George H. White's final speech.

I've been reading up on local history: one book on politics in North Carolina and another on residential patterns in Charlotte. The decade that really grabs me is the 1890s, when a Republican-Populist coalition, representing small farmers, mill workers, and African-Americans actually managed to beat the Democrats, who represented the state's large farmers and businessmen. By broadening voting laws, the coalition made it possible for a good number of African-Americans to be elected as officials. At the high tide of this movement — 1896 — George H. White won a congressional election and became the only African-American in the House of Representatives. He won reelection in 1898.

But 1898 was also the year that the Democrats orchestrated a massive white supremacy campaign and recaptured the machinery of North Carolina politics. Determined to hamstring the opposing party, they followed the rest of the south in deliberately disenfranchising black voters by means of a the poll tax and the literacy test. Representative White realized he couldn't win after this law passed and declined to run for reelection in 1900.

I found his final speech to Congress in UNC's Documenting the American South online collection. It's a remarkable and moving speech. The most quoted section is the closing:

This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people--rising people, full of potential force.

Mr. Chairman, in the trial of Lord Bacon, when the court disturbed the counsel for the defendant, Sir Walter Raleigh raised himself up to his full height and, addressing the court, said:

“Sir, I am pleading for the life of a human being.”

The only apology that I have to make for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States.

Dear FLG

From your open letter:

“I agree that taste is relative, but was wondering what you want out of music? And further what you think I want out of music?”

I can answer with some authority on what I want out of music. I've got a couple of priorities. Speaking really roughly, you could put the albums I really like into three groups: albums by songwriters I like, albums by composers/performers that I like, and albums by rock bands that I like.

I like songwriters who develop conceptual worlds across their albums and careers. (Not that they'd describe their own work this way.) Phil Elverum from The Microphones and Mount Eerie basically has a whole personal mythology set up at this point, and I dig that. Jason Molina from Magnolia Electric Company writes album after album about lonely wanderers guided by the north star and seeking the blues, and I always love it. I can let albums from guys like this really get into my head; I'll pore over the lyrics or just lie back and do nothing but listen to the album.

I'm pretty into mathematics, and I think that has something to do with why I like counterpoint so much. If I want pure music, I will often go for English Renaissance or for Bach. Sometimes Handel, but I don't feel Handel's music as deeply as I do Bach's. And I'm no jazz-head, but I get something good out of the interplay in Miles Davis's modal stuff. I know enough about music theory to get the barest intuition of what goes on in really great music, and sometimes it's really frustrating when I can tell that I'm missing something important. At some point, I want to study up and get better at interpreting art music. Basically, I like art music that pushes the interplay of melodic and/or harmonic lines.

While I'm rather comfortable with my taste in lyricists and in art music, I'm a little bit at odds with myself on what I want out of a rock band. It's a bit Dionysian, I guess, but I like bands that I can really get caught up in: Springsteen (oh, Springsteen!), punk-rock bands like Superchunk, a whole bunch of local bands in Chapel Hill or Durham… For a time, I was really into local music, and I've come to get a big kick out of seeing a good band in a small room — like, 400 people or less. But a big draw here is catharsis and community, even more than aesthetic merit.

I could go on and on here, talking about exceptions and outliers, but it would probably just be for me. As for what I think you (that is, FLG) want out of music, all I have to go on is your “currently listening” postings and your comment that you'd take Journey over Radiohead. I am guessing — and I could be totally wrong in this — that you go for strong melody and solid rhythm. Do you usually listen to music while doing other things? Do you tend to like songs that have some presence in pop culture, or is it more that those are the videos that are easy to find on YouTube? My hypothesis is that strong melody (or “hook”) and competent-to-exceptional performance are key to your taste in music. Don't be mad at me if I'm wrong, please.

By the way, I'd pick Radiohead over Journey ninety-nine times out of a hundred because the only Journey song I know is “Don't Stop Believing,” whereas I've really come to like a bunch of Radiohead songs.

Yours,

-wrb

PS Here are some videos.

The story of Charlotte, and the Charlotte Museum of History.

I need to start out by saying that the Charlotte Museum of History is a local treasure. It's a wonderful place to spend a few hours: exploring the museum, seeing the preserved colonial house, or just wandering the small network of wooded paths. But I out there looking for the story of the city of Charlotte, and, for the most part, I had to tease it out of smaller details.

Driving up the museum feels like finding an oasis. The beautiful flowers and fountain welcome you to the grounds, and the grounds are wooded enough that the parking lot seems to be way out in a forest, even though you can still see Shamrock Drive. It's a peaceful place. You walk into the atrium and pay your six dollars for an adult ticket, and you're off to the exhibits.

Off to the right, there are two rooms, one dedicated to the founding of Charlotte and another to its growth. The Eighteenth Century room has a model of what the Trade and Tryon intersection looked like in the late 1700s — two dirt roads and a small group of houses and cabins. You'll find the story of how Thomas Polk got Charlotte to be named the seat of Mecklenburg County, and where our local emphasis on hornets came from. The other room is for the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, with a nice display for the gold rush of the 1830s and cases full of artifacts from America's wars.

Between these two rooms, you've covered the broad outline of American History. Colonial times, American revolution, agriculture, gold rush, slavery, Civil War, reconstruction and industry, World War I, World War II. And I can see how this is probably the best way to draw people into Charlotte's history. But it doesn't seem like Charlotte's own story. If you want to figure out how Charlotte became the most populous city in North Carolina, you have to read between the lines.

For example, one placard showed that before the Civil War, almost a third of Mecklenburg County's population was enslaved. It also says that about 6,000 African-Americans were emancipated after the war. If I'm thinking about this correctly, that puts the population of Mecklenburg County at about 18,000 people. Which is to say: not that many, compared to now. In fact, Charlotte's population boom didn't start until the early 1900s, when a streetcar network and a “Watch Charlotte Grow” campaign created a ring of suburbs and an industry boom. There is basically one panel on this growth in the downstairs rooms, although elsewhere there is a map that shows the sequence of Charlotte's annexations over time. What's rather startling is that in 1899, the city limits were roughly where the inner beltway is now. It was in the decade that followed that Charlotte's population eclipsed that of Wilmington, which was to that point North Carolina's largest city. All of which reinforces my hunch that Charlotte wasn't very important prior to the last few decades of the 1800s, and makes me wonder what advantages Charlotte had over other cities. One of the clues to Charlotte's rise can be found in the railroad maps, which shows Charlotte at the intersection of the line running from Wilmington to the mountains and the line running from Raleigh down to Columbia, South Carolina.

While I felt the two permanent rooms were trying to tell America's story through Charlotte's eyes, one of the upstairs exhibits told a particular Charlotte story more along the lines of what I was looking for. North Charlotte was a company town that was built in Charlotte's crucial decades of early growth, and for a time functioned as a self-contained mill community. The neighborhood weathered the Great Depression only to decline when the mills closed after the second World War. North Charlotte languished under high crime rates until a group of new artists and old locals restyled the area as NoDa, or North Davidson. It was an excellent display, evoking the lost world of Piedmont mill towns, despite a somewhat goofy use of the same photograph of one mill in full color to illustrate good times and menacingly grayed out to represent bad times.

Another room downstairs was devoted to the photographs of Margaret Morley, a writer and biologist who moved to the North Carolina mountains and distilled a decade of observation into her 1913 book The Carolina Mountains. The photographs and captions are beautiful, and it's worth six dollars just for that if you love the Blue Ridge as much as I do.

Out behind the museum, you find the Hezekiah Alexander house. This carefully restored building dates to colonial times. I didn't have time to take the tour, so I won't say much about it except that it's really nice to walk around to the herb garden, and to see the old trees in the yard. The woods are tranquil and verdant, and worth stopping in. Wander too far, and you'll end up on the grounds of a Methodist retirement community called Aldersgate.

I realize that it's a bit unreasonable for me to walk into a museum demanding a particular narrative, especially when there's a whole other museum dedicated to the rise of Charlotte as a New South City. And the Charlotte Museum of History recommends some interesting books in its display and has a great website. But I was surprised that the question “Why did Charlotte grow?” wasn't addressed more explicitly, as it's perhaps the crucial question for rooting our aspirations to world-class status in our own history.

Still, don't let any of this stop you from visiting. They're doing good work over there.

Margaret Morley

Below a photograph of a mountain cabin:

“Because the Northern Mountains are so cold and barren, the people live down below and look up to them. Here the people live among the mountains themselves. They love them, and are afraid to go down to the country that lies level below, because, they say, if you go out of the mountains you die. And truth to tell most likely you do.”

Below a photograph of a road in the woods:

“Whether alone or companioned, you must never walk right on. You must linger along and listen attentively, and sniff the air for news, and you must look, not only at the clouds and the blue of the sky, at the distant landscape and the colors of the near slopes, but you must look at the ground. For there also you will find things to remember when the doors are shut on the wander-life.”

Below a photograph of the Blue Ridge Mountains:

“The Blue Ridge! What mountains ever offered themselves to the sun so enchantingly as the long curve of the Appalachian chain.… This battlement of heaven was not named by accident. It was named Blue because there was no other name for it. It is blue; tremendously, thrillingly blue; tenderly, evasively blue. And the sky that contains it is also entrancingly blue.”

Culled from placards at the Charlotte Museum of History's exhibit “Photographs of Margaret Morley.” Quotations are presumably from Morley's 1913 book, The Carolina Mountains, though perhaps they are from letters or some other such source.

Here are some pictures of the exhibit.