Toby Harnden
in Salisbury, North Carolina
02 October 2024 7:45pm
More than six decades ago, Dorris “Deedee” Wright was at the forefront of American history. The teenager’s defiant smile in her police mugshot symbolised the confidence of civil rights activists that their dignified struggle to end racial segregation would be successful.
In the final weeks of the tumultuous 2024 presidential election campaign, Ms Wright is once again on the front line, this time working as a Democratic Party activist in Rowan County, a reliably Republican part of the crucial swing state of North Carolina.
She is still smiling—this time at the prospect of Kamala Harris being elected as the first black female president of the United States. “There’s always been women who have led the movement, although the men have gotten the credit,” Ms Wright says.
“It’s a surreal moment, knowing that Kamala is, in a way, standing on my shoulders. Each step one takes is part of a building process. She is the right person at this time in this country.”
Ms Wright can barely bring herself to contemplate the alternative scenario. “I don’t know what will happen to brown and black people if Donald Trump were to become president again,” she says. “I perish the thought.”
In July 1960, Ms Wright, then an 18-year-old high school pupil, was part of the Greenville Eight, five young women and three men—one of them Jesse Jackson, who went on to run for president in 1984—arrested for staging a sit-in at the whites-only library in the South Carolina city.
She had been arrested repeatedly for protesting at swimming pools, lunch counters and churches from which black people were excluded. “The colored library did not have reference books,” says Ms Wright, who went on to study physics and politics at university before taking a graduate degree in psychology.
“If you were doing additional research, you would have to go to the librarian and the colored library had to call the white library, which would detail the books back to us within a day or two days—maybe.”
In 1961, Ms Wright was among nearly 200 arrested for marching on the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina. “The jailer comes through with the newspaper in his back pocket,” she recalls. “I said, ‘May I read your newspaper?’ He said, ‘Yes, go ahead.’ I said,’ I can’t read it in your back pocket’—my being insolent.
“So he threw me in solitary confinement, where I stayed all night, no water, no bathroom breaks, and I guess I cried myself to sleep until the next morning.”
The resulting legal case led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1963. “Edwards versus the state of South Carolina enabled Martin Luther King to protest in Birmingham, Alabama,” says Ms Wright. “It also enabled Donald Trump to protest on the Capitol in Washington DC.”
She chuckles at the irony of her free speech case helping pro-Trump rioters on Jan 6, 2021, as part of an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory two months earlier.
Trump won North Carolina in 2016 and 2020 but the contest there has been thrown into turmoil by claims that Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor, had called himself a “black Nazi” and approved of slavery in lurid postings on a pornography website.
Mr Robinson has not been disavowed by Trump and the scandal threatens to erode the Republican vote. “This may have been a divine intervention for us here in North Carolina,” says Wright, a devout Baptist. Democrats now have high hopes of pocketing North Carolina’s 16 electoral college votes, which could be key in helping Ms Harris amass the 270 needed to win.
The vice president is campaigning hard in the state and neighbouring Georgia, in rural areas as well as traditional Democratic urban strongholds.
Geoffrey Hoy, a former Lutheran pastor who is the Democratic Party chairman in Rowan County, points out that Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, was elected in 2016 with a margin of just 10,000 votes, “Rowan County produced about 24,000 votes for Cooper,” he said. “No matter where you are, you have to get every vote that you can.”
Both Ms Wright and Mr Hoy pride themselves on being friendly towards Trump voters and understanding their concerns. Ms Wright has voted Republican in the past. Her philosophy since childhood has been to avoid anger and bitterness. “It takes too much energy,” she said. “It will weigh you down.”
Her first act in the civil rights movement was in 1957 when she was 15. It was instinctive and perhaps rash but led to a friendship that bridged the racial divide.
At the time, Greenville buses had signs that directed white customers to sit in the front and black customers to sit in the back. One day, Ms Wright got on the bus at the back and saw a white girl sitting in the middle with an empty seat beside her.
Ms Wright knew not to sit in the seat but she put her books on it as she positioned herself to stand in the aisle. The white girl promptly knocked the books off the seat onto the floor. “I’m not a violent person, but I slapped her,” recalled Ms Wright.
“She ran up front and yelled to the bus driver that a n—– hit her. Well, I didn’t respond to that because my mother, who was very well-read, used to say that the word n—– was a behavior, not who you are.”
The bus driver drove to the police station. Both girls got off the bus and sat at the police station waiting for their parents to arrive. “My mother said that you people stink,” the white girl ventured. Ms Wright moved closer to her and asked: “Do you smell me?” The white girl answered that she didn’t. Ms Wright responded: “Sometimes parents say things just to keep us separated.”
“So we became very good friends, as much as we could,” Ms Wright recalled. Her new friend would buy her milkshakes from the “whites only” lunch counter and the pair would sit outside and talk.
At one point, Ms Wright’s activism led her mother to fear that one of them might be killed. They moved to New York and Ms Wright became a self-described nomad, moving to Georgia and then Florida before ending up in Salisbury, which is 53pc white and 37pc black.
She worked as a therapist and psychologist, specialising in treating abused children and battered women.
Several of the Greenville Eight are now ailing. Mr Jackson, 83, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and made a poignant appearance in a wheelchair at the Democratic convention.
Ms Wright, however, is still operating at full tilt, serving on committees, publicising her autobiography, published two years ago, and airing her views on an array of topics. A lifelong smoker, she has a gravelly laugh and is teased by her friends for her habit of swearing—a trait she shares with Ms Harris.
The civil rights veteran spent 15 years campaigning for the restoration of the local Dixonville cemetery, where poor blacks, including slaves, had been buried since 1851. The initiative received broad community support, a sign that old racial wounds had healed.
“Our city council here has two black guys, one a Democrat and one unaffiliated, and a Jewish lawyer,” said Mr Hoy. “A lesbian woman is mayor pro tem and a Republican lady in her 70s is the mayor. That’s about as diverse as it gets for an old Southern town.”
Ms Wright believes that Trump is almost uniquely ill-equipped to unite America. “In the treatment plans, you try to correct the behavior,” she said. “But with a narcissist, there’s no plan for that. He’s a sick puppy.”
A woman in the White House, she argues, would be a welcome change. “A female perspective is different from a male perspective,” she said. “The compassion is there, but the resolve is also there.
“I can’t let fear paralyze me. So you have to work for the better, for the good. Right? With Kamala Harris, she’s most qualified and she knows how to weave this fabric of our country, so to speak. And it is my hope that we will come out with a beautiful quilt of many pieces.”
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