North Carolina Now; Episode from 1999-04-20

It's Tuesday, April 20th, tonight a Charlotte Mecklenburg court case with far-reaching implications in North Carolina now. Good evening everyone, I'm Arita Matray, welcome to North Carolina now. On this Tuesday edition of our program, we'll examine the role women have played in our state's history. Our guest tonight is the co-author of a comprehensive book about the impact Tarheon women have had on the shaping of our state. Plus we'll bring you part two of our special report investigating the threat of domestic terrorism that it poses to North Carolina and how our state is prepared to cope with an unthinkable occurrence. But first a history-making trial is underway in Charlotte that could end the 30-year-old desegregation policies of the Charlotte Mecklenburg school district. The Swan versus the Board of Education case, which began in Charlotte and ended up in

the Supreme Court, led to the imposition of a busing plan to overcome decades of segregation in Charlotte schools. It also began a wave of often controversial busing plans in school systems around the country. But reopening the case has uncovered the old wounds of racism and segregation in North Carolina's largest city. I'm joined now by David Haines, who is covering the trial for North Carolina now. David has covered the school board in Charlotte since the 1970s and spent three years as the systems spokesperson in the mid-90s. Welcome, David. Good to be here as always. Tell us a little bit about the background of this case, exactly what is being litigated here. What's the basic question is when is a school system desegregated? Charlotte Mecklenburg schools certainly were segregated as late as the late 1960s. The Swan case began in the middle 1960s. The Supreme Court issued its Swan ruling in 1971, which began the whole busing controversy or the whole busing or movement towards busing in that school system and school systems

around the country. The plaintiffs in the case, a group of parents, say that the school system has essentially fulfilled all of the requirements of Swan, and therefore the school system should no longer be allowed to use race as its primary basis in all of its student assignment plans. The school system, on the other hand, says, well, we haven't fulfilled all of Swan. Even though we've had 30 years to do this, we have not completed the job. The original Swan plaintiffs are actually a part of the case. There's actually three sides in this case. You've got the parents, you've got the school system, and the original Swan complaint conditions. The Swan complaints are essentially agreeing with the school system and saying the school system has not fulfilled its obligation to desegregate the Charlotte Mecklenburg system. Are the parties broken down along racial lines? Yes. Well, yes, and no, the school system's representation is all white. The Swan defendants are African-Americans. The plaintiffs are all white.

Now, what has the atmosphere been like in the courtroom? Well, it's been kind of interesting. This is really a very dry stuff. A lot of it is demographics and charts and tables and that kind of stuff, which makes for really sleepy testimonies, I can attest to having been in the courtroom for two days. But on the other hand, the attorneys in the case seem to really dislike one another. I've covered a lot of trials and I've seen attorneys kind of go at one another. These attorneys are very appointed in all of their objections and all of their arguments that they're making before the judge against one another. They started the trial off with the plaintiffs trying to get all of the members of the school board removed from the courtroom because they had been subpoenaed by the plaintiffs as witnesses in the case. But since there were parties to the case, the judge allowed the school board members to stay in the courtroom. It's very, very interesting. The judge has some interesting history as well. He does. Judge Robert Potter, who is a Reagan appointee, actually drew up a petition, opposed to busing in Charlotte, Mecklenburg during the early parts of that case in the 1960s.

He didn't have a great deal of involvement in the opposition to busing, but he does have that. I opposed busing 30, 35 years ago, and now here I am sitting in judgment of the busing plan that Charlotte Mecklenburg School's put in place. But it is viewed by all parties that he can be a fair and impartial and handling of this case. Oh, there's no question that Judge Potter is a first-rate federal judge. He's known as Maximum Bob because of the sentences that he gives out. He's very crotchety guy, he's kind of crabby in the courtroom. He likes things to keep moving, and he doesn't hesitate to let you know it. But there's no question as to his ability to judge a case like this. I guess the most important question here, David, is what is the implication of this case? Well, in Charlotte, it could mean an end to the race-based student assignment plan. There are a lot of cases that are kind of bubbling along at the district level in the federal court system that oppose this kind of race-based approach to student assignments.

So in Charlotte, it would mean an end to something that was controversial at its start, the busing plan. But then really drew a lot of community consensus and support all through the 1970s and all through the 1980s. And some of that support started to wane during the 90s when the population of Charlotte grew rapidly, and a lot of people came in from other places and didn't really understand the history of it. So it could throw out the school's pupil assignment plan and kind of give Charlotte a much different view of itself than it has right now, which is a community that is very conciliatory when it comes to race relations. I asked about what the mood was in the courtroom, but what's the mood in the community of Charlotte as this trial progresses? Well, the trial began with a prayer service outside the courtroom at the NAACP and some supporters of the school system organized, and there was lots of television cameras and that sort of thing. But it is, as I say, some of the testimony tends to be a little dry and tables and graphs and that sort of thing.

So the courtroom is not jam-packed the way it would be for a criminal trial or something like that. Civil trials tend to be a little sleepy if you're there for the whole thing. And you'll be back again on Friday. That's right. Hopefully we're going to be here at least once a week during the course of the trial and then do something that kind of draws it all together and wraps it all up at the end. Now another story that you're working on or that you have produced for us is the domestic terrorism piece and we're going to air part two of that special series coming up here in a moment. But while I have you here, let me ask you your impressions as you were putting those pieces together for us. Well, the domestic terrorism, the whole thing is something that law enforcement people in North Carolina are starting to think a lot more about and they're thinking more about it because they have to think more about it. And as they think more about it, all of us are going to have to be thinking about it and kind of looking over our shoulders. You know, this is North Carolina is probably as easy as target as you'll find anywhere in the country, just about anywhere in the state.

And it's kind of sad to see that we are in a position now to where we have to start worrying about what is behind us and the terrorism possibilities. But it is also apparently and unfortunately inevitable. All right. Thanks, David. Sure. Now, as we told you last night, during part one, authorities are aware of more than a dozen hate groups operating in the state. And when it comes to terrorism, as David just told you, any place that you might consider safe is an easy target in this piece produced by David Haynes and Michael McGinnis, the experts talk about how concerned we all should be about terrorism and what we can do to prevent it. At the Western Carolina University Conference on Domestic Terrorism, the law enforcement officials who gathered learned of a new threat in terrorism. There has recently been events, explosive events, where there's been secondary devices, meaning that there's been second explosive packages placed in and around the scene designed to function some time after, not a long time after, but some time after the first responders

are on the scene, which is essentially causing them to become the target. If the terrorists are becoming slightly more sophisticated, they are still very unpredictable. That makes large cities like Charlotte and Raleigh just as vulnerable to attack as the beaches and the mountains. Experts here in Colory agree that terrorism is very hard to predict. Who, for example, could even begin to guess that these scenic mountains are believed to be the home of bombing terrorist, Eric Rudolph? But there may be one exception to that unpredictability. It's the year 2000. In the worst case scenarios, the year 2000 problem could generate hardships that last for days, weeks, and maybe even months, and that the experts say could lead to terrorism. There is a potential. There's also a number of, he says that there's a number of movies that are going to come out this summer. They're going to be focused on catastrophes that occur on January 1st, the year 2000. If people start to listen to that, if people start to get an appreciation that there's

going to be a severe change in the world order, or believe that there's going to be a severe change in the world order, how will they react? It's difficult to understand and get into the minds of a terrorist or an extremist, because it's their thought process that justifies their act of violence. The images of terrorism are shocking, but these crimes are designed to frighten people as much as they physically scar the innocent. How much does the average person have to fear from an act of terrorism? In terms of individuals being threatened, I think the concern realistically should not be that great. I think it's a concern for anybody that is from North Carolina, grew up in North Carolina as I did, that we certainly don't want our state associated with these people and these ideas. But the experts who gathered in Kullaby caution that acts of domestic terrorism are increasing, and that everyone can take simple steps to deal with it.

On a personal level, you need to be more of what's going on around you, just like when you're walking through a parking lot, what's going on around you, who's doing what, not just to walk with blinders on, and to be prepared to confront people. The conference in Kullaby addressed the law enforcement community. One of its main messages was that different police agencies need to communicate better in an emergency, a sentiment echoed in Asheville, where a February 13th bomb at an abortion clinic was discovered and later destroyed by police. Our initial response was good, but in a catastrophic situation, response, because you have so many people responding, you have emergency medical personnel, you have fire personnel, and you have police. So it's important that you coordinate, and that's extremely hard to do. If communication is the key for the police, it can be just as successful for the average citizen.

Joe Watten tracks the movement of terrorists and hate groups for the North Carolina justice academy. The things that I've seen that impress me most is when communities bind together to say not here, not us, and to make it clear that the community itself has, that people with these views are not welcome. While the conference here focused on better communication and secondary threats, it carried an underlying message. Terrorism is a fact of life. Its violence may never touch North Carolina, but the threat won't go away. There's a movement now to try and be prepared for not necessarily if, but when terrorists events start coming to this country, it's inevitable because we are part of the world, and these type things have happened in other parts of the world. I want people all over this state to realize that this is a potential threat. Just as we've gotten pretty good at preparing for hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, other kinds

of disasters, we've got to get good at this. It's something we hate to even think about. I hope to gracious it never happens in a big way, but it's happening in other places and we've got to be prepared. Governor Hunt plans to call a major statewide conference on terrorism later this year. Congress has passed legislation that increases the penalties for terrorism, and President Clinton has requested $2.5 billion to prepare for protection against terrorist attacks. The money would be used for everything from stockpiling medical and adults to making computers hacker proof. Well, coming up on North Carolina now, I'll look at the role that women have played in Tarheal history. But first, let's get an update of today's statewide news headlines by turning to Mitchell Lewis. Hi, Mitch. Hello, Marita. Good evening, everyone. Owners of a Dupland County hog farm think vandals caused a 1.5 million gallon hog waste spill yesterday. The waste leaked from a lagoon at Vestel Farm south of Kenensville, and ran into an adjacent

creek which feeds into the Northeast Cape Fear River. The lagoon has been roped off by investigators. But workers at the scene say there is a 25-foot wide hole in the wall of the lagoon. The environmental impact of the spill is still unclear, and investigators haven't confirmed the cause. The farm is owned by Murphy Family Farms, the nation's largest hog producer. State Supreme Court Chief Justice, Burley Mitchell, wants legislators to give up control of day-to-day court operations and give the judiciary more autonomy. He is calling for the creation of a State Judicial Council to oversee the courts and for merit selection of appellate judges. The Chief Justice also wants lawmakers to increase funding for technology because the courts' antiquated system is overloaded and has no backup in case it fails. Mitchell plans to retire when his term ends in six years, and he would like to see the changes in the court system before he leaves. Crime victims in North Carolina can now turn to the internet for information. The State Department of Corrections has created a website listing victim services, criminal

justice, and social service agencies in North Carolina, along with contacts, addresses, and phone numbers. The site also contains what is thought to be the only internet search engine dedicated to crime victims. The page can be found at www.doc.state.nc.us slash victim services. The State Insurance Commissioner Jim Long sends a legislative proposal to raise the minimum auto-insurance coverage, convening savings for two-thirds of policy holders in North Carolina. The plan is drawing opposition from insurance interests because it would raise rates for those who can least afford it. The bill under consideration in the State Senate would double the minimum coverage required for bodily injury to $50,000 a person, and $100,000 an accident. According to the bill's sponsor, Senator Ham Horton, the last time rates were raised was in 1979. New Hanover County commissioners have approved a plan to help save Shell Island Resort. The plan involves dredging Mason Enlet, whose southward migration is threatening to topple

Shell Island Resort and some property on the northern tip of Ritesville Beach. Owners who benefit from the more than $4 million project will be required to pay back the county in three years at seven percent interest. Shell Island homeowners have fought the state for years to protect the resort from erosion. And now for a look at tomorrow's weather, high temperatures should be in the seventies to around 80 state-wide, partly to mostly sunny skies are expected for most areas. The Boone-Analysipate City Area should see or could see afternoon showers. In Business News, DuPont has announced plans to expand its facilities in Blayton County by building a plant to test new Teflon technology. The technology being tested at the $40 million plant was developed at UNC Chapel Hill. The process will make a significant change in the company's current manufacturing methods and is expected to lower operating costs as well as provide environmental enhancements. Company and state officials say the investment could grow to $275 million by 2006. Officials with Greensboro-based Eastwind Airlines today told Attorney General Mike easily

that they would address complaints from customers regarding poor service. The airline blamed recent operational problems on a newly installed computer reservation system. Those problems included flight cancellations and delays, overbookings and flight time changes. Last week, Attorney General Mike easily threatened to sue the discount airline if they did not address the complaints, and now for a look at what happened on Wall Street today. Most of history is told in terms of men fighting battles, making discoveries, formulating

laws, but history is not complete unless the contributions of all people are documented. In order to fill the void in the coverage of North Carolina history, a new book has been written. It's called North Carolina Women Making History. That tells the story of the efforts and achievements of Tarheal Women from prehistory through World War II. And joining me now is one of the book's co-authors, Margaret Sippley Smith. Miss Smith, thanks for taking the time to be with us tonight. Thank you for having me. Why did you feel a need to write this book? Well, it's a book that needed to be written. It was time that women had their own history, and it's coming out right before the millennium, so it definitely seems like it's time. The North Carolina Museum of History had started a women's history project back in the 80s. And the idea was to focus attention on women in the state, women of various economic levels,

geography, race. And I was the coordinator of that project, so I traveled around the state and talked to women's groups, collected information, we put it together in an exhibit that opened the North Carolina Museum of History in 1994. So through that whole process, we felt that a really major document were book, something more than a catalog needed to be done, and that's this book. So a lot of research really went into this, because I was thinking about the fact that women in history is scarcely written about, and it must have been very difficult to find this information. Well, certainly since the 1970s, there's been a lot of attention to women in history, but it has tended to take the form of biographies, or women in various, like, mill women or form women, and what we attempted to do here was to bring all that together, tie it into

the history of the state, and insert women into that. And that's why you have the structure that you do now of the book. That's right. We constructed a narrative, and we have biographies, we've got 250 illustrations. So you can see things that women made, things that women used, what they looked like at various periods of time, plus documents, legal documents, and personal letters, things like that. It's really fascinating to me are the photographs that are throughout this book, you have a great many of photographs, and we have one of them on the screen right now, maybe you can tell us what it is that we're looking at. It looks like women in a field, picking cotton? That's right. It's a photograph about 1900 of black women in Newburn, North Carolina. And after the Civil War, the recently freed black women had hoped that they would not have to do field labor, but as the years went by, it turned out, in fact, they did have

to continue. And so this shows women in the field doing work. Something that economics required them to do. And this is a fascinating photograph here. It looks like a basketball team or something. Well, it is. It's at what used to be called Women's College, and is now the North Carolina, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And I was thinking of critical moments in women's history as I was coming over to meet with you. And certainly, the creation of the Women's College is one of those, because it educated a whole group of women who became the teachers, the librarians, the civic leaders in the state. And it really also brought North Carolina women, it doesn't show in this photograph, but it brought North Carolina women into a national scene. And so they became involved with politics at the local state and federal level. And this shows the, oh, I was just going to say, this shows the idea of physical fitness

that women didn't have to be corseted, that they could go out, move their bodies, play games. But, of course, they weren't supposed to be too competitive. And what do we have here? It's people standing on some sort of porch or? Well, this is Cherokee training school. And you've got the teachers, the missionary teachers who went out into the western part of the state, set up the schools, the little girls were all trained in domestic arts, boys and mechanical arts. And there's a whole, this isn't, there are so many great stories in North Carolina, and this is one of them with the missionaries who went out not just to teach the Cherokee, but to also revive crafts at Breastown and Lucy Morgan and Pendlin and things like that. All right. Okay. And then the last photograph we have that strikingly tall woman in the forefront of that. That's right.

Eleanor Roosevelt with the Greensboro of Junior League in the 1930s. In North Carolina women, North Carolina Democratic women had played a key role in bringing the state into Franklin Roosevelt's camp. And so they expected political benefits from that, and indeed they got it. The last photograph there of the women in the junior league strikes me as being one of the few photographs in the book that document women of any kind of a fluence or high society. This really is book that's filled with a lot of poverty. Well, actually it may look that way, but I don't think that it is because one of the challenges in women's history and recovering women's history is that most of the letters are written by literate women who were privileged and educated, and most of the artifacts, the objects that have come down to us, are also from women of privilege. So it's actually very difficult to document people who were poor or even moderate income.

And I'm trying to think, now why would it look that way to you? And partly it might be because the photographs are in the past, and so people are dressed more simply than we do now. We tried to show women working. And so that means you've got women in the fields, women in the factories, and that's because women's labor is one of those hidden parts of history that you don't see, but it actually was there. So we tried to show that as well. Thomas Smith, it's a fascinating book, I thank you for taking the time to be with us tonight. Thank you. Margaret, so please Smith's co-author for this book is Emily Wilson. Again, the title of the book is North Carolina Women Making History, is published by the University of North Carolina Press. And that wraps up tonight's edition of North Carolina now.

Thanks for having joined us. Please join us again tomorrow night when we'll learn about a health program designed to improve the physical condition of young children. Plus Shannon Vickory looks at how NC State is at the cutting edge of bringing together education and high-tech businesses through its centennial campus. Have a great night. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a safe night. . . .