Traditions of Protest in North Carolina

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Justice Rally, Lumberton, NC 1987

I will be participating in a truly unique exhibit and program organized by the North Carolina Folklore Society titled Traditions of Protest in North Carolina. The exhibit will hang in PB&Java in Greensboro, NC, from September 2 to October 2 with a special program on Saturday, September 10 at 10:30 am. The exhibit and program seeks to illustrate North Carolina's long and storied history of protest and resistance to racism, Jim Crow, and anti-union activity. 

In the mid-1980s I served on staff and as a contract photographer for the Rural Advancement Fund, a non-profit, farm advocacy organization based in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a field office in Pittsboro. RAF had many projects under its auspices, one of which was a Justice Project based in Lumberton, NC, which was organized to combat the systematic racism existing throughout Robeson County that resulted in the yet-unsolved murders of community members. My photographs in the exhibit are from two large rallies in Robeson County protesting these murders and the racism that brought them about.

While RAF published one or two of these photographs in their newsletters and brochures, the majority of them have never been published or exhibited. I'm honored to work with the North Carolina Folklore Society and their director, Joy Salyers, to bring these images to light. 

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Funeral and Rally for Julian Pierce, a candidate for Superior Court Judge who was murdered in his home, Robeson County, NC 1988

Hero - Edna Harris

I met Edna Harris in 1986. I was freelancing for the Rural Advancement Fund (RAF,) a 50 year old non-profit, farm advocacy organization and traveling with Charlie Thompson. Charlie was a field organizer for RAF who was working with small farmers throughout the southeast that were suffering through a long-term drought with thousands facing foreclosure. He was given the task of introducing me to specific farmers that I would photograph to illustrate stories, appeal letters, and brochures. Edna Harris was one of those farmers.

Within a couple of months, I was hired to a staff position and one of my jobs was to continue and broaden the documentation I had begun as a freelancer. Over the next couple of years, I spent many days and nights with Edna, her husband Lonnie, and their extended family. I took my young son with me a couple of times to hang out with Edna’s two grandsons of the same age. Edna’s was a comfortable place where you were encouraged to feel at home and be yourself.

Edna and Lonnie farmed their entire lives on 160 acres in Iredell County, in the small hamlet of Harmony. They raised tobacco and owned a small dairy, grew gardens, kept chickens and hogs and lived their lives within their small community. They had three sons, 19 grandchildren, and too-many-to-count greats and great-greats. Theirs was a full life. They were not rich by any means, or even middle class, but there was always plenty to eat and enough money to pay the mortgage on the farm and their short-term agricultural loans.

By the mid-1980s things had changed. Lonnie had suffered a stroke and was unable to do much of the work around the farm, which fell to Edna to do. The boys had left home by then, married, worked on off-farm jobs, and had little time to help out. Then came the drought, which crippled the two Carolinas for a number of years. Hay, corn, tobacco, even row crops were stunted and non-productive. The cows gave less milk. Edna and Lonnie, like many of their neighbors, were unable to pay bills and were quickly facing foreclosure. Keeping the land in the family was of primary importance to Edna and Lonnie. They understood the farm served as both legacy and insurance. It offered survival.

Edna, desperate, called a hotline for distressed farmers that had been set up by RAF and soon learned she was not the only farmer facing financial disaster. This was a period of time when the number of farm foreclosures nationwide exceeded the number during the 1930s. With guidance from RAF, Edna was able to wrestle with her problems and get back on track with her loans. She also came to understand she had a gift for working with other farmers in similar circumstances. People trusted Edna and would be open with her. She began running her own hotline and founded a local chapter of the United Farmers Organization. She worked with Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid and was awarded the Nancy Susan Reynolds Award by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation in 1987.

I got to know Edna pretty well. Words that come immediately to mind are tough, resilient, down to earth, open, and generous. She was a fair person, able to see both sides of an issue, while being clear about what the outcome should be. She had opinions, generally in favor of the little guy, and I would say she never knew a stranger.

Edna died in March 2012. The farm had been paid off in full a few years earlier and she was buried close by. At the Visitation, as she lay in her casket, I focused my eyes on her hands – smooth, un-calloused, and spotlessly clean – so unlike the hands I remember when I was most around her. Back then, her hands were rough, arthritic, and permanently clenched, with dirt etched deeply into her skin. Dirt that she wore with pride - a symbol of the working person she knew herself to be.  

Hero - Wendell Berry

I was on staff and freelanced for the Rural Advancement Fund for many years during the 1980s and 1990s. The non-profit, farm advocacy organization had its beginnings during the Great Depression as the National Sharecroppers Fund, and when I began working with them in 1985, they were approaching their fiftieth Anniversary as an active voice for farmworkers and small family farms.

A number of events were created to celebrate the Anniversary and broaden their message. One was a Citizen’s Hearing on Agriculture that was held at US House of Representatives in 1987. One of the citizens was the much-noted author, scholar, activist, and farmer, Wendell Berry. I was photographing the event for RAF and made this photograph of Mr. Berry while he was delivering his testimony. Later, we sent a copy of the print to Berry as a thank you and he used it as the author’s photograph on his novel Remembering.

For those of you who don’t know Wendell Berry and his work, his credentials and accomplishments are near impossible to list. Berry’s 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture was instrumental in my evolution of thought about community and place. It should be required reading for everyone. Wikipedia offers a good accounting of Berry’s life and work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry

I was a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War, one of many thousands of Americans opposed to that war in particular, and all war in general. In 1968, Berry delivered a “Statement Against the War in Vietnam” during the Kentucky Conference on the War and Draft at the University of Kentucky. It was a courageous act in that place and time and continues to resonate today.

We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ‘truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.