When "stand your ground" fails

SCOTLAND NECK, N.C. - The poverty is so acute that it hurts, says Marcellus Brown.

Brown, 43, has lived in Scotland Neck for about 30 years. He doesn't have a steady job, but he wants one. To apply for unemployment, he has to get a ride to Roanoke Rapids, about 30 miles north. To look for a job, he typically tries to get a lift to Tarboro (20 miles) or Rocky Mount (30 miles).

So it hurts when politicians ignore the poor or say they're lazy, he told the head of the state chapter of National Association for the Advancement of Colored people during a tour of poverty-stricken areas to his hometown in northeastern North Carolina.

"You can walk across the street, and you don't see none of this from the other side of town," he told the Rev. William Barber on Friday. "I mean, you don't see trees still here from the hurricane, abandoned warehouses. You don't see that."

The invisibility on the national level and from fellow townspeople hurts, he said. "It hurts because this is our home. This is what we have. When you go across town, you see the different environment," he said, referring to the wealthier, mostly white part of town.

"That's like five minutes away. And that's still Scotland Neck."

The two-day Poverty and Hope Tour led by the NAACP and other groups was meant to put faces on numbers of poor who live in in northeastern North Carolina. Participants met more than 1,000 people during stops in six places during two days on the road. The tour will go to other rural communities and inner-city neighborhoods later this year, Barber has said.

Education and housing were the other main issues that residents mentioned as they ran up to Barber on the street. Joining him were representatives of the N.C Justice Center; the N.C. Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at North Carolina Central University in Durham.

In Scotland Neck, population about 2,000, the participants saw for themselves a community where almost 50 percent of residents live below the federal poverty level and unemployment is almost 13 percent, compared to a statewide figure of 9.5 percent as recently as November. Almost 70 percent of the people who live there are black, but that's not reflected in the town council, which has one black among its five members, or the police department, which has no full-time black officers among the eight who work there.

Scotland Neck is named for the Scots who settled it in 1722 and its location in the neck of the Roanoke River. It's part of Halifax County, which was one of the state's largest slave-holding counties. A Census count from 1860 shows that Halifax was one of 19 counties with black majorities - its population of more than 19,000 included more than 10,000 slaves and more 2,000 free blacks. Whites numbered about 6,600 and made up 34 percent of the population.

"As long as it's ignored and it's invisible, nobody will take it seriously," Barber said as he walked through a neighborhood with abandoned houses with giant trees felled in August by Hurricane Irene still on the ground. "Maybe if we can drive home this issue, maybe we can put a light on poverty and all of its ugliness, and it will create a different kind of conversation and the possibility to make some real substantive change."

The town's mayor is 85-year-old Leonard Bunting, who took office last month after defeating the town's first black mayor, James Mills. He says he's excited about the town's future - one restaurant recently opened, as did a hardware store and another restaurant is in the works. Other changes are in the works, but he has to stay mum on those for now.

Race relations in the town are great, he says. "There are a few people who would like to have a problem," he said. "But the majority of whites and the majority of blacks will tell you that we have no problem."

Even the death of a 61-year-old black man who was shocked by police with a stun gun hasn't upset that balance, he says. Roger Anthony died Nov. 22, a day after he was stunned.

The State Bureau of Investigation is looking into Anthony's death. Police Chief Joe Williams said Friday that the officer has since resigned.

"We've got a few people who would like for it to (cause problems), but that's not the case," Bunting said of Anthony's death. " ... This is a good little town. It's a country town. We have a lot of people coming back here to retire, both black and white."

Other local leaders don't see the town quite the same way. James Mills, the former mayor, and David Harvey, head of the Halifax County chapter of the NAACP, say many of the homes on the east - or black - side of town wouldn't be inhabitable if they were inspected. But the inhabitants can't complain because then they wouldn't have anywhere to live.

And the county continues to have three school districts that Barber and some groups say should be unified.

A study by the UNC Center for Civil Rights and released last year said the system that includes Halifax County Public Schools, Weldon City Schools and the Roanoke Rapids Graded School District remains one of the most segregated systems in the state. The county is 39 percent white, while nearly 100 percent of students at Halifax County and Weldon City schools are non-white. The Roanoke Rapids district is more than 70 percent white.

The report, released last May, said Halifax County and Weldon City schools have some of the lowest-performing schools in the state, along with high teacher turnover rates.

Paying for three of everything, including bus systems and superintendents, makes little sense, Barber said, and the set-up is rooted in the history of segregation.

That history is part of what the state must transform, he said.

"But you can't move beyond it until you own it and you deal with it," he said. "Once we tell the truth, then we can move forward with the transformation."

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In six poor rural counties the rates range from 21% to 26%.  Among blacks, poverty rates approach 40% in parts of those counties. Statewide, the poverty rate is 17. 4%, the nation's 12th highest.

The state's NAACP, seeking to put a human face on what it calls "bloodless statistics," mounted a Truth and Hope Tour of Poverty through the six counties Thursday and Friday. More than 60 volunteers from the civil rights group and several other nonprofits piled onto a bus to hear local residents describe what poverty looks like and feels like.

"It's no sin to be poor," the Rev. William Barber told residents of tiny Roper, N.C. "But it is a sin to allow entrenched and systemic poverty in the richest nation on Earth."

For two days, residents stood up in churches, town halls and community centers in the six counties to lay out the full dimensions of lives circumscribed by poverty.

In Beaufort County, Charlette Blackwell Clark told of trying and failing to raise enough cash to remove a tree that had collapsed on her mobile home, crushing the roof.  She's a member of what demographers call the working poor. She cleans neighbors' homes for cash; her husband, Noah, is a trash collector. Between them, they barely earn enough to survive day to day -- they can't pay $2,000 to remove a tree.

In Roper, town clerk Dorenda Gatling told of reluctantly cutting off town water service to friends and neighbors unable to pay their bills -- most of them low-wage workers or elderly people on fixed incomes. It pains her, Gatling said, because she has endured unemployment and hand-to-mouth living herself. But because the town itself is strapped for cash, she said, she had no choice but to "aggressively collect."

In Elizabeth City, the Rev. Tony Rice welcomed the tour to the cramped homeless shelter he runs. It's the only men's shelter within 100 miles, he said. It can accommodate just seven men a night. With the county's homeless rate rising along with the poverty rate (23%), there are more than a thousand homeless people seeking shelter in the city every night.

Gene Nichol, director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, listened to dozens of people pour out their life stories. Poverty is far more than cold statistics, he told one gathering, "it lives in wounds to the human heart," he said.

And federal poverty statistics tell only part of the story, tour leaders insisted. The federal poverty earnings threshold of $22,113 per year for a family of four is too low; families earning more than that amount also live in poverty, they said.

In Halifax County in northeastern North Carolina, for instance, the federal poverty rate is 26.2%. But a working family of four actually needs $46,120 a year to afford basic living expenses in the county, according to the N.C. Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group.

In Scotland Neck, a poverty-stricken northeastern North Carolina town that is 70% black, James Mills took the tour on a walk through the black part of a town he says is largely segregated by race.

Mills served two terms as the town's first black mayor. He was voted out of office last fall.

Mills pointed out ramshackle homes and trailers occupied by blacks, and the ruins of abandoned houses along potholed streets.  Then he suggested that tour members drive through the predominantly white side of town, where he said roads are well paved and public services are far better.

As Mills spoke, a backhoe raised a racket while removing a large tree that had fallen onto a small house last summer. Mills said he had tried for months as mayor to get the city to remove the tree but was told that no facilities were available.

"Today, with y'all due to show up on your tour," the deposed mayor told the poverty tour, "it looks like the city decided it could find the energy and the facilities to clear out that tree."