Minrose Gwin: Parallels to Jim Crow era

Regarding the April 11 news article “Meet the business leaders who helped broker HB2 compromise”: It is telling and disturbing and, yes, infuriating, that our elected officials in North Carolina will listen to CEOs with deep pockets rather than to all of the rest of us – LGBT and straight, professors and scholars, teachers and students, pastors and doctors, workers and parents, old and young – who protested House Bill 2 not on grounds that it was bad for business or entertainment or sports but that it was bad, period. Discrimination of this sort is just plain wrong.

As a professor and researcher who teaches and writes about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, I see many troubling parallels between the current state of affairs in North Carolina and the Jim Crow South of the post-Reconstruction period. Our Republican-dominated legislature has become notorious for its mean-spirited, self-serving legislation designed to discriminate on the basis of sexuality and sexuality identity, race, and class.

Those of us who have sat on the cold hard marble floors of our state legislative halls, which our tax dollars paid for, and watched the guys in $1,000 suits walk by, ignoring us, still live here and still pay taxes and still vote. And we are still demanding our seat at the table.

This story was originally published April 15, 2017 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Minrose Gwin: Parallels to Jim Crow era."