In my newspaper column, celebrating the Civil Rights museum and pondering the overdue demise of "the post-civil rights era, pre-civil rights museum ways" of racial politics.

You can read the whole thing after the jump.

Last year, one of my favorite columns: "The pole stars were Christ and Gandhi. Closer to home, Martin Luther King Jr. was showing how the strategy could work."

A tale of two buildings

By Edward Cone
News & Record
1-31-10

Finally.

Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Center & Museum is opening, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins that became Greensboro’s finest hour. The project has been in the works for almost one-third of that time. Its leaders, Skip Alston and Earl Jones, have slogged through the fundraising shallows, outlasted management issues and persevered through the difficulties of renovating the old Woolworth building.

I asked Alston recently how it felt to be nearing the finish line. He said it was like raising a child. After all the travails, it was worth it.

He’s right. This city owes a debt of thanks to Alston and Jones, and to many others who have made this museum a reality. The Greensboro Four — Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.), Joseph McNeil and the late David Richmond — deserve to be remembered. They were true American heroes, blessed with moral clarity, strategic and tactical vision and physical courage. And Greensboro’s peaceful response to their request for service at a downtown lunch counter, uneven and belated as that response was, should be remembered, too,

The museum is bigger than that, of course. It will tell many stories of the long struggle to force the United States to live up to its founding ideals. Some of that history is sad and violent. Some, as attorney Romallus Murphy explained at a recent, pre-anniversary event at Elon Law School, involves all-but-forgotten men and women who dared to challenge the laws and customs of their own country.

It says something powerful that the struggle for civil rights has reached a place where it can be commemorated in a museum. On an essential level, that part of the battle is over, and the good guys won. Racism itself is less pervasive and certainly less public than it was only a few decades ago.

But matters of race and justice can still be complicated and old wounds still tender, as we have seen in Greensboro as recently as last week. What just happened here — and what didn’t end up happening — suggests that we continue to make progress in the post-civil rights era, and that we still have a ways to go.

The controversy started when two local businessmen, Mike Weaver and Dennis Quaintance, filed a request to the city and county for information on projects that may be funded with bonds related to the federal stimulus program. One of those projects is a big downtown hotel, in which African American investors would hold a majority stake. Alston brokered the deal to bring the hotel project to its planned location between Elm and Davie streets, and presumably will collect a fee if the thing gets built.

Weaver and Quaintance have clear interests in questioning the new hotel. They own two hotels that could be hurt by high-end competition and have talked in the past about building a downtown property of their own. They also say the project as currently conceived would be unlikely to pay back its bondholders — a claim supported by a recent consultant’s study — and that a failed hotel would hurt downtown, where Weaver has been a leader of the recent renaissance. And they argue that the confused approval process for the funding mechanism may have overlooked worthier projects.

Yet school board member Deena Hayes, who sits on the museum’s board of directors, claimed that questions about the project were racially motivated, and threatened to lead a protest outside the museum on Monday, the anniversary of the sit-ins. One consequence of the sit-in movement’s success is that charges of racism have become heavy weapons, even when they are of dubious merit, so serious and ugly that all other details are chased from the field.

Not this time. Last Monday, the march was canceled. Alston took credit for defusing the situation, saying he knew it was about business, and that Quaintance and Weaver are stand-up guys on matters of race.

What really happened? Maybe Alston didn’t want to mar the long-delayed opening of the museum. Maybe he just wanted to do the right thing.  Maybe he thought browbeating City Council members in private would be more effective. Maybe, as William Chafe, author of the book “Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom,” said at the same Elon Law event where Romallus Murphy spoke about forgotten heroes, this is a town where the green of a dollar bill tends to trump black and white, and Alston, a successful businessman, recognizes that his own hard-earned place in the power structure gives him as much in common with the hoteliers as with Deena Hayes.

Hayes did not help her cause by failing to mention that she lives with John Greene, a member of the development group behind the new hotel. Her larger issue, economic justice for all people, is very real, and one that became a major concern of Martin Luther King Jr., as basic civil rights became law. But the old ways — the post-civil rights era, pre-civil rights museum ways — failed her this time.

And that’s a good thing. Unfounded charges of racism are not just unfair, they give cover to racists and people who want to pretend for political reasons that race is no longer a factor in American life. Credit Alston, in all his complexity, for making the right call on the eve of his triumph.

© News & Record 2010

Comments

[Doc Alexander]

Ed, I'm not sure I saw anything in your article about Skip Alston's attempted shakedown of our newly elected Mayor and our two newly elected city council members.

And Ed, I'm pretty sure that it was Skip Alston's and Earl Jones's intent to open this museum many years ago, like around 1999-2000. I recall when the News & Record (in a rare example of showing some journalistic integrity) wrote a series of articles back around that time asking why it was taking so long for the museum to open (and why so much money was being spent on just about everything except construction costs) Skip Alston played the race card and stated he would no longer speak to "the white media."

Tomorrow's opening is a significant event. But let's not start having selective memory or revising history.

[Ed Cone]

Doc, I'm not sure what you saw, either, but the column mentions both the long, tortured history of the project and Alston's backroom pressure on council members.

[john wrenn]

On the otherside of the coin. How does Elm Street Partners or what ever they are called fit in? How can you justify spending 12.4 million for properties that were bought for a little more than a 10th of that about 7 years ago in the worst real estate market in the last 30 years. Hasn't anybody on the buy side heard of "negotiating"?

[Ed Cone]

As Mike Weaver has pointed out, it's other people's money.

Also, the "buy side" and the "sell side" are on the same side -- they are working together on the project.

I would like to know the implications of equity participation -- what does one get, besides a stake in the project? What are the tax benefits, and can equity holders find ways to get cash from the bond offering?

[Mick]

Certainly somewhere in the process independant appraisal(s) of the Elm Street properties would have been required...... right? maybe they already have them? Does anyone know if/when appraisals would have been required?

[Ed Cone]

I'm unaware of any such appraisals, Mick.