch). It also will remind them that domestic deployments (sending troops against U. S. Citizens here in the “homeland”) is both illegal AND a very REAL threat under rule by TH. (The troops have been taught this.)
This approach is based on my eleven years as Director of Quaker House in North Carolina, near Fort Bragg/Liberty. There we counseled dissident troops, and organized well over 150 peace protests, large & small, in the midst of one of the biggest military communities.
In our work we learned early on that to get our messages across, it was CRITICAL that our public witness constantly express “support” and respect for the troops, even while rejecting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
We were surrounded by many troops and veterans who had been brainwashed by Fox News etc. to believe we hated and looked down on soldiers (which we did NOT), and were atheist commies, etc. which we also weren’t.
(Sorry, lefties.)
Just in case you think I’m exaggerating about the attempts to smear us as “troop-haters & Commies”; this was in Smithfield NC, in October 2007.
We DID “support” them, in our Quaker ways, as persons of conscience, many of whom had moral questions about the war and military culture. We worked to help them clarify their personal moral convictions (if they asked), privately and for free. We didn’t try to make them Quakers or pacifists.
The efforts to push us and our work into a polarized frame never stopped (and this was years before MAGA appeared). And our “Yes to the Troops/No to the Wars” pushback was just as steadfast.
It paid off. In the first two years of the Iraq invasion, our vigils in downtown Fayetteville often drew catcalls and one-finger salutes. But then, with the war bogged down and casualties kept mounting, morale shifted and we began to get thumbs up, and even an occasional cheer.
As the war’s cost climbed ever higher, our “Yes to the troops” became more credible, as we weren’t locked into a polarized frame.
In 2025, there are many issues facing conscientious servicemembers. Some surfaced at the West Point commencement last month. While the big media didn’t notice, the thousand graduating cadets watched and listened as West Point Superintendent General Steven Gilland subtly but fiercely denounced Trump’s character to his face as utterly beyond the pale of every section of the academy’s strict honor code. The sitting Commander in Chief would have been booted out of West Point with the first of his multitude of indictments; along with his skeezy Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth (who didn’t even show up).
Hegseth taking aim
But these two “leaders” are also the pair who seem determined to loose the military on the American citizenry, in defiance of the law and the oath those thousand cadets took to defend, not a president but the Constitution.
Hegseth published an entire book about his fixed vision of a real medieval-style crusade to “annihilate” the enemies within (mostly, besides migrants, that would be us).
If that dire push should come to shove, will there be a significant portion of the officer corps and troops who will stand by their oath in the crunch? In real life, coups fail if they don’t keep control of the national military.
Those of us who will be protesting Trump’s vanity parade are more than spectators (or targets): we can evade the ginned-up polarization and appeal to the best in the uniformed ranks. Sure, the military tends to be more conservative than the general population, and extremists are hard at work recruiting there.
But that’s not the end of the story. How we communicate with them could make a difference, maybe a key difference.
Our motto at Quaker House can be adjusted: NO To The COUP. Remember Your Oath. Defend The Constitution. NO To Domestic Deployments.
I have more sign ideas, and will add some soon.
But if you’re on board, you write the next ones. And pass this on.
pVb/h June 14 will be here quick. Get ready. I’ll catch up.
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 County; and Limestone University, about 60 miles west of Charlotte, just over the border in Gaffney SC. In Raleigh itself, a venerable HBCU, St. Augustine’s University, is hanging on by a thread.
St. Andrews and Limestone officially closed after commencements early in May.
St. Aug’s, as it is called, is on life support, having lost its accreditation, it appealed, unsuccessfully. Then it managed a stay of execution until an arbitration process is completed.
Even if it wins the arbitration, St. Aug’s enrollment this year was around 200, down drastically from 1100 in 2024; plus it is facing lawsuits for millions of dollars. It gave out a few diplomas in May too, asserting that as long as its disaccreditation was not final, the degrees were legitimate. Odds are, they will be the last.
While not widely-known, these schools aren’t fly-by-nights: among them they have delivered almost 350 years of academics in the region, over seven generations. But time, demographic change, management and debt can be pitiless, and the combination caught up with all of them.
As it seems about to catch up with yet another: Guilford College in Greensboro, which opened 188 years ago, in 1837.
Guilford’s crisis echoes Ernest Hemingway’s famous dictum about how one goes bankrupt: “gradually, and then suddenly.” We’ve reported on Guilford’s decline in this blog more than once —as early as 2015, and during the runup toits current difficulties.
This week, in mid-May, Guilford’s plight got an in-depth and unflinching analysis in a lengthy piece by Matt Hartman of The Assembly.This aggressive online startup has been doing a fine job of covering many major topics largely lost in the smog of social media exhaust that has filled the vacuums where so many local newspapers once thrived.
Hartman’s piece is thoroughly excellent, except for an awkward headline (and in the good old days, reporters could usually blame editors for such lapses.) Here it is:
Guilford College Debates How ‘Quakerly’ It Should Be
For pete’s sake: No, Guilford is not doing that. Here is a more accurate version:
Guilford Is Struggling to Survive, with Time Rapidly Running Out.
Yes, Guilford was founded by Quakers, though it soon opened its doors to pupils outside the denomination. Quaker numbers in North Carolina have been dwindling for over a century. Besides, while Quakers take (humble) pride in their “distinctives,” they share one key feature with almost all the rest of humanity, namely: they have bills to pay. And at Guilford, bill-paying has become steadily harder. After ten years and more of juggling, stalling, avoidance and dissembling, the college has six weeks left to close a yawning financial gap. Or else.
How big a gap? The Assembly’s Hartman dug through heaps of obfuscation, books-cooking, and years of what is at least gross mismanagement (and could even include patterns a prosecutor should hire a forensic accountant to sort out.) The total hole Guilford needs to fill? Hartman says the current management
which took over this year, is aiming to raise $5 million in gifts, cut $3 million in expenses, and generate $3 million in other revenue by June 30.
Matt Hartman, The Assembly
I was not good at math, but I can add 5 + 3 + 3, and it equals 11.
Eleven. Million. Bucks. For years the repeatedly-quoted — but bogus — deficit figure was around two million. And at this writing, on May 16, there are 45 days to get it fixed; six weeks til Judgment Day, June 30.
A big chunk of the running deficit is produced by interest payments on tens of millions of dollars of bonds Guilford issued to finance renovations and upgrades of dorms — to house an expected bulge of student body growth.
The dorms got rebuilt; but the student bulge did not arrive; enrollments sank instead. And the bond payments made for chronic deficits, and the bank that owned the bonds has potent legal options in the case of default.
Gradually the deficits grew, and then suddenly, last December, the crisis arrived. (Details here.) In March of this year, an “emergency” fundraising campaign was launched (not, by the way, the first) for the $5 million in gifts.
How is it going? Hartman says,
School officials say they have raised $3.3 million since March but have not met their goals for cutting costs and raising other revenues.
On May 14 a Guilford staff meeting was told expense cuts were coming, but specifics were vague. This raised a familiar ominous question: would expense cuts also mean staff and faculty layoffs, of which there have already been several rounds?
The responses were vague; but if the target for expense cuts is $3 million, it is hard to credit any hope that more job cuts can be avoided.
And finally, there’s an even more vague category, “raising other revenues.” How? Bake sales? Bingo or raffles? (Certainly not! Quakers have long been against gambling. And don’t get me started on wine tastings. But . . . $3 million??)
Hmm. What else could there be —what other, “other sources?”
. . . “Other?” Oh, no, some quietly gasped. No, not that. Surely not that!
Yet there were those inside and outside the May 14 meeting who were thinking — YES, that:
That, or rather those, are The Guilford Family Jewels.
Not ordinary gems, diamonds or pearls; traditional Quakers sternly shun such worldly baubles (there’s since been some slippage); Guilford’s are more precious than that:
Green jewels: the woods. The land.
There’s a lot of it at Guilford, almost 350 acres. The actual campus takes up about 90. Much of the rest is mostly woods.
Nice woods. Walkable woods. Historic woods.
Developable woods.
Woods that maybe could be turned into “other revenues.”
But $3 million worth?
Who knows?
At least one active alum wants to find out: Mark Cubberly, who spends much of his retirement free time working to save his alma mater. Hartman reports that
In its current economic climate, [Cubberly] says, Guilford has no choice but to do what [some] others are desperately trying to avoid: Think like a business. . . .
Recently, Cubberly said, he helped facilitate a meeting between Guilford’s then-CFO and a real estate broker to discuss selling part of the Guilford Woods, an undeveloped, 240-acre section of campus.
Faculty and staff have been opposed to their sale for years because of what [the acting president] called their “historic value and environmental value,” largely due to their connection with the Underground Railroad, which area Quakers were part of.
. . . But no deal has come to pass.
Instead, one longtime faculty member is pressing a plan to replace most of the upper administration with a council that would operate much like a local Quaker meeting for business, and support a communal ambiance that would attract new students.
There is more than a tinge of romantic nostalgia to this idea. Quaker meetings can indeed offer warm-fuzzy community experiences. But they are also prone to what some sociologists call “the paralysis of analysis,” though Friends prefer to call it “discernment.” Often the bigger the stakes, the longer this “Quaker process” takes.
So, what does this plan, even if adopted, have to do with bringing in $11 million by the end of June?
Lucia Safran Messina, another active local alum, was blunt: “This kumbaya stuff is for the birds now.”
[The acting president] said selling land is “something we would only do in extremis,” and that her team is looking for ways to monetize the woods instead. One option is a conservation easement with the Piedmont Land Conservancy, though no deal has been reached.
Well, if Guilford was a train station, the In Extremis Express, enroute to Or Else Junction, would be rounding the bend, rolling steadily closer, the big headlight flashing right/left, shrill whistle booming, rails humming.
What would In Extremis deliver for Guilford? From The Assembly article and other inquiries, three scenarios emerge for post-June 30.
Best Case: Guilford shows it has $11 million in hand or rock-solid committed. The budget is balanced, their accreditation overseers smile and bow, and The Family Jewels are unscathed.
Next Case, Or Else #1: Receivership. Guilford defaults on bond payments. The bondholders exercise their right to put the college in receivership. That means putting it under the control of a court-appointed overseer, authorized to make drastic changes by decree, such as selling off as much of The (green) Family Jewels, along with job and program cuts, to erase the deficit while preserving a functioning and viable, if quite different Guilford.
Worst Case, Or Else #2: The college defaults, the bondholders take full charge, close the school and liquidate all available college assets to recover as much of their failed investment as possible. The Family Jewels are gone; Guilford joins St. Andrew’s, Limestone (& St. Aug’s?) in Carolina dead college oblivion. Only memories and the historic markers remain.
I’m not a fortuneteller, but I will venture that today the best case sure looks to have pretty slim odds. I will also dare to say that the apparent divergence between being “Quakerly” and being “Businesslike” voiced by some at Guilford rings quite false to what I know of historic Quaker life and witness.
Indeed, “businesslike” attitudes have been integral to Quaker practice since the first generation, and a serious businesslike way of operating (including making the tough calls) is also “Quakerly” and has a very long pedigree.
[NOTE: Since this article was posted (May 16) there have been rumors about a deal involving some of the wooded acreage taking shape; but these are not yet confirmed.]
Other than that, my hat is off to Matt Hartman and The Assembly, for showing that quality journalism in Carolina survives amid that legacy industry’s rubble.
Would that more of its small colleges can do likewise.
This past First Day (Quaker talk for Sunday) I Zoomed into worship in my Friends meeting, the one out in the farmland of Flyover County, North By-God Carolina, where I missed one of my favorite annual scenes there: the appearance in the back 40 of a big unruly spread of wild daffodils. But I did hear a stirring message.
Types & Shadowsis the quarterly journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts.(FQA) It first appeared in 1996, and has been produced ever since by dedicated and creative volunteers.
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were strongly against the arts for their first two centuries, regarding them as “vain” and hazardous distractions from plainness and more serious and “spiritual” things.
Their evolution away from this prohibition is traced in an FQA Booklet, Beyond Uneasy Tolerance, which is also available free on the FQA website.
often pondered what had shaped this annual devotion. When she was a schoolgirl, around the corner on Lakewood, the street was a dirt road, the city and its schools were rigidly segregated; her mother and other elders were unable to vote. Durham had a large Klan chapter.
It wasn’t a contest. A glance up and down the otherwise flag-free block confirmed it. We took America for granted; but despite its failings, which she knew all too well and did not excuse, Ms. Hazel did not.
In our work we learned early on that to get our messages across, it was CRITICAL that our public witness constantly express “support” and respect for the troops, even while rejecting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
This week, in mid-May, Guilford’s plight got an in-depth and unflinching analysis in a lengthy piece by Matt Hartman of 
