#pierce freelon

[blackchildrensbooksandauthors]

Daddy-Daughter Day

Pierce Freelon

Olivia Duchess

Little, Brown BYR (2022)

[blackmensuited]

[dr-archeville]

Four Years After HB 2, Gray Ellis Wants to Become the First Transgender Man Elected to a State Legislature

“There’s still only 841 LGBTQ elected officials, meaning that we’re just 0.1 percent of those in elected office.”

On a warm summer day in 1977, a group of neighborhood kids spilled into the kitchen of the Ellis family home in Whiteville, a small town in rural Columbus County, awaiting popsicles.

“Line up.  Girls first,” Gray’s mother called out.

The four-year-old walked to the back of the line.

His mom caught Gray’s attention.  “Girls first,” she repeated.

“I heard you.”

Gray didn’t have the vocabulary to describe how he felt.  He wouldn’t know the word transgender until he was much older.  He only knew that he didn’t feel like a girl.

“I knew I identified as male,” he says.  “But what that meant, I didn’t know.  And I thought I was the only person in the world like me.”

His grandfather preached at the town’s Pentecostal church, and his father was the choir director.  But Ellis stresses that the town embraced him.  He never told his grandfather — or anyone — about his gender identity, but his grandfather referred to him with masculine pronouns and, as he neared death, offered him one of his prized suits.

It was, he says, one of his first gender-affirming experiences.

“I really don’t know whether he just knew and accepted it,” Ellis says.  “But it was never vocalized.”

Finding people like him, however, meant leaving Whiteville.  The day he graduated high school, he packed all of his belongings into a white convertible Mustang and drove to the Triangle to attend N.C. Central, his first step toward law school.

Three decades later, Ellis, now 47, is a family lawyer, whose firm has locations in Pittsboro and Durham, where he lives with his son and partner.  He transitioned at age 39.  He’s been living as an openly transgender man for almost a decade.

He says Durham welcomed him.

“I’ve had shockingly little backlash,” Ellis says.  “People just accepted me for who I was.  Part of that is luck, and part of that was just who I was as a person.  I’ve never been polarizing, despite being a trans person.  I cross bridges with a lot of people.”

Now he’s seeking to become the first transgender person elected not only to the General Assembly, but to any state legislature in the country.  Ellis is running against Natalie Murdock and Pierce Freelon in the Democratic primary for the District 20 state Senate seat, until recently held by Floyd McKissick Jr.  He’s already the first transgender man to run for any elected office in North Carolina.

This is part of a trend.  As stigmas surrounding sexual and gender identities recede, more and more LGBTQ people — including, notably, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is among the top tier of Democratic presidential hopefuls after the Iowa and New Hampshire contests — are seeking public office.  All of this is happening less than five years after the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, and four years after Republicans in the General Assembly targeted transgender people with HB 2.

“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the last two years,” says Elliot Imse, communications director for the Victory Fund, a political action committee that helps elect LGBTQ people.  “There’s still only 841 [LGBTQ] elected officials, meaning that we’re just 0.1 percent of those in elected office.”

In 2018, Danica Roem was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, becoming the country’s first openly transgender woman — and transgender person — to take office.  Since then, the Victory Fund says 20 more transgender women and five transgender men have won elections, too.

“Places that are more welcoming to LGBTQ people have more LGBTQ people in office,” Imse says.  “When LGBTQ people are in the halls of power, we influence the debate, we humanize LGBTQ lives for legislative colleagues, and that leads to more inclusive legislation.”

Advocates hope that could be the case in North Carolina, as well.

In addition to making it a crime for transgender people to use public facilities that conform with their gender identity, HB 2 — the so-called bathroom bill — also prohibited local governments from enacting nondiscrimination ordinances that protected LGBTQ people.  While the law was repealed amid a furious backlash in 2017, its replacement — HB 142 — kept that prohibition through the end of this year.

Ellis is one of three transgender people who will appear on ballots in the area next month.  Angela Bridgman is running for the state Senate, as well, in District 18 in Wake County.  Wendy May is making a second bid for Johnston County commissioner.  Her first effort in 2016 made her the first transgender person to seek office in North Carolina.

“I’ve faced a lot of hate,” says May, who also identifies as nonbinary.  “In reality, I’m not running because I’m transgender or nonbinary.  I’m running because I’m an advocate.”

Bridgman — the first transgender woman to run for the General Assembly — says the positive response she got from her community after HB 2 passed inspired her to run.  

“A whole bunch of people became my ally,” Bridgman says.  “People stood up for me.  It really shook me out of my complacency.”

Like Bridgman and May, Ellis says he’s not running simply as the transgender candidate.  He’s focused on progressive issues like expanding Medicaid and improving education.  But being a transgender candidate has brought national attention, including an endorsement from the Victory Fund and a profile in The Advocate.

Still, Ellis is likely an underdog in a marquee contest.  

Murdock has the backing of the influential Durham People’s Alliance PAC, while Freelon — the son of a world-famous architect and a Grammy-nominated jazz singer, not to mention a former mayoral candidate and well-regarded musician in his own right — is supported by Mayor Steve Schewel and other city politicos.

Whatever happens on March 3, Ellis says he’s “super proud” of his campaign.

“I hope that what I’m doing, win or lose, is going to help bring about changes and is going to open up doors where people didn’t even know there was a door to go through,” he says.

Comment on this story at [email protected].

Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.

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[dr-archeville]

The INDY’s 2019 Virtual Holiday Potluck

Bring your finest Thanksgiving dish and gather ’round our imaginary table.

After the success of last year’s soiree, we decided to make our Virtual Holiday Potluck an annual tradition.  So once again, we contacted a collection of notable North Carolinians with one question: What would you bring to a holiday potluck?

Without further ado, let’s (virtually) gorge.

Guests

Durham Distillery

WRAL anchor Ken Smith

Duke football coach David Cutcliffe

Attorney General Josh Stein

Raleigh Mayor-elect Mary-Ann Baldwin

Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane

Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry

First Lady Kristen Cooper

Fashion designer Alexander Julian

Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler

Actress Amy Sedaris

Theatre in the Park executive director Ira David Wood III

Elementary school student Stella Freelon

“Local Dish” host Lisa Prince

Cocktails

Durham Distillery offers two libations for our virtual feast.  The first is a Gin Martinez, a twist on the classic martini.  The second is a concoction to fill your punch bowl, featuring the distillery’s Damn Fine chocolate and coffee liqueurs.

Ken Smith, meanwhile, shows off Guavaberry rum, a holiday favorite his mother made for Christmas Eve carolers on Tortola in the Virgin Islands.

Conniption Gin Martinez

1.5 oz Conniption American Dry gin

3/4 oz sweet vermouth

2 bar spoons Luxardo

4 dashes bourbon-barrel bitters

Orange peel garnish

The Naughty List

1 375 ml bottle Damn Fine Chocolate Liqueur

1 375 ml bottle Damn Fine Coffee Liqueur

12 oz. Irish whiskey

3 oz. simple syrup (turbinado or demerara preferred)

20 dashes of bitters (Bittermens elemakule preferred, or Angostura)

25 oz. of skim or 2% milk

Serve on ice with orange peel and cracked cardamom pod as garnish.

Guavaberry rum

Serves 24 (4 oz. servings)

1 cup red guavaberry, divided

1 cup yellow guavaberry, divided

1 cup brown sugar

1 bottle dark rum (750 ml)

1 cup prunes

1 cup raisins

Vanilla beans

1 cup sorrel

Gingerroot

Cinnamon sticks

Prep: Rinse berries and clean by popping them and removing seeds.  Rinse seeds, strain, and save liquid.  Put seedless berries into a large pot, but reserve 1/2-cup yellow and 1/2-cup red berries for later.  Add liquid saved from rinsing seeds into the pot and add brown sugar.  Boil mixture until berries are soft.  The juice should have a medium syrup consistency or be sticky when cool.  Mash or grind saved berries and mix with strongest old rum available.  To the cooled mixture, add prunes, raisins, vanilla beans, sorrel, ginger root, and cinnamon bark.  Pour into bottles and cork.

Store in a dark place for several months.  When guavaberry liqueur fully ripens (the taste will tell), strain and re-bottle for use.  Careful: Guavaberries can leave a permanent stain.

Apps

For his first dish, Duke football coach David Cutcliffe brings us a healthy chicken salad with apples, cranberries, and sour cream, served with whole wheat crostini and endive dippers.  His second: blue deviled eggs (get it?) in two varieties.  One has blue cheese stirred into the yolks; for the other, the whites are soaked in a blue dye bath until they are a true, brilliant Duke Blue.

Attorney General Josh Stein says that, when he was a kid, his mom’s sweet potato rolls always got the best of his self-control: He’d eat as many as he could.  His mother and now his sister-in-law still make the rolls — the recipe came from Leah Chase’s The Dooky Chase Cookbook — for him every year.

Incoming Raleigh mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin shares her Bloody Mary shrimp, a zesty blend of fresh shrimp, vodka, horseradish, and sriracha, garnished with avocado and served as a single bite on a porcelain Chinese spoon.

Sweet Potato Rolls

Makes 12 to 18 rolls

1/4 cup warm water

1 package dry yeast

1 cup milk

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/3 cup butter or margarine

2 cups cooked mashed sweet potatoes

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 egg (slightly beaten)

5–7 cups sifted all-purpose flour

More butter

Prep: Put warm water into a small bowl and dissolve yeast, then set aside.  Scald milk; add sugar, salt, cinnamon, and butter.  Stir until butter is melted.  Pour over potatoes, add lemon juice, and beat until smooth.  Cool to lukewarm, then add egg and the dissolved yeast and mix well.  Stir in 2 cups flour and beat at medium speed for 3 minutes.  Add enough flour to make a fairly stiff dough.

Turn onto a floured surface and knead until satiny.  Place in a greased bowl, grease top of dough, cover, and let rise until it doubles in bulk.  Punch down and knead once more, then shape into rolls.  Place in a greased pan, cover, and let rise until double in bulk.  Bake at 400° for 20 minutes.  Brush tops with melted butter.

Bloody Mary Shrimp

Makes about 40–50 hors d’oeuvres

1 pound peeled and de-veined shrimp

3 to 4 celery ribs, thinly sliced

3 scallions, thinly sliced

1/2 cup ketchup

1/2 cup Absolut Peppar

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

Zest from one lemon

2 tablespoons horseradish (or more, to taste)

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon sriracha

Garnish with diced avocado

Prep: Bring large saucepan of salted water to a boil.  Add shrimp, then remove from heat and let stand in water until cooked through, about 5 minutes.  Drain in colander and cool to room temperature.  Cut shrimp into four pieces and put in large bowl with celery and scallions.

Whisk together remaining ingredients.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Stir sauce into shrimp mixture.  Spoon shrimp mixture into Chinese soup spoon or shot glass and arrange on tray.

Sides

Baldwin’s also making Collard Green Gratin, a recipe she snagged from the culinary site Epicurious and made her own, using pancetta instead of country ham or prosciutto and sometimes adding muenster cheese on top.

The woman she’ll replace next week as Raleigh mayor, Nancy McFarlane, is bringing a sweet potato pudding, an update of the familiar sweet potato casserole that you can top with either marshmallows or tropical coconut.  McFarlane got her recipe from a well-worn, stained page in a cookbook of submissions from politicians’ wives.  

Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry will be leaving office next year, which means another face will grace the state’s elevators.  Her contribution is a twist on the Thanksgiving standby mashed potatoes.  She adds butter during boiling, then adds, um, mayo (Duke’s, of course) during the mashing.

Once again, North Carolina’s first couple will sup with us, and Kristin Cooper is supplying the traditional cranberry sauce, sans can.   She took a recipe from Southern Living and adapted it over time.

Amy Sedaris — star of Strangers With Candy and Divorce — will join us with either her homemade spanakopita, spinach turnovers made with phyllo dough, or a Mediterranean macaroni-and-cheese-like dish made with ground lamb and long tubular noodles called pastitsio.

Collard Green Gratin

8 servings

4 oz. thinly sliced country ham or prosciutto (alternative: pancetta)

1 cup coarse fresh breadcrumbs

4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme

1 cup finely grated parmesan, divided

Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper

2 bunches collard greens (about 1 pound), center ribs and stems removed

1 large onion, thinly sliced

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 cups whole milk

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Prep: Preheat oven to 325°.  Place ham on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake until crisp, 20–25 minutes; let cool and break into pieces.

Combine breadcrumbs and 2 tablespoons oil in medium skillet; toast over medium heat, tossing occasionally, until golden brown and crisp, 10–15 minutes.  Remove from heat and add thyme and 1/4 cup parmesan; season with salt and pepper.  Mix in ham and set aside.  (Can be made 1 day ahead.  Store airtight at room temperature.)

Cook collard greens in a large pot of boiling salted water until tender and bright green, about 4 minutes.  Drain, transfer to a bowl of ice water, and let cool.  Drain and squeeze dry with paper towels.   Coarsely chop greens and place in a large bowl.

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat.  Add onion and garlic and cook, stirring often, until softened and golden, 15–20 minutes.  Transfer to bowl with greens; set aside. Reserve saucepan.

Increase oven to 400°.  Melt butter in reserved saucepan over medium heat.  Add flour and cook, whisking constantly, until mixture is smooth and pale brown, about 4 minutes.  Gradually whisk in milk, 1/2 cup at a time; add nutmeg.  Bring to boil, reduce heat, and simmer, whisking often, until thickened, 5–8 minutes.  Whisk in remaining 3/4 cup parmesan.  Add béchamel to collard greens mixture and mix to combine; season with salt and pepper.

Transfer collard greens mixture to a 10-inch cast-iron skillet or 9-inch pie dish and top with breadcrumb mixture; place pie dish on rimmed baking sheet.  Bake until gratin is bubbling, 15–20 minutes.  Let cool slightly before serving.

Sweet Potato Pudding

6–8 servings

2 cups mashed sweet potatoes

1/2 cup melted butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon cloves

1 cup evaporated milk

1/2 cup shredded coconut

1 cup marshmallows

Prep: Blend potato, butter, and sugar.  Add eggs, beating after each addition.  Add spices and milk.  Mix thoroughly.  Bake in buttered 9-inch square pan at 375° for 35 minutes.  Remove from oven and sprinkle on coconut or marshmallows.  Return to oven and bake for 10 minutes or until top is toasted.  Serve warm.

Cranberry Sauce

4 cups fresh cranberries (two bags)

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup water

2 teaspoons grated orange rind

1/2 cup orange juice

1/3 cup slivered almonds, toasted

Prep: Combine the first five ingredients in saucepan; bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes or until the cranberries pop, stirring occasionally.  (It will seem runny.  That’s OK: It doesn’t firm until chilled.)  Cool, cover, and refrigerate.

Toast nuts in microwave on plate for 1 minute; stir.  Toast for additional 15 seconds if needed.  (Caution: They burn quickly.)  Cool and stir into the sauce just before serving.

Mains

Alexander Julian is the fashion designer behind the iconic UNC argyle.  He’s also an Eastern NC barbecue evangelist.  He brings us “a nice warm, aromatic bowl of Eastern North Carolina barbecue from The Pig in Chapel Hill.  It’s organic, and it’s whole-hog, and I think it’s got more flavor than anybody’s.”  

Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler, an alpha-gal sufferer, is allergic to meat.  He’s bringing a Honey Baked Ham anyway.

Ira David Wood III, executive director of Theatre in the Park, one-ups the commish with his very own country ham, which he boils for 4–6 hours on low heat in a deep pan.

The trick, he says, is to pour off the salty water every hour or so and refill the pan with fresh water; for the last two hours, swap the water for apple cider.

Desserts

Stella Freelon’s father is currently running for state senate, her late grandfather was an iconic architect, and her grandmother is a renowned jazz singer.  That’s quite the pedigree.

Young Stella, who’s in elementary school, is a budding chef with a unique take on a yogurt parfait.  She layers the yogurt with honey, blueberries, granola, and chocolate chips in a large vessel.  It resembles an English trifle but is fresher and lighter.

Finally, we have two family recipes from Lisa Prince, host of the WRAL cooking segment “Local Dish”: peanut butter balls, a riff on buckeye candies with a creamy peanut butter center covered in a shell of Ghirardelli dark chocolate; and a classic chess pie made with cornmeal and vinegar.

Peanut Butter Balls

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter

3 tablespoons butter, softened

10 oz. Ghirardelli dark melting wafers

Prep: With a mixer, combine the powdered sugar, peanut butter, and butter. Shape peanut butter mixture into 1-inch balls, placing them on a baking sheet covered with wax paper.  Let balls stand for 20 minutes until dry.

Melt dipping chocolate.  Drop balls one at a time in melted chocolate.  Using a fork, remove from the chocolate, letting excess chocolate drip off.  Place back on the wax paper.  Let stand until dry.

Cover and store peanut butter balls in a cool, dry place.

Classic Chess Pie

1 deep dish or regular pie crust

2 cups sugar

2 tablespoons cornmeal

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter or margarine, melted

1/4 cup milk

1 tablespoon white vinegar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 large eggs, lightly beaten

Prep: Stir together sugar and next 7 ingredients until blended.  Add eggs, stirring well.  Pour into piecrust.  Bake at 350° for 50–55 minutes, shielding edges after 10 minutes to prevent excessive browning.  Cool on wire rack.

Comment on this story at [email protected].

Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.

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[dr-archeville]

Instead of Compromising with White Supremacy, the Afrofuturist Youth Center Blackspace Is a Visionary Alternative

Before he ran for mayor of Durham, Pierce Freelon founded Blackspace with a lot of help from people like Tarish Pipkins.

“Everything was white," Pierce Freelon says.  He's talking about the original walls in Blackspace Durham, but he could also be describing why he founded the Afrofuturist youth center — first in Chapel Hill, now expanded into the American Underground start-up hub.

Tarish Pipkins, aka the visionary puppeteer Jeghetto, was a key player in the informal think tank that birthed Blackspace.  When Freelon opened the AU location last year (and got busy with others things, like, you know, running for mayor of Durham), Pipkins became creative director in Chapel Hill.  On Friday night at Blackspace Durham, their regular hip-hop cypher in CCB Plaza is about to start, but they're not sweating it — the kids can run it themselves.  Three young men are already gathering beats downstairs, where formerly white walls are now covered by an Afrocentric cosmology of paintings and comic books and computers with nicknames like Octavia (as in Butler, the African-American science-fiction writer).

Blackspace offers a wide variety of free programs, which it calls "wokeshops."  Mariah Monsanto runs a poetry program, while Josh Rowsey (disclosure: Rowsey is an INDY account executive) teaches freestyle and theater performance; this year, they took six young women to the Brave New Voices youth slam in San Francisco.  Street gRIOT is a puppetry workshop, while Conscious Code and Digital Storytelling teach 3-D printing and video production.  But, just as important, Blackspace is a safe place in which to incubate ideas or just hang out.

"You can work on beats, read a comic book, or just chill," Freelon says.  "A lot of kids just like being in the space, with African art around and Jeghetto's portraits of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix."

But if Blackspace is about giving kids shelter, that's not the same as sheltering them.  Pipkins recently had his nine-year-old son, Tarin, operate the KKK puppets in a show about lynching, and he practices the same radical openness with his students.

"They're going to be aware of things I didn't learn till I was an adult," he says.  "This is racism, this is how far it goes back."

"That's deeper than learning your history.  You're performing your history," Freelon adds.  "Some kids come in super woke because they have parents like Jeghetto.  A lot of kids don't have that luxury, but they recognize things they don't have words for."

Focused equally on imparting skills and self-esteem, Blackspace shows young people of color not how to assimilate into white-dominated arts and tech worlds, but how to redefine them.  As a true alternative to, rather than a workaround for, white supremacy, there's nothing else like it in the Triangle.

Its origins lie in Beat Making Lab, a hip-hop production course Freelon taught at UNC.  Pipkins was among the artists involved in the conversation about black liberation and Afrofuturism that swirled through the space.  Beat Making Lab eventually became a more overtly political entity called Artivism, which started evolving toward becoming Blackspace in the crucible of 2014.  That summer, Artivism hosted its first Black Liberation Youth Cypher, a black-power summer camp.  In its second week, Michael Brown was killed by a police officer.

"That really lit a fire in our building sessions, especially working with the kids and hearing their reflections," Freelon says.  "Our whole curriculum shifted.  The first week it was hip-hop, the second week it was revolution, freedom, liberation.  The first week the kids were doing graffiti and designing sneakers, the second, they were making placards for our rally."  That rally accelerated Artivism's evolution; the Blackspace brand, which puts Afrofuturism front and center, became official in early 2016, the day the police officers who killed Cleveland twelve-year-old Tamir Rice got off scot-free.

"[The rally] was a big shift," Freelon says.  "In Durham there's always been an active, civically engaged black community, but it coalesced different groups into organized solidarity, especially millennial activists."

Outside of the poetry program, in which African-American writers need to be vulnerable in a way white participation would impede, all races are welcome at Blackspace.

"The space is black," Freelon explains.  "The programming facilitators are black as often as possible, and the curriculum is black.  If you're secure and unapologetic in that aspect, then anybody can come in and it's still going to be Blackspace."

The Blackspace Chapel Hill studio is owned by the town, which staffs it with two employees.  One is program director Brentton Harrison, who says that at Blackspace, students can discover their true affinities.

"I see the youth realizing that older people are interested in what they do, and they start taking the initiative to work on their art," Harrison says.  "We have conversations about school systems that don't teach critical thinking or challenge the status quo.  People can get stuck on having the right or wrong answer to a question, but life is full of gray areas.  You start to see a different swagger when they walk through the world."

The Durham space is owned by American Underground.  Blackspace doesn't pay rent at either, which is crucial in running it with a mostly volunteer staff and virtually no operational expenses.  But don't mistake this for charity.

"It's mutually beneficial," Freelon says.  "We fill the space with equipment and dope programming at no charge to the town of Chapel Hill.  In AU, we're training kids in the tech sector that they want minority participation in so badly.  If diversity is important to them and getting free is important to us, there's some shared space in that Venn diagram.  Technology can be and has been used to oppress us, so getting in on the front end of this stuff is a survival mechanism."

Blackspace recently launched a crowd-funding drive (patreon.com/fundafrofuturism) to further its mission of providing concepts, language, space, and solidarity to people who were Afrofuturists long before they ever heard the term.

"I was an Afrofuturist all my adult life and had no idea," Pipkins says.

"Alexis Pauline Gumbs talks about Harriet Tubman being an Afrofuturist because she envisioned a world that was science fiction for her time — black people being free," Freelon adds.  "You are Marty McFlying the game right now!"  He frequently talks about black liberation in terms of superheroes.  To him, it's a short line between the X-Men versus the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to Martin versus Malcolm, W.E.B. Du Bois versus Booker T. Washington, Biggie versus Tupac.

"Whether it's enslaved Africans or those brothers, when all the skill sets on those squads step up, that's a problem [for white supremacy]," Freelon says.  "Black people have been exploited with the tactic of pitting black talent against each other.  Our liberation depends on working through that."

At Blackspace, young people are encouraged not only to be proud of their powers, so often dismissed or feared by a white supremacist culture.  They're encouraged to combine them in a way that can reshape, not just react to, the future.

"Very much in the tradition of Octavia Butler, we shape change," Freelon says.  "Her whole thing is 'God is change,' and we manifest things.  That, to me, is the true power of Blackspace."

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[dr-archeville]

Which Local Pol Got a Grammy Nom?

Wed., Nov. 24: C'mon, that's not a hard question + a note of gratitude

Wed., Nov. 24: C'mon, that's not a hard question + a note of gratitude 

Durham Council Member Up for Grammy

UNRELATED: While scrolling through the list of nominees, I saw that Louis C.K. is up for Best Comedy Album. Weren’t we done with that guy?

Click link for more.

[dr-archeville]

Pierce Freelon Is Running for North Carolina State Senate

Freelon, who ran for mayor in Durham in 2017, will now vie for the seat left open by Floyd McKissick's appointment to the public utilities commission. McKissick says the seat until he's confirmed by the Senate and he's tendered his resignation.

Musician, professor, artist, and community organizer Pierce Freelon last announced that he is running for the State Senate seat may be left open by the pending departure of Floyd McKissick.

On Friday, the INDY inaccurately reported that McKissick's seat is already open and that he had been appointed to the state's public utilities commission.

On Monday, McKissick contacted the INDY to say that his seat is not yet open.  He voted last week on bills before the General Assembly and expects to vote on bills this week.

"My seat is not open," McKissick said. "I occupy the seat at this time.  I am still here at the State Senate, doing everything humanly possible for the good of the state and for my constituency.  That includes a bill to reinstate early voting precincts and primary sponsorship of a bill to create opportunities for people with criminal records to obtain expungements."

McKissick says he has no criticism for Freelon, but he wanted to set the record straight about his ongoing representation of his senate seat.  The veteran lawmaker says if he's confirmed by the Senate, he would then tender a letter of resignation, and elected Democratic Party officials in District 20 would then recommend someone to finish his term to Governor Roy Cooper.

McKissick added that confirmation by the House does not guarantee a similar approval vote by the Senate.

Freelon, in an email announcement of his candidacy stated that's he's running for the senate seat, "because we Millennials need to show up big in 2020 to shift the political landscape of this country.  I’m running to fight gerrymandering and to end voter suppression.  I’m running to decriminalize marijuana in North Carolina. I’m running because we need a champion of progressive values in Raleigh."

Durham’s District 20 covers a little over six hundred miles that include city and countywide voters, with a median age of thirty-four.  In the 2018 election, McKissick won nearly 84 percent of the vote.  The Durham attorney has served six terms in the General Assembly.

McKissick said the Senate confirmation could take six to eight months.

The veteran lawmaker’s departure and Freelon’s candidacy is the intersection of two of Durham's most prolific families.

The outgoing senator is the son of the son of the late civil-rights lion Floyd B. McKissick, the first African-American student to attend UNC-Chapel Hill's law school, who went on to become the director of the Congress of Racial Equality and the founder of Soul City, a community that sat on acres of farmland in Warren County.  The short-lived municipality's goal of black empowerment, and particularly the senior McKissick, met fierce opposition from former, U.S. Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who died in 2008, the younger McKissick told the INDY on Monday.

Freelon, a thirty-five-year-old married father of two children, is the son of jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, who is a six-time Grammy nominee, and architect Phil Freelon, who designed many of the nation’s high-profile museums honoring the black tradition, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Freelon says he was inspired to run for state office in recent months while he and his mother served as his father’s caregivers before he passed away.  He says that although the debilitating illness had paralyzed his father physically, his mind remained sharp.

Phil Freelon died at the age of sixty-six on July 9 after a three-year struggle with ALS.  His son says he’s also running for State Senate because he promised his father that he would fight to ensure all state residents have access to health care.

Freelon’s announcement early Friday morning marks his second foray into the political arena.  He made a respectable run as a progressive candidate in the 2017 Durham mayoral race, campaigning in support of affordable housing, LGBTQ rights, Durham’s status as a sanctuary city for undocumented residents, the proposed light rail system, and racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Freelon, who started the venture Blackspace in Chapel Hill and Durham to support youth arts, said a major concern of his campaign is the denial of access to affordable health care for “tens of thousands” of state residents when the General Assembly opted to not expand the federal Medicaid program.  He said the General Assembly’s refusal to expand Medicaid was a subject he often discussed with his father.

“Dad was able to access all that the City of Medicine had to offer: a wheelchair, hospital bed, all the things that someone suffering from ALS needs, but he said that if he lived ten miles up the road, he would have died much sooner, because he wouldn’t had access to health care that allowed him to live a life of comfort and dignity,” Freelon says.  “That’s not right.  So many people in the state are not insured because of the gridlock in Raleigh.”

[email protected]

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[dr-archeville]

Phil Freelon’s Works Will Inspire Generations Not Yet Born. But His Most Important Monument Is His Family.

A remembrance of the Durham master architect, Phil Freelon, who led the design team for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

On the evening of July 31, Pierce Freelon took the stage at the Hayti Heritage Center during a spoken-word concert in memory of his father, the celebrated Durham architect Phil Freelon, who died on July 9 after a three-year struggle with ALS. He was sixty-six.

Pierce was joined by Nnenna Freelon, who is his mother and Phil’s wife of forty years. Though regal as always, wearing a navy-blue African dress, Nnenna, a six-time Grammy nominee, appeared tentative until she began to sing.

I told Jesus it would be all right if he change my name ...

She started the song in an almost conversational tone that increased in intensity each time she repeated the line.

I told Jesus it would be all right if he change my name ...

At times her voice would soar up to stirring heights, then drop down into a dark, lonely place that spoke of a deep hurt.

I told Jesus it would be all right if he change my name ...

Then her singing gave way to low, soulful moan while her son spoke about “God being a strong black woman.” Before leaving the stage, Nnenna looked upward and stretched her beaming face and open hands to the heavens.

“In the African-American tradition, we say, ‘Every goodbye ain’t gone,’” Nnenna says, adding that the veil between the world of the living and the ancestors is thin and that we allow our loved ones to live on by continuing their body of work and spirit. Nnenna says that her youngest son, Pierce—who last week announced that he is running for North Carolina’s State Senate—has vowed to continue his father’s good works and service.

Phil was still alive when Nnenna decided she was going to perform at the concert. In the days after his passing, she struggled with that decision. It was a chance to “step my toe into the waters of a public expression,” she says.

“It was good for me and good for the public to see what grief looked like in that moment,” Nnenna continues. “I chose that song because there are a couple of times in life that changes your name. When we get married, when we have children, and when you lose someone. To go from wife to widow, or husband to widower. I was seeking inside that song the spiritual strength to bear that name change.”

“Yesterday was a good day for her,” Pierce says the next day, sitting in a conference room at Blackspace in Durham, a youth-arts venture he founded. “She was uncertain as to whether or not she would be able to perform, and then it ended up being a very healing moment for her. Grief can take a lot of different forms, and for our family, art is a tool to process and heal.”

It’s apt that the event was held at Hayti, an African-American cultural center that was formerly St. Joseph’s Church. Pierce says the connection between art, faith, and worship was the reason why his parents transformed a Gothic Revival church in Old North Durham, which once served parishioners with hearing impairments, into NorthStar Church of the Arts earlier this year. More than just a venue, NorthStar is a sanctuary that recognizes the “sacred bond between art and spirituality.

“Phil said, ‘If you want something, you have to give the same thing,’” Nnenna says. “If you want love, you have to give love. If you want peace, you have to give peace. If you want healing, you have to give healing.”

And first and foremost, Phil Freelon was an artist.

The tall, patrician, athletic, and soft-spoken man used a drafting table and a pen to create a legacy of public buildings that will inspire generations not yet born, most notably by leading the design team of the National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C. But what he built in his family and in Durham is just as important as what he built for the world. Pierce will tell you that his dad’s legacy is so much bigger than any building he designed.

Pierce grew up in a home saturated with black music. His father loved James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire, Tower of Power, and Sly and the Family Stone. At home, as in the world, he built.

“There’s a saying around the house that he can fix anything,” Pierce says. “He would dismantle and put bikes together. He liked the challenge of figuring out how it worked. He didn’t like instructions and manuals. I think that was part of how he viewed the world, and that was ingrained in his parenting style.”

Pierce remembers when he was sixteen years old and wanted to get ear piercings and a tattoo. His uncle and his cousins had tattoos, so it wasn’t unheard of.

“He didn’t say no,” Pierce says. “He offered me an alternative. He said, ‘If you wait until you’re twenty-one, I’ll get one with you, and I’ll pay for it. But I’ll bet that in waiting, you’ll find that whatever you want to put on your body right now won’t be the same when these things are permanent.’ As soon as I turned eighteen, I wouldn’t have needed his permission, but the prospect of him getting a tattoo was an offer I couldn’t refuse. He was putting up the canvas of his body as collateral!”

“On my twenty-first birthday,” Pierce continues, “I told him, ‘Dad, I have no idea what I wanted on my arm at sixteen. It was probably some barbed wire or a snake. Whatever it was, I don’t want it anymore. So you got me. The lesson around permanence has been ingrained.’”

Leading by example was Phil Freelon’s favored form of guidance and discipline. Whenever Pierce or his siblings misbehaved, he would remind them, “Freelons don’t do that,” powerfully invoking “a community of ancestors who are outraged by your shenanigans.”

“There is Phil Freelon the person, the human, the drummer, the photographer, the father, the husband,” says Pierce, who was holding his father’s hand when he died. “That is the pyramid, the monument, the obelisk of his legacy.”

Phil Freelon was born and raised in Philadelphia. The home he shared with his parents and siblings was filled with art. His grandfather, Allan Randall Freelon, was an Impressionist painter during the Harlem Renaissance, and his grandchildren regularly visited his studio.

Freelon’s parents noticed his interest in drawing and assembling things and encouraged it. His father was a traveling salesman for a medical-equipment company.

“He would come back with a model of a car that I would assemble, or a battleship, or even things that required more creativity and imagination,” Freelon said in the 2017 N.C. State University Libraries oral history about him that provides quotes for this story. “I was fortunate to be in a family where I was surrounded by the arts and was able to be inspired by that.”

Freelon attended Central High School in Philadelphia, a public school focused on the arts that attracted drawing students from all over the city. He took classes in design, art, and drafting, realized he was drawn to architecture, and decided to become an architect. He enrolled at Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, a historically black college, after high school.

It was the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement, along with growing assertions of Black Power and Black Pride, were at a high point.

“There was pride in heritage in the 1960s, not that it wasn’t there before,” Freelon said. “But it was the Black Power movement, the music, the clothing. I wore an Afro. In some ways, we are in a similar time period now, with a heightened awareness of racial tension and inequity.”

Hampton had an accredited architectural program, and Freelon finally met a real architect, Liberian-born John Henri Spencer, who was chairman of the department. Freelon, barely into his sophomore year, was already tutoring fifth-year students, and the college professor took the “unusual and unselfish” step of encouraging Freelon to transfer to a bigger school after observing his drafting skills.

Freelon transferred to N.C. State, where he took graduate-level courses as an undergraduate and received the school’s top design award in 1975, when he earned his degree. Then, he earned a master’s degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. Nnenna was in Cambridge at the same time, studying at Simmons College. But the two did not meet until they were both in North Carolina.

It turned out that the future couple had mutual friends, a married couple who were living in the Triangle. It was on their friends’ front porch, on July 7, 1978, that they first met. They talked all night. Phil told Nnenna he wanted to be a father.

“It could have been a deal-breaker!” says Nnenna, who was twenty-two at the time. The young architect told her about his own father being a great dad, and memories of riding on his shoulders, being lavished with love and attention.

“He wanted that,” Nnenna says. “He was the best dad and a fun dad. All three of our children have that shine because of a dad who loved them.”

Nnenna says she and her husband were like “a key and a lock” when they met. “It’s like we were destined.”

At the time, Nnenna had no intention of pursuing the singing career that would eventually bring her six Grammy nominations. She was eyeing instead a career as a public health administrator. But she says Phil encouraged her in a way that “wasn’t in words only, it was love in action.”

“There was no question in his mind that I would achieve what I needed to achieve in my life,” she says. “People ask, ‘What’s your secret?’ My secret is, ‘Marry well. Don’t be with someone who whispers doubt in your life.’”

One year later, in October 1979, they married. Pierce says his parents’ marriage was “one of purpose.”  

“They met in ‘78, married in ‘79, had Deen in ‘80, Maya in ‘81, and me in ‘82,” he says. “They just hit the ground running!”

Freelon returned to the Triangle in 1978 to work with Durham architect John Latimer and landed a job teaching at his alma mater’s school of design. He enjoyed teaching and applied for a full-time tenured position in 1980. But he was not offered a tenure-track position, and school officials did not give him “an acceptable answer,” he said, for not hiring him to teach full-time.

“I left in disgust,” said Freelon, who later added that the school of design still had a dearth of black faculty members more than thirty-five years later.

Freelon accepted a job offer with 3D/International, a large architectural firm in Houston, where he and his wife’s first two children were born. In 1982, John Atkins, who had worked with Freelon at Latimer, asked him if he wanted return to North Carolina to work with O’Brien-Atkins, a firm he had started seven years before with Bill O’Brien. At first, Freelon declined, but it started a conversation with his wife about concerns over raising a family in a large city. He called Atkins back a month later and took the job. During his seven-year stint with the firm, Freelon was named a vice-president and helped it grow from thirty members to one hundred fifty.

In 1989, at the age of thirty-five, Freelon applied for a prestigious Loeb Fellowship at Harvard. Nnenna was just starting her singing career and had accepted a visiting artist position in Brunswick County with the N.C. Arts Council.

“It was tremendous,” Freelon said. “She got to sing for the first time, and our youngest had just started kindergarten. We lived on the beach for a year.”

In late 1989, Freelon decided to leave O’Brien-Atkins and start his own firm.

“Nnenna and I were like, ‘Let’s go for it,’” he said. “She didn’t hesitate. She said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this’ … We were willing to cut back on some things, and she was starting to earn some income for her singing, and I was confident we would not be in a deficit for long. I was confident in my ability to grow and cultivate the practice, and that happened very quickly.”

Pierce remembers the change in family dynamics when his mom signed a recording contract with a major label, Columbia Records, in 1992.

“Dad told her, ‘Do what you love.’ She made the bold choice to step into music, and we see how that story is going,” Pierce says, who is also a musician, with projects such as hip-hop jazz band The Beast. “They worked together to lift each other up. Mom in the ‘80s was singing at Hayti and Bimbe and learning the American songbook. By 1990, my dad had started his architectural firm, and in 1992, my mom had signed and was going on world tours. We would eat beef enchiladas every day while she was gone, because dad only knew two or three recipes. She was working and we were cheering her on. … They kept climbing together.”

By 2014, the Freelon Group was a sixty-member firm when it was acquired by Perkins+Will, a global architectural firm.

“Dad’s favorite quote was ‘architecture is frozen music,’ and it made complete sense,” Pierce says. “My dad was frozen music. Mom is fluid music—same source material, water, in different phases.”

Housed at N.C. State Library’s Special Collections section, the Phil Freelon Papers, 1975–2018 contains his architectural drawings, voluminous project files, and architectural records that document his work in this area, including Hillside High School, the Diamond View Office Building, the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the Durham Police Department, the east terminal of Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Hope Valley Elementary, the Hill Center, and others.

“The Durham Bulls Athletic Park is one of the first really memorable buildings that my dad created,” Pierce says. “I have so many fond memories of that structure, so many foul balls, so many little kids scrambling to try and catch them, so many mouthfuls of cotton candy, so many songs and chants and laughter and cheers and fun and pride in the Bull City. He is responsible for so much of that—the ease with which you get in the building, the concession stands, everything. The spirit of it. His soul is in that structure, and how about that?”

The collection also chronicles work that Freelon designed throughout North Carolina and the United States, including college buildings, libraries, cultural arts centers, and historic parks. The one thing that Phil Freelon didn’t build, though, were prisons—those dismal industrial structures which are little more than landlocked slave ships in this era of mass incarceration. Those kinds of complexes stand in stark contrast to his life-affirming designs.

“And believe me, there is lots of money in designing [prisons],” Nnenna says. “He really, really believed people deserved beautiful spaces to be in, light and airy spaces that should say, ‘welcome.’”

In 2017, when Fast Company named Freelon its Architect of the Year, writer Diana Budds described him as the designer “of nearly every major museum or public space dedicated to black culture in the United States: the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Motown Museum in Detroit and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.”

Those museums are akin to modern-day pyramids that pay tribute to African Americans and others who struggled and sometimes gave their lives to move this country forward. In downtown Atlanta, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights’ exterior presents two multi-shaded walls that curve inward toward each other. The design symbolizes the links that “connect and empower” disparate individuals and groups, according to the architecture website ArchDaily.

Torrie Shepard, a center spokesperson, told the INDY that the design reminds her of a woman’s hands, and its earth-tone shadings represent the women of the world.

“It shows the power of people and what we can accomplish when we stick together,” she said.

Unquestionably, Freelon’s masterpiece is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, located on the National Mall, just across from the Washington Monument.

The monument was first proposed by black Civil War veterans more than one hundred years ago. The building’s design was inspired by the three-tiered corona used in Yoruban art by the Nigerian people of West Africa. Two hundred fifty thousand square feet of surface presents a latticework fashioned from bronze-colored aluminum panels that recall the bronze art of the ancient Benin empire and the iron works created by African Americans throughout the South.

A tour of the museum beckons visitors on a journey of historical galleries and exhibits that tell a vast story of African-American slavery and freedom, struggle and resistance, ingenuity and achievement.

Phil Freelon was a pole vaulter and hurdler in high school. He ran five miles each day as an adult. Then his run began to slow. His right ankle started bothering him. Following a battery of medical tests, he was diagnosed with ALS in March 2016, six months before his Smithsonian museum officially opened.

“I’m like, ‘You are kidding. That can’t be the truth,’” Nnenna remembers thinking.

The couple looked for alternative treatments. Freelon underwent medical trials at the Duke ALS Clinic, which seemed promising. But the illness grew worse as he lost the ability to walk, speak, and swallow. Nnenna remembers the transitions he was forced to make from cane to walker, scooter to wheelchair, finally needing a breathing device and neck braces. She says her husband’s decision to join his ancestors came when the doctors said they could extend his life with the use of a feeding tube after he was no longer able to swallow.

“We said ‘no,’” Nnenna says. “He did not want that.”

Shortly before his dad died, Pierce finally got a tattoo. He rolled up his left shirt sleeve to display a three-dimensional pyramid.

“That’s my dad’s first logo of the Freelon Group, 1990,” he says. “He was here when I got it. He loved it. He said, ‘It looks good.’ I told him, ‘I know it looks good. You designed it!’”

When Pierce was a kid, he thought the symbol was merely a triangle, but before his father died, he explained to his son that the pyramids are of African origins, and the ancient structures speaks to the African origins of science, mathematics, and architecture.

Pierce’s discovery is a fitting coda for his father’s legacy. In 2003, when Phil delivered  the commencement address for the N.C. State College of Design, he told the graduates, “I want to first say that we are designers. In my view, design is not only a process and a way of thinking, it is a way of life.”

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Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.

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