I have only begun closely following the 4th Congressional District primary in the last couple of weeks. Mea culpa: Despite the district’s political isolation in North Carolina, this is one of the most significant primaries being held in the state. National politics has moved on a bit from the battle between progressives and “moderates” (though I think that label is wrong for the progressive Foushee). But the decisions of the 4th District, encompassing Durham and Chapel Hill, have always had symbolic meaning as one of the few expressions of Southern liberalism to be seen in American politics.
I no longer live in the 4th District and do not plan to endorse either candidate. Rather than adjudicate the disputes being roughly hashed out in the race, I want to say something about this primary’s historical implications. This is a race between two left-leaning women of color in the heart of a former slave state. Orange County was the location of five documented lynchings between 1869 and 1898. In one instance, the terrorist mob left a grisly note alongside the victim’s body: “If the law won’t protect virtue, rope will.”
Durham’s history, too, has its share of ugly boils. For many years, the county was dominated by the tobacco and cigarette-manufacturing industries. This alone is a bit ugly. Cigarettes are, in the words of one Stanford historian, “the deadliest artifact in human history,” killing 100 million people in the 20th century. It troubles me that the Triangle was built on a carcinogen. Cigarette manufacturing was integrated, unlike the textile industry. But whites had the best jobs and full-throatedly hated Black people. Jesse Helms won Durham County in 1972…