The New Year began here in the Crescent City with a bang. The sky was alight with fireworks at midnight on the 31st, stacks of Christmas trees were put to flame on neutral ground medians, and guns blazed throughout the city as some people fired randomly into the air, honoring a dubious local tradition of […]
Matt Robinson
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Sexual violence in Orange County
Last month, a student at Chapel Hill High School reported that she had been raped by two fellow students in the woods across the street from her school. Later that same week, an employee at Britthaven nursing home was sexually attacked by a coworker while she was at work. In the background of these attacks […]
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A memoir of the Greensboro Massacre
The morning was clear and cool, the sun was shining when a handful of Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis opened fire on an unarmed group of demonstrators in Greensboro’s Morningside Homes neighborhood 23 years ago this month. When the shooting stopped, at least six people lay bleeding on the ground, hit by gunfire […]
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Undocumented Students Kept Out of College
Justice, 9-11 styleThis fall, some incoming students at North Carolina’s community colleges are finding that the rules for getting educated just got more exclusive. Due to new federal requirements recently handed down by the U.S. Department of Justice after the Sept. 11 attacks, international students who do not have appropriate and valid student or work […]
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Junius Irving Scales
In a time long ago and in a place beneath your feet, a notable person came to his sisters’ and brothers’ aid during a time of censorship and repression. That man was Junius Scales, that place was Chapel Hill, and that time was the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Scales was a communist when […]
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Race Riot
On a hot August night 65 years ago, amid flying bricks and blazing guns, a race riot exploded at the intersection of West Franklin Street and Main, on the border of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. One relatively minor incident at a gas station ignited hours of disorder, which included official fears of a lynch mob […]
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How Green the Greene Tract?
Recent proposals to shape the future of a 169-acre plot of land north of Chapel Hill sound like an environmentalist’s dream. But if neighbors’ fears are realized, it could turn into just another in a long list of their garbage-related nightmares. The land, known as the Greene Tract, was bought jointly by local municipalities in […]