Erskine Bowles didn't mean to deflate anybody's high hopes when he announced Thursday that he wouldn't seek the Democratic nomination for governor.
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State House Speaker Thom Tillis, under attack by many liberals for leading the way in severe cuts to public education, is on the verge of making state history in a positive, bipartisan way – with the Democratic governor who has lashed out at him on those cuts.
2012 is going to be one wild ride, with politicians from President Obama down to county commissioners fighting to keep their jobs. And challengers fighting to take their jobs — with promises of how they'll create jobs to put all of our friends and neighbors back to work.
What if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive? Here's one supposition.
When I first met Charles Holt of Kernersville in June, he was letting his beloved stepdaughter, Melissa Hyatt, tell the story of his forced sterilization by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina.
I've just returned from a trip back in time.
Merry Christmas, all. And Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday, Selma.
We must be doing something right because people who differ about everything else agree that we're doing something wrong.
As the governor's task force on sterilization compensation took up how much that compensation should be during a meeting last week, they heard plenty of outrage from those the state rendered barren. But some of the main victims — the children those operated on never got to have — will never get a chance to speak. And their absence is one big reason why those sterilized are so outraged at $20,000 as a starting point for compensation that the task force discussed Tuesday.
Law and justice are not
Ina Jean Stephens walked the floor of the gleaming new Caterpillar plant built on farmland that had been in her family for generations.
On Veterans Day, as several of his fellow World War II veterans made the last Flight of Honor, Clyde Duggins was buried with full military honors in a quiet churchyard in King.
Forty-eight sterilization victims. That's the sum total of victims the state has found after more than a year of half-hearted searching. That's shameful, considering how quickly earlier generations of state officials rounded up more than 7,600 victims to render them barren.
Rep. Thom Tillis, the conservative Republican Speaker of the state House, and Rep. Larry Womble, a liberal Democratic member of the House, share little in common. But they're taking tentative steps at working together to achieve a noble goal that Womble's party blew for all the years it controlled the legislature: Helping the living victims of the state's forced sterilization program, which rendered barren more than 7,600 victims from 1929 through 1974.
We're deep into the American Dream phase of the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election.
Railey column: Help for sterilization victims must from unlikely allies
Notes from a Fort Lauderdale vacation ...
One of the first stories I covered was that of Zsa Zsa Cotton, who was killed by her husband in Suffolk, Va., back in 1985.
There's plenty of room for criticism of the state's new Republican majority. But there's also room for praise.
"In my lifetime, I've been blown up twice, I've totaled two cars, I've been shot at more than a few times, I've been beaten to a pulp, I've jumped out of airplanes and had bad things happen doing it, and I've lived through corporate wars and won."
I don't believe that what I was doing and thinking on Sept. 11, 2001, matter that much. Nor do I have any big thoughts about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath.
"This was genocide." The writer Edwin Black, speaking of North Carolina's forced-sterilization program, dropped that bomb soon after he arrived in Winston-Salem to speak last week.
Thursday night, for the second time in four years, Winston-Salem State University will host an event that explores the chilling ramifications of this state's forced sterilization program.
When William Styron came out with "The Confessions of Nat Turner" in 1967, his friend James Baldwin wrote that Styron "has begun the common history: Ours."
Look out Atlanta — we are the real New South.
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