Patrick O'Neill: Solitary Confinement
“I have been in solitary confinement for two weeks, following a 4-day stay in the hospital about 45 minutes away. While in the hospital, I was under armed guard (2 corrections officers at all times) who kept me in leg irons and chained to the bed 24-7.
The following column by Ted Vaden originally appeared in lastgaffe.com, an online blog for people in their retirement years.
I wrote to you recently about Patrick O’Neill, the Garner, NC, Catholic pacifist who is serving 14 months in federal prison for following his conscience. That is, he broke into a Naval base in Georgia and defaced a monument to nuclear warfare. The official sentence was conspiracy, trespassing and damage to government property.
Patrick since has written to me – a pencil-scrawled letter on yellow legal paper – to express gratitude for the people who have sent him letters of support after reading of his ordeal on this blog. He recounted a harrowing tale of his recent hospitalization after experiencing a heart flutter in his cellblock. I’ll let Patrick tell the story from here:
“I have been in solitary confinement for two weeks, following a 4-day stay in the hospital about 45 minutes away. While in the hospital, I was under armed guard (2 corrections officers at all times) who kept me in leg irons and chained to the bed 24-7. I was only out of the bed (always in leg irons) for brief tests. I was expected to use a handheld urinal instead of the toilet….
“The guards worked 8-12 hour shifts over the four days. (They basically ignored me, but one of them I became friends with.) I listened to their conversations and realized some of them were working overtime at close to $50 an hour, so the cost of guarding me for those 4 days was likely in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. Your tax dollars at work.
“I spent my birthday (March 27) in the so-called ‘Special Housing Unit,’ AKA ‘The Hole,’ and I may be in here for Easter as well. So this Lenten season is unlike any other I’ve ever experienced (harder than the year I did a juice-fast all 40 days for Peace in Iraq and lost 30 pounds.) I really do thank God daily for my suffering, but I do have my moments when I try not to think about the fact that I’ve now been in a 9x5-foot room for 13 days and counting without the door opening once. I did feel a little stir-crazy one night and paced and recited the Rosary and felt better. I’m not as tough as I used to be, that’s for sure.”
Patrick’s wife Mary told me that she finally had received a phone call from him on April 7 and that he had been released from solitary confinement. He had been placed there because of COVID. He still has not been vaccinated but was returned to his cellblock of more than 100 inmates. The disease reportedly has infected hundreds of inmates and staff at the Ohio federal prison complex where he is incarcerated.
In a recent letter to supporters, Patrick wrote, “Some of the men in this room have been here for more than 10 years, many have 10 years to go! And almost all for charges that warranted placement in a ‘low security’ prison that has cubicles instead of cells. That means the Bureau of Prisons finds all the men in Elkton are low risk for any kind of violence, which begs the question – Why are they here? Why didn’t they get compassionate home confinement due to Covid? Why didn’t they get some alternative sentence to years in prison? Answer: because the U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex is a self-perpetuating institution that employs thousands of people doing unnecessary jobs, such as watching TV in Patrick’s hospital room.”
Patrick O’Neill is age 65. He and his wife Mary are the parents of eight children and are grandparents. He will complete his prison term in March of 2022 – maybe by Christmas, if gets out on good behavior.
Patrick O'Neill: A Birthday Behind Bars
Next Saturday, March 27, Patrick turns 65. He will observe his birthday living in a prison cellblock at the Oakton Federal Correction Institute in Lisbon, Ohio, where he is serving a 14-month sentence for breaking into a U.S. Navy base to protest nuclear weapons.
The following column by Ted Vaden originally appeared in lastgaffe.com, an online blog for people in their retirement years.
I would like to tell you about my friend Patrick O’Neill.
Patrick and his wife Mary live in Garner, where they operate a Catholic relief shelter for women and children in crisis. The couple raised 8 children of their own there, and they now are proud grandparents.
Next Saturday, March 27, Patrick turns 65. He will observe his birthday living in a prison cellblock at the Oakton Federal Correction Institute in Lisbon, Ohio, where he is serving a 14-month sentence for breaking into a U.S. Navy base to protest nuclear weapons.
Patrick is a man of unimaginable faith and adherence to his convictions. A longtime pacifist, he is one of the so-called Kings Bay Plowshares 7, a group of peace activists who on April 4, 2018, cut through a security fence and slipped into the King’s Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Ga. King’s Bay is the world’s largest nuclear sub facility, where six Trident submarines bearing nuclear-tipped missiles are berthed.
The group of activists chose the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to protest the nuclear weapons stored at King’s Bay. Patrick was apprehended banging on a monument to nuclear warfare with a hammer made of melted-down guns.
The seven protestors, all Catholic pacifists, were convicted in 2019 in federal court in Georgia, on charges of conspiracy, trespassing and damage to government property. They pleaded not guilty, saying they had entered the base not to commit a crime but to prevent one - “omnicide,” from nuclear warfare. They were sentenced last fall to terms ranging up to 33 months. Patrick was sentenced to 14 months and entered the Ohio prison on Jan. 14. With time served and good behavior, he could be released in 10 months.
Even though Patrick is in a low-security facility, his incarceration has been anything but easy. First, there is the threat of COVID-19 infection. Hundreds of inmates and staff in the Elkton facility have been infected, and nine inmates have died of COVID. A federal judge denied Patrick’s request to delay the start of his sentence until vaccines would be available for inmates.
Because of the infection, the prison is in lockdown, which means prisoners cannot receive visitors and are confined to their cellblock. “My block includes a range of 110-120 men living in a room with bodies always in constant motion as men move about looking to pass time in meaningful ways,” he wrote in a recent letter to supporters. “Many guys speak too loudly and there’s a public address system where guards make shrieking, sometimes shocking announcements throughout the day. The sensory overload is relentless, something akin to low-level torture.”
Patrick reports that many of the inmates are in prison for sex offenses – not for touching children or for manufacturing porn, but for viewing or sharing it on computers. They receive little or no rehabilitation and are treated by guards and other inmates as the lowest caste in prison society.
It is also a race-reversal society.
“Here, in an ironic reversal of fortune, whites are second-class citizens, so I have to learn and follow the rules, rules which are made by the inmates,” he writes. “I see it as my required affirmative action.”
Patrick is an indefatigable spirit. I first came to know him 28 years ago, when he was a reporter at The Chapel Hill News, where I was editor. He covered UNC like a bloodhound, producing such scoops as the story that 50 coaches and Ram’s Club officials were receiving free loaner cars from 45 auto dealers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Among the beneficiaries were basketball coach Dean Smith (a Cadillac Sedan de Ville) and former star Phil Ford. The dealers were made members of the Rams Club and given free season’s tickets to football and basketball games.
Within a month after Patrick’s stories appeared, UNC cancelled the program.
Another Patrick story was about cars with Rams Club stickers being allowed to park in fire lanes outside Kenan Stadium on football Saturdays. Shortly after, then-Athletics Director John Swofford (now ACC Commissioner) encountered me on campus to ask why the newspaper was so negative about the athletics program. I told Swofford we were just covering the news and told Patrick to keep doing his job – which was not necessary to tell him.
Over the years, Patrick has continued as a freelance journalist, but he has devoted himself foremost to his Catholic activism protesting nuclear arms, the death penalty, racial injustice and mistreatment of immigrants. In his peace work, all in the form of nonviolent protest, he has served more than two years in jail and prison, even before this current term.
After Patrick was sentenced last October, he emerged from the courthouse with an upbeat attitude. The judge, moved by testimony from Patrick’s children and others, gave him a lesser sentence than the 26 months allowed by law.
He said then: “I’m pleased with the outcome. I’m sad that I’m going to be away from my family for quite a while, but I think that the purpose of the Kings Bay Plowshares was to be willing to face the possibility of redemptive suffering, and so it is. It’s not the most severe thing. It’s certainly something that I can tolerate.”
In prison, not surprisingly, he has been an advocate for his fellow inmates, seeking better treatment and more opportunity for pastoral care. He says he sees his sacrifice as a blessing:
“I pray in gratitude each morning for redemptive suffering and humility. The unpleasantness of solitary is also a gift, as I experience a small taste of the suffering that most human beings face every day all over the world. I hope to feel a little more empathy for my sisters and brothers who barely survive in the world.”
Only Patrick O’Neill would see forced isolation in a COVID-invested prison as a gift.
Happy Birthday, Patrick. Happy Easter.
Opinion: My Open Letter to the WCPSS School Board. Dr. Sallie Permar
“I am a pediatric infectious disease physician, virologist, immunologist, vaccinologist, and parent, previously at Duke and now the Dept Chair of Pediatrics and Pediatrician-in-Chief at Weill Cornell Med School/NewYork-Presbyterian. I have a child who remains in Wake Co schools until the end of this school year., and I am writing to speak out for the children under your care.”
Sallie R. Permar, MD, PhD | Duke School of Medicine
Dear Wake County Public School System School Board,
I am a pediatric infectious disease physician, virologist, immunologist, vaccinologist, and parent, previously at Duke and now the Dept Chair of Pediatrics and Pediatrician-in-Chief at Weill Cornell Med School/NewYork-Presbyterian. I have a child who remains in Wake Co schools until the end of this school year., and I am writing to speak out for the children under your care.
My new role has given me a new vantage point of the crisis that has been created by keeping schools closed – a tidal wave of children requiring hospitalization for mental health crises that fill our ERs because the inpatient units are full, an obesity epidemic unrestrained, children with pre-existing conditions who have lost fitness and strength and worsened their disease, and child maltreatment that is not being detected until it is too late. And that is not even addressing the education gap that has become a chasm. We are creating an unhealthy and undereducated generation out of fears for that are now largely invalidated by data – infection control strategies can prevent transmission of CoV in congregate settings for kids, strategies that also work for the new CoV variants.
We lost precious time in the fall keeping kids almost completely virtual before the holiday surge, but during this time the data was collected that secondary transmission in group settings for children can be prevented. This work even preceded availability of vaccines. Per the current Plan B schedule, my 4th grader will only go to school 5 days out of the next 2 months. That is not an intervention that will reverse the trends mentioned above. Vaccines are here, and surely we are just a couple weeks away from all teachers being able to access vaccines – and I feel confident they will still protect against disease and death even with the new variants circulating.
I urge the board to put in place Plan A – before we cannot reverse this child wellbeing crisis. Moreover, mitigation measures need to be planned now (summer school) to make up for lost time.
Thank you,
Sallie Permar
February 7, 2021
Garner High School Alum Dolly Sickles Publishes New Novel
“I never felt like I was being strangled by a small town, like I think a lot of people do. To me it was a safe place, a good place to grow up,” she said. “You kind of have a sense of place and belonging.”
By Margaret Damghani
Dolly Sickles knew she wanted to be a storyteller ever since she was in Melody Sear’s class at Garner High School back before she graduated in 1991. A former student council member and co-editor of the yearbook for two years, she now has a degree in English and a variety of writing credits to her name, including children’s books and other novels.
She fondly remembers how much she loved the pastor at Aversboro Baptist Church back when Garner was such a small town that every adult knew every kid. Among her favorite memories of Garner is learning to drive a stick shift in Vanstory Hills in the old Datsun her aunt gave her, and how exhilarating it felt to drive in fifth gear for the first time𑁋 something she only had the chance to do when she went out onto Highway 401 with a friend. Though she was a varsity soccer player herself, she enjoyed going to football games even if she didn't love football, because everything in Garner revolved around community.
“I never felt like I was being strangled by a small town, like I think a lot of people do. To me it was a safe place, a good place to grow up,” she said. “You kind of have a sense of place and belonging.”
Her latest writing endeavor, a romantic suspense novel titled “Mine By Design”, written under the pseudonym Becky Moore (released on February 3). It’s the first time she’s been published in over 8 years, after recovering from a traumatic brain injury, and she says she has a lot of excitement and hope surrounding the book’s release.
She’s currently an adjunct professor and has been a columnist and a book reviewer, worked in marketing and as a grant writer. She’s traveled to Italy, Spain, Barbados and Belize𑁋 to London, Paris, Geneva and the Swiss Alps. Throughout the various jobs and travels, she says she still loves coming home to a small town.
“I’ve traveled all over the world, I’ve traveled places where I'm the only person who looks like or speaks the way that I do. Any time you have an opportunity to be the only something, you should do it,” she said. “I always seek out people who are outsiders or different. I like odd birds. I like people who are unexpected. They always have something to say.”
“Mine By Design” is available at the retailers listed here.
Local Garner Activist Patrick O'Neill Reports to Federal Prison
“We come in peace on this sorrowful anniversary of the martyrdom of a great prophet, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Fifty years ago today, April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee as a reaction to his efforts to address “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” We come to Kings Bay to answer the call of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) to “beat swords into plowshares” by disarming the world’s deadliest nuclear weapon, the Trident submarine.”
Local Activist Patrick O’Neill Prepares to Serve 14 Month Sentence
By Margaret Damghani
During his most recent stint in jail in Woodbine, Georgia, the result of actions he will soon report to prison for, longtime Garner resident Patrick O’Neill threw parties for the men on his cell block.
He remembers saving up peanut butter, tuna packets, jelly, crackers and powdered drink mix, and enlisting the help of two friends he’d made in jail to set up the food and drinks. He took a piece of tape he found in an old book to hang up a flyer, inviting the entire cell block, making sure to include the guards so that it wasn’t torn down as contraband.
“It was fun to do that, and to give dignity and a loving encounter to people that are in the most oppressive situation you can basically be with in this country,” he reflected.
One gathering loudly sang “Freedom” by Richie Havens, and O’Neill remembers reading from Isaiah and sharing a reflection on the Pharisees.
“Jesus was always with prostitutes and tax collectors, the outcasts. I said ‘Guys, He’s here with us, at the jail. This is exactly where Jesus hangs out, here with us,” O’Neill recalled saying.
The Protest Path to Prison
That was over two years ago, and O’Neill has been on house arrest since then. He was sentenced to report to prison in Ohio on January 14 for 14 months and ordered to pay $33,503.51 in restitution for charges stemming from an act of anti-nuclear protest at the Naval Submarines Base Kings Bay. The offenses can be summarized as trespass, conspiracy and destruction of property.
The coordinated action took years of planning and saw O’Neill and his collaborators, called the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, stealing onto the base in Georgia on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They engaged in acts of vandalism, ultimately providing a written statement of their opposition to nuclear weapons and peacefully accepting arrest, and resulting in jail and prison time for all seven.
Much of what the group did was symbolic, following in the tradition of other Catholic Plowshares peace actions, part of a decades long movement in the Christian pacifist community. O’Neill, for his part, brought with him a hammer made out of melted down guns to use against a statue of a Trident missile on the base, but did not ultimately do much actual damage.
The action statement from day of arrest read:
“We come in peace on this sorrowful anniversary of the martyrdom of a great prophet, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Fifty years ago today, April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee as a reaction to his efforts to address “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” We come to Kings Bay to answer the call of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) to “beat swords into plowshares” by disarming the world’s deadliest nuclear weapon, the Trident submarine.”
Progress Through Resistance
At 64, O’Neill is a prolific freelance writer, devoted father of eight, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker House in Garner with his wife Mary Rider. He also volunteers time in the hospital ministry at WakeMed. Sprinkled throughout, a lifetime of actions to bring awareness to various social issues add up to over 25 arrests, 7 at the Pentagon protesting war, and over 2.5 years in prison.
He served 90 days after his first arrest in 1982 for impeding traffic, when he participated in a sit-in at Fort Bragg protesting the overthrow of democracies abroad.
In federal prison in Atlanta in the mid 1980’s, O’Neill got the chance to know many among the group of Cuban refugees known as the Marielitos. Many wrote ‘Libertad’ on their bedsheets as a form of nonviolent protest, and when a mattress was set on fire, the guards reacted in retaliation to the entirety of the Cuban men there by seizing anything deemed flammable, including personal photos, letters and bibles and burning them in a large bonfire. O’Neill, working on the landscaping crew, saved as many personal items as he could.
He ended up finding ways to slip information to the press about the treatment of the Marielitos on the inside, resulting in more than one story in the Atlanta Constitution, and solitary confinement for him. It would be the year after he was released that an announcement about a deportation agreement led to what is commonly referred to as the ‘Atlanta Prison Riots’, though it is doubtful that O’Neill would agree with that characterization.
He was in jail for 15 days in Alamance County in 2009 for participating in a dramatic scene in front of the doors to the jail. Dressed as an ICE agent, he demanded the police arrest a woman costumed as the statue of liberty to call attention to issues in immigration policies and detainment.
Progress Through Compassion
O’Neill’s experiences have made him far more familiar with many realities many do not think about; the reasons people end up in jail, the cycles that previous offenses and poverty make it hard to escape, and the treatment of inmates.
“I’m not gonna go into the stories about guards beating them and people suffering with withdrawal,” O’Neill said. “It’s just kind of a place of despair. We are basically dealing with the same moral issues Jesus spoke about 2000 years ago, and a lot of people don't’ really think about that.”
O’Neill is inspired by other Christian pacifists who engaged in non-violent civil disobedience such as Philip Berrigan, a personal mentor, and Thomas Merton, a well-known Catholic theologian and activist, but his upbringing also influenced his life’s work.
Progress: The Roots of Justice
His mother, a resourceful woman who raised O’Neill and his brother after his father died, was not an activist but made it clear that she would not be sacrificing her children to the ‘war machine’.
His father died in a preventable construction accident when he was pre-school aged, and his mother was able to provide for her two sons by paying off the mortgage on their home with life insurance, and successfully winning in trial against the company his father had worked for.
And, of course, underlying all is his Faith. All four of his grandparents that immigrated to this country were Catholic, and O’Neill met his wife in 1977 when he was doing pastoral work at St. Gabriel Catholic Church in Greenville and she was a student at ECU.
That pastoral work is what brought him to North Carolina from where he was raised in Queens, and opening the first Catholic Worker house in North Carolina in 1991 brought him to Garner.
“My wife and I started an intentional community that does hospitality to women and children in crisis. It’s a pacifist community,” O’Neill said. “We have times that people will stay for a short period of time, we’ve had people stay for years.”
Rider, a home health care and social worker, supports her husband’s actions and often takes part as well, having been arrested similarly for nonviolent civil disobedience throughout the years. She was also raised in the Catholic Faith, and was influenced by being in a military family, born at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
“I think I had a heightened awareness to a lot of these issues. Even at 14 or 15 I was opposed to war,” Rider said. “I could see what it did to the people of Vietnam, and I could see what it did to my father.”
Catholic Workers model their lives after the Works of Mercy from Matthew 25, and O’Neill can also speak at length about the spiritual disciplines and practices of St. Ignatius and mysticism, and notes that preparing to go to jail has a spiritual aspect to it.
Progress Through Sacrifice
“It’s going to be hard for my wife. Taking care of the kids. Jail is just another address for me. I’m going to be lonely in jail. But I’ll make the best of it. That’s what I’ve always done whenever I’ve been in,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we so easily accept this kind of suffering we impose on others, and it’s done with a cavalier attitude. ‘You get what you deserve’.”
There is a cohesiveness to the stories O’Neill tells from his life. The last work of mercy, to bury the dead, is one that many do not find themselves having to fulfill. During that time in the prison in Atlanta, when many of the Marielitos were suffering depression and away from their families, the suicide rate in the prison was, sadly, higher than usual.
“They were detained because they had no rights, just like the guys in Guantanamo had no rights. You can't go into a court of law and defend your rights. A lot of them were despairing. I supervised over a half dozen burials while I was there,” he said.
Progress Through Prison
This time, the stress of the pandemic is weighing heavily, but O’Neill said he will make the best of it as he always does. A request to not report to prison until after getting a Covid-19 vaccine was denied. His penchant for getting involved, such as with the Marielitos, often results in consequences for him, and he doesn’t count on having any days served for good behavior taken off of his sentence until it's granted.
“Sometimes I get the feeling of ‘Lord take this cup from me’. I wouldn’t mind just going to prison and doing my time, and not finding a cause to have to get involved in again, it just seems like that’s the way the spirit leads me. I kind of go into things kicking and screaming. When there is an issue of injustice involved, I feel like I have to speak up. it’s scary to do that. I’m not going to say it’s easy,” he said.
O’Neill spent the last few days before he’ll travel to Ohio with his large family, and he already has concrete plans to run a book club, starting with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and may host a prayer group as well. It certainly wouldn’t be in character for him if he didn’t find someway to be of service while he’s there.
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The Fr. Charles Mulholland Catholic Worker is at 124 Perdue St, Garner NC 27529. Info at https://www.catholicworker.org/communities/houses/nc-garner-charles-mulholland-catholic-worker.html
Helen Phillips: A Tribute
Born January 15, 1927, Mrs. Phillips, who died June 2 at age 93, was always proud of the fact she shared a birthday with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man I consider the greatest American who ever lived. Mrs. Phillips, who turned 2 the day King was born, may be the greatest Garner citizen who ever lived.
By Patrick O’Neill
Two prominent members of the Garner community have died during this pandemic. One, former Garner Mayor Ronnie Williams who's death Sept. 12 at age 72 was reported by The News & Observer. The other, Helen Sturdivant Phillips, a woman who kept Williams busy as an activist member of the Garner community.
Born January 15, 1927, Mrs. Phillips, who died June 2 at age 93, was always proud of the fact she shared a birthday with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man I consider the greatest American who ever lived. Mrs. Phillips, who turned 2 the day King was born, may be the greatest Garner citizen who ever lived.
No, Mrs. Phillips never got elected to public office, and she was not rich and famous, but she was someone who delighted in standing up for the rights of others, for speaking truth to power, and for being a voice for those Jesus called outcasts.
Born a sharecropper's daughter, Mrs. Phillips lived in our town at a time when African Americans were considered second-class citizens, or worse, less than human. She lived through Jim Crow, facing discrimination and racism in then-segregated Wake County.
In a 2011 speech Mrs. Phillips delivered at The Town of Garner's 1st annual Martin Luther King Birthday celebration, she captured the essence of what life was like for a Black woman growing up amidst racism in Garner and Wake County.
"I hate to talk about my own hometown, but I got to tell it," Mrs. Phillips said to laughter in that 2011 speech. "Garner had two local restaurants," she said, never divulging the names of the two restaurants. "You could order your food at the side door and you waited and picked it up at the back door."
Blacks -- then known as "Coloreds" -- could not eat in Garner's segregated restaurants.
When Mrs. Phillips got a job in downtown Raleigh, she would catch a Greyhound bus near "the big tree" on Garner Rd. "We'd flag the bus down, get in the bus, give the man a quarter, go all the way back to the back, plenty empty seats (in the front of the bus), couldn't sit there," she said.
Her white co-workers would send Mrs. Phillips on food errands to the F.W. Woolworth's lunch counter. "How much is that pie a slice?" Mrs. Phillips said she asked the server. "Ten cents," the woman answered. "'You can buy it, but you can't eat it (in here).' Hudson-Belk was the same way. You had the bathrooms segregated, water fountains was segregated -- coloreds here, whites here."
Once as a child, Phillips complained to her mother because she was thirsty, and she wanted to drink from the "whites only" water fountain -- the colored water fountains were often broken. Said her mother: "Just you remember, we are colored, and we have to drink from the colored water fountain."
Rex Hospital was also segregated, Mrs. Philips said. "You could work there," she said. "You might get sick. You might get hurt, but you couldn't be treated there. You had to go to St. Agnes Hospital, the only hospital for blacks."
But as she grew older, Mrs. Phillips saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and things kept changing for the better, and then she lived to see the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first African American president.
All the while, Mrs. Phillips stayed hopeful: "Deep down in my heart I knew one day, if I lived, I would be able to drink from the white fountain. I would be able to sit anywhere I wanted to sit. I would be able to have freedom of speech, to express myself. I had that confidence that one day, if I continued to live, if God would spare me to see that day."
“I knew one day — one day, we were going to be free. I am so glad the Lord let me live to see this day, that I can stand before you, and say, ‘I’m free. I’m free. Thank God, we’re all free.’”
She told herself, "One day, Helen, you'll be able to sit where you want to sit, you won't have to go to the backdoor, and you'll have freedom of speech. And once I got the freedom of speech I've been speaking ever since."
Mrs. Phillips was active in local politics, and she made sure to make her opinions known. In an interview I did with Mayor Williams when he honored Mrs. Phillips during Black History Month, he told me Mrs. Phillips would call him "several times a week," and he appreciated her "motherly-like support." But most importantly, Williams praised Phillips for her strong commitment to Garner, her citizen activism and her willingness to persevere in her causes.
"What I've always admired about Mrs. Phillips is her drive to accomplish what she sets out to do," Williams said. "She has been a leader in Garner as long as I've known her. She's been an activist. She's been a promotor of Garner, and she is the best example I know of anyone who deserves to be recognized and honored during Black History Month."
She may not win every battle, but "she's working toward winning the war," Williams said.
A widow, Mrs. Phillips married Graham G. Phillips on March 14, 1953. She was a mother of eight children. In the program from her funeral, her daughter, Sherry Phillips wrote: "Helen loved people, politics, watching the news, and most of all voicing her opinion. She loved the Town of Garner, and also loved the people in Garner. She spent many years advocating for the needs of the citizens of Garner.
"... Helen especially loved gardening, which consisted of planting flowers, mowing her lawn, and ensuring each flower was strategically placed."
In a 2016 speech titled: "Why are we still marching?" that she wrote for Garner's Martin Luther King birthday celebration, Mrs. Phillips said, "More than 50 years since major Civil Rights changes became the law of the land, the fight for basic justice is still being waged. Voter suppression laws have passed in the N.C. General Assembly. Major budget cuts have hit education, health care and nutrition programs."
While racism and white supremacy have not gone away, Mrs. Phillips did live to see the blossoming of the "Black Lives Matter" movement with millions of Blacks and whites marching together throughout the nation to decry police killings of African Americans.
Ahead of her time, Mrs. Phillips simply told the truth.
"Segregation is no stranger to me," she said. "I continue to embrace whatever comes my way. We, as a human race, must continue to strive for justice and equality for everybody. Martin Luther King's life and legacy, rooted in love, grounded in nonviolence, teaches us whatever happened in the past, and what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, we, at the end of the day, we should know we are all God's children and members of the human race.
"I knew one day -- one day, we were going to be free. I am so glad the Lord let me live to see this day, that I can stand before you, and say, 'I'm free. I'm free. Thank God, we're all free.'"
Mrs. Phillips said it was her hope that "the people can all live together in peace and harmony. Not that you're black and I'm white; I'm poor, you're rich.
"Because we breath the same air; you breathe the same air that I breathe -- God's air. And once it's cut off that's it. We have got to learn to live together and think about one another because when we die and leave this world that's it. We need to learn how to live together down here with one another. What hurts me hurts you. That's the way I look at it."
1968: School Integration Comes to Garner - Part 2: Teacher Perspectives
One largely characterizes integration as unproblematic, but judges it that way because of the lack of blatant conflict. The other recalls rallying black teachers together to support one another against a racist backdrop, and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging both the good and the bad.
Garner High Integration’s Impact on Teachers
BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
Part two of the series on the year of Garner High School’s integration focuses on the perspectives of the teachers. Two teachers, Mary Yarborough and Margie Hall shared their memories of the time. (Find Part 1: 1968: School Integration Comes to Garner - Principal Wayne Bare HERE)
Two local teachers, both transferring to the new Garner High from the school on Powell Drive and teaching there for three decades, are able to shed light on a complicated reality.
One largely characterizes integration as unproblematic, but judges it that way because of the lack of blatant conflict. The other recalls rallying black teachers together to support one another against a racist backdrop, and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging both the good and the bad.
Most staff undoubtedly believed in the aims of Wayne Bare and Earnest Sanders in regards to wanting an untroubled integration process, if nothing else, while dealing with the hardships of an unfinished school. None of the teachers appear to have opposed the changes being made openly, though a few quietly disagreed or showed their political views in regards to segregation outside of school.
Coming Together: Apprehension. Hope. Reality.
Mary Yarborough
“It was at this time that all of us, principal, teachers, students, custodial staff, and parents in the community pulled together to make our opening a success. The atmosphere was one of excitement and fear for two schools, one black and one white, merging together as one in 1968,” said Mary Yarborough. “We had issues just like any other school in Wake County, but we had an educated and caring principal who tried not to use prejudiced practices and decisions in solving problems.”
Yarborough was there full-time until 1997 and worked with Bare for one year when Garner High was still on Powell Drive.
Despite the concerted efforts of so many at Garner High that year, entrenched attitudes surrounding segregation and race would rear their ugly heads in situations less controllable than picking a new mascot or school colors. Teachers interacted with the entire community; students, parents, each other and administration, and staff from neighboring schools. These would prove to all be relationships affected by integration.
Extra Challenges for Black Teachers
One stubborn racist belief that black teachers were not as smart as white teachers cropped up in parent-teacher relations.
“Black teachers were sometimes confronted by prominent parents in the community about their child not receiving an A or B in their class. Some white students felt that a black teacher was not smart enough to teach them so they didn’t work as hard for an A or B in that teacher’s class,” Yarborough said. “I had a few like that. But I was always prepared for that kind of conference with parents by keeping a folder of every graded work and required work in a folder for each student.”
Yarborough took on an unofficial leadership role when it came to supporting the other black teachers at the school in those first years, sometimes getting 20 or so people together for socials. There were about 100 teachers in all.
“I wanted to let them know that I was always backing them in terms of them being included, them being heard, and them being not stepped on like they were nothing. They knew they could come to Mary Yarborough and sit and talk to me about it, and try to see both sides, and that’s the way we made it. We weren’t working against anybody, we just wanted to be treated fairly,” she said. “I think the reason I was successful at what I did is people thought that I was fair, that I cared about people. I brought that from my roots. Every bit of it.”
Black teachers had a harder time getting new resources, which seemed to generally go to the white teachers, she said. At times they were a listening ear for their black students who were subject to racist treatment by white students, whether or not it was on school grounds, and the two school counselors helped both parents and students wrestle with their differences in treatment.
“Teachers got along decently. There were issues over white teachers getting the best equipment for advanced classes and teachers of beginner classes had to wait for a couple of years for new equipment. As usual, blacks had to wait most of the time, especially in the vocational education classes,” said Yarborough. “We socialized in cliques a lot of times. You didn’t hear a lot of name calling or use of vulgar language unless you walked up on a conversation that you were not supposed to hear.”
Challenging Times & Tough Decisions
Margie Hall taught for two years at the school on Powell Drive before integration and taught Health Occupations. She doesn’t remember tension or specific conflicts between teachers, but says not all teachers agreed with some of Bare’s decisions.
Principal Wayne Bare
“I think some of them didn’t agree with it. There were a few of them that I didn’t agree with. You got to be flexible and understand where they are coming from, and I think we did that,” Hall said, of the compromises made, adding that Bare’s communication skills paved the way for the teachers’ success. He explained the changes and his reasoning clearly, regardless of how individuals may have felt about decisions.
“He was a tremendous leader. He had that talent, and that’s what made it work. I give him basically all the credit for just great leadership,” Hall said.
Hall also doesn’t remember witnessing any racist incidents happening in her particular class and didn’t approach anything differently after integration. She wonders if her background as a nurse and growing up on a farm made her more comfortable with her black students at a time when fellow white teachers may never have spent any time with anyone of a different race before, and she remembers a string of property damage and downed mailboxes targeting black residents in Garner some time before integration.
“I didn’t really have any problems. I just did what I thought was right. I just treated everybody the same. That’s what people want anyway. People just want to be treated fairly, when you get down to it,” Hall said. “I think that was the answer to all of it.”
Standing up together for Staff: Coach James Farris
Outside the walls of Garner High, it became necessary to stand up for black coaches, at least on one well-known occasion.
After the well-qualified James Farris from the Consolidated School was appointed basketball and golf coach despite some complaints, he faced discrimination when trying to coach his team, sometimes not allowed to get off of the bus during games.
“There were disputes and hard feelings among coaches and some parents in sports from both schools. White head coaches wanted to remain as head coaches and felt comfortable with black coaches being assistant coaches. There was the same feeling among administrators. However, the late James Farris, a black coach, was a pioneer in sports at Garner Senior High School,” Yarborough said. “He worked very hard to become the head coach of the boy’s basketball team and head coach of the boys golf team. He wasn’t allowed to be on the golf course during a tournament with his players.”
Because of the athletic division Garner High was in, the teams played schools along the Virginia border, as well as Durham and Chapel Hill. Bare was a part of an administrative organization for the division that consisted of coaches and school administration, so he decided to look for support there.
“I called a person at Chapel Hill High School. ‘This is the situation we’re in, and I’m looking for a sympathetic ear from somebody who attends these conference meetings’,” Bare said, adding that he doesn’t believe there were any other black coaches in the entire division at that time. “He was responsive to that. He and I in essence set the tone. We got over that in just a matter of months.”
Paving the way for the future:
Even Positive Progress is never perfect
The guiding principles of Garner High’s integration and situations in which leadership chose to advocate for black teachers were unique for the time period, yet it’s also clear that prevailing attitudes could not be overcome solely by the manner of Garner’s integration.
“There were a lot of things the black teachers especially knew weren’t going right, but we just didn’t push the button,” Yarborough said. “It was not something that kept us from functioning and being able to get the best we could out of what we had on campus, that includes the teachers and students. We still tried to do our best when it came to Garner Senior High getting things done.”
These truths make it hard to define what impact Garner’s unique integration plan had on the working life of Garner High’s staff in the 1968-69 school year, but unsurprisingly, the experience of the time period was different, depending on whether one was black or white.
Community Navigators Community Builders 'Corona Relief Crew' Awarded $10,000 by Lead4Change for Fighting the Isolation of the Quarantine
A group of ten Garner high school students donated over 300 care packages to local organizations to address the needs of the homeless and those in assisted living facilities during the COVID-19 crisis. They planned and implemented their project, the Corona Relief Crew, as a part of their involvement in the local organization Community Navigators Community Builders and were awarded a $10,000 grant by the Lead4Change Student Leadership Program for their efforts.
Corona Relief Crew members Andrew Lacewell and Genesis Moragne gathered supplies wrote letters to fight the loneliness of quarantine.
BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
A group of ten Garner high school students donated over 300 care packages to local organizations to address the needs of the homeless and those in assisted living facilities during the COVID-19 crisis. They planned and implemented their project, the Corona Relief Crew, as a part of their involvement in the local organization Community Navigators Community Builders and were awarded a $10,000 grant by the Lead4Change Student Leadership Program for their efforts.
Donations, supplies or drop off locations were supplied by Hudson Hardware, Target, Little Details Boutique, Office Depot, Papa John’s, Red Robin, Revonnae Hayes, members of First Presbyterian Church in Garner, and members of Poplar Springs Christian Church. David Williams contributed photography and videography.
The packages contained commonly needed items like soap, socks, washcloths and non-perishable foods, but the students added extras to help people cope with the current pandemic.
You’re not alone in quarantine
“We decided that everyone is at home alone, having to stay in the quarantine and distance themselves from everyone else. We thought about the people that don’t really get thought about a lot,” said Genesis Moragne, a rising senior at North Wake College and Career Academy. “We said, ‘Why don’t we think about them and let them know that we have not forgotten about them.’”
To that end, the care packages were made to include not only currently in-demand hygiene items like masks and hand sanitizer, but also handmade notes for those in assisted living and a letter of encouragement to be read to recipients of the items at the men’s shelter in downtown Raleigh.
“The donation was good but a lot of volunteers aren’t coming in. They aren’t getting a smiling face. With this letter they could know that folks really didn’t forget them,” Moragne said. Two of the students wrote the letter personally.
Real World Projects in the Community
The Community Navigators Community Builders group was founded in 2017 by Cleopatra Lacewell to provide opportunities for character development and leadership skills in middle and high school students. She guided her students through the curriculum created by Lead4Change, and their project was ranked in the top five out of over 30 other projects that were also recognized.
“Our CBCN program is much like the Lead4Change program. We give them projects to do and this was one of them. Our organization is basically showing them project based learning opportunities,” Lacewell said. “We try to bridge the gap between school and community.”
The Lead4Change Student Leadership Program is a national program that began in 2012 with a fully developed curriculum aimed at teaching students about themselves as well as leadership skills, said program manager Linda Spahr.
“They were a great example of how the program really comes to life. What the students walk away with is a real change in themselves. They really go from teenagers to knowing how to lead. To all come together as leaders in their own talent area and make change happen. They can really talk about that in job interviews and on college applications,” Spahr said.
The program gave out over $150,000 in grants for the academic year and has about 11,000 registered student groups that can submit projects for challenges twice a year.
Responsibility and Results
Each student was responsible for a certain job related to the completion of the project, with some students garnering donations, finding organizations to give to or marketing the project. The students ran their collection event on June 5 and 6 in the Office Depot parking lot, and also garnered donations to purchase supplies from local businesses. They also practiced skills like giving elevator pitches as they developed their project.
In all, 90 care packages were given to the Men’s Shelter, 10 to Haven House Wrenn House, 75 to Bella Rose Nursing Home and 132 to Pruitt Health Center.
Many local organizations donated money or items, and at the collection event several individuals came back to donate more than once.
“We had great support from the community,” Lacewell said. “Because we are fairly new, we’ve been trying to grow it. This year we have 19 kids in our program, just trying to teach them to give back. The whole premise is growing and developing community leaders.”
More information on Community Navigators Community Builders can be found at www.communitynavigatorscommunitybuilders.org.
Garner Businesses and Organizations During COVID-19: The Community is in Your Hands
The decision for a small business owner or someone who runs an organization comes down to assessing risk, something good entrepreneurs are already good at. Only in this situation those risk assessments extend beyond their doors and into the entire community.
As the state and county loosen restrictions over the coming weeks and months, the responsibility shifts to individual private business owners and organizations to make decisions on what’s safe and what is actually good for business.
They are now responsible for the safety of their customers and, by definition, the community.
They are even responsible for protecting their mindful and cautious patron from others that do not have a belief in COVID-19 and/or don’t care to take precautions.
So, the question business owners and organizations need to ask is, which customers do you need to accommodate to make your business safe and thus viable?
It’s an important question because with the right answer 1) the right customers will bring in more customers and clients and 2) the wrong customers will increase the likelihood of exposure in your business establishment and increase the probability and frequency of required temporary shut-downs because of localized quarantines.
A Matter of Believing and Caring
Customers and clients are going to fall somewhere within these two categories of believing and caring, ranked from best for business to worst for business as restrictions loosen.
Believe it vs Don’t Believe it: This comes down to a simple determination of whether or not someone believes COVID-19 is a threat at all or if it is even real. It is a measure of someone’s thoughts and opinions about the COVID-19 as a pandemic.
Care/Caution vs Don’t Care: Care is measured by someone’s willingness to take preventative measures and precautions either for themselves or, more importantly, for others. It is a measure of their actions, their actual behavior, relative their thoughts and beliefs.
The Best and Worst Customers for Your Business During COVID-19
The Community is in Your Hands Now
So, the decision for a small business owner or someone who runs an organization comes down to assessing risk, something good entrepreneurs are already good at. Only in this situation those risk assessments extend beyond their doors and into the entire community.
Now they have to ask, what role will my business play in protecting the most vulnerable members of our community against people who just don’t care?
Garner Retirees to the Rescue; Making Masks Makes a Difference in Local COVID-19 Battle
“We are just using what technology skills that we know how to do to meet the need. We’re all stuck at home with nothing to do. It kind of adds a little power to what we can do in our retirement,” said Nancy Cope, a retired educator. “We do not sell them, and we do not have any for sale. Our focus is healthcare and frontline workers like the police and the fire department.”
BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
An unexpected endeavor started in mid-March with an email sent to the students of a sewing class at Saint Andrews United Methodist Church looking for anyone interested in fulfilling a request for homemade cloth masks needed by a medical center in Elizabeth City.
In the weeks since then, an impromptu team of about 20 people, mostly residents of the Village at Aversboro retirement community, have contributed to the production and delivery of 721 masks to organizations near and far. After that first email and the accompanying pattern, the idea to create masks was put out through the Village’s messenger service.
“We are just using what technology skills that we know how to do to meet the need. We’re all stuck at home with nothing to do. It kind of adds a little power to what we can do in our retirement,” said Nancy Cope, a retired educator. “We do not sell them, and we do not have any for sale. Our focus is healthcare and frontline workers like the police and the fire department.”
It kind of adds a little power to what we can do in our retirement.”
- Nancy Cope
There are at least six sewers making two different types of masks, along with pattern cutters, a quality control person to snip the threads and insert filters, others help to prepare coffee filters to improve the masks efficacy, a courier, and those that donated materials all contributing to the team of people that have now been working at it for nearly a month.
“We have a system going. We have baskets on our porches, and the deliveries come in Ziploc bags and we leave them in the baskets for several hours, and some of us spray the bags before bringing it in the house,” Cope said.
They only exchange fabric, finished masks, and other supplies through the baskets and are adhering strictly to social distancing guidelines to protect everyone involved, including not accepting donations from the public.
“It really has been neat, the sharing, the community,” said Mary Gail Ellington, a retired nurse and Garner native. She, like many of the sewers, has spent full days sewing.
“It’s a need, and the love of Christ I have, to be his hands.”
- Mary Gail Ellington
The recipients range from Garner’s local first responders to numerous medical offices, hospitals and assisted living facilities, and even a few to caterers and individuals handing out meals to school children that are missing school lunches. The Garner police received 70 masks total, including 50 for their officers and 20 in smaller child sizes, made in kid-friendly fabrics as requested.
The sewers have gone to great care to pick out fabrics suited to the recipients, such as special fabric for the fire department and the cheerful ones for nurses and police officers.
The supplies to create this volume of masks come from a variety of fortuitous circumstances. Spearheaders Cope and Ellington both run Bless This Child programs at their churches𑁋Saint Andrews United and Plymouth Church, where Ellington’s son is a pastor.
The programs provide homemade clothing to children in the U.S and during mission trips abroad, and thus there was already a network of people who, as luck would have it, have an abundance of scraps saved that are too small to do much else with.
Garner Officers Cameron Driver and PL Kevin Pena sporting their Garner grown face masks.
One current issue for anyone producing masks is obtaining enough elastic, which has become nearly impossible to find locally and across the country. Ellington just so happened to have an abundance of elastic she had held onto for years, ever since a local store changed hands, enabling her to give away 10 yards or so to others.
“‘Okay God, you showed me what I’m going to do with that elastic.’” Ellington said. She had recently been wondering if she should just throw it out after holding onto it for so long. “That first week when everybody was sewing, I think I’m the only one in Garner that had elastic.”
The group also received more than one donation from a quilting store in Angier, Sew There. Owner Bonnie Glover has been giving sewers between 10 and 20 yards of elastic at a time, according to Cope.
“Our neighbors were a tremendous source, and the lady at the quilt store (Sew There), Bonnie (Glover), has been very helpful,”
- Nancy Cope
“Our neighbors were a tremendous source, and the lady at the quilt store, Bonnie, has been very helpful,” Cope said. “Just about everybody in this neighborhood found elastic at their house, so we had many sources of elastic...One of our sewers brought me 288 yards of elastic. 288 yards for me and 288 yards for her. I’ve already shared quite a bit of it.”
Jana Soward with Johnston County Pediatrics was one of the first to receive a Garner grown mask.
The spirit of sharing seems to permeate everything the neighbors do, and the requests have not slowed down since they started, though they managed to complete all of the larger requests just before Easter Sunday. They have even begun sending masks by mail to family members and have a list of at-risk residents of their community that may need a mask for medical appointments who will get extra.
Cope said they will continue “As long as we’ve got energy and threads and elastic. Every time we think we’ve finished our list, somebody else calls.”
Local Architect Mon Peng Yueh Appointed to Garner Parks and Rec Advisory Board
Longtime Garner resident and architect Mon Peng Yueh, who is known for her work as lead designer on the Garner Veterans Memorial, was chosen to fill a vacancy on the Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department’s Advisory Committee.
BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
Longtime Garner resident and architect Mon Peng Yueh, who is known for her work as lead designer on the Garner Veterans Memorial, was chosen to fill a vacancy on the Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department’s Advisory Committee.
Yueh is a principal designer at downtown Raleigh architectural firm Clearscapes and moved to Garner in 2003. She was attracted to the community and small town feel of Garner when house-hunting with her husband when her eldest of two daughters was a toddler.
“We came to Garner and just really fell in love with this town and the neighborhood that we found,” Yueh said. “We have really been enjoying living in this community, and also the fact that there are so many programs and facilities for the citizens.”
When the Garner Veterans Memorial Committee began searching for design submissions, Yueh took the idea to Clearscapes, which has designed the likes of the Raleigh Union Station, Marbles, and the Shimmer Wall, and combines architecture with artistry.
Not only did she win the role of lead designer, working with artist Thomas Sayre, Yueh was among the delegation sent to represent Garner ahead of the town winning the All-America City Award in 2013.
“I just want to be more involved with the community and to share my experience and background as an architect. I’m really proud to be living in Garner. We are a small town but we have first class, high quality programming and spaces,” Yueh said. “We have really high quality facilities here and I want to ensure we maintain that and offer whatever expertise I have in guiding the development of the parks and recreation and cultural facilities.”
The eldest of three, Yueh immigrated from Taiwan with her family in the late 1980’s, when her parents sacrificed positions as teachers in order to move.
Yueh discovered her love of the arts and architecture while attending the competitive North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, where she was mentored by architects from Research Triangle Park, only a few years after moving to the United States and learning English in the fifth grade.
She went on to receive her degree from NC State.
Yueh and her family are active in many of the local events Garner is known for; her children performing over the years with the Flying Tiger Martial Arts Demonstration Team at holiday events. Like many in Garner they enjoy the fireworks, Fireman’s Festival and downtown events, and her father in law is active at the Garner Senior Center.
The Advisory Committee consists of ten members who offer recommendations to the Town Council on recreation services, facilities and fee policies.
1968: School Integration Comes to Garner - Part 1: Principal Wayne Bare
“We haven’t overcome all these things yet, which is disappointing,”
— Wayne Bare
Wayne Bare at his home in 2020, holding the first Garner High School yearbook.
BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
The 1968-69 school year was not business as usual for 11th and 12th graders at Garner High, who were starting the year in a newly built school, with a new principal and a new vice principal. A new mascot, and new school colors. Two school counselors instead of one and for athletes, new teammates.
1968 was the year Garner’s high school integrated, and unlike in most places, a group of student ambassadors and administrators took steps to make the identity of the new Garner High representative of all students, and the black and white schools from which they’d be transferring.
1968: Still Separate. Still Unequal.
In 1968, North Carolina schools were still nearly entirely segregated, and Garner hadn’t been any quicker to embrace integration than the rest of the state. Nearly 15 years after school segregation was ruled unconstitutional, school systems were relying on Freedom of Choice programs, allowing for token amounts of black students to apply to white schools, rather than committing to or believing in the importance of integration.
“We haven’t overcome all these things yet, which is disappointing,” — Wayne Bare
Garner Consolidated School (now the site of East Garner Middle School), served every grade level for black students.
Six other elementary schools and a junior high existed, as well as what is now North Garner Middle School, serving ninth through 12th grades, among the traditional white schools.
Often when school systems integrated, white schools only did so after federal mandate, forced to enroll black students while black schools were shuttered and closed down, with little to no thought given to the sentiments nor impact black students and the black community.
Garner’s New Way Forward
The efforts at a thought-out integration process in Garner, at least at the high school, were successful enough that Principal Wayne Bare and Garner High are referenced in a scholarly article by J. Michael McElreath contrasting Garner with Chapel Hill, which struggled with years of tensions after Lincoln High was unceremoniously closed and the black students joined the white students at Chapel Hill High School.
Wayne Bare.
“During that time we were fully aware that there were people in the majority group, that loosely translates to the Caucasians, who weren't excited about this because they had the perception that desegregating schools, and bringing children of whatever race they happened to be all into one school would dilute the academic progress of the school. In particular, their children."
Wayne Bare, at the time principal of the old Garner High, began meeting with acting principal of Garner Consolidated Earnest Sanders, while the new school was under construction, to discuss how to best approach integration. Bare would become Principal of the new high school, and Sanders would become Assistant Principal, developing close, positive relationships with their students. Both have been spoken highly of by students in the community.
“As we were preparing for that year, we were attempting to lay the groundwork for getting to know people and what they were accustomed to at least in the school culture, from each side of that,” Bare said. A variety of questions had to be considered. What about the different styles of cheerleading? What if the prom queen and king are different races and how will the community react?”
Students Lead The Way
In early 1968 while Garner High was being constructed, they arranged for rising 11th and 12th graders, the only grades the high school would house at first, to meet and discuss student activities and spend time at each other’s schools.
Student input was involved in choosing a new mascot, merging school colors, ensuring there would be both black and white cheerleaders, and drafting a student council constitution that said that the President and Vice President should be of different races, to represent the student body fairly.
“That is credit if I have any,” Bare said, of the student advisory groups. While he is quick to downplay the credit he receives for Garner being seen as an example of where integration went well, there were dozens of little decisions impacted by integration to be made before and after the school opened.
Applying The Lessons
Wayne Bare brought his experience at Forsyth County schools, where he had been an assistant principal. During his time there, a smaller county school merged with a larger city school, and he applied what he learned to the issue of integration.
Bare said he faced an “unbelievable amount of skepticism and fear” from the smaller county school that coaches and others would be completely looked over in favor of the city school.
That brought home the importance of bringing teachers and coaches from both schools and ignoring some prominent members of the Garner community that voiced opposition to some of the decisions, notably the hiring of the well-liked James Farris as the basketball coach.
In an effort to make the students and parents feel more secure, Bare fought for the resources to have two school counselors, Christine Toole and Betty Knox.
“I stretched things a lot money wise and was able to eventually get agreement from the superintendent’s office. We twisted as much arms as we had leverage to do,” Bare said. “The counselor [Toole] exercised a certain amount of disciplinary guidance because not only did she know the students that had come from Garner Consolidated, she knew their parents and might have taught them. I think the fact we had the two counselors there was as much of a positive thing as we could have done.”
Yearbook Dedication
“This is my bragging page. They dedicated the first yearbook to me, and that’s the dedication,” Bare said.
Pages 4 and 5 of the yearbook read:
Happiness is not an easy thing. You must be willing to work for it and to shape it for yourself. Happiness is not dependent upon complete freedom from pain, but the ability to transmute pain into power. The human self is not a gift; it is an achievement. The same is true of happiness, for it is not a static reality sprung full blown. Rather, happiness is a painfully earned progress past lions in the way, a running battle, a continuing progress. Happiness is not something that comes upon from without, but is it is something that has its fountainhead in the heart.
It is knowledge that give man a clear, conscious view of his own opinions and judgement, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophisticated, and to discard what is irrelevant. To have knowledge — broad, deep knowledge — is to know true ends from false and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man’s progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries.
Change Brings Success and Tumult
Perhaps one measure of the initial success of integration could be in the amount of incidents that required intervention.
“That's a point of pride. We made zero calls to the law enforcement or our central office about any kind of disruption at school,” Bare said. “I’m not dumb enough to tell you that there were never any problems. But there was never anything that would be described as a mob fight or any type of disruption in the building.”
When no black students made the cheerleading team, Bare intervened and went back to the wishes of the student ambassadors, administratively adding one of the two black students that had tried out.
“In my opinion, there is no group of students other than possibly some athletic teams where the school representation is more visible, to the community, to people in other communities,” he said. “And on the year where we have just brought two groups of students together, what message does it send about the nature of our school not to have a single minority? We had to have some representation.”
Right Man. Right Time. Right Place.
Bare doesn’t indulge much in reflecting on if their decisions during integration and building a new school had much impact beyond the immediate, nor does he speak much about the implications of those actions in a turbulent time period in which many white people accepted segregation as reasonable.
“We haven’t overcome all these things yet, which is disappointing,” Bare said.
He also says they didn’t waste time looking at how integration was going anywhere else.
“We were attempting to have equal opportunity in school events,” Bare said. “I don’t know that I made a judgment on it being radical, but it probably was. I did it from the standpoint of caring.”
All of these decisions were complicated by the fact that while all this was happening, Garner High’s construction wasn’t completed before the first day of school. But the community banded together and got the school ready enough for classes to start.
The lessons were yet to come.
To be continued in Part 2
A theatrical interpretation of Garner High’s integration can be watched below
The Story of Our Storyteller: Garner's Tim Stevens Inducted into North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame
Life-long Garner resident Tim Stevens is one of twelve people to be honored later this year with induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, paying tribute to his 48-year career as a high school sports writer and editor for the Raleigh Times and later the News and Observer.
BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
Tim Stevens vividly remembers the December night over 30 years ago when Garner became a ghost town. There were only 12,000 residents of Garner at the time, yet 10,000 people traveled from this area to Charlotte to cheer Garner High’s football team on for Championship game. When a media team came to Garner that night to interview local residents, none could be found. Signs on the front of businesses said they were closed.
There are too many highlights of his five-decades long career in sports writing to mention, but he relates the story of the 1987 Championship Win by Garner High with a mix of fondness and pride that seems to portray his way of thinking about his work.
“It had almost nothing to do with football. It was really about community.”
A life-long Garner resident, Stevens is one of twelve people to be honored later this year with induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, paying tribute to his 48-year career as a high school sports writer and editor for the Raleigh Times and later the News and Observer. During that time, he tirelessly covered all types of high school sports and anything else that he was moved to write about; the socioeconomics of high school athletics, concussions, transgender athletes, and more.
“I’m a storyteller. I tell stories in plays. I tell stories in sports. I’m not much of a sports fan at all. I’m a people fan.”
It’s clear he enjoyed the time he spent as a sportswriter, however, though not for the fame and fortune many associate with the highly publicized arena of college and professional athletics, or even the many other honors he’s received along the way. It’s the values that sports instill in young people that draw him to it; accountability, consequences and a sense of community. It’s because sports and high school work together to make better people.
“It doesn’t affect my life who wins the Super Bowl. But what is taught in high school does. I came to the realization high school is more important than anything,” Stevens said. “I got to write about all these diverse things. I got to write about society through the lens of young people. I got to write nice things about kids that may not have nice things being said to them.”
He is honored, of course, to be recognized in the Hall of Fame for his body of work, which includes other accomplishments like co-authoring the first North Carolina High School Records Book, along with some of the giants he grew up watching.
“I’m in there with people I grew up dreaming about, I can truthfully say I’m the most unathletic person in the NC Hall of Fame.”
Garner’s history and future are both important to Stevens. His family has been in the area for 200 years, he says, and long-time Garner residents may remember his mother Evelyn Stevens as an editor of the weekly Garner News that ended in 2013, and his father as Town Council member James R. Stevens. His son, one of three children, teaches and coaches at Garner Magnet High School.
Retired from the News and Observer in 2015, Stevens spends his time on his work at Aversboro Road Baptist Church and enriching the lives of Garner residents through his plays focusing on Garner’s history, such as the one he wrote about that 1987 win. He has written plays on the civil war, WWII, integration, and the Vietnam War, all focusing on Garner’s specific people and contributions.
The Wall that Heals will on display at Garner’s Lake Benson Park from April 16 to April 19, 2020.
He brings entertainment to the area with projects like the long-running Broadway Voices series. Most recently, he set his sights on successfully bringing to Garner the Wall That Heals, a traveling replica of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.
Stevens has also been inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame, the North Carolina High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame, the Garner High Hall of Fame, and the Broughton High Hall of Fame. He was honored in 2015 with the annual James R. Stevens Service to Garner Award, an award named after his late father.
“They’re all different but they all mean as much to you,” Stevens said, of the many recognitions he has collected over the years.
NCSHOF 2020 Inductees
A brief biography of each 2020 inductee follows; deceased inductees being inducted posthumously are indicated by an asterisk:
Debbie Antonelli – Entering her 30th season as a full-time broadcaster for ESPN, Antonelli is one of the best-known female college and professional women’s basketball television analysts in America today. An Emmy Award winner and Gracie Award winner for broadcasting, she is also known for her on-air commentary for men’s basketball and in 2017, Antonelli became the first woman in 22 years to be a color analyst during the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues – After a standout career at Wake Forest, the 5-foot-3 Bogues defied the odds and played 14 years in the NBA. He remains the shortest player in NBA history. A first-team All-ACC selection as a senior, he led the ACC in both assists and steals in 1985, 1986 and 1987 and was the 12th overall selection in the 1987 NBA Draft. Bogues currently ranks 23rd in NBA history with 6,726 career assists and 20th in assists per game (7.6).
Mack Brown – After recently completing his 11th season as head football coach at the University of North Carolina, Brown has compiled a record of 244-123-1 (.664) in his tenure as a head coach at the FBS level. His 244 career victories rank 10th on the all-time list and are the most among active coaches. A two-time national coach of the Year (2005 & 2008), Brown is 13-8 in post-season bowl games with his 2005 Texas team winning the national championship with a 41-38 win over USC.
Dennis Craddock* – One of the most successful coaches in Atlantic Coast Conference history, Craddock coached the men’s and women’s cross country and track and field teams at the University of North Carolina for 27 years, winning 45 conference championships, more than any coach in any sport in the history of the league. He was named ACC Coach of the Year 31 times and 25 of his athletes won 38 NCAA titles while 19 of his stars competed in the Olympics winning five gold and two bronze medals.
Dr. Charles Kernodle – The 102-year-old Kernodle has been the Burlington Williams High School football team doctor more than 60 years. He has lived in Burlington since 1949 and has missed only a few home or away games during that time. The football field at Williams High was named in his honor on his 90th birthday in 2007. In addition to his duties at Williams, he also helped with the football and basketball teams at Elon University.
Mac Morris – A member of the NCHSAA Hall of Fame and the co-executive director of the North Carolina Coaches Association, Morris served as the head basketball coach at Greensboro’s Page High School for 25 years and compiled a 456-151 (.751) record, that included state 4-A titles in 1979, 1983 and 1990. Both his 1983 and his 1990 teams were undefeated at 26-0 and 31-0, respectively. The 1983 team ranked second nationally by USA Today and he was named the AP Coach of the Year.
Trot Nixon - A two-sport star at New Hanover High in Wilmington, Nixon became a standout baseball player with the Boston Red Sox. As a high school senior, he was named the North Carolina player of the year in both football and baseball and was named Baseball America’s national player of the year. A right fielder, Nixon hit .274 in a 12-year major league career with 137 home runs and 555 RBIs. In 42 post-season games, Nixon hit .283 with six home runs and 25 RBIs.
Julius Peppers – One of the most celebrated players in pro football history, Peppers finished his 17-year career with 724 tackles, including 159.5 sacks – the fourth-best mark in NFL history. His 266 games played are a record for a defensive lineman and his 13 blocked kicks are the second most ever in the NFL, as are his 51 forced fumbles. At the University of North Carolina, he led the nation in sacks in 2000 with 15. A unanimous All-America in 2001, he also won the Chuck Bednarik Award as the nation’s best defensive player and the Lombardi Award as the best collegiate lineman.
Bobby Purcell - The Executive Director of the Wolfpack Club. Purcell has served in a number of capacities since joining the N.C. State athletics department staff in 1981. He served as an assistant football coach and recruiting coordinator under Monte Kiffin, Tom Reed, and Dick Sheridan. At the Wolfpack Club he has overseen the construction of the Murphy Football Center and Vaughn Towers as well as the funding of nearly 300 student-athlete scholarships annually.
Judy Rose - The former Director of Athletics for 28 years at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Rose became the third female to serve as the athletic director of an NCAA Division I program when she accepted the position in 1990. In 1999-2000, she became the first female to serve on the prestigious NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. Chief among her accomplishments with the university was the overall growth of the 49ers athletics department, culminating with the unveiling of the school’s football program in 2013.
Tim Stevens - One of six North Carolinians in the National High School Hall of Fame, Stevens built a national reputation for his reporting of high school athletics. He covered high school sports for The Raleigh Times and The Raleigh News & Observer for 48 years, winning numerous national awards. Named as one of the top 10 sports reporters in the country by the AP Sports Editors, Stevens is a member of the NCHSAA Hall of Fame and its media award is named in his honor.
Donnell Woolford – A three-sport star at Fayetteville’s Douglas Byrd High School, Woolford graduated from Clemson University, where he earned All-ACC and All-American honors twice. A first-round draft pick of the Chicago Bears in 1989 and a Pro Bowl honoree in 1993, Woolford started every game from 1989-1996 and ranks third in Bears history with 32 career interceptions. A Graduate Assistant Coach at Clemson in 2016, he was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2005.
You Probably Don’t Know How Much You are Going to Miss Brandon Zuidema
It is hard to conceive of a better police chief than Garner’s Brandon Zuidema, the energetic, community-focused chief who has led the Garner force for 10 years and gained statewide, national and international recognition in the process.
Photo by Rick Mercier
An era is ending in Garner and you probably didn’t notice.
It is hard to conceive of a better police chief than Garner’s Brandon Zuidema, the energetic, community-focused chief who has led the Garner force for 10 years and gained statewide, national and international recognition in the process.
He is taking a position as an assistant town manager in Morrisville, a career change that he knew was coming eventually and is suddenly here after 26 ½ years of carrying a gun, driving a car with blue lights and rushing into places as most people rush out.
Zuidema, a native of New York, did his job as few others have. We were lucky to have him. We’re going to miss him.
He came to Garner from Lynchburg, Va., where he was a police captain. Hardin Watkins, then the town manager, interviewed him for four and a half hours before deciding he was the guy who could move a very good police department to the next level.
But Watkins probably couldn’t imagine that he was hiring a man who is not only held in high esteem in the county, but also in the state. And in the nation. And all around the globe.
You probably didn’t know that either.
That’s not surprising. Zuidema does many things well, but commanding the stage is not one of them, unless you count his performance in a play about the 1987 football team. He believed in being involved in the community and agreed to take the role of Chris Dorman, a fiery fullback and linebacker. Zuidema played Dorman by being Brandon Zuidema on stage.
There was a toughness inherent in both. Fearless. Motivated. No backing down to a challenge. And just as importantly, living by the idea of it doesn’t matter who gets the credit as long as the job gets done.
This is the guy who has walked in our midst, enjoying almost every day protecting and serving the people of Garner.
He told an overflow group at the Garner Civitan Clubhouse, a place where he spent many hours in community service, that he enjoyed most days.
Photo by Rick Mercier
Not all the days were filled with fighting crime, though. There were many discussions about “birds, hens, deer” and the other problems that crop up in a community. Like traffic. And a dead animal on the road.
All the problems were important to someone and he treated them as such.
He was thankful for the people that he worked with. He called them “good folks” and said that he pursued the job in Garner 10 years ago because it was big enough to present law enforcement challenges and small enough to know the people that he was working with.
Rodney Dickerson, the town manager, summed up the feelings of many of the people at the dinner. Dickerson said he was sorry to see the Chief leave, but happy for him to begin this next phase of his career. Everybody knew this day was coming. Most everybody is sad that has come now.
Zuidema said people had asked him if he knew what he was doing. He said he hoped so. This day has been a long time in coming and it is now time to start a new challenge.
He handled the old challenges very well.
“Garner is a better because he was here,” said Matt Poole, the Garner fire chief.
Zuidema leaves a department that is a flagship agency, a department that has impacted police departments all over the state.
The speakers at the dinner, many of them the chiefs of police in other communities, lauded Zuidema as a servant leader chief. No task was beneath him, nor any task too tough to tackle.
He has been recognized on the state, national and international level. He has been chairman of the SafeShield Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The SafeShield Committee is dedicated to protecting law enforcement officers.
Some of the programs that he developed in Garner have been emulated in other places. One of his favorites was the Garner P.A.A.L. program (Police Athletic/Activities League). P.A.A.L. is a nonprofit organization that provides opportunities to enhance youth and family achievement while improving police-community relationships and reducing delinquency in our community.
He was a chief that took care of the immediate while looking to the future.
“I look forward to seeing our first law enforcement officer from the P.A.A.L. program,” he said. “I am so glad that we started it.”
And the folks in Garner are so glad that he has been a part of our lives for 10 years, even though many of us never noticed.