The Best of Enemies: Chapter 8

The woman behind the desk asked even more personal questions while Ann, standing before her, was forced to explain her life—with a special emphasis on her problems—to a roomful of strangers. At last, the woman dismissed Ann with a brusque wave.

Michaux was used to being treated with deference and did not know what to make of Howard Fuller.

Howard Fuller harbored no illusions about what he was up against: he quickly saw through the "jewel of the New South” palaver.

He had help in this effort from several people, including publisher Louis Austin, who, though aging and in ill health, was as pugnacious as ever.

Fuller, who had never known his own father, developed a deep, almost filial affection for the older man.

The situation was so blatantly corrupt that even the conservative Morning Herald was moved to cry foul: “Several members of both the city council and the board of county commissioners are known to be heavily interested in ‘shanty property' and it is unlikely...that they would support a movement which might seriously destroy or curtail their earnings.”

The city made good on its promise to bulldoze blighted areas, demolishing thousands of derelict houses and hundreds of crumbling businesses in Hayti.

On the right, segregationists such as Jesse Helms often inveighed against open housing laws, with Helms citing in his editorials the few (but always existent) blacks who agreed with his reactionary positions.

"It is time," Helms pontificated in a 1960s TV editorial, “to face, honestly and sincerely, the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinctions in group intellect.”

As if poor blacks, in their simplemindedness, believed that proximity to whiteness conferred a blessing, a kind of miraculous dispensation from the travails of poverty.

Ann quickly found a focus for her housing work that fall, in two incidents that would galvanize the black community in Durham over the next few years.

Edgemont, where the properties were located, was a tumbledown, racially mixed neighborhood, once a mill village, known euphemistically in the mid-1960s as “transitional.”

Victor III was far more enlightened, but his liberalism was paternalistic, rooted in noblesse oblige.

As the board’s first chairman, Bryant saw the organization as a means to inculcate the values of education in the poor—to "get the children started in the right direction”—not as the activist, even militant association of poor blacks, devoted to challenging the established order in housing, welfare, and politics, that Howard Fuller wanted.

This view was shared by Mayor Grabarek, who used his position on the board to carp about what he saw as the organization’s many flaws.

He preached eloquently about the importance of creating a true community out of the miasma of Hayti.

Durham would have to "get real” about its problems or it would pay a price for its intransigence.

"Fuller and his movement embarrass other Negro leaders,” observed Louis Austin, who had never let up on his attacks on the black elite’s complacency.

Ironically, this disenchantment with Durham’s black elite among poor blacks came just as the former group realized its apotheosis.

The month before UOCI stretched out its fledgling wings, the venerable North Carolina Mutual had opened the doors to its handsome new headquarters, with pomp and circumstance unrivaled in Durham’s history.

They acted slowly and without resolve, they backtracked, they obfuscated, they spoke with a small hesitant voice when what was needed was a howl.

Stith was suddenly embroiled in a bitter racial battle, horrified to find black protesters walking a picket line outside his office carrying signs reading: STITH, ARE YOU BLACK OR WHITE?

The Morning Herald, sanctimonious as ever, editorialized: There is a proper course in protesting substandard housing, and Operation Breakthrough would have been well advised to have counseled the Edgemont Community Council to follow it.

The paper noted, almost as an afterthought: “It must be added too, that it is incumbent upon the city to enforce its building code”—as if the writer was unaware that the city’s repeated failure to enforce the code had sparked the demonstrations in the first place.

The immediate storm over this affair blew over, especially after Operation Breakthrough banned vehicles from transporting picketers, but a far more serious controversy quickly escalated, one that reflected the national schism that had been growing in the coalition of interests known collectively as the civil rights movement since 1963.

Some saw the phrase as wrongheaded and divisive, freighted with racially exclusionary shadings that would diminish white support.

But it was equally true that a militancy among younger blacks and a concomitant mistrust of all whites worked against Wiley and for McKissick.

By the time the weary marchers trudged into Jackson, the furor over Black Power had eclipsed discussion of voter registration, the march’s ostensible purpose.

“You can’t let them treat us like this!” she cajoled her peers.

For a high school dropout like Ann, all this was heady stuff.