Richard Fausset

LaPLACE, La. — The New York artist Dread Scott was standing in a tiny traffic island in this working-class suburb west of New Orleans on a recent afternoon near the EZ Stop convenience store. He had come to point out a single sentence on a historical marker, one unheeded by the truck drivers barreling down Airline Highway: “Major 1811 slave uprising organized here.”

“That’s the only marker anywhere in the United States, as far as I know,” Scott said, that mentions the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. He gestured toward one of the oncoming trucks, his voice shifting into a sardonic gear: “I’m pretty sure that guy didn’t read it.”

The remedy Scott is planning, for Nov. 8 and 9, is likely to be the most ambitious artwork thus far in his long career as a radical multidisciplinary artist: A large-scale re-enactment of the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which as many as 500 enslaved people of African descent marched toward New Orleans from the surrounding sugar plantations in an inspiring, but eventually doomed, effort to win their freedom.

“It was a really buried history that a lot of people didn’t know, and it needed to be known.” he said. “And these people were heroes.”

Scott, 54, first generated widespread notoriety in 1989 as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an installation that seemed to encourage viewers to tread on the American flag and led to efforts to amend federal law to make it a crime to display the flag on the ground. In his 27 years in New York he has become a fixture on the gallery scene with works that highlight the plight of the dispossessed and the injustices suffered by his fellow African-Americans.

Like the flag piece, which sent thousands of veterans and other protesters into the streets of Chicago, his planned Louisiana re-enactment, which will be documented by British filmmaker John Akomfrah, has already managed to seep beyond the art world and into the broader public imagination. Organizers expect 300 or more people of color — teachers, lawyers, artists, students, activists — to participate. Over two days, they will march 26 miles in period costumes, armed with prop machetes and muskets and chanting for their freedom.

Some will be on horseback. Some will carry flags. They will pass near oil refineries and subdivisions and trailer homes along the Mississippi River, creating anachronistic tableaus that Scott hopes will spur meditations on the modern-day meanings of oppression and crisis.

He hopes it will force people to think about who the real heroes were in the 19th-century South and encourage participants to reflect on their forebears’ bravery and sacrifice.

It already has. “It’s about the way my ancestors were reared — I’d like to see the way they experienced it,” said a re-enactor, Jackie Patterson, 60, an elementary school teacher who was standing in the hectic fitting rooms of the project’s costuming department on a recent afternoon. The costuming team had just transformed Patterson into a plausible 19th-century rebel with a simple skirt, a floral-print shawl and a coppery red tignon, the headwrap women of color wore during that period.

The re-enactors’ triumphant final march through the French Quarter on Saturday will reimagine the outcome of the actual rebellion, which was viciously suppressed and ended with some of the rebels’ heads on pikes.

“It’s just good for us,” said Dorthy Ray, 26, the project coordinator. “Returning to a historical narrative but at the same time moving forward. You get to camp out with black people, and walk for miles with nothing but black people.

“And it’s not because somebody died,” she added, “I feel like that hardly ever happens. It’s like we always get together for tragedy, but never just for celebration.”

Organizers say funding for the re-enactment has come from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute, as well as other institutional and individual donors.

So far, their plan has generated little pushback or controversy, although they are taking security seriously and coordinating with law enforcement across three parishes. (Scott asked that the exact route not be published for security reasons.) Karen Kaia Livers, a New Orleans actress charged with community outreach for the project, said she has received “100% support” from Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a white Republican who is Louisiana’s chief tourism official.

Nungesser’s office declined to comment for this article, but his quiet support is emblematic of a complex moment in the South as it confronts and recalibrates the story of its brutal racist past. Nungesser was so opposed to the recent removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans that he wrote to President Donald Trump, pleading for him to intervene. Yet his office is also in the process of planning a Civil Rights Trail across the state.

There is no question the re-enactment will contribute to the broader conversation about memorials and Southern history that was catalyzed by the 2015 massacre of nine African-American churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina. New Orleans removed some of its most high-profile Confederate monuments in 2017 after street protests in which hundreds of anti-racist activists confronted scores of alt-right defenders.

Today, the bases of a couple of statues remain — transformed, in a way, into knotty conceptual pieces themselves.

Scott’s idea for the project predates the Trump presidency; he has been planning it for more than six years. The re-enactment, he said, is not about slavery, but self-emancipation — “and people who had the boldest and most radical idea of freedom in the United States at that time.” Some believe the rebels wanted to seize all of Orleans Territory, which includes present-day New Orleans, and establish a state where human bondage was abolished. Scott said he wanted to show how everyday people had “resisted a brutal system of enslavement that everybody would think was unjust, and see this was the only way they could get free — and then they could draw conclusions about how people need to get free today.”

With a wide mohawk and spectacles, Scott, who was born Scott Tyler, speaks quickly and precisely, with a hint of accent from his native Chicago, where he grew up on the punk rock of the Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys, and found art-school inspiration in the original Dadaists and contemporary conceptual artists like Hans Haacke.

His previous pieces have addressed the victims of United States bombings abroad and police violence against people of color at home. As a self-proclaimed communist, he hopes his slave revolt re-enactment will show what radical solutions look like at a time when he believes the country, and the planet, need more than just incremental change.

“Their solution was to end slavery,” he said of the original rebels, “not to form a super PAC and see only if they could get whipped Monday through Friday.”

For the revolt project, he said, he found inspiration in the Soviets’ 1920 re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, which took place three years after the actual event, and “The Battle of Orgreave,” a film by the British artist Jeremy Deller that re-created a clash between striking miners and the police in 1984. He also looked to the African-American painter Jacob Lawrence and his depictions of heroes of the Haitian Revolution, which was a likely influence on the Louisiana rebels.

Not everyone is on board with the project. Malcolm Suber, a New Orleans activist who helped lead the movement to take down the Confederate statues, backed out of the re-enactment project, saying that the emphasis is too much of an “art piece” and “not on the organizing of the black community to resist ongoing racism and oppression.”

But Scott’s vision is being realized with the help of a small army of creative local citizens. Luther Gray, 67, a well-known drummer here, has been working out rhythms to accompany the re-enactors in battle formation. At a recent rehearsal, he and others hammered out a 6/8 beat on log drums inspired by the Haitian yanvalou rhythm. “It sounded like war, man,” Gray said.

The costume designer is Alison Parker, who has outfitted large Hollywood productions. Parker said she first looked to American art of the period but found it to be untrustworthy, slanted toward “propaganda” about “happy” people in bondage. She ended up relying on detailed descriptions of clothing culled from advertisements seeking the return of runaway slaves.

The story of the uprising had not been completely hidden. An activist named Albert Thrasher wrote a book on the topic that was locally published in 1995. Daniel Rasmussen wrote his Harvard undergraduate thesis about the revolt and turned it into the 2011 book “American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt.”

Still, Livers, the actress, said that she remembers finding “one little paragraph” about the uprising in a history book, and was inspired to write a play about it. In the late 1990s, she took the play to a majority-black summer camp in central Louisiana. When the camp’s black organizers learned about the nature of the play, she said, they were “shocked.” That, in turn, shocked her.

“To talk about the fact of being enslaved is uncomfortable,” she said.

But in recent months, Livers found a more enthusiastic buy-in as she introduced the idea to officials and community leaders in St. John the Baptist Parish, home of LaPlace, and St. Charles Parish, where much of the march will take place.

She found an ally in the Rev. Donald R. August Sr., 62, whose Rising Star Baptist Church is on land that was once the Andry plantation, where the revolt began. “There is a sense of uneasiness that can be felt by those who feel that this may stir some of the wrong emotions, and may stir some of the wrong responses,” said August, who plans to join the march, along with some church members. He felt it was more important to recover a history that many knew very little about. “We do Confederate re-enactments all the time,” he said.

The old plantation house is still intact and a short walk away from August’s church. It was recently purchased and restored, and will soon be the home of a museum that will honor the 1811 uprising, the Reconstruction era and the Creole jazz trombonist Edward Ory, known as Kid, who was born on the plantation in 1886 to mixed-race parents.

John McCusker, 56, Ory’s biographer, is leading the museum plan, part of a growing movement that seeks to use the old plantation homes along the River Road to tell the unvarnished truth about the African-American experience, rather than the moonlight-and-magnolias myth, as they have for many years.

McCusker, who is white, said that he has volunteered to play Manuel Andry, the plantation owner, who survived an ax attack at the beginning of the uprising. “I’ll be taking an ax for the team,” he said, grinning.

But McCusker was mostly serious about the playacting to come. His ancestors were sugar planters near the town of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, who once owned hundreds of slaves, a fact that he finds appalling.

“I told Dread,” he said, “that from my point of view, this is going to re-sanctify and cleanse the land.”

This article originally appeared in

(Surfacing)

An Artist's March to Freedom

But something far less festive was unfolding. On the asphalt, a few feet from the taco truck, bright yellow cartons overflowed with knives and sharpening tools, used to debone chickens, left behind by 99 workers who were swept up in a massive federal immigration raid at the plant Wednesday morning.

Many of the people who flocked to the parking lot Friday were relatives of the detained. They had come to claim the tools or drive away some of the dozens of abandoned cars. Others were workers who were documented, or simply not working the Wednesday morning shift when the raid occurred.

Friday was also payday, and the only thing open in the chicken plant was the office that cut the paychecks.

Mostly, people wanted to know what would happen next, when they could return to work and whether the doors that this chicken processing plant had opened for them would close. The raid had been part of a sweeping crackdown across Mississippi at seven work sites, the largest single-state operation of its kind in recent memory,

“Look, I have faith that I’m going to survive, but not 100%” said Betzabeth Carachure Hernandez, the taco vendor, who has parked her truck in the chicken plant lot for 15 years. “Not if most of the Latinos don’t come back.”

In the public imagination, the mythos and moral failures of this state are wrapped up in cotton. In reality, modern Mississippi is a poultry state, accounting for nearly $3 billion of the state’s $7.7 billion agriculture industry in 2017, compared with $623 million for cotton, according to Mississippi State University’s extension service.

Over the last decade or so, in small country cities like Morton, population 3,500, it has been Hispanic workers, many of them living here illegally, who have been most willing to deal with the blood and guts and stench of the business.

They came to Morton to work at PH Food, or to work at the big Koch Foods chicken plant up Highway 80, which spreads its scent around town with the shifting breeze — the smell of dead things not yet rotten. Hispanics made up 13% of the population in 2000 and now account for about a quarter of it.

The numbers are in line with the wave of Latino immigration that has transformed the southern United States. Between 2008 and 2018, the South saw an increase of 33% in its Latino population, more than any other region.

Morton is in Scott County, east of Jackson, historically in the heart of cotton country. Nine lynchings of black residents took place here between 1877 and 1950.

Today, Morton is a mash-up town not unlike like many other small Southern cities. There are signs for boiled peanuts and Envios de dinero — money transfers overseas. There’s a Sonic Drive-In, Maria’s Mercado, a Pizza Hut. A Chinese food place on Fourth Street has signs for English lessons and Spanish lessons. A bilingual sign at City Hall — “Here in — aqui en — Morton” — beckons residents to a circus in town this weekend.

But the raids across the state now have scores of families wondering where they belong, which members might stay and who might be forced to leave. In a store Friday morning, a 36-year-old woman named Juana — who like many unauthorized immigrants declined to give her last name because she feared being targeted by authorities — clutched a bouquet of cilantro, trailed by her 2-year-old daughter, Emily.

Her husband had been picked up Wednesday, she said. He talked to her on the phone Thursday. He was going to be deported, he said.

“It’s horrible. I’m afraid. I’ve lost him,” she said in Spanish. She motioned to her little girl, in pigtails and wearing a shirt that declared, in English, “I’m a princess worth waiting for.”

“She is going to be without her father,” Juana said.

Emily, the little girl, was born in the United States. Juana said it made sense for the two of them to try to stay and make it in America.

“I don’t want to go back” to Guatemala, she said. “There’s violence everywhere.”

In the PH Food parking lot, a Mexican man named Omar, 39, had come for his wife’s tools. She was apprehended Wednesday and transferred to a detention center in Louisiana.

He said he would try to get a lawyer. His wife does not have a criminal record, he said, so he thinks she might have a good chance of being released. And besides, he said, their life is not in Pachuca, the old mining town in south-central Mexico where he grew up and left years ago. It was here in Morton, the only world they know, where they had a house — “paid off,” he said proudly — and raised three American-born children, ages 11, 9 and 6.

On Friday, pallets were stacked high with packing materials and high-grade sodium phosphate inside the chicken processing plant, but the chicken lines were not running.

A supervisor named Jorge Mazariegos took a call on his cellphone. “Monday morning, I’m open, six o’clock, day shift,” he said.

Mazariegos did not think there were enough workers to bring the chicken plant up to full capacity. Perhaps 30%, he said. He did not know what the future might hold.

“I think people are going to leave this state out of fear,” he said — but not necessarily return to Latin America. “They’ll go to Atlanta, or Memphis.”

Beyond the Hispanic community, it was easy to find an alloy of emotions. People said they were empathetic. But they also said they wanted immigrants to stop violating federal immigration law.

“I kind of hate to see it,” said Gerald Neil, a 61-year-old ponytailed bass player and a fan of President Donald Trump. He said he worked with Hispanics and he hated to see families torn apart. “But it comes down to, ‘Are we going to be a nation of laws or not?’”

At a Subway sandwich shop on Highway 80, Markhenry Brauch, 54, of Wheatland, Missouri, said he had been coming to town as a trucker for two years, hauling in chicken feed and hauling out chicken meal.

“At first I got scared,” he said — not so much for the detained people but for the entire industry, from the chicken growers to the millworkers who make the feed. But he was relieved to see that the Koch plant was operational Friday morning.

Mississippi’s immigrant rights infrastructure is as weak as its chicken industry is strong, and this week, activists and lawyers were pouring in from around the Southeast and beyond to offer expertise, representation and succor.

But there has always been an informal network here of Americans looking out for noncitizens during hard times. Sara Ramos, 42, a homemaker, had driven down to Jena, Louisiana, to bail out a family friend in detention there. Her son had sent her links to the news that Koch Foods would be hosting a job fair Monday in Forest, Mississippi, about 11 miles east of Morton, where many workers were swept up in the raids.

Ramos huffed. “I want to see how many American citizens are going to want to take those jobs,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/ice-raids-mississippi.html" id="d9edd604-22b2-3f23-ada9-677eb4fadccf">The New York Times</a>.

After ICE Raids, the Parking Lot Was Crowded, but No One Was There to Work

MORTON, Miss. — From a distance Friday morning, the parking lot of PH Food could have been hosting a flea market. Scores of vehicles were haphazardly parked, and a throng of people milled around. A woman sold tacos al pastor and tacos de asada from the back of a food truck.

And yet Lutz, a 71-year-old internist, is not in the least bit worried about any of it surfacing to embarrass him.

“I figure that since every black person of any prominence I knew was also in that parade” — and also in blackface, he said — “then I was in pretty good company.”

That parade was Zulu, famously staged each carnival morning by the historically African-American philanthropic and social club of the same name. Zulu’s paraders, mostly black but some of them white, wear blackface and grass skirts, a tradition that stems from a 1909 visit that club members made to a theater performance in which black people in blackface portrayed members of the southern African ethnic group.

This month, the revelation that Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia and other white public figures once wore blackface has opened a conversation among New Orleanians about Zulu’s very different blackface tradition — about what it means, who should be allowed to participate, and whether it should continue.

The debate is as intense now as at any moment since midcentury, when some embarrassed black leaders urged the group to give up its costumes. In 1956, Clarence Laws, a former field secretary for the NAACP, called the parade “degrading and depressing,” and “perpetuating a stereotype which self-respecting Negroes detest.”

More than 60 years later, the tradition remains distasteful to some New Orleanians. “It’s always made me cringe,” wrote Jarvis DeBerry, a columnist with the Times-Picayune newspaper, earlier this month on Twitter. “That said, they swear it’s satire.”

Kim Coleman, 29, who like DeBerry is African-American, said this week that she no longer attended Zulu’s parade because of the sight of white people in blackface. “I find that disgusting,” said Coleman, curator of the city’s McKenna Museum of African-American Art.

This particular, and peculiar, blackface debate is at once familiar and different, whirled into some other thing by the complicated semiotic daiquiri machine that is New Orleans — and by the taboo-busting spirit of its carnival season. The pre-Lenten celebration of Mardi Gras, which this year falls on March 5, is a party that has long exposed the city’s serious social divisions, with its parading groups, or krewes, largely hewing to divides between black and white, suburbanite and city-dweller, old money and new.

But Mardi Gras is also about a radical suspension of seriousness. It was in that spirit that Sylvester Francis, 72, founder of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, which displays Mardi Gras Indian suits and other exuberant expressions of black Mardi Gras traditions, defended Zulu this week.

“It’s carnival. Do what you wanna. Be what you wanna,” said Francis, who is black.

“Even the governor,” he added, referring to Northam, “if he wants to wear blackface that one day, nobody would care.”

It was an intentional exaggeration, much like the Zulu costumes themselves. Members of the group and outsiders alike offer various opinions on their meaning and intent. In an interview Wednesday, Zulu’s historian emeritus, Clarence A. Becknell Sr., said the early paraders wore blackface because they were too poor to wear masks. “These people were laborers who started this organization — they couldn’t afford anything,” he said. “And blackface meant nothing.”

In a statement he issued Wednesday, Becknell urged people to not compare or conflate blackface with Zulu’s use of black makeup, calling the latter a way for the group to honor its African ancestry and the “continent’s most fierce warriors.”

There are other theories. Kim Vaz-Deville, an associate dean at Xavier University of Louisiana who has studied carnival, said that Zulu’s use of the black men wearing blackface is a satirical weapon subtly wielded against an exclusionary white society in the midst of the annual grand debauch.

Vaz-Deville said that it became unsafe for black residents to protest their condition after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that enshrined separate but equal accommodations for the races. (The case had been sparked by black New Orleanians testing segregated rail cars). Zulu, she argued, was a sendup of the whites-only carnival krewes that mimicked European royalty while upholding the segregated social order. Early kings wore a lard can for a crown and a banana stalk for a scepter.

“One of the ways that we found that people resist is through satire and irony and parody when they’re in oppressive situations, because it gives the cover of, ‘I’m making fun of you, but this is just a big joke in case you get angry,'” Vaz-Deville said. “They blackened their already-dark skin to say, ‘You white people are putting on white powder and coming from some mythical European space, so in the same way we’re going to darken our faces even more and say we come from a magical mystical place in Africa.”

Either way, the eventual inclusion of white people in Zulu, which Becknell said began in the late 1970s, amped up the complication.

For years, a New Orleanian who saw a white man in blackface on a Zulu float was likely to assume that the rider was either a member or an invited guest of a person of color. Instead of a boorish racist, that white person was likely to be perceived as a racial progressive, one who openly celebrated integration.

So it is with Lutz, who for 13 years served as the city health director and forged lasting friendships with black colleagues, one of whom sponsored him for membership in the mid-1980s. He is probably one of about 10 white men, out of 525 regular members, said Zulu’s president, Elroy James.

Earlier this week, Lutz stopped by the member’s lounge of Zulu Social Aid &amp; Pleasure Club on North Broad Street, the only white face in a crowd of about 30 men. (The club is all-male, but women are involved in a number of its activities.)

He was immediately greeted with warm pats on the back and cries of “Doc!”

In a city over-blessed with good places to have a drink, the members-only Zulu lounge is among the best of them. There was a kind of eased-back, space-age funk on the sound system, the ambience was inviting and cheerful, and the back wall exploded with vibrant photos of Zulu kings past in spectacular glittering costumes. Some were in black face and some were not. Among them was Louis Armstrong, who reigned in 1949.

Most members hewed strictly to rules forbidding them to talk publicly about club business without the consent of the president. But a number of them said the blackface masking was purely positive — a way to honor tradition and the working men, locked out of white Mardi Gras, who had invented the practice long ago.

Later in the week in an interview, state Sen. Troy Carter, a Zulu member for two decades, said that the club’s blackface was in the spirit of African and Native American peoples who painted their faces as a matter of ritual or self-expression. “We’re paying homage to the original Zulu tribes of Africa,” he said.

But black paint on white faces has proved explosive when perceived beyond the membrane of New Orleans.

Coleman, the museum curator, said that her social media feeds had been blowing up with fresh debate over Zulu since Northam’s scandal. She used to attend the Zulu parade every year as a child, she said, but soured on it as she grew older and began questioning the world of New Orleans and her place in it.

She no longer attends. If white people ride on the floats, she said, they should wear a different uniform, no matter their views on race: It was “demeaning,” she said, to have to watch “a white man in black face throwing out coconuts,” a reference to the shaved and painted coconuts that are Zulu’s signature throw, and the most prized of the Mardi Gras loot that rains down from float-riders to spectators. (The coconuts are actually handed, not thrown, for insurance and safety reasons.)

Other black New Orleanians this week said they were as uncomfortable with Zulu’s presentation as the critics of the 1950s and ‘60s. But they were reluctant to speak about it openly. The club, once the province of the working class, is today also stocked with local power brokers, doctors and lawyers, and generations of locals of all races find it difficult to conceive of Mardi Gras day without the spectacle Zulu provides.

It also remains a true social-aid organization, funding toy drives, food drives and scholarship programs.

Vaz-Deville predicted that the new debates would have little affect on the club, whose king proclaims each year that citizens shall endeavor to make merry and “not confuse Mardi Gras with other issues.”

“I think Zulu’s going to party like Zulu always parties,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/us/zulu-parade-new-orleans.html" id="277ec07b-e197-376a-a0d5-7e4008170a1c">The New York Times</a>.

A Black Group Says Mardi Gras Blackface Honors Tradition. Others Call It 'Disgusting.'

NEW ORLEANS — F. Brobson Lutz Jr. is one of those prominent Southern white men who once made a public appearance in blackface. It was at a big Mardi Gras parade years ago, and he knows there is photographic evidence.

The shooting death of Emantic F. Bradford Jr., 21, at the Riverchase Galleria mall in Hoover, Alabama, incited protests and raised questions about whether police officers are too quick to assume that a nonwhite person who is armed is a wrongdoer.

In a 24-page report, Attorney General Steve Marshall concluded that the Hoover police officer — identified only as Officer 1 — who shot Bradford had “reasonably exercised” his duties.

“Officer 1’s actions were reasonable under the circumstances and were consistent with his training and nationally accepted standards for ‘active shooter’ scenarios,” the report stated.

The police officer shot Bradford, who went by E.J., a few seconds after gunshots had rung out at the mall on Nov. 22, sending shoppers racing for safety and leaving an 18-year-old man, Brian Wilson, injured by two bullets.

The officer, who was on duty at the mall, said in a statement that he had turned toward the sound of the gunfire with his weapon drawn, and saw an injured man clutching his stomach near a railing, with another man helping him. He said he also saw “an armed suspect” who was “quickly moving towards the two males standing near the railing.”

“The suspect was advancing on the two males and had a black handgun in his right hand,” the officer said. “I fired my duty weapon at the armed suspect to stop him.” That man was Bradford.

The officer said that he thought Bradford was going to kill the two men. He also said he was unable to issue verbal commands before firing, “due to the quickness of the event and the immediate threat Bradford posed” to the two men he was approaching.

The police later arrested another man — Erron Martez Dequan Brown, 20 — and charged him with attempted murder in connection with the shooting of Wilson, the injured man by the railing.

The attorney general’s report said there was no evidence that Bradford’s handgun was fired at the mall.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/us/alabama-mall-shooting-death.html" id="ac2477e6-b79c-3e35-a747-5a3887bce5f7">The New York Times</a>.

An Alabama police officer will not be criminally charged for killing a young black man whom he had mistaken for the gunman in a shopping mall shooting Thanksgiving night, the state attorney general’s office said Tuesday.

Officer Faces No Charges in Fatal Shooting at Alabama Mall

So in late January, they sent a fat packet of documents to state and federal prosecutors, laying out what they believed to be possible criminal conduct in voter turnout work Dowless had done in 2016.

But Dowless was never indicted or sanctioned in any way. And now, the turnout work he did two years later on behalf of a Republican candidate, Mark Harris, is at the center of the investigation in the 9th Congressional District. The inquiry has the potential to force a new election in the contest, which Harris had apparently won by 905 votes over the Democrat, Dan McCready.

On Wednesday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement made public the packet of documents it had originally provided to the Wake County district attorney and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

The documents show that the board’s investigators were concerned about “possible manipulation or attempts to manipulate election results” in Bladen County in 2016, and that problems there and elsewhere could merit “possible criminal prosecution.”

Dowless, 62, has been named as a person of interest by the board as it looks into possible irregularities this year. The board has scheduled a Jan. 11 evidentiary hearing, where they could order a new election.

On Tuesday, Dowless’ lawyer, Cynthia Adams Singletary, said in a statement that Dowless “has not violated any State or Federal campaign laws and current ongoing investigations will prove the same.”

This week Dowless, through Singletary, also declined state investigators’ requests to interview him.

The elections board had referred its concerns about Dowless’ work to the federal prosecutor’s office in January 2017, soon after Dowless made statements at a board hearing that caused them to grow concerned about his operation.

State officials followed up with the packet to prosecutors in early 2018 as concerns mounted that Dowless might once again get involved.

“After a year without indictments, we wanted to pull everything together in one place,” said Josh Lawson, general counsel for the state board. “It was like, ‘Guys, here’s everything.'”

In the newly released documents, the board’s investigators describe concerns about Dowless’ 2016 operation that are similar to those that turned up this year.

Specifically, the documents describe two workers who said they were paid by Dowless to pick up absentee ballots from voters and deliver them to him. Such handling of absentee ballots is illegal under North Carolina law.

In one case, investigators say, the workers, Caitlyn Croom and Matthew Matthis, went to the home of a couple, telling them they were getting paid to get absentee ballot request forms. They encouraged the couple to request absentee ballots.

The couple never received their ballots, and when the wife tried to vote in person on Election Day, she was told by poll workers that she had already voted.

In a subsequent interview with investigators, Croom and Matthis said they signed the couple’s ballots but did not vote in any of the contests. They said their motivation was to include those ballots with others that they delivered to Dowless, expecting to be paid for them.

The investigators note that falsely signing ballots is also against the law. They also accuse Dowless of attempting to obstruct their inquiry by calling Croom and Matthis and coaching them on what to tell investigators.

Neither Croom nor Matthis could be reached for comment Wednesday evening.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/politics/carolina-election-fraud-dowless.html" id="1f33af31-cd8e-383d-a63a-a0afe8a4473f">The New York Times</a>.

North Carolina Election Contractor Was Investigated for Possible Fraud in 2016 Race

In early 2018, officials at North Carolina’s elections board were worried about the integrity of the coming midterm elections in rural Bladen County — particularly because of the possibility that a political operative named L. McCrae Dowless Jr. might run a worrisome absentee-ballot program similar to one they had seen him run there two years earlier.

But it could find no place for Dr. W. Melvin Brown III.

On a Monday night in October, Brown, a respected emergency-room doctor and native Charlestonian, waited in a hallway of the private club with 13 other men who hoped to be voted in. One of the members who sponsored Brown’s application had introduced him at the club’s monthly meeting, emphasizing his good character, local roots and military service.

Then the nominees were ushered out of the room, and the 50-odd club members in attendance began scooping up handfuls of marbles. There were 14 small boxes, each marked with an applicant’s name: A white marble dropped in was a yes vote, a black one meant no. Six or more black marbles would spell rejection.

Brown was the only African-American nominee, and the only one to receive a subtle tap on the shoulder on the way back into the room. Eleven black marbles had been dropped in his box.

And so, instead of quietly crossing one of the uncodified racial barriers that linger in American life, Brown, 49, found himself standing outside the clubhouse, in the salt air along the Ashley River, taking the measure of his feelings.

He was stunned, but not wholly surprised. “A huge disappointment,” he said later, “and a little embarrassment.”

The thwarted plan to make Brown the all-white club’s first black member had been both casual and serious.

He had white drinking buddies who belonged to the club, and they wanted him to be able to join them there for a beer or two.

“I wasn’t trying to be a hero, to be like, ‘Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev,'” Brown said. “It was my friends saying, ‘Hey, it’s fun, it’s relaxed, it’s casual.'”

But it was also a calculated effort to nudge a tradition-soaked Southern city into the 21st century. And when they met with resistance, Brown’s friends were furious.

James W. Ledlie, a lawyer who co-sponsored Brown’s membership bid, rushed outside and apologized to his friend. Then he went back into the meeting, livid.

“What happened here tonight is disgusting and despicable,” he recalls telling the members in the room. “There’s no question what happened here. And it’s wrong.”

In the following weeks, Brown’s story escaped the walls of the rifle club, spreading disappointment and embarrassment through a city still grappling with the pain of the June 2015 massacre of nine black people at Emanuel AME Church by a white supremacist from out of town.

In its aftermath, a multiethnic crowd of thousands gathered to protest and pray, and insisted that Charleston was not that kind of place.

And now there is this small, ugly, unresolved matter. It has forced Charleston to consider which lines have been erased and which remain, in a former slave port more recently reborn as a tourist destination and glittering global arts hub.

“What this is is an aberration, and a slight from these few bigoted people in that club,” said Joseph P. Riley Jr., 75, a white former mayor of Charleston and longtime liberal on racial matters. “They’re not representative.”

Dorothy Scott, the president of the local NAACP, disagreed. “We are a very polite city,” she said. “But even when our best and our brightest show up, the color of your skin is still the one thing you can’t change.”

Brown’s rejection, first reported by The Post and Courier newspaper, drew widespread condemnation. The local March of Dimes said it would no longer hold its annual bowling tournament at the club, as it had done since 1945. The Kiwanis Club no longer meets there. The College of Charleston and Porter-Gaud, the prestigious local prep school that Brown attended, have also severed ties.

The club’s president and members of its board did not respond to repeated attempts to reach them for comment. One reform-minded club member who spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of damaging professional relationships, wondered whether the club’s days might be numbered. “Who’s going to touch us?” he said. “We’re radioactive.”

The rifle club, with about 800 current members, has played a significant role in Charleston’s history. Founded by German immigrants, the club’s annual schützenfest, a festival built around sport-shooting, grew after the Civil War into the city’s biggest public party.

During the volatile days of Reconstruction, though, the club allowed other clubs of armed white men to march in the schützenfest parade. Jeff Strickland, an associate professor of history at Montclair State University in New Jersey, contends that their presence turned the parade into an intimidating expression of white paramilitary force, as groups like the Ku Klux Klan began terrorizing newly freed blacks in the South.

The connection with German ethnic pride had long since dwindled when Brown was growing up a couple of miles away. He knew the place as just another whites-only club still dotting neighborhoods like his on Charleston’s upper peninsula, which had once been majority white but had flipped to majority black after the city desegregated its schools.

But in other ways, Brown felt welcome in the city. His father, the founder of a military contractor that at one point employed more than 300 people, served on civic boards and commissions and moved easily in white society; Riley eulogized him when he died in 1994.

“All my life, no matter where I went, strange Caucasian men would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I know your father, great guy,'” Brown recalled.

At Porter-Gaud, the prep school, he was one of fewer than 10 black students on a campus of 750; he played football, sang in the glee club, and made lifelong friends.

He was accepted into the Naval Academy, earned a medical degree, served two tours in Afghanistan, and retired from military service in 2015 to return to Charleston for good, taking a job in a local emergency room and settling with his family in a smart Craftsman-style house close to where he grew up.

By then, the upper peninsula neighborhoods were changing again. Upper-middle-class whites were moving in, including some of the friends Brown had made over the years. And they discovered the rifle club, with its $175 yearly dues, cheap cold beer and 1,800-foot dock.

One of them was Tommy Dew, 52, a tour-guide operator. He calls himself an ultraconservative, and refers to the Civil War as “the war between the states.” He also hoped when he joined the rifle club about seven years ago that it could evolve, with new buildings, a swimming pool, and crucially, a membership reflecting the neighborhood.

Dew and his allies began to bring black friends to the club’s bowling alley as guests, including Darius Rucker, singer in rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, and Corey Alston, a weaver of sweetgrass baskets. The members fawned over Rucker. Alston said he had a great time.

Brown was the one black friend they persuaded to try for membership.

Their hopes were high, given his easygoing manner, his military service and his deep Charleston roots. In a city where there is cachet in being native — a “been-hya,” as the locals say, and not a “come-hya” — Brown was pure been-hya.

At his last military posting in Jacksonville, Florida, Brown had been happily surprised to be accepted into the nearly all-white Florida Yacht Club. “I’m thinking to myself, I guess this is how you fight perceptions,” he said. “And my kids love it. They’re getting hamburgers by the pool. Then I get to Charleston, and my friends are like, ‘Let’s do it.'”

But there was trouble nearly from the beginning. “After Melvin’s application was received, there was immediate pushback,” Dew said. “There was a buzz, and it was kind of like a wildfire. People were saying, ‘We’ve got a black applicant, we’ve got a black applicant!’ And it was a mixed reaction, positive and negative. But the negative was strong enough that it was communicated to me” that he was going to be rejected.

Dew and his allies tried in March to get the club to ease its rules so that an application would not be blocked by just six black marbles in a club of 800 members. But they failed.

The club’s two monthly meetings since the October vote have been rancorous, according to numerous people who attended. Some argued that the rejection had nothing to do with race, a claim that left Brown’s friends scoffing. Some members were angry that the episode had leaked to the press.

On the night of the December meeting, Brown was sitting at the bar at Leon’s, an oyster and chicken place a few blocks from home. The club’s bylaws say he must wait a year before reapplying, and he is not sure he will. He has told his friends not to quit, and to keep fighting.

He said he still believes racial relations are getting better in the U.S., despite the headlines. He spoke about how seeing the world in the Navy broadened him. He spoke of the respect he tried to show men under his command — some of them rural Southern whites — and how they often reciprocated.

“The best way to fight racism,” he said, “is to meet people.”

He talked about a white girl in the eighth grade who hurt him more than the rifle club did. There was something between them he said, a rapport, and he asked her to be his girlfriend. She answered him with a note that was short on explanation. But an explanation was unnecessary.

“I’m sorry,” it said. “I can’t.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/us/charleston-rifle-club-black-member.html" id="a6556c2d-7db0-32a4-a24a-d869e28d0a03">The New York Times</a>.

At Place for a Friendly Beer, a 'Despicable' Divide

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Though the Charleston Rifle Club was founded in 1855 to promote good marksmanship, it is better known today for a more prosaic pastime, bowling. And though the sign out front, with its lion-flanked escutcheon and Gothic lettering, gives off a whiff of high society, the club’s membership spans classes, embracing socialites and police officers, lawyers and factory workers.

The other candidate was a white ex-congressman from Texas, barreling through South Carolina with an improvisational air of empathetic energy, and acknowledging that his whiteness had given him a leg up in life.

For Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, these recent swings through the South included an overlapping purpose: delivering messages that appeared tailored to black audiences in a region where black women, in particular, will likely be key decision-makers in the Democratic primaries.

But the separate appearances by Harris and O’Rourke also underscored that no single formula exists for winning over black female voters, who received the two candidates with a mix of enthusiasm and caution.

There are others vying for these voters’ attention. Sen. Elizabeth Warren., D-Mass., was in the Mississippi Delta earlier this month talking about affordable housing. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was in Florida, touting how she had been discussing 2020 strategy with Andrew Gillum, the African-American candidate who narrowly lost the Florida governor’s race in November. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has been a near-constant Southern presence the last couple of years, offering his endorsement and oratorical skills to a range of Democratic candidates.

This activity is a demonstration of the belief among 2020 contenders that the hearts and minds of black female voters are up for grabs in the Democratic primaries. Strong potential suitors are still weighing presidential bids, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams, the popular black Democrat from Georgia. For now, Harris, 54, is one of two major black Democratic candidates — along with Booker — and many southern black and liberal voters are excited by the idea of the first black woman president.

While Harris has drawn enthusiastic audiences, she has also faced some criticism that as a former prosecutor and California attorney general, parts of her criminal justice record were insufficiently progressive. And Harris, whose father is from Jamaica and whose mother is from India, has been the target of offensive online memes about her race that have sparked questions among some voters.

On Sunday, as Harris prepared to introduce herself at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, a former New York state corrections officer named Lamarr Robinson brought up both matters. He criticized Harris’ handling of a highly-publicized case of a black death-row inmate whose case was tainted by racism. And Robinson added, “She’s more east Indian than African-American.”

Amid the swelling voices of church’s choir and congregation, Harris emerged from the wings, joined by Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s second black female mayor.

“Let me show you how far we’ve come,” Ebenezer’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, declared from the pulpit. “Atlanta’s got a mayor named Keisha.” The crowd chuckled and cheered.

He added: “We’ve got a presidential candidate named Kamala.”

Warnock argued that Harris’ campaign was “the realization of our ancestors’ wildest dreams.” He spoke of the black trailblazers who had made it possible, from Fannie Lou Hamer, the voting rights activist, to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988.

Harris spoke briefly, telling the congregation that her parents had been civil rights activists in California. She lamented that babies were being “ripped from their parents” at the border and that black parents must still give “the talk” to their children about the racial bias in policing.

The reception at church was warm, but it was closer to ecstatic in the afternoon at the Morehouse College gym, where school officials estimated Harris drew a crowd of 3,000.

The audience was an energized, multicultural mix. Some, like Deliska Cooley, an elementary schoolteacher from Talladega County, Alabama, and her two teenage daughters, had already decided that Harris was their candidate. Cooley said online memes questioning Harris’ blackness were ludicrous.

“I’m a teacher. I have a rainbow in my classroom,” she said.

Her daughter Skyla Cooley, 17, a high school senior, said that she thought Harris was unfairly taking heat for simply being a tough prosecutor.

“We don’t want people not to be prosecuted — we want it to be fair across the board,” she said.

A few seats away, Naquila Gilchrist-Jalajel, 46, a small-business owner, said she had not made up her mind on a candidate; with so many of them, she said, she still had homework to do.

But Gilchrist-Jalajel, who was worried about health care, education and the shrinking middle class, said that she would definitely get out and canvass once she had chosen a candidate. Abrams’ campaign for governor, she said, had converted her from an observer to a participant.

Harris took the stage, strolling around comfortably as she spoke, more animated than she was in church. “What’s up Atlanta?” she said.

ATLANTA — One presidential candidate was a black female senator from California, speaking with subdued precision and being received like distant kin at what used to be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Atlanta.

Richard Fausset

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