I now want to say a few words to my dear friends, my fellow citizens, my sisters and brothers, here

[struggle4progress]

in Durham in North Carolina

And the words I want to say are Thank you

I rang a lot of doorbells, and I learned Durham really understood what was at stake. On Tuesday, Durham turned out and we typically won here by margins of 70-30 and often by margins of 75-25

http://www.civilwaralbum.com.nyud.net:8090/misc3/images/bennett_nc4.jpg

Ours is a strange town. The largest Confederate surrender of the Civil War occurred here at the Bennett farmhouse in April 1865, and in 1923 the General Assembly commissioned a unity monument to commemorate it. Tobacco made a fortune here, and that fortune built Duke University. And the tobacco industry here was unionized. North Carolina Central University is one of many black colleges and universities which harbored on its faculty educated refugees from Nazi Germany, and Central played an important role in the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s. Witness for Peace, which helped the entire country fight back against Reagan's wars in Central America, was headquartered in Durham. Until the 1980s, there was a large, long-established, and well-known black commercial district near downtown, and it build a solid black middle-class here, a number of important and enduring commercial ventures, and parts of our downtown skyline -- so the state department of transportation drew a highway through the heart of it, and yet Hayti remains unforgotten. Integration won here, and when white flight threatened to re-segregate our schools, Durham responded by consolidating the city and county school districts

Civil-Rights Activist, Ex-Klansman C.P. Ellis
November 8, 2005

Civil rights activist and former Ku Klux Klansman C.P. Ellis has died at age 78. Ann Atwater, a black civil rights activist, talks about her friend. Ellis had a change of heart after a 10-day forum on integration of schools in Durham, N.C. He renounced his Klan membership, became lifelong friends with Atwater and went on to organize black and white labor unions ...

Mr. C.P. ELLIS (Civil Rights Advocate): I wanted to make them angry. I didn't like them. I didn't like integration. I didn't like the demonstrations downtown. I didn't like Ann boycotting stores. And she was an effective boycotter, too. She was making progress. I hated her guts ...

Ms. ATWATER: Well, some of the people in City Hall was Klansmen as well, and they had him put out there so he could disrupt everything that everybody was trying to do. He was to tear it apart ... C.P. had a machine gun, and he would show it to the city councilmen in the trunk of his car every morning. And when I'd walk up to the school building, I had my white Bible in my hand. So I told C.P. we would see whose God would be the strongest, my God or his God. I always said if they'd said something to me, I was going to knock the hell out of them with my Bible ...

BLOCK: Civil rights activist Ann Atwater in Durham, North Carolina. She spoke at C.P. Ellis' funeral on Saturday.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4994854

[kick-ass-bob]

1. K&R neighbor

:)