Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church Sesquicentennial

Our church in Durham is celebrating its Sesquicentennial this Sunday.  Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, former slaves, some at least from the Stagville Plantation, organized a congregation in the boundary area of Durham County and Granville County.  When in 1933 their land was appropriated to build a military base, Camp Butner, these families moved south into Durham County, taking their congregation and their church building with them.

Some settled in the Mill Grove community, north of the main city but still in the central part of the county where the Eno River flows past Roxboro Road and Old Oxford Highway.  Many continued sharecropping and farming.  Some developed commerce in trades such as home construction and furniture making and repair.  Ultimately descendents of these settlers struggled for education and advancement, scattered to all parts of the county and beyond, and they have influenced this region in many ways.  I'm proud to be adopted into their family.  Here is a write-up from the local paper.

MOUNT LEVEL MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH TURNS 150
April 30, 2014
Dawn Baumgartner Vaughn

Health Insurance Options

Last week it became clear that the discussion, soon to be a debate, on health care is beginning to hit its stride in Washington. The first big news was that people in the medical and insurance industry were making big promises about keeping down the rate of growth in health costs. Up to now we've been told by them that the expenses were unavoidable. Hmmm.

Then the analysts came into the discussion speculating on what it might mean that these people in the industry were willing to make such a public promise. Discussions of how many lobbyists have been hired were supplemented by figures on how much the insurance industry, pharmaceutical industry, and other medical interests are paying to lobbyists. People with deep pockets and big profits at stake will get the best representation that money can buy.

The rest of us suckers will have to take what they decide is best for us. Or maybe not. We may not have the money, but we have the people to stand up to these interests. If the Republicrats and Demicans in Congress are inclined to do what the medical interests say, we need to let them know that they are in for a few million wake-up calls from the people who are suffering under the current system which is force-fed to us as if the experts know what is best for all of us clueless people with and without paychecks they want us to sign over to them.

Here is a letter I wrote to the Durham Herald-Sun, and it showed up in this Sunday's edition.

Insurance Options

I know that the health insurance industry made a big public show of saying they will cut back the rise in health care costs. If they can, why haven't they done it already?

As it stands, people who still have health insurance have been losing real wages in a giant wealth transfer to the insurance companies and their allies. And so many more people have simply lost insurance coverage.

This is not a system of choices. It is a system of betting against the odds that one illness or injury won't make you go broke.

A real option would be to make these insurers compete with a public plan available to anyone who needs or wants it. A fair and competitive public insurance plan will force the insurance industry to cut profits and big bonuses so people can afford to go to the doctor.

We can't let Washington give in to the medical lobbies that want to maintain the costly, inequitable system we now have. They need to listen to the voters and make a quality public health plan available to all. That would be a real choice.

MIKE BROADWAY
Durham
May 17, 2009

NC Lacrosse Owes a Debt to Jim Kirkley

I have a fond friendship with Jim Kirkley. We were occasional conversants when he was finishing his dissertation at Duke and I was just taking courses in the late 1980s. Then when I was entering the job market, thanks to Jim a job at Shaw University found me. Going on sixteen years later, as they say, the rest is history. During the time that we both taught undergraduates, I spoke with him most every day. Over the past few years, as our teaching paths do not cross so often, we try to catch up every now and then. And through the years I have learned to admire him as a teacher, a leader, a scholar, a minister, a father, and a coach.

When Jim started coaching lacrosse in North Carolina, there was not much of an organization. A few private schools were playing, and a few public schools in the Research Triangle were getting things going. I don't know the history that well, but I do know that he became the driving force in making lacrosse become a team sport in many cities and schools across the state.

An article in the Durham Herald-Sun recognized his achievements this week (the photo here was published with the article--Jim is the tall one on the right). He is retiring from coaching after seventeen years at Riverside High School in Durham. He has won state championships, helped students get athletic scholarships, and mentored other coaches, along with serving as commissioner of the NC High School Lacrosse Association. People like Jim help you know what it means to live a good life. I wish him the best in the new pursuits he will undertake.

Money buys attention. The evidence has been overwhelming lately.

For instance, I saw a magazine cover in the grocery store with a picture of an actress who is nearly my age of 49. The teaser line on the cover asked why she never ages. Any of us who aren't intentionally suspending reality to think about that question can already give the answer. She probably spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on personal coaches, physicians who mess with her skin and her subcutaneous adipose tissue, tailors and designers who adjust her clothing to cover or enhance her figure, and make-up artists and photographers who can hide the signs of age. With all this investment, her promoters and the publishers of the magazine collaborate to pretend that she has a gift, a discipline, and a cleverness to seem forever young.

A second example has been in the letters to the editor of the Durham Herald-Sun. I have never seen such a well-coordinated campaign of letter placement in our local paper. Well crafted letters which cover the key talking points and stay on message appear over and over, defending the three lacrosse players who were alleged to have committed sexual assault. Apparently the evidence is less convincing now than several months ago, and the charges of rape have been dropped. What amazes me is the way that the letter writers let their attack on the rape charges ooze over into saying that nothing wrong happened the night of that party. I am not fond of conspiracy theories. But never before have so many self-righteous people from all fifty states given so much attention to writing almost the same letter to our small local paper. There has to be something at work behind this, and I'm not blaming the Holy Spirit. Money can organize letter writers, too.

They pretend that it is easy to discern the truth among the "he said, she said" nature of sexual assault cases. They try to live in a pristine moment apart from the history of rapes swept under the rug and differential application of the laws according to gender and race. Even a young woman who grew up in my neighborhood has joined in the attacks on anyone who was critical of the lacrosse team, especially certain Duke professors and administrators.

Some professors seized the opportunity to speak about the ongoing presumption of privilege among many white Duke students who resist and resent their associations with blacks. It is real. I speak with black students at Duke often enough to know that although they have been 0fficially admitted to the school they seldom find the path to mutuality across racial lines, opportunities, understanding, or respect. But many propagandists are hard at work to hide all this for the sake of buying an untarnished future for the accused.