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North Carolina

Paying It Forward: North Carolina J20 Ex-Defendants Pass On Anti-Repression Funds

Two years ago, roughly twenty anarchists, anti-fascists, and anti-capitalists from the North Carolina region were among the 200+ people arrested for disrupting the Presidential Inauguration spectacle, also known as J20). Some of us went to trial. Some of us stuck it out until the final dismissal. None of us accepted their bullshit pleas. Despite the prosecution’s divide and conquer tactics, we stuck together. And we beat them! Along the way we learned valuable lessons, gained stronger relationships, and, thanks to our amazing regional support network, a few thousand dollars in defense funds.

Samuel Oliver-Bruno Kidnapped By ICE: Sanctuary Is Disobedience

The biggest sale this year for Black Friday is deportation. As millions gathered around tables and screens, celebrating their families and purchases, we the folks of North Carolina are in mourning. On Friday morning, August 23rd, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) set a biometric trap for Samuel Oliver-Bruno. After eleven months of living in the basement of City Well Church in Durham, advocating for “prosecutorial discretion,” Samuel Oliver-Bruno unsettled sanctuary and left for an immigration appointment in nearby Morrisville. Held by clergy and spirited warriors, Samuel walked into the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he was besieged by officers. His son, Daniel, was swept into a mangle of arms and charged with assaulting an officer.

Read The Moving Letter The Descendant Of A Racist Confederate Leader Wrote In Support Of Anti-Racist Activists

Meg Yarnell, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Julian Carr, is calling for academic and criminal charges to be dropped against Maya Little and other anti-racist activists who have been arrested for protests related to the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam. In an open letter to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill administrators, including Chancellor Carol Folt, Yarnell notes that she is “grateful for what Maya did to contextualize this statue and advance the cause for its removal.” In the weeks and months following the toppling of Silent Sam on August 20, Carr’s speech at the statue’s 1913 dedication ceremony has been widely recirculated.

Hurricane Florence Highlights The Cruel Reality Of Factory Farming

Broiler chickens (chickens raised for meat) are the top agricultural commodity in North Carolina. In 2015, 823 million broiler chickens were raised in the state. (Photo credit: North Carolina Department of Agriculture). In 1999, Hurricane Floyd tore through North Carolina, killing 74 people and causing $6.5 billion in damage. But it didn't just destroy towns and claim human lives; it also claimed the lives of millions of farm animals. The images are impossible to forget: lifeless pigs floating in flood water, thousands of dead chickens inside a factory farm and a few live pigs huddling on top of a barn almost completely submerged under water.

In North Carolina, Co-Ops Are Building A More Democratic Economy

Nestled at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina, Morganton may seem like an unlikely place to find a large Mayan community. But since the 1980s, the Burke County city of almost 17,000 people, over 75 percent of them white and 12 percent black, is home to a growing Latino community, including Mayan immigrants from Guatemala. Like other immigrants before them, the Maya came to Morganton in search of economic opportunity. Many found work at the local Case Farms chicken processing plant but grew dissatisfied over low wages, poor working conditions, and unsuccessful labor organizing efforts. Searching for a better way to make a living, some have found it in cooperative economics.

How The Confederate Statue Came Down In Chapel Hill

Silent Sam has been a flashpoint for anti-racist struggle for at least fifty years. It was donated to the university and erected in 1913 during the Jim Crow era by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Capitalist, racist, and KKK-supporter Julian Carr, for whom the neighboring town of Carrboro is named, boasted during a speech at the statue’s dedication that he had, just yards away from the monument and under the gaze of Confederate soldiers, “horse-whipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds” because she had insulted a white woman. Protesters threw paint on the statue when Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in 1968; demonstrators gathered around it to remember two black men, James Cates, who was murdered on UNC’s campus by a white motorcycle gang, and William Murphy, who was murdered by a NC highway patrolman, in 1971.

Make It Right Project Billboards Boost Activist Campaigns To Remove ‘Silent Sam’ Confederate Monument

Raleigh, N.C.  — The Make It Right Project has put up two Raleigh-area billboards that support the removal of UNC-Chapel Hill Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam.” The signs, which include a photo of the statue covered by a red “X,” display the message “North Carolina needs a monumental change.” UNC students and Chapel Hill activists have been demonstrating against Silent Sam since 1968. The billboards are part of a larger campaign by the Make It Right Project to elevate and bolster protests by those who have put their lives and livelihoods on the line to remove Confederate monuments. “For five decades, UNC administrators have ignored students’ requests to remove an homage to an army that fought to defend black chattel slavery,” said Kali Holloway, Director of the Make It Right Project.

20,000 North Carolina Teachers Walk Out, Demanding More Resources And Better Pay

Twenty thousand teachers staged a school walkout in North Carolina on Wednesday, demanding better salaries and more money for education. Forty school districts canceled classes in what The New York Times reports is the first walkout for teachers in that state. North Carolina, as The Guardian reports, “stood 39th nationwide in terms of public school teacher pay in 2017 and teachers’ wages have fallen by 9.4% in real terms over the last decade. Over the same period, spending on public schools here has dropped by 8%.” Both the low pay and the lack of resources have taken a toll on teachers’ morale. “I have to work other jobs,” Kaitlyn Davis, 26, a fourth-grade teacher, told The Guardian. “And it’s not fair because it takes away from the energy that I have to put into teaching.”

North Carolina Teachers Just Closed Schools With A Massive Protest

Thousands of North Carolina teachers poured into downtown Raleigh and marched to the state’s General Assembly on Wednesday morning in the latest in a series of red-state public school teacher uprisings across the country. The demonstration was believed to be the largest teacher protest in North Carolina’s history, with educators creating a sea of red on Fayetteville Street and inside the assembly galleries as they demanded more public school funding and better salaries for school staffers. The largest school districts in the state announced closures once it became clear that not enough teachers would be in the classroom. Roughly a million students were out of school as a result, according to the News & Observer, a Raleigh-based paper.

How Solar Panels On A Church Rooftop Broke The Law In N.C.

A North Carolina environmental group that tried to challenge the state's utility monopoly by installing solar panels on the roof of a predominantly African-American church and selling the church cheap, clean power has lost its appeal to the state's highest court. Advocates say they are disappointed in the ruling, but they aren't giving up the fight to lift restrictions on clean energy. The case involved an attempt to bust through restrictions that solar advocates face in much of the Southeast. The region has a history of maintaining strong utility monopolies while other states have opened their markets to competition. The result, advocates say, limits rooftop solar in a region with some of the strongest solar power potential.

How Durham, NC Became The First U.S. City To Ban Police Exchanges With Israel

Durham, North Carolina became the first city in the country to ban local police exchanges with Israel on April 16, when the city council unanimously passed a resolution opposing any international “military-style” training for police officers. During a heated discussion at City Hall, opponents of the resolutions expressed confusion over the policy’s relevance to Durham, or said they opposed what they saw as unfair targeting of Israel. “There are real problems facing this city, and the Palestinian situation is not one of them,” Richard Ford of Durham’s “Friends of Durham” political action committee said during the public comment period. Durham Mayor Steve Schewel also expressed dismay at what he said were false rumors that Durham had plans to send its police to Israel for training. But Southern solidarity with Palestine has deep precedent. Three years after the famous student Freedom Summer actions in Mississippi in 1964...

Man Led Away In Handcuffs After Protest Outside Duke Energy CEO’s Home

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - One person was arrested after a handful of protesters set up a makeshift fracking tower outside the south Charlotte home of Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good Wednesday morning. About eight protesters with the group Beyond Extreme Energy set up in front of Good’s house around 7 a.m., claiming Duke Energy is putting profits before the safety and well-being of its customers. They are trying to stop the Atlantic Coast pipeline that will go through counties in eastern North Carolina, arguing that the project will wreck the environment. Police were called to the home and spoke with the protesters for a while before issuing an ultimatum to leave or be arrested.

CIA’s Secret Torture Program Sparked Citizen-led Public Reckoning In North Carolina

President Donald Trump’s nominee for CIA director, Gina Haspel, is reported to have overseen a U.S. site in Thailand where torture of a suspected terrorist took place. Later she allegedly helped destroy evidence of torture. Her nomination, pending congressional approval, is viewed by many as further evidence of this administration’s support of torture and an undoing of Obama-era efforts to end it. Her work was allegedly part of a program the CIA launched after 9/11 called Rendition, Detention and Interrogation. From 2002 to at least 2006, the CIA orchestrated disappearances, torture and indefinite detention without charge of suspected terrorists. What can a small group of committed citizens who oppose these practices do to push back?

North Carolina Tribes Fear Impact Of Atlantic Coast Pipeline Construction

American Indian tribes in the path of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline are making an eleventh-hour plea to stop construction until regulators can ensure ancient artifacts and their ancestral lands won’t be damaged. The largest tribe east of the Mississippi, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina has rarely weighed in on environmental permits. But its recent resolution, along with one from the state’s Commission of Indian Affairs, reflects growing concern among tribes that the pipeline could destroy swamps and forests that have long sustained their culture. With nearly all the required permits in hand, the project’s developers have already begun felling trees along a 600-mile corridor from West Virginia to North Carolina’s Robeson County. Pipeline foes have mounted an array of legal challenges, and this week showcase the plight of the Lumbee in a new documentary, Robeson Rises.

DA Drops Charges Against Remaining Confederate Statue Protesters

District Attorney Roger Echols announced Tuesday afternoon that he is dropping the charges against the five remaining people accused of destroying a Confederate statue in downtown Durham last summer. The announcement follows a long day in District Court Monday in which a judge acquitted one defendant, Raul Mauro Jimenez, and dismissed the charges against two others, Peter Gilbert and Dante Strobino, after an assistant district attorney presented all her evidence. The judge said the prosecution failed to prove the defendants were guilty of three misdemeanors: injury to real property, defacing a public building or monument and conspiracy to deface a public building or monument. Prosecutors presented all of the admissible evidence available, Echols said. Since his office planned to present the same evidence against the remaining defendants, it no longer made sense to prosecute the case...
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