At The Altar of Shiny and New

I left off in yesterday’s essay by noting the irony that some cities sacrifice sense of place at the altar of fantasy and things “shiny and new” while others even nearby fight hard to preserve it. Last week, while attending an awards banquet in a Winston-Salem hotel, I had pause to reflect on how emblematic that non-descript, designed to be “Anywhere, USA” 1980s structure and its 1970s twin are of that community’s struggle to hold on to sense of place. Invariably, unless a community’s advocates succumb to the demons of the “shiny and new,” the latter will always eclipse the former because research shows that the distinct sense of a particular place is ultimately more appealing, even to those visitors and newcomers seeking fantasy. When I arrived in Durham, NC twenty-five years ago, part of its appeal to me as its newly hired guardian was that the importance of sense of place was apparent here but even so it has been besmirched here and there by those worshipping the “shiny and new.” Startups are incredibly intense but indispensable is taking time to interview those with ties to the founders who had helped perpetuate and protect it. One of the questions I had learned to ask during these interviews was, “Which community in the state had done the best job leveraging sense of place?” Invariably, during my first few months in Durham the answer always came back, “You’ve got to study Winston-Salem.” So even before visiting nearby Raleigh, which even back then seemed intent on surrendering sense of place to the “shiny and new,” I targeted Winston-Salem for my first excursion while familiarizing myself with North Carolina. En route, I took a swing through Greensboro, which confirmed what my sources had noted would be more in the mold of Raleigh when it came to undervaluing sense of place. Winston-Salem’s “sense of place revolt” occurred in the wake of WWII nearly three decades before one similar in Durham, 1948 to be exact, less than two months after the first flight aboard a DC-3 of W-S’s home-grown Piedmont Airlines, now folded into American Airlines. In April there was a union-organized civil rights protest but it was a zoning request in July for a supermarket that kindled Winston-Salem’s “sense of place revolt” (coincidentally also my birth month/year.) Back when Durham was just emerging as a crossroads, Winston-Salem had just been “Salem,” the administrative town for a 100,000-acre tract the immigrant Moravian Church had purchased and named Wachovia in the early 1750s. This also included several other settlements, some slightly older. For the next hundred years, the church owned the land and members owned their own structures. But by 1849 the church transitioned away from that model, turning over administration of the town to residents and setting in motion the sale of land parcels to each respective structure-owners with some acreage remaining as community “commons.” This was occurring just as the newly created Forsyth County was eyeing Salem as the natural county seat. Passing on that opportunity, the Moravians instead sold some land just upland for creation of the new gentile-friendly town of Winston for that purpose. Like Durham, Winston became an industrial powerhouse, quickly tripling in size as Salem declined. Fast forward fifty years and the U.S. Postal Service created the name Winston-Salem for as the name for newly combined postal facilities. By 1913, just as the iconic Camel cigarette brand was created, the two towns merged but one had already become more of a neighborhood. Gradually over the next two decades, non-Moravians moved or established businesses in Salem including Krispy Crème Doughnuts, founded there as a wholesale operation in 1937. Symbolic, nearby was a brothel. To put this in context, this was the period when the Wake Forest School of Medicine, then an extension of a small Baptist college north of Raleigh, opened in Winston-Salem thanks to a trust set up by RJR executive Bowman Gray. Some historic Salem structures had tragically been torn down and replaced by incongruent structures that certainly didn’t fit or belong. But it was plan to plop a supermarket in the midst of the old village that sparked a community-wide “sense of place revolt.” Within a year, an architectural design overlay, only the fifth in the U.S., was created to protect Old Salem. A Boston firm whose two principals had helped create Colonial Williamsburg was commissioned to conduct a historic survey and propose a plan for preservation. But a young WWII Navy veteran and antique collector named Frank Horton had already been busy combing through the meticulous Moravian archives to identify which buildings were truly historic. He accompanied the survey team and in late 1949, the findings were presented to Winston-Salem leaders in the 1920s-era Robert E. Lee Hotel, a contemporary of the Washington Duke in Durham. While even older landmark hotels are still in service in many communities across the country such as Spokane, where I served, both the Robert E. Lee and the Washington Duke would soon be imploded by the forces of “shiny and new” in favor of generic substitutes. Mayor M.C. Kurfees had just been elected and moved quickly to form a commission to oversee preservation, headed by James A. Gray III, the scion namesake of the then head of R.J.R Tobacco and nephew of Bowman Gray. The long-serving Kurfees is as crucial to Winston-Salem as his contemporary, the equally long-serving Mayor of Durham, E. J. “Mutt” Evans. But as sense of place advocates rallied, so did disciples of the “shiny and new” a few blocks away. Without due process and against Kurfees’ caution, officials listening to chamber types fired the city manager there and replaced him with a relative newcomer, a former FBI agent who had recently been Police Chief. The manager soon became a spearhead for commercial boosters of the “shiny and new” there pursuing an expressway and setting in motion destruction in the guise of urban renewal. Significantly, not only was Gray connected to the power structure in Winston but his mother was also a Moravian with deep ancestral roots in historic Salem. Together with Charles Babcock, a newcomer with connections, and Frank Horton as officers, Gray, a newspaper executive, founded Old Salem Inc. to implement the preservation plan. Gray and Babcock, also related to RJR by marriage, raised the funds to implement the preservation plan for the old town of Salem, while Horton took on the challenge of buying and destroying 120 intruding structures. In 1954, Horton was joined for two decades by another vet, Frank Albright, as director of research, who in real life was one of The Monuments Men, a special unit made famous this year in the acclaimed George Clooney film. Already Horton had begun reclaiming Salem artifacts that had slipped away and began reconstructing the story of Old Salem. Albright, an archeologist by training, soon began excavations. As I first walked through Old Salem in early 1990, Horton, Kurfees and Gray had retired as legends, but the results of their four decades of work on Old Salem was incredible to see including several restorations serving as museums, clearly distinguished from reconstructions. Gardens were also being restored and Horton had founded the adjacent Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, populated in part with the meticulous collection he and his mother had assembled. Making sweet irony, its home was a former Kroger Supermarket. Within a year of my first tour of Old Salem, Hobie Cawood, with whom I would then work on state-wide tourism issues, retired from a three decade career with the National Park Service to head Old Salem for a decade. On our morning walk after that awards banquet last week, we headed down the hill through Old Salem, my first visit in over two decades. It is a “real” and authentic place. No Disney-ification here. It is now managed and programmed by more than 200 employees and its historical research and archeology continue. It is clearly the temporal heart and soul of Winston-Salem and the enduring symbol of its sense of place. The area had been re-branded before I retired from a four decade career in destination marketing as Old Salem Museums & Gardens and the village as the Historic Town of Old Salem, but at its heart remains Old Salem Inc. The 1950s were heady times for Winston-Salem in other ways including relocating the rest of what is now Wake Forest University there. But panic set in as its manufacturing heartbeat quietly began to lose steam. Leaders had been stung by criticism during that 1947 “sense of place revolt that the town wasn’t new and modern enough and that its flair for the fantasy arts a joke. Next came a new convention center followed by implosion of the old Robert E. Lee to make room for two equally incongruent formula hotels without the character or the bones of the old hotel or its connection to sense of place. Little more than a decade later Durham would make the same fatal decision, an incongruent testament to the “new and shiny” in violent contrast to the state’s first commercial district on the national historic register. In the 1960s, in part because the first arts council had also been created there in 1949, leaders pursued the new UNC School of the Arts which protects the southern approach to the Old Salem Museums and Gardens as does green space along Salem Creek. UNCSA saved and restored a 1929 silent movie theater from the forces of “shiny and new,” and restored it in 1983 as a 1400-seat performing arts center. Now the acclaimed school has plans to add a 3,000 seat performing arts center downtown. Experts note that most performing arts centers are in “the assembly-line business” rather than being actual creators. But in Winston-Salem, the new center for performing arts will be both. As such, it will leverage rather than put sense of place at risk as most large-scale venues do. But advocates for the “shiny and new” are impatient with growing indigenous festivals and culinary arts. Downtown advocates there have sought instead to try and lure away name restaurants and festivals from other communities such as Durham, failing to recognize that sense of place would not come with them. A new visitor’s center at Old Salem is now linked from the west by a state DOT pedestrian overpass in the form of a recreation of an old wooden bridge. Pinned down by those obsessed more with the “shiny and new” when I visited Winston-Salem in 1989, its much longer established destination marketing organization lagged behind until recently, so beholden only to the solicitation of the 10% of national visitation drawn for conventions and meetings that it didn’t even have a visitor’s guide at the time. So Durham was able to rapidly eclipse Winston-Salem by adopting data-driven holistic community marketing and fulfilling the customary role as guardian of sense of place. Beginning in 1982, Durham was also first to begin adaptively reusing millions and millions of square feet of its old factories and warehouses, but still lags behind Winston-Salem and other similarly sized destinations with only an avatar of a local history museum, more than 60 years after residents and officials embraced it during its centennial in 1953. But many community leaders in Winston-Salem have never lost sight of sense of place as a as a priority. In the 2000s, a New Winston Museum was created (a museum of local history distinct from Old Salem – get it?) Plans are for a new facility downtown, along with a new Carolina Air & Auto Museum along the north edge of downtown. RJR buildings are now also being adaptively reused, one as the state’s first Kimpton Boutique Hotel. But Winston-Salem has also learned from that near miss in 1947. It is careful to define districts and works hard to guide developments and architectural styles into those where they will coherently belong. Durham has design guidelines but proponents of development often sell out for fear of losing, even with the community’s own public facilities. Durham is better at community branding, understanding than an overarching personality is about what a place really is, not what you strive to be. Still stung by those 60-year-old criticisms, Winston-Salem has proclaimed itself the city of arts, now adding on innovation. But this isn’t where the city is distinctive, falling far below many other cities on indices for these traits, even in North Carolina. Communities such as Winston-Salem and Durham, where sense of place has been preserved, are still torn by the forces of fantasy lobbying incessantly for things “shiny and new” things that make them the same rather than distinct and threatening to hollow out sense of place. The less rooted in these communities should take heed from a famous 1952 quote by Frank Horton as work on Old Salem began: "There will be no window dressing. We plan to restore the old town as it was and not as we imagine it should be. Whatever is done in the name of history must be honest, authentic, and accurate.” Communities such as Durham and Winston-Salem cling to sense of place while others long ago gave up and became merely commercial replicas in pursuit of “edifice envy”, forces from which no community is ever immune. Thanks to those with ties to founding generations but when each community was still 90% North Carolinian, they set a standard for sense of place. Now it falls to more recent and often unfamiliar generations as well as newcomers to take up the torch. Hopefully Durham and Winston-Salem are still learning from one another and can tame the forces of “shiny and new.”

The Core vs. Transient Values of Place

As Mugs and I drive cross country each year via different routes, we average 9 or 10 hours a day on the road and always stop in time to grab dinner, if possible, at a local restaurant and swing through the downtown area.

On this trip stops included Tuscaloosa, Fort Worth, Santa Fe, Richfield (UT,) Salt Lake, Dillon (MT,) Coeur d’Alene, Casper, Lincoln and Nashville before returning to Durham, North Carolina where we live.

I also read or re-read books on the trip, often related to places along the way, including this year, Creating the Land of the Sky, Rising Tide, The Big Burn and West of the Revolution, a horizontal snapshot across North American during the time of the American Revolution.

Usually histories drill down into an event but horizontal histories are fascinating because they link events across context.

I even re-read the fictional This House of Sky, the memoir of an author who grew up ten years ahead of me along the Montana Side of the Bitterroots.

To get “centered” each morning, I randomly read for a few minutes from the life and beliefs of Saint Francis of Assisi.

It was remarkable how similar revitalized downtowns were along the way, almost as if they were following a formula.  They were similar down to the variety of street trees also planted back in Downtown Durham and the near universal application of the description “cool.”

I happened to be re-reading The City: A Global History by Joel Kotkin as I enjoyed my now once-weekly “steak night” by dropping into Misty’s, an acclaimed local restaurant and located in the “P District” of Downtown Lincoln, Nebraska.

It is a local favorite familiar to one of Lincoln’s native sons who will be chef of Nanasteak when three friends open it in Durham’s historic American Tobacco District, lending a touch of Durham authenticity to a section devoid.

Equidistant from Misty’s in downtown Lincoln is a plaza, a performing arts center featuring Broadway musicals, a minor league baseball stadium, and historic buildings adapted for residential lofts and hotels, all seemingly replicated in every downtown now at the expense of differentiation and often obscuring organic traits.

Kotkin, the director of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University is an expert in the evolution of cities over the last nearly 10,000 years.

He laments that the rush of cities now “to convert old warehouses, factories, and even office buildings” into “residential resorts” is not sustainable because “an economy oriented to entertainment, tourism and ‘creative functions’ is ill suited to provide upward mobility.”

He warns that “focused largely on boosting culture and constructing spectacular buildings, urban governments may tend to neglect” what makes cities sustainable including relentlessly fostering a strong and always evolving “middle class.”

These places risk becoming “dual cities,” inhabited only by the rich and the low wage workers it takes to provide for them.

Professor Kotkin makes a compelling argument that historically, cities that continue to thrive over time engender a “shared identity” and “a peculiar and strong attachment, sentiments that separate one specific place from others.”

He would agree with Bill Baker, an expert at helping communities drill down into the values and traits that make them distinct, that these elements of sense of place are far more significant than physical traits such as historic structures.

Fortuitous for Durham where acceptance of differences has historically been a key part of its personality over many generations, this aspect is one of the pivotal and predictive traits Kotkin pinpoints as to why some places rise and fall while others remain vital.

Coincidentally, I first read Kotkin’s book, The City, in 2006, right after Baker had concluded his work over a two year period in conjunction with thousands of Durham residents to distill its overarching personality or, as we say in marketing, brand.

It was also the year I attended a small destination marketing conference of professionals beginning to embrace a strategy I had somehow stumbled onto early in the four-decade career from which I retired at the end of 2009.

Distinguished from idolization of mega-cultural facilities that have proven to homogenize community identity, it is anchored foremost in differentiation and authenticity of sense of place, organically incorporating only distinctive facilities of appropriate scale.

It isn’t easy to revitalize city centers but care must be taken to differentiate, and often that means protecting cultural, historic and natural elements from the very forces of homogenization it unleashes.  Place-making is often more about deciding “what not to do.”

This is why sustainable revitalization is more like “gardening” than “big game hunting.” Once erased, distinctiveness is impossible to “salt and pepper” back into formulas without going through another cycle of decline and resurrection.

At dinner recently, a long-time friend of mine at the very center of Durham’s revitalized core rhetorically asked, “What does Durham need to do to get more of the entrepreneurs it has always spawned to stay and buy homes here?”

“Just be true to who we are at our most temporal level,” I replied remembering Kotkin’s admonition.  People who share and help perpetuate that distinctiveness will be drawn to build their lives here.

Seeking to become something your not or frenetically replicating other places in pursuit of what Kotkin terms the “transient values” of “hipness, coolness, artfulness, and fashionability” is a recipe for losing a community’s soul.

Places “without moral cohesion (shared values) or a sense of civic identity, we are doomed to decadence and decline.”

The Hyper-Localness of Sense of Place

One thing you quickly learn growing up on a family cattle ranch, such as I did in the 1950s, is that beefsteak has a distinctive taste based on the geographic region where the cattle are raised and grass-fed.

Judging by the number of people in the nook of Idaho between Montana and Wyoming that specifically sought a side of beef only from my dad, that taste varies even within a locality.

I suspect the flavors specific to our ranch came from volcanic soils and spring-fed waters that had gathered tastes as they filtered for hundreds of years through rhyolite lava flows.

That water bubbled up from Big Springs (image shown below by Robert English) to form the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River and recharge groundwater where it was again filtered down through the nestled calderas of Henry’s Fork and Island Park created by past supervolcanic eruptions.

It then emerges from the slopes of Big Bend Ridge onto the ranchland and meadows along its base such as ours.

Further south, these same waters contribute a distinctive flavor and texture to seed potatoes which are then replanted much further south again giving Idaho its famous Russets, heralded on restaurant menus nationwide.

Both our cattle and those potatoes are taste- and sense of place-distinct, just as are the Jersey Beef grown on Bull City Farm in Durham, North Carolina, long identified as one of the “foodiest” towns in the nation and where I have lived since the 1980s.

Long before these terms were coined, “foodie” and “local-sourcing” emerged in Durham’s DNA.  Newbies may misattribute their notoriety here to Downtown Durham’s resurgence, but quite the opposite, Durham’s long pre-existing restaurant culture, when transplanted, fueled that revitalization.

“Local” plays a role in six of the top ten national culinary trends for 2014, including specifically ranch- and farm-branded produce, dairy and meats.

Altering Durham’s DNA, beginning more than thirty years ago, Durham chefs led by Georgio Bakatsias (Bok-i-shaw,) Ben and Karen Barker and Mary Bacon began relying on local-sourcing and even hyper-locally sourcing meats, dairy, produce and seafood either grown in Durham or nearby including their own gardens.

As they mentored, they also passed the importance of locally-sourcing foods to generations of other now-acclaimed Durham chefs such as Scott Howell, Amy Tornquist, Chris Stinnett, Phoebe Lawless, Matt Kelly and Billy and Kelli Cotter.

But going back even further, locally-sourced food products can be traced back in Durham more than two hundred years to locally-grown grains milled at Cole Mill and West Point, as well as famed dairies such as Croasdaile and livestock growers such as Quail Roost.

From the time it was formed twenty-five years ago, this uber-organic food scene was woven into every fiber of Durham’s overarching personality and appeal by its community marketing agency, and today it is viewed as much a part of North Carolina’s brand as its vaunted scenic beauty.

Communities began to lose their distinctive taste when transportation enhancements resulted in food products traveling now an average of 1,500 miles before they reach our grocery stores or restaurants.

One must also be extremely wary when the term “local” is used today which is often attributed to sources in a 500 mile radius.

More than just semantics or attempts to encourage more sustainable practices, locally-sourced foods have tastes that differ even within a community.  Foods sourced from northern Durham, for example, where many of its farms are located, will have gleaned the much older taste of slate.

Any foods gleaned to the south of downtown are more likely to exhibit the influences of shale, accented by Trilobites, extinct marine arthropods.  Yum, yum!

Both Durham tastes are distinct from flavors elsewhere even within the same poly-centric sub-region such as those locally-sourced in nearby Raleigh or Wake County.

Dining out is one of the two most frequented activities overall by visitors in the United States.  Recent surveys show that 83% of travelers make it a point to experience foods specific to a destination.

A destination’s locally-sourced food products will influence even the taste of recipes that aren’t distinct to a location.

Food may not be exclusive to a community, but the way it is manifest can be as much a part of a community’s distinct personality and brand as its building materials or architecture or species of trees or heritage or indigenous events or scenic character.

In the end, all local is hyper-local.

Manifestation of a Community Value

Many felt it was prescient that Durham, North Carolina, where I live, happened to honor social entrepreneurs at its Annual Tribute Luncheon in the spring of 2009.

Conceived in 2008, the honorees for that event seemed to foretell an explosion of entrepreneurial interest here including campus-like hubs such as Bull City Forward and two American Undergrounds.

However, that may be more coincidence.  The roots of Bull City Forward can also be traced to meetings in 2008, one of which was attended by an ATL organizer.  So it appears the revelation itself was entrepreneurial.

But Durham’s almost temporal entrepreneurial nature had been unearthed two years earlier during a two year process from 2004-2006 involving hundreds and hundreds of residents as well as external audiences culminating in the distillation of Durham’s “overarching” personality including community values.

It may also be coincidence that the notion of “social entrepreneurs,” was simultaneously gleaned during that two year drill-down to reveal Durham’s brand, when one of the executives involved with managing that process happened to read a 2004 Fast Company Magazine article.

The magazine recognized 20 companies as “best of the best” social capitalists including one based in Durham, The Center for Community Self-Help which was founded in 1980.  This clue led to uncovering a deep vein of community interest and activism that had been long taken for granted.

The idea that Durham is inherently entrepreneurial didn’t surface from a wish to be so or from envy or because it is now in vogue, but because it was unearthed by hundreds and hundreds of citizens digging down to discover Durham’s enduring distinctiveness.

A community’s personality, or brand in marketing parlance, is not an aspiration or a slogan or a tactic or even a strategy.  It can’t be imported, exported, transplanted or developed.

Its elements cannot be not born of or made sustainable from envy or trends.  While not always unique to a community, their distinct manifestation is.

Today’s press is all about the incredible American Underground with two 20,000+ sq. ft. downtown Durham campuses within a few blocks of each other.  It was recently recognized as part of the exclusive Google for Entrepreneurs Tech Hub Network.

But this and any subsequent efforts will always stand on the shoulders of generations of entrepreneurs here dating to the late antebellum 1850s of Durham’s founding.

That is what I mean by near-temporal.

Illustrating A Touch Point

Place branding is still relatively new, successfully distilling an overarching brand, such as has been done by Durham NC, where I live, is even more rare.

Most places still fall into the trap of thinking a brand is just a logo or a catchy tagline or what officials there want or presume it to be rather than something distinctive that can  be truly delivered.

An authentic brand is a distillation of the almost temporal values, traits and descriptors that are distinctively manifest in the minds of generations of not only its internal stakeholders but also its external audiences.  Far too many attempts at defining a place brand seem contrived or incomplete or even misleading and the problems can always be traced back to a flawed process.

Some place brands are just inaccurate in the same way that White Rhinos aren’t really white, Australian Shepherds don’t come from Down Under, Sperm Whales weren’t valued for their sperm, Hermit Crabs don’t live alone, Guinea Pigs don’t come from Guinea, Oystercatchers only rarely eat oysters and Flying Lemurs aren’t lemurs at all.

Various road trips over the nearly three years since I retired have taken me through 40 of the 50 states in the USA, crisscrossing many via multiple routes.  This is pretty impressive for someone who hated to travel during a nearly 40-year career in marketing communities as destinations for visitors.

Through a windshield it is easy to see why geography isn’t a very good way to brand or summarize the personality of any state because each one offers such a variety of landscapes and terrain.  Taking that approach is likely to result only in a stigma.

States are not usually destinations anyway.  Instead, they are a means of narrowing down a route or a specific destination town or city.  But how a state is branded, both in communications and in terms of being litter and billboard-free, can enhance or destroy first and last impressions.

An effective place brand must be reinforced at every touch point.  The State of Maryland even appears to tweak the hue of yellow used on roadway signs and markings there to resemble the shade of yellow in its welcome signs and on its state flag which are drawn from a part of the state’s seal.

Officials there swear that isn’t the case.  Maybe its just a dab fluorescence, but the change was very noticeable, to me at least, as I have traveled across state lines into and out of Maryland from adjoining states on six different occasions.

State seals and flags are notoriously poor designs for large scale use but Maryland, since the Civil War, has not only extracted an element that is scalable, but made it an overarching brand signature for the state including the University of Maryland.

If you are wondering what “every touch point” means, the appearance that Maryland seems to tweak the standard yellow used on roadways and signs is a good example, even if only perceived.

As for Baltimore Orioles, whose sweet sound heralds spring throughout much of the Eastern half of United States including where I live in North Carolina, they are not named for the city or the baseball team but because some believe the species exhibits a bright color similar to that in the crest of Lord Baltimore, the first Proprietor of Maryland.

On the other hand, some may find in the name a reminder of something I once read entitled Why Men Love Red but Wear Brown!

Openness–The Road Less Traveled By

Probably because the word “tolerance” has a condescending ring to it, various research studies conducted over the last three or more decades which are designed to identify what makes a community attractive to talented people and thus economically vibrant shifted instead to using the term “openness.”

Durham, North Carolina, where I live, has been scientifically documented to be 2.3 times more open than the benchmark for communities in this state or across the nation.  The value of openness also surfaced as a key element in the community's personality as distilled a few years ago from a series of balanced focus groups and scientific surveys of the opinions of both residents and non-residents.

Maybe it was because I was new and people sought to influence my initial perceptions, but in the few weeks after I moved here in 1989 to jumpstart Durham's official community marketing agency or destination marketing organization, a position from which I have now been retired for two years, I had several encounters that shed some light on the struggles of the previous decades that most likely shaped the value Durham places on openness.

In one experience, a high-level state tourism official in Raleigh told me that Durham had always been a “black town.”  In another encounter I quickly terminated a recently-hired employee when I overheard him tell a Raleigh-based state association meeting planner that downtown Durham was just for Blacks.  Neither person meant their reference in a good way.

On another occasion, a prominent physician took me on a tour during lunch and pointed to a now-defunct shopping mall as “Durham's real downtown,” explaining that it “had to be built” because downtown Durham had been surrendered to Blacks.

I also heard firsthand about the family experiences of two friends who are nearly a decade younger than I am and who entered high school at the time of desegregation of the Durham public schools.  Both were raised in homes less than a quarter mile apart located not far from where I live today.

One friend’s family elected to send their high school aged children to the nearby recently desegregated high school where the student population is predominantly African-American. They went on to graduate with honors and have lived and worked in Durham to this day.

The other friend’s family, also Caucasian, elected instead to buy a second home in South Durham in which they lived one week each month so their high school-age children could attend a school where the students were predominantly white.  They went on to graduate with honors and also live and work in Durham to this day.

The descendants of both families celebrate the openness of Durham today.  Their stories along with two books I highly recommend gave me insight into how Durham's openness evolved.

One book entitled The Best of Enemies is the true story of how a man and a woman living in Durham, he the head of the Ku Klux Klan and she an African-American activist, worked together to desegregate schools here. The other is entitled The Provincials by Eli Evans which includes the true story of his father Mutt Evans a Jewish six-term Mayor of Durham during the 1950s and early 1960s who was also head of United Dollar Stores and who took the seats out of the store’s lunch counter so that standing Whites and Blacks alike could be served together while, at the same time, defeating a law and a judicial order intended to segregate them.

Jazz saxophonist performing and recording star Branford Marsalis eloquently articulated Durham's openness when, during an interview on The State of Things, a program on WUNC public radio, he described why he moved here:

"Durham is everything I ever wanted in a City. It's fair…You can find everything… people who are wealthy, people who are not wealthy, blue collar workers, white collar workers, farmers. They are all hanging out together. You go in the grocery store and you see people talking. It's not like the farmers on one corner and the lawyers are in one corner. In Durham, you don't have those stringent class lines."

 

While it is clear that Durham chose “openness” when “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” it is also evident that many communities and a high percentage of all Americans are still conflicted if not, contrary.  It is often quoted that in 1940, only 18% of Americans received some sort of government benefit compared to 49% of households today who benefit in some way from nearly two-thirds of all federal spending, as one essayist did on Christmas Eve.

Those who quote these statistics seem to fail to grasp, though, that from the 1930s to the 1950s government programs were purposely designed to primarily benefit only White people.  It is interesting that such a large portion of the population only became concerned about how many people were benefiting when, as a result of the Civil Rights movement, legislation was passed to grant those same benefits to all Americans, regardless of race or class.

Understanding when that shift in opinion began to occur reveals a lot about the rationale behind today's polarized public discourse. Just sayin…

The Meaning and Personification of Grit

“Grit” is a word often used to describe my adopted home, Durham NC. When place-branding expert and author Bill Baker used hundreds of individual interviews and scores of inclusively-balanced “focused groups” and generalizable research to help Durham distill its “overarching” brand,” he joked with the community-wide brand advisory group that he’d never heard so many people use the same traits and values to describe a place, including in a positive sense, the word “gritty.”

The term was also frequently used to describe me in a back-handed sort of way by people who resisted and often tried to undermine the team I spearheaded in the successful two-decade turn around of the negative perception of Durham’s in nearby communities, now vigilantly sustained even after my retirement back in 2009 by “the defenders of Durham’s image and brand and the guardians of its unique sense of place.”

It is a word I’ve often used myself to describe friend and colleague Bill Kalkhof who, over a decade and a half, has been spearheading the physical revitalization of downtown Durham and my neighbor Kevin McDonald who during the same period has built T.R.O.S.A, a beehive of social entrepreneurship and Commissioner and environmental activist Becky Heron and many others here. I could easily tick off hundreds of names from every gender, ethnicity and era.

But as concise as I’d like to be I’ve never been good at describing what I meant by the term.

Then while reading through the magazines that stacked up at the Post Office during my just-concluded and most recent three-week cross-country road trip, I came across a Next Strategy column in Fast Company magazine about “grit.

During the same span when a team of us were turning Durham perceptions around, Sally Herndon Malek’s team at North Carolina Project ASSIST, faced down the seemingly insurmountable tobacco lobby, culminating in a ban in restaurants that took effect in 2009.

To the authors, grit is “defined as endurance in pursuit of long-term goals and an ability to persist in the face of adversity” and they cite studies and research showing it is a key element in what makes people successful including one at West Point that explains the success of another Durham example of grit, Coach K.

I had the honor of working briefly with Sally from the tourism side of things during the final years of that campaign and I agree that she definitely personifies “grit” and yup, she also lives in Durham.

The biggest victories truly are won an inch at a time! And for those fighting to free North Carolina of outdoor billboards and their latest desperate strategy to strip local communities of the right to regulate them? The tobacco lobby tried the same thing in 1993.

Keep the faith.