It’s taken Durham 30 years to invite Howard Fuller, the legendary community organizer, to discuss his work in Durham’s Civil Rights Movement. He’s even been too busy to think about it himself. He’s been in Milwaukee running public agencies, founding a school reform institute, and working to fix the social problems of today. But this […]
Rah Bickley
Posted inNews
Sax and medicine
Mook McKee, said the big black letters on the white T-shirt on the slim chest of the yellow-haired guy playing the saxophone. Behind him a band swung to a jazz beat, or maybe the jazz beat swung the band, as arts-lovers crowded into the Durham Arts Council building on a recent weekend night. All the […]
Posted inNews
Homesteading
At our new house down in Woodcroft, I returned to find John, my fiance, staggering up the hill from the back yard under an armload of rotting wood. For two days, he’d been carrying loads of debris out of the wooded area behind the house and up to the street, dumping it there for pickup. […]
Posted inMusic
Here to stay
Walter Shackelford, a white-haired Rotarian, was in a bland banquet room at his umpteenth club luncheon last year, when suddenly a song took him back to his honeymoon weekend in 1951. Instead of the usual speaker, a jazz trio was entertaining the Durham Rotary Club that day. Over the cascading notes of piano and bass, […]
Posted inNews
My neighbor, Ed Bumann
I always called him Mr. Bumann, and he always called me Miss Rah. I used to rent the little duplex across the street from his house. Mr. Bumann was my landlord, but he treated me like a queen. He’d bring me big glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, wrung by hand from oranges from his beloved […]