Michael Graff is executive editor of Charlotte magazine. Reach him at [email protected]

They arrived, like their forefathers did a half century earlier, in buses, with small signs taped to the windows for the North Carolina cities they represented: Fayetteville, Asheville, Charlotte, Newton, Weldon, Wilmington. There were visitors too, with signs that said not from around here: A James River bus carried a group from Richmond, Elite Tours of Atlanta came up from Georgia, and there were two shiny Spriggs buses from Washington, D.C.

They were here, on Feb. 8, for the “Moral March,” the culminating rally in a new movement that grew from a few dozen protesters for weekly “Moral Mondays” protests to a few hundred to these tens of thousands, a movement that has been gaining steam with nearly every stroke of our new Republican governor’s pen.


One month into his term last year, Gov. Pat McCrory signed a bill cutting unemployment benefits. By the time the legislature’s session ended in August, the state seemed like a new place. In six months, lawmakers passed gun laws that allowed permit-holders to carry concealed weapons into bars and onto playgrounds, and they slipped more restrictive abortion measures into a bill about motorcycle safety, and passed that, too. The state rejected Medicaid expansion called for under the Affordable Care Act, and 500,000 people who would have been eligible for benefits on Jan. 1 weren’t.

And so the Moral Marchers came. The associate chief of the University of North Carolina’s division of infectious diseases was there, walking in his white coat, calling the Medicaid situation “an emergency for North Carolina.” There were more doctors at the march, and lawyers too—lawyers like those challenging the constitutionality of North Carolina’s most recent redistricting, in which Republicans redrew legislative and congressional districts, creating a curious map that, in some places, looks like it could read, “Blacks here,” and “Whites here.” And when those people do go to vote in those districts, they need to have a government-issued photo ID, thanks to the new voter ID law. The lawyers are also challenging that, and the case moved forward in federal court last week.

Teachers marched as well. Most of them haven’t had a raise in five years, and the state legislature last year eliminated tenure.

They all came to the State Capitol building here, waving signs —“Legalize Medical Cannabis,” “No Fracking,” “Stop Medicaid Cuts,” and my personal favorite, “Grandmas in Action”—and after listening to speaker after speaker, they pointed to the sun as it poked through the clouds during the group rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”

Under that sun, singing that song, they didn’t seem like losers.

***

That is, though, how some members of their own legislature describe them. In June, as the Moral Mondays were gathering momentum, one Republican state senator, Thom Goolsby, wrote an op-ed in a small-town newspaper. He described the attendees as “clowns,” and he called the movement “Moron Mondays.”

This winter, another Republican state senator, Bob Rucho, compared Obamacare to Nazism, and faced considerable criticism for it. One woman, whose bio says she’s a cancer survivor, tweeted #Moron at him, and he responded by saying, “look in the mirror and you will see the moron.”

The governor isn’t exactly fond of his foes, either. One day last summer, McCrory dropped a plate of chocolate-chip cookies on the ground in front of the protesters, then turned around and walked back inside the gate to the governor’s mansion. And just this month, in Charlotte, his home city, McCrory was in an upscale grocery store. A cook came out to help him, and when he realized he was speaking to the governor, the cook said, “Thanks for nothing.” The governor’s staff told the owner about the incident, and the man was fired.

The Daily Show has made several appearances here, and even through comedy, we had news. In an interview with Aasif Mandvi, one of the show’s correspondents, a Republican precinct chairman said of the voter ID law: “If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” The GOP immediately distanced itself from the man, and he soon resigned.

That’s life now, down here in North Carolina, the prettiest, ugliest, most forward-thinking, most backward-minded, most divided state in the South.

***

Look at us, this beautiful state. After the Civil War and slavery, we needed a boost, so we started marketing the phrase “Southern hospitality” to give people the impression that we’re friendly and welcoming. In the last quarter century, the rest of the country really started to believe us. The population jumped from 6 million in 1990 to almost 10 million now. We’ve built industries and put people to work—a massive film studio in Wilmington, a top-rate research campus and university system in the Triangle, banking and energy in Charlotte, counterculture and tourism in Asheville. Young people move here. Smart people move here. And with the warm climate and access to the beach and the mountains, older people retire here.

In February 1997, I was a high school senior visiting colleges. I’d been accepted to the University of Maryland near home and had a scholarship offer from Indiana University. But when I visited little High Point University, North Carolina sparkled. The weather was sunny and warm, the young women were tan and beautiful, and I was a boy at 17, so I stopped looking for other colleges.

I left for a few years after graduation, but I’ve been back since 2005. I’ve lived or worked in Raleigh, Rocky Mount, Fayetteville, Winston-Salem, Greensboro and now Charlotte, and I’ve visited all 100 counties. North Carolina has always struck me as a state with ideas and a can-do spirit. I remember how, when a textile mill closed in the town of Kannapolis and left most of the people there out of work, David Murdock, owner of Dole Food Company, turned the old mill property into a top-notch research campus. People who had worked in the cotton mill went back to community college to find jobs in medical research. And near the Appalachian Mountains, land that was used for tobacco has been turned up and turned into a wine region.

But despite a statewide ability to adapt and adjust, North Carolina’s conflicting identities have bubbled.

In terms of our politics, one moment stands out: It is November 2008, and I’m sitting at a gas station at the intersection of U.S. Highway 220 and N.C. 211 in the center of the state. It is just after midnight, and I’ve spent the evening at a victory party for Democrat Larry Kissell, a social studies teacher who that night was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The Democrats would also win the U.S. Senate race and seven of the other 12 congressional races that night. Kissell’s celebration is a pot-luck dinner at a community hall in his hometown of Biscoe, population 1,800.

On my way back to my home in Fayetteville, rain falls lightly, and as I drive through the darkness, I turn up the radio to listen to President-elect Barack Obama’s victory speech. It is moving and decisive, and he talks about unity.

But even as he speaks, North Carolina has not been decided. Days later, they’ll call it for Obama, the first time the state has chosen a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976. The split is close to 50-50.

***

Look at us, this beautiful state: On the eastern side, where hog farms and sweet potato fields stretch for miles, the towns are predominantly black, and the election maps are all blue. On the western side, where hills reach toward the heavens and the Cherokee Indians once were the primary landowners, the people are now mostly white, and the map red.

The lines that divide us are clear: In Charlotte, a child born poor is less likely to advance out of poverty than in any of the 50 largest cities in the country, according to a study published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But in the same city, we have enough wealth to support 10 craft breweries, a heap of new high-end restaurants, an NFL football team and a brand-new Bentley dealership on Independence Boulevard.

Divides become clearer as you drive deeper into the prettier parts of the state. In Moore County, Pinehurst will host not one but two U.S. Open championships this June. The three counties bordering Moore to the west and south all have poverty rates above 20 percent, and nearby Robeson County is home of Lumberton, the poorest city in the country—all within an hour’s drive of a famous resort that just underwent a multi-million dollar renovation to make the grounds look more natural.

***

After that night in 2008, we experienced anything but unity. Republicans were beaten but not finished. They hadn’t controlled the legislature in nearly 140 years, and they’d had enough.

The leaders of the battered party, including current House Speaker Thom Tillis, a masterful strategist, developed plans to win it all in 2010. Tillis and his friends went all over the state, doorstep to doorstep, targeting districts they believed they could take. Art Pope, a businessman who would become the budget director for McCrory, poured millions into groups that bought ads. People on the left say Pope bought the state. But he was more like a sports-franchise investor, helping fund the team that went out and did the work to win. In the 2010 election, Republicans went from 10 seats down in the state Senate to 10 seats up, and from 17 down in the House to 15 up.

When you win elections in a year ending in zero, you have the privilege of redrawing the districts. And the Republicans got creative. Not long after the new GOP-led legislature drew the new maps in 2011, then-governor Bev Purdue, a Democrat, decided not to run for a second term. Kissell, the social studies teacher who became a congressman, had his district altered significantly in the redesign, and he lost his seat to Republican Richard Hudson.

Since 1870, the Democrats had held at least one house of the legislature, and often they had both and the governor’s mansion. But in 2012 came complete surrender.

***

We’ve always been a little split. In the eastern half, people still own land that was granted to their families by the king in the 1700s—big farms and plantation-style homes. In the west, the mountain people shave their beards about as often as their Scots-Irish ancestors did. We have a saying, “From Murphy to Manteo,” and if you actually make that drive, it’ll take about nine hours, tip to tip, and you’ll see many different states along the way.

Time was, there were three kinds of people in North Carolina: those from around here, those not from around here, and blacks. That breakdown even played out in the state’s favorite sport, college basketball. There were UNC and N.C. State, which loaded up with players from here. There was Duke, which gathered its players from all over the country. And there was the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, the historically black college and university athletic league that, still today, fills every hotel in uptown Charlotte each February for its annual tournament.

Even back during the Jim Crow era, though, North Carolina showed signs of social progress. One Sunday morning in 1944, while the rest of Durham was in church, Duke and North Carolina College for Negroes played a secret, integrated basketball game. The College for Negroes won, 88-44. Then the two teams mixed squads and played shirts and skins, “Just God’s children, horsing around with a basketball,” one of the players said in a 1996 New York Times Magazine story.

Then came the 1960s, when four black students from North Carolina A&T walked to Woolworth’s in Greensboro and sat down at the lunch counter, igniting the sit-in movement that spread throughout the South.

One of those men, Franklin McCain, died in January. I remember the one afternoon I spent with him: It is November 2010, and I’m in the lobby of the Sheraton Four Seasons in Greensboro. Joe McNeil, a retired Air Force officer and another member of the Greensboro Four, and I are sitting in red cushioned chairs. He tells me that McCain will join us soon. A few minutes later, McCain slowly walks out of the elevator, hunched over. He sits down and talks, a big man with a high-pitched voice. Together, he and McNeil recount the story of Feb. 1, 1960, the day they started the sit-ins. They laugh at the memory of a cop who slapped a nightstick against his hand in a threatening manner, laugh at the memory of the waiters who made smart-aleck remarks toward them. They talk about what it was like to be pushed and not push back.

“You have to have directed and channeled anger. If you can do that, it can be positive anger,” McCain says. “I’m at my angriest often when I’m in full control of the things I’m saying.”

***

Fifty-four years after the Greensboro Four, here we are, fighting like hell against each other again.

As the Moral Marchers pushed forward on that Saturday in February, those in the back looked for places to see the stage. People hung their heads out of the openings of parking garages and from rooftops. They strained to listen to the Rev. William Barber, the state’s NAACP president and the face of the movement. On stage, Barber’s speaking turned into preaching. Preaching turned into singing. Singing turned into dancing.

“You call us whiners and losers,” Barber exclaimed, calling some of the legislators by name. “We are North Carolina. We are America. We are here. And we ain’t going nowhere.”

Barber quoted the Bible, and a rabbi on stage clapped alongside him. As more and more people pressed into the five crammed blocks, the cheering and responses to Barber’s words grew louder and more unified.

Behind the stage, though, there was another sound.

“Watch that motherf*cker!” a man wearing a security jacket yelled, pointing toward the lawn surrounding the Capitol behind the stage. A white man in his twenties with close-cropped hair stood on the hill, wearing a loose-fitting, hooded sweatshirt. He waved his arms and shouted obscenities and verbal threats. The security team asked him to leave, and as he walked away, one of the security guards followed him from a distance, craning his neck until the man was out of sight.

After Barber finished, handlers rushed him to the passenger’s seat of a gold GMC Envoy. Later that day, the NAACP sent out a release saying the crowd had swelled to more than 80,000. Right-wing groups scoffed, with some saying the Moral March barely eclipsed 2,000. The following week, the Raleigh News & Observer sent photos to professional crowd-counters, but nobody came up with a definitive answer.

However many there were, after the rally most were gone within 20 minutes. They left behind words and drawings in colorful chalk in the street.

“Forward,” one read.

And near the end of the street, in big, looping letters: “Together we shall overcome.”

Will we, now? For years, the people here believed they lived in a world apart, and that the ugliness of politics in other parts of the country would stay away. But more people are coming, from the Rust Belt, from Mexico, from places in between. Forbes this month published a list of America’s fastest-growing cities—Raleigh is second; Charlotte is eighth. With growth comes change, and with change comes tension, and with tension comes conflict and winners and losers.

For a few hours that Saturday, though, the losers believed they were winning, and that was enough for them.