At UNC, the students are leading us. Thank the Lord.
The remarkable, fearless and inspiring young women and men of the Daily Tar Heel have been teaching North Carolina much in recent weeks. Once again, faced with a brutally ideological and almost comically incompetent Board of Governors, translated through lavishly compensated but habitually cowering campus leaders, students have risen to the challenge. It’s apparently hard to convince 20-year-olds that hopeless submission to the repeated sins of the past is their manacled lot in life. Thank the Lord.
The DTH has gone to court to invalidate the consent decrees, reached “in total secrecy in violation of the Open Records Law,” through which UNC pays $2.5 million and $74,999 respectively to the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I’ll admit if I was going to give millions of university dollars to a white supremacy outfit, I’d want to keep it quiet, too.
The lawsuit was launched after the DTH had reported on the operations of the SCV and its “mechanized cavalry,” campaign law violations, “intermingling” with gangs and hate groups, and “cigar box in the gun safe” accounting. The group noted a spike in membership in 2015 after a pro-Confederate white supremacist murdered nine Black church attendants in South Carolina. Let that sink in. These are the folks we subsidize. Another student and faculty group, represented by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, now seeks to intervene in the earlier sham settlement. Private dissenters doing our most crucial public work.
We have a powerful legal system, but it’s not self-triggering. No entity of government, no office of university administration, no higher education entity, no attorney general, no secretary of state, no district attorney will call a lawless, destructive and humiliatingly complicit Board of Governors to task. Oddly, it takes volunteers, those without portfolio, spending their own money, dedicating their own energies, risking their reputations, their future prospects, and, often their own safety, to make our vaunted constitutional system work.
Think how deeply we have relied on this fragile structure of protection over the last decade, North Carolina’s new dark era. The NAACP has litigated time, after time, after exhaustive and expensive time to invalidate the General Assembly’s efforts to end equal protection of the laws here. The largest, most pervasive and persistent racial gerrymanders in American history. The racially-biased manipulation of the electoral process, the judicial process, the educational process. Private, thinly resourced, but courageous and brilliant citizen volunteers have carried our most central and defining obligations.
Common Cause, I can also attest, doesn’t have two dimes to rub together. But it has litigated daily, for years, to try to assure North Carolina’s actually a democracy. As Phil Berger, David Lewis and Bob Rucho have used every lever of power and deception to crush our democratic institutions, Common Cause and its inspiring kin have manned the barricades. Like the North Carolina NAACP, they too have almost always eventually prevailed, so lawless is the crew that today rules us. But it is singular, even if usual, that the rest of us sit back hoping a selfless posse of do-gooders – the DTH kids, the NAACP, Common Cause, and all their good and various brethren organizations – will guarantee our way of life. But often, too often, that’s precisely what we do.
Our constitution is great. But it’s not self-enforcing.
This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 7:06 AM with the headline "At UNC, the students are leading us. Thank the Lord.."