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http://www.newsobserver.com/print/sunday/sunday_journal/story/2474719p-8879212c.html
Pinehurst in black and white
He could, however, cook for the all-white clientele, and he did because a job at the resort was one of the best jobs a Moore County black man could get in those days. It was like being on the inside and yet stuck on the outside at the same time. Six decades later, civil rights workers say too many black residents of Moore County remain on the outside, kept at arm's length from their white neighbors by municipal boundaries. The sometimes circuitous borders limit the black neighborhoods' access to public water, sewer and other services, making it difficult for owners to develop their properties. At the same time, zoning laws of the municipalities reach into the black neighborhoods, where residents are told how to use their property but aren't allowed to serve on the towns' governing boards. As the 2005 U.S. Open brings the national spotlight to Pinehurst this month, the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law wants to use that attention to press for change. Activists want the cities to annex five historically black settlements and offer them the full range of services their neighbors take for granted. The issue of annexation is a prickly one; some residents of the black neighborhoods have expressed fears that it could bring unwanted changes including loss of their identity and their land to upscale development. There is also the cost of annexation: city taxes, utility connections, user fees. "I don't know how much it would be," says Mae Murchison, who bought a house in Jackson Hamlet with her husband in the 1940s and lives there still. "I know it would be plenty." Pinehurst's roots stretch back to 1895, when Bostonian James Walker Tufts bought 5,000 sandy acres here. Stripped of its virgin-pine timber, the land was almost barren when Tufts got off the train in Southern Pines to stretch his legs during a trip from his hometown of Boston on his way to Florida to scout for property. Tufts was an energetic entrepreneur whose original plan for Pinehurst was a winter health resort for Northerners of modest means. Just as the wealthy needed a place to escape the cold, damp winter air of Northern cities, Tufts reasoned, so did the working class. But from the time it opened, the resort attracted only the elite. And although they may have enjoyed the relative warmth of Southern winters, guests were not content to sit on the deep porches of the hotels for weeks at a time. The earliest visitors brought with them golf balls and clubs, and spent hours firing shots into the treeless landscape. James Tufts died in 1902, leaving the fledgling resort to his sons, who built it into a popular tourist attraction. It also became a labor-force destination, especially for African-Americans, who moved from all over central and southeastern North Carolina to work. Drawn to work Barrett came here in 1945, a 16- or 17-year-old kid, the son of a farmer and a schoolteacher from Carthage, the county seat. His first job was cooking vegetables at the Holly Inn. Six decades later he is still on duty, working three days a week serving hot meals to the staff of the Pinehurst Hotel. The workers -- and many of the hotel guests -- know him as Mr. B. "These were good jobs," Barrett recalls of the opportunities that drew him and others to the resort. Although they were barred as guests, blacks were welcomed as laborers in Pinehurst from the early days. When he started work, Barrett says, most of the kitchen help was black, and all of the caddies were. At first, the workers stayed in dorms near the hotel or rented homes or rooms nearby. But when they were ready to buy or build a home, black workers didn't look in Pinehurst, where the Tufts men were selling lots on the winding streets of a village laid out by the architectural firm of Frederick Law Olmsted. Even if they could have afforded property there, they couldn't buy it. The same exclusions that applied at the resort extended to the real estate beyond it. All over Moore County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, clauses were commonly added to property deeds prohibiting sale or use "by a Jew or a Negro, or any person affected by tuberculosis or consumption." Even after such restrictions became illegal, says Maurice B. Holland Jr., who lives and owns land in all-black Midway, blacks sometimes encountered problems trying to buy in white neighborhoods. "When you buy a house, you have to buy it from somebody, and people just wouldn't sell it to you," Holland says. "Or the banks would refuse to lend you money, and you'd have to go to a secondary lender and pay punitive interest rates, which people couldn't afford to do." Instead of integrating into white neighborhoods, blacks built their own, where they could get enough parcels of contiguous land. There were at least a dozen such settlements across Moore County, most of them sidled up against the larger communities where the residents worked and shopped. Like their white neighbors, African-Americans were proud of their neighborhoods, which had their own schools and churches. Jackson Hamlet had a nightclub, where Cab Calloway and Ray Charles played. Some built community centers, where residents held homecomings and celebrated annual festivals. No services Holland is one of several local residents who serve as guides on a tour the Center for Civil Rights has been leading through five remaining black neighborhoods of Moore County. Law school students and reporters pile into a university van in a strip shopping center on the edge of Aberdeen and take off on a circuit never traveled by the big charter buses that hiss to a stop at the veranda of the Pinehurst Hotel. The van bounces up the sandy road that loops through Monroetown, completely surrounded by Pinehurst; comes to a stop on Waynor Road, on the northeastern edge of Southern Pines; passes Lost City, a tiny outparcel in the middle of Southern Pines; cruises through Midway, on the eastern boundary of Aberdeen; and rolls into Jackson Hamlet, the largest of the neighborhoods, which looks like a squared doughnut on the southwestern boundary of Pinehurst. Some of the five communities lack public water, sewer service or both, and some have cyclical problems with drinking water quality and wells going dry. Lots in some areas -- small by current standards -- are not large enough to accommodate septic fields, and some of the land doesn't percolate, causing raw sewage to bubble up. Not one of the neighborhoods has public trash collection. Though all are surrounded by or adjacent to a municipality, none is served by city police -- only the county sheriff's department, whose deputies may have to drive through a neighboring town to reach the area. Some lack paved roads. Where street lights exist, residents have paid to have them installed. While parts of Moore County are seeing tremendous growth, development in the African-American neighborhoods appears to have stalled in the 1960s. With the children and grandchildren of many of the original owners gone north to look for jobs, lots sit vacant, overgrown or used as trash dumps. Empty houses become havens for drug dealers. Those neighborhoods that favor annexation are in a no-win situation. They can't force a town to accept them. Towns tend to prefer to annex areas of dense development, in order to recoup the cost of extending services. But without those services already in place, development remains sparse. So close, so different On her property, less than a half-acre in Midway, Irirain Hill guesses she has at least 20 places where she's dug a hole and burned trash until the ash and debris filled the opening to the top. On disability, she says she can't afford the $35 a month it would cost for a private hauler to pick up her garbage. Now, she lets her nephew use a spot behind the house to burn the trash he collects from his customers for $10 or $15 a month, as long as he torches hers, too. She stays inside when he sets fire to the bags of kitchen trash and old furniture he drags back there because the smoke hurts her lungs. When the fire is out, her nephew picks through the remains for anything that can be sold as scrap. The ash pile is 4 feet high. The air smells charred. "Everybody in here burns their trash," Hill says, though a state law forbids it. In rural areas throughout Moore County and elsewhere in the state, people live happily along dirt roads with no streetlights and get along fine drinking well water, relying on septic tanks and making a weekly trek to the landfill with their household trash. They feel perfectly safe with the periodic patrols of the county sheriff's cruisers. But advocates for the poor say that living so close to a town -- sometimes yards away -- while enjoying none of its conveniences creates a sense among some residents that they are viewed as "less than" -- less desirable, less important, less worthy than their wealthier neighbors. Kim Maples, who works with at-risk kids in a program called Moore Buddies, based in Carthage, says the effect on children raised in an environment of exclusion is palpable. Many of the children she works with live in the neighborhoods targeted by the Center for Civil Rights. "They feel defeated before they ever get started sometimes," says Maples, who attributes the kids' low expectations and low self-esteem, in part, to the substandard conditions in which many of them live. "It gives them a sense of, 'This is your station in life.' " The juxtaposition of the houses in the black neighborhoods, which include mobile homes and modest block or brick structures with tax values of generally less than $100,000, against the million-dollar-plus structures sometimes a half-block away, is obvious. Annexation worries "You can't help but notice," says Andy Wilkison, manager of the Village of Pinehurst. "I mean, it's very different." During his 17-year tenure, Wilkison says, the village has never been formally asked to annex either Monroetown or Jackson Hamlet, which are surrounded by or against its corporate boundaries. Historically, residents of these and other black neighborhoods have expressed reservations about annexation, some fearing that if they became part of a town, the town government might condemn the land and force the residents off, or developers would pressure owners to sell. Either way, families who have held land or property for two or three generations might be displaced, and the neighborhood's identity forever lost. As it is, Pinehurst has some zoning power over Jackson Hamlet and Waynor Road through its extraterritorial jurisdiction, or ETJ. But annexing the neighborhoods would likely make them subject to the full range of Pinehurst's notoriously picky zoning regulations, something residents of the outlying neighborhoods have said in the past they wished to avoid. The rules govern such things as the shade of roofing shingles, the placement of doghouses and the color of children's play equipment. Jackson Hamlet resident Mae Murchison, who has expressed concerns about the costs of annexation, moved to the area from Hoke County and retired from the resort in 1995 after 49 years. She rose to the position of head housekeeper in one section of the main hotel. "I was bossy," she says, and particular. No cobweb could escape her searching eye, and if she thought one of the girls was trying to get away without changing both beds in a room, Murchison might hide something under the covers just to check. She knew the Tufts family and worked for Malcolm McLean, the trucking magnate who bought the resort from Tufts in the 1970s and then lost it in bankruptcy. It's now owned by ClubCorp, a Texas-based resort operator. It was McLean, Murchison says, who finally integrated the resort. "Anybody who had a dollar, they could have their room," Murchison says. Seeking another way Still, many days, the only African-Americans resort visitors see are the porters and bellmen at the hotel doors or the jacketed young men and women who whisk away dirty dishes in the dining rooms. Murchison would be welcome to come for lunch any day of the week, but the $20 buffet for broiled tilapia and slivers of Key lime pie is out of her budget range. Wilkison, the Pinehurst village manager, says he believes that if the village council were asked to annex Monroetown or Jackson Hamlet, it would vote to do so without regard to whether it would be a financial drain or benefit to the village. But like Murchison, who is not sure she wants to be part of Pinehurst, Wilkison wonders whether annexation would solve the problem. "I look at Jackson Hamlet and I think, 'Is their quality of life what it could be?' " Wilkison says. "But annexation won't necessarily make someone fix up their property. Annexation isn't going to lift someone up out of poverty." If the neighborhoods want to retain their identity, Wilkison says, it might be better to find other ways to provide missing services. One means would be community development grants, which have been used to bring what infrastructure exists in the five neighborhoods. Moore County recently was awarded a grant to expand water service in Midway and is seeking grants for some of the other neighborhoods. But commissioners are committed to not raising the county's taxes, assistant county manager David Cotton says, which are the 10th lowest in the state, and are only willing to consider raising utility rates -- unchanged since 1994 -- enough to pay for necessary upgrades to the lines and equipment already in place. According to the 2000 census, 8,369 of Moore County's 79,269 residents live below the poverty line. The county has the fifth-highest per capita income of any county in the state. Mr. B found another way to make sure his children have the same opportunities as all their neighbors. He never let them work at the resort.
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