By Jade Brooks

Durham, NC
October 29th, 2012

Sherri Mason looks on during Monday’s press conference

“It feels like they stole my joy,” Sherri Mason, a resident of  Lincoln Apartments said about her eviction in front of Durham City Hall Monday evening, as ice-cold wind whipped through the alleyway. About twenty Lincoln residents and supporters from People’s Durham marched from the Department of Social Services to City Hall carrying signs that read “Save Lincoln Apartments,” “Don’t Be Unfair, Care,” and “Need Our Community Back” in the first of two actions Lincoln leaders have planned for this week.

Back at the end of September the company that owns Lincoln Apartments sent notices to everyone living in the 150-unit apartment complex and told them they had to move out by Halloween. Soon after, residents started to fight back. They began holding weekly meetings, inviting city officials, and demanding the city do something to be sure they have a place to live.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Crisis of Affordable Housing in Durham

A Storm of Sorts

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast of the United States. Over 1800 people died. The overwhelming majority were poor, Black, and stuck in a system that had diregarded them for decades. Thousands were then scattered across the U.S., unable to return to the town that they loved and called home. Today, New Orleans is “rebuilding” a version of itself that has no place for the low-income residents that made it the vibrant center of Black culture known worldwide.

Just yesterday Hurricane Sandy unleashed similar devastation in New York City. We don’t yet have a sense of what the fallout from this storm will be, but we’ve already heard that public housing residents have been forcibly evacuated to emergency shelters, once again those hit first and hardest.

Read the rest of this entry »

This election season People’s Durham has been out in full force doing “Get Out The Vote” work in Precinct 13, the neighborhood where the McDougald Terrace public housing community is located.  Below is information that we shared with residents about work we’re doing in the neighborhood and the importance of voting to advancing those struggles.

Two Durhams – Separate & Unequal

Our city’s neighborhoods are segregated. Poor people live in different neighborhoods than rich people. Black and Latino people live in different neighborhoods than white people.

These neighborhoods are also unequal. The schools, housing, and grocery stores in the poor, Black, and Latino neighborhoods are worse than the ones serving white or wealthy neighborhoods.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Bryan Proffitt

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress”  Frederick Douglass

Violence
The Durham community, and the Hillside family specifically, recently lost a young person to a violent act.  We are saddened by this fact.  This was someone’s friend.  Someone’s son.  Someone’s brother.  Kaaylon had a beautiful smile and a caring heart.  We will miss him.

Unfortunately, we are not surprised.  For so many young African-Americans, a vicious cycle of school struggles, drugs, poverty, police, prisons, and violence seems unavoidable, no matter what choices one makes.  And while we encourage better decision making to reduce the likelihood that violence will occur, we know that the violence that took Kaaylon’s life is not just about bad choices.  If it were, it wouldn’t be so heartbreakingly common.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Kimberly Rodriguez

People’s Durham members help canvass with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

This summer I took a trip to Mississippi and New Orleans. I went with an organization called People’s Durham. We took this trip to know more about other organizations like ours, how they do their work, and how they get things done.

Down in Mississippi we met with an organization that is helping a man named Chokwe Lumumba run for mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.  I was surprised by how positive the people were about this man, and how they put so much hard work and effort into getting things done. We also went canvassing with this organization. We walked through neighborhoods and just talked to some people. Just being fifteen years old, and having a chance to canvas was a good experience for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Jasmine Grays

Students Leading the Forum

As we all know, the May and November elections are of critical importance to the state of our schools, our communities, and our state.  In keeping with the Committee for Democratic Education’s commitment to organizing students, teachers, school staff and parents to empower working-class communities and people of color, CDE spent the months of April and May adding more than 250 Durham Public Schools students to the state’s voter lists. CDE also surveyed more than 500 students about the state of their schools.

To help that mission, CDE planned three events relating to our “Our School, Our Voice, Our Vote” campaign. On April 19, CDE held a workshop at Hillside High School where our goal was for  participants to learn about and discuss the following topics: the structure of the school system, how to act together to change it, and what role the upcoming election will play in our schools and communities.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Dorothy Nam

Our Vote Campaign Shirt

Over the months of April and May, I played a leadership role in a Committee for Democratic Education (CDE) campaign to organize high school students.  If there was anything that I learned from organizing a project (and trust me, I learned a lot), I learned that it takes a great deal of time, effort and effective team work in order to get satisfactory results.

Before joining CDE, I had no idea how many puzzle pieces had to be utilized to form one giant puzzle. Although these puzzle pieces were “simple”- for example, sending emails and text messages and making phone calls to all of our previous contacts- the puzzle pieces seemed complex when each step had to be completed accordingly in order for the whole picture to jive. For this particular project, CDE decided that we should engage all the high schools in the Durham Public School system by registering new voters, distributing surveys to the high schoolers about how they felt towards their schools, and conduct several workshops and forums to spread awareness about the upcoming primary election.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Holly Jordan & Bryan Proffitt

Because we here at People’s Durham think we need to change a whole lot more than who sits on the school board, we try to run our campaigns in ways that connect on-the-ground demands that will improve our lives with deeper ideas that can begin to challenge the whole system.  Immigrant-bashing, homophobia, capitalism itself; it’s all got to go—not just the people who sit in seats of power.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Sendolo Diaminah – Lead Organizer, McDougald Terrace

1960s Protest in McDougald Terrace

Aldon Morris, a historian of the Civil Rights movement, wrote that movements for justice are never just reactions to bad conditions or the result of a few leaders. Movements emerge and become powerful because they are deeply rooted in the social networks—the individual and group relationships—and the institutions of a community. The civil rights movement grew out of the relationships built over generations in segregated Black communities as well as from the institutions of the Black community. Without the personal relationships of local people, without the years of organizing by groups like the National Negro Congress and the NAACP, and without institutions like beauty shops, churches, and movement training centers—without this rich soil of relationships and institutions, the civil rights movement never would have existed.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Jasmine Grays – Committee for Democratic Education, Leadership Team

Discussing Capitalism at the CDE Forum

I always wanted to make a difference in the world. There was a problem though, I didn’t know how. One day all of that changed.  I stumbled into a Committee for Democratic Education interest meeting, and I am glad I did because it has brought me a world of good.

The purpose of CDE is to create a system where the people who know the most about the education system – teachers, students, and school workers – are also the ones involved in making decisions about how the system is run.  I have been involved with CDE in some capacity for over a year now.  In that time we have organized a campaign to fight budget cuts to already underfunded schools, a forum on proposed schedule changes, a Freedom Summer School, and more.

Read the rest of this entry »