Economy strains neighborly feelings in North Carolina: The town clerk of Roper, population 617, knows the community has suffered from layoffs and foreclosures. When they don’t pay utility bills, she has to cut off their services — a job she hates.
Photo credit: David Zucchino / Los Angeles Times
(Source: Los Angeles Times, via pod313)
Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.
Riddick was never told what was happening. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”
Her records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program. By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.
To read more about this story, click here. Dr. Nancy Snyderman’s full broadcast report, ‘State of Shame’, airs Monday, November 7, at 10pm/9c on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.
(via pod313)
When the Mint Museum opens its major retrospective of work by noted collage artist Romare Bearden in September, Raleigh and Thelmetia Bynum plan to be among the opening night visitors. But they might feel more at home among these masterpieces than most viewers. Not only do the Bynums have their own collection of works by great African-American artists in their home in the Davis Lake community, but their collection includes an original Bearden. They’ve loaned that work to the Mint for the show.
***The title and date of the Bynums’ work, “Back Home” (1978), says a lot about the Mint exhibit and its focus on Bearden’s exploration of his Southern roots.Bearden lived here for the first four years of his life, though the family eventually settled in New York, and the artist had an urban upbringing. Early works drew on those childhood memories. But in the 1970s, when he made a return visit to the Charlotte area and saw how much of his childhood neighborhood near Uptown had been demolished, he began to use his collages and paintings to chronicle that disappearing way of life. His wanted to celebrate the rituals of daily Southern life for African-Americans in the mid-20th century, including baptisms, blues music, fish fries, gardening and farming.
(Source: ibrations)
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