Patrick O'Neill

Larry Syverson and Lou Plummer don’t share George Bush’s definition of patriotism, and that’s why both men were standing in vigil last week to protest Bush’s visit to Fort Bragg. Syverson and Plummer are both active in the national group Military Families Speak Out, which opposes the war in Iraq. As he did in two […]

“It means to be poor and live among the poor, to be nonviolent and insist upon nonviolence. To be truthful and loving, not owning stuff and not lording it over anyone. And it means going to some position of equity with one another, with an understanding that the Spirit speaks where she will and that […]

The mood was tense at the General Assembly on June 1. Backers of the two-year moratorium on the death penalty were expecting a vote in the House on a bill that would halt executions for two years while the fairness of the death penalty system is studied. The votes to pass the measure weren’t there, […]

On February 1, 2002, the first day of Black History Month, a white worker hung a rope tied like a noose in a Department of Transportation workplace in Raleigh. A group of African-American DOT employees perceived the noose as an offensive symbol of racial hatred and filed suit. Last month, a Raleigh federal jury found […]

One day in the 1940s, a young St. Augustine College professor named John Hope Franklin walked up on the aftermath of car accident in downtown Raleigh. When two white police officers arrived on the scene and saw that the accident involved African Americans, they said, “Just a couple of niggers” and left. That incident “gave […]

Earl Richmond Jr. was an out-of-control drug addict and alcoholic when he killed four people and ended up on death row in Raleigh’s Central Prison. In his final days and hours, however, Richmond was his own man, humbly and honestly taking responsibility for his actions, offering no excuses as he faced execution last Friday morning, […]

If Gov. Mike Easley denies clemency Thursday to Central Prison death row inmate Earl Richmond Jr., it will mark the state’s 20th execution to be carried out under the former state prosecutor. A Cumberland County jury sentenced Richmond to die for the 1991 killings of 27-year-old Helisa Stewart Hayes and her two children, Phillip, 8, […]

Ten years ago, the Rev. Robert T. Schriber was notified by Bishop F. Joseph Gossman that Schriber, formally an Episcopal priest, had been approved to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood and serve in the Diocese of Raleigh. The letter from Rome granting Schriber permission to become a Catholic priest was approved by Pope John Paul […]