Wednesday 7 June 2006

USA Today about Duke & Durham


DURHAM, N.C. — Overlooking the congregation in the Hayti Heritage Center for African-American culture in Durham is a stained-glass image of the building's sponsor, Washington Duke, the white 19th-century tobacco magnate whose name graces Duke University.
The window and its prominent place in the old church building are testament to the historic and often beneficial relationship between Duke and Durham's black community. But there is another side to the relationship, one involving segregation and racial tension.
Such divisions resurfaced after a black stripper hired to perform at a house party for the Duke men's lacrosse team told police that three white team members had raped her in a bathroom.

District Attorney Michael Nifong obtained indictments charging team members David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann with rape and kidnapping. All three say they are innocent.

Duke University President Richard Brodhead this week reinstated the lacrosse team for next year. He canceled the rest of the team's 2006 season April 5 after the rape accusation became a public issue.

Nifong's actions against the Duke players may have inspired black voters to rally around him in the election May 2.
A study by Vanderbilt University based on an analysis of precincts and their racial composition concluded that a majority of whites voted for Nifong's two rivals. Nifong prevailed among black voters, which gave him enough to win the race by a slim margin.

"The level of frustration with the rape case is related to historic frustration with Duke," says Fred Davis, a school board member.

University's efforts
"There are certainly historical issues that folks have with Duke," says Susan Kauffman, a spokeswoman for the university. "But you'll find that Duke has been working on solutions."

The university is the city's largest employer, so many blacks depend on it for their livelihoods. As a wealthy school, it has been involved over the years in many city endeavors.

The university provided $4 million in loans to convert dozens of rental houses in Walltown, a historically black neighborhood near campus, into homes for low-income, first-time buyers. It created community centers, health clinics and tutoring programs in Durham public schools, training programs for teachers, and college prep programs for at-risk teens. It created 24 full-tuition scholarships for Duke education students who commit to work two years in Durham Public Schools.

Michael Page, a black county commissioner and former school board member, says Duke "reached out to the community that they were living in, (and) they were embraced very well there."

Durham lawyer Keith Bishop agrees. But tensions that came first "are not so old that they can't be revived and reawakened."
That's what happened after the rape accusation. For two weeks, protesters demanded an arrest. Nifong was denounced by people attending a public forum for candidates in the election.

"There is something about Duke that rubs people the wrong way," says John Scarborough, Jr., who runs Scarborough & Hargett funeral home. "It goes back years."

Durham is a city of about 200,000 people in which blacks and whites have lived together in equal numbers for decades.
As in much of the South, blacks in Durham endured segregation and other injustices prior to the civil rights movement. But Durham's blacks experienced a larger measure of prosperity, education and independence than blacks elsewhere in the South.

Tobacco history
Durham rose as a tobacco industry center after the Civil War. Freed slaves were drawn by jobs in the industry. They created a self-sufficient black community called Hayti(pronounced hay-tie) across the tracks from the white part of town.
Tobacco created steady work for Hayti and gave rise to a class of black professionals: doctors, lawyers, pharmacists and builders. Barber John Merrick, with advice from his customer Washington Duke, opened a chain of barber shops and in 1898 co-founded North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. In 1907, Merrick co-founded the Mechanics and Farmers Bank. The companies helped give blacks in Hayti a degree of independence not seen elsewhere.

"Until 1954, we had more black homeowners than any other city in the United States because of these ... institutions," Scarborough says.
Duke University arrived on the scene in 1924 when Washington Duke's son, James, gave $40 million to Trinity College to expand into a world-class university. Blacks were initially excluded. In 1961, Duke enrolled its first blacks, graduate students in its divinity school.
Other schools resisted integration violently. In 1963 a mob attacked federal marshals protecting the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. That year, Duke's first black undergrads enrolled peacefully.

In the late 1980s, a wave of violent crime fueled by crack cocaine swept through Durham. Dealers used the neighborhoods around Duke as their market, attracting other crime. Two Duke students were raped in one month in 1995.

In combating crime, Duke sometimes overreached. In 1988, Duke apologized to a black law student who said he was illegally arrested for not having a valid college identification card. In 1995, the son of a black professor at Duke was identified by a rape victim as her attacker but was exonerated later. The university apologized.

Black student organizations, sometimes backed by scores of demonstrators, complained about harassment by campus police.
Bruce Bridges, 41, owner of The Know Bookstore, said he was once wrongly stopped by campus police while passing through Duke. He says that experience came back to him when the woman, who is from Hayti, alleged she was raped by the white lacrosse players.
That's when Bridges decided to found a Durham chapter of the New Black Panther Party.
"I got a very negative, frustrated feeling about Duke," Bridges says.

Durham Mayor Bill Bell, who is black, agrees that the rape case has caused problems between the city and Duke. He says it won't be the last time the two have differences.

"It's a very activist community," Bell says. "People get an opportunity to speak, and they speak."

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