Reexamining Durham's Past Through Music

I wrote a somewhat lengthy(ish) essay about coming back to my piece ‘No Name In The Street’ after a two year delay due to the pandemic

The timeline from the completion of a new orchestra piece to its premiere is, in the scheme of life, a fairly quick one. In the case of most composers, the piece is done a few months or so before the first performance, though we all admit sometimes to cramming the night before a deadline like a term paper; the first rehearsal — the time in which the composer finally gets to hear the piece for the first time — usually occurs about a week before the premiere. The pandemic of course changed this traditional timeline, as it changed all aspects of time for many of us. During the pandemic, orchestras were in most cases the first to shutdown and the last to reopen. Needless to say, dozens of musicians cramped together on a stage in close proximity blowing and spitting and sweating next to one another didn’t transition well into the world of social distancing and face coverings. In the case of a recent piece of mine, No Name In The Street, the normal timeline of weeks or months, stretched out to nearly two years.

But with that expanded time between the completion of the piece and its upcoming premiere next month, a lot changed. According to what I jotted down on the final page of the score, No Name In The Street, a ten minute piece written for the Durham Symphony Orchestra about the near destruction of an all Black neighborhood near Durham, was finished on January 19th of 2020. Roughly a month later, on February 23rd, Ahmaud Arbery went for a jog in his hometown of Brunswick, Georgia and was murdered by three white men in what has now been officially ruled as a racially-motivated federal hate crime. Nineteen days later, in Louisville, Kentucky, Breonna Taylor was murdered by the Louisville Metro Police Department when serving a no knock warrant on the wrong apartment in the middle of the night. And then twelve days later, Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds until he died outside of a Minneapolis, Minnesota grocery store after being suspected of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. The ensuing two years would, at first, show one of the largest mass protests in American history, calling for racial equality and an end to systemic police brutality against black and brown Americans. Then, a reexamination of American history and its roots in white supremacy and systemic racism. After that, a cultural backlash from the conservative right, pushing forward, not dog whistles, but all out assaults on telling the ugly truth about American history and what aspects of that history are still smoldering in our current society.

When I wrote No Name In The Street, few if any school board members knew what “critical race theory” was. Few white Americans could understand why one would want to reallocate funds from police departments to other social programs. I would bargain that a good number of white Americans had little to no knowledge about redlining or other methods in which our government kept our society segregated. There has been a seismic shift in this country, much like after the 1968 murder of MLK and the 1991 beating of Rodney King, in regards to examining who are we as a country and how does race intersect with that idea of who we are collectively. 

I wrote No Name In The Street because of my own ignorance.

St. Joesph’s AME Church in 1911 and 2018

When I was asked by William Curry to write a new piece for the Durham Symphony, I had little to no clue where to start. Having a million ideas and no idea is virtually the same thing when beginning something new; it leaves one frozen and creatively immobile. So in desperation to find something to latch on to, I looked up the concert venue, the Hayti Heritage Center, on the internet. The Hayti Heritage Center was built as an extension to the former St. Joseph AME Church, a National Historical Landmark built in 1891. The church, the space in which the piece would be premiered, was what caught my eye initially. Beautifully frozen in time, the dark brown wood which frames the proscenium arch flows out into the pews and up towards the banisters of the balcony. The ornate stained glass illuminates the equally intricate patterns of the cream and turquoise ceiling. As a resident of the Raleigh-Durham area from birth until college, I had never heard of this church, never heard of the Hayti Heritage Center, never heard of the Hayti District of Durham period. 

And there was a reason why I hadn’t heard about Hayti.

The original NC Mutual Life Insurance Company Building on Parrish Street in Durham (RAL Today)

Shortly after the Civil War, Hayti was founded by formally enslaved African Americans on the southern edge of Durham. Named after Haiti, the first independent black republic on the Western Hemisphere, Hayti quickly grew into the first entirely self-sufficient black community in the U.S. after the Civil War, operating over 200 businesses as well as theaters, schools, hospitals, hotels, and notably the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest and richest African-American company at the time. After several visits to Hayti, Booker T. Washington, who in 1911 penned his Durham, North Carolina: A City of Negro Enterprises, wrote that “in addition to many prosperous doctors, lawyers, preachers and men of other professions, I found some of the most flourishing drug stores, grocery and dry goods stores I had seen anywhere among Negros.” After visiting St. Joesph’s, he noted that “never in all my travels have I seen a church as great as St. Joseph’s.” Washington was frankly astounded by “the information that the white people everywhere encouraged the new Negros to buy and own property.” Along side Tulsa, Oklahoma’s so-called “Black Wall Street,” Hayti was a successful example of what was possible for freedmen during Reconstruction; that there could be, at least in the eyes of Washington, successful racial integration in the south.

But in 1958, under the guise of “urban renewal,” North Carolina Highway 147, also known as the Durham Freeway, was constructed. The path of the new highway was designed to go straight through the business district of Hayti. By design, more than 200 acres of Hayti, which housed many of the businesses Booker T. Washington first saw as the future of a truly integrated America, were cleared for the Durham Freeway. In his 2017 book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein documents how cities across the country from Detroit to Miami to Camden systemically placed new highways through predominately black communities. The Chrysler Expressway or I-75 in Detroit, for example, displaced “4,000 families, 87 percent of whom where African American.” He goes on to note that “federal appeals courts concluded that HUD officials knew that the highway would disproportionately destroy African American homes and make no provisions for assisting them in finding new lodging.” Barbara Perry, on returning to Hayti during the construction of the Durham Freeway, referred to it as “a nightmare, worse than pictures of a war torn or burned out riot area. Who caused all this?” According to research done by Bull City 150, after the freeway’s construction, over 4,000 families and 500 businesses were displaced from the once prosperous district. Those who were renting, and even those who previously owned their own homes, were relocated to housing projects. 

Because the piece was going to be premiered at St. Joesph’s, I wanted to write something that was a sort of memorial to that space. No Name In The Street borrows its title from a collection of essays by James Baldwin and is, in essence, about the history of Hayti. The piece begins with a long melodic solo line in the strings (based upon spelling the word H-A-Y-T-I into musical pitches). This “Hayti theme” grows and fleshes out into a broad, sweeping orchestral statement. This moment is slowly taken over by the brass and winds which begin to distort and obscure the theme. The theme, now abstracted by the winds and brass, only occasionally can be heard. The piece reaches a great climax and is abruptly cut off. The “Hayti theme” is now heard in its most clear and intimate form played by a solo string quintet. Slowly, over time, the theme begins to get erased by the orchestra, note by note, until one solo viola is left trying to sing out.

Hayti during the construction of NC Highway 147

But how was it that I, as a student going to school about 20 minutes away, had never heard about this? Having whole years of public school, in my case fourth and eighth grades, devoted to North Carolina history, how was this never brought up? These were the questions I asked myself two years ago and now these questions are really at the core of this national conversation about how race is talked about in schools. Rather than discuss it, states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and indeed North Carolina, are passing legislation that doesn’t simply say don’t mention these historical facts, but rather, don’t talk about race, period. In the eyes of these legislators, race was not and should not be a factor in teaching history. The goal is to make history race neutral which is to wildly distort history. And contrary to their talking points, there is no boogeyman lurking around public school corridors hellbent on making white children feel bad about themselves. That argument is the same thread which binds this current backlash to that of the Boston busing protests of the 1970s and to the backlash all over the south after Brown versus Board of Education. In this case history doesn’t just rhyme, it is in many cases saying the exact same thing. 

I’m still wrestling with another conversation which has come into focus after the murder of George Floyd, that being, is this piece a story that I even have the right to tell? Is it my piece to write? And I still don’t know. Is music so abstract an art form that it frees me from criticism unlike white novelists who write about marginalized populations or playwrights that write about urban renewal? And am I hiding behind that abstraction? I briefly thought about discarding this piece after the summer of 2020 in favor of writing something new. I had time on my hands being locked down and free from teaching responsibilities. But ultimately I kept the piece largely as is. My hope is that, first off, the piece is a worthwhile ten or so minutes for the listener. But secondly, I hope, if anything, this piece gives an artistic perspective to something that has sadly become more inflammatory over the intervening two years. The main question of the piece, as I see it, is what happens when a community fails to discuss their own history and erases it from memory. My lack of education on this topic is proof positive that as a student in NC public schools, I was shielded from this history. This piece was written out of that initial ignorance and because the history of the Hayti District was to some degree successfully erased. That in and of itself is the argument plaguing school boards right now. And it’s not just the race neutral teaching of history that has become inflammatory but Durham’s contemporary problems of housing affordability, single family zoning laws, and gentrification which were at the root of the “urban renewal” movement decades ago which led to the construction of the Durham Freeway.

In all likelihood, on the day of the premiere, I will drive on the Durham Freeway to get to the Hayti Heritage Center and will probably leave on that same road, as will most audience members. Maybe we all will, at the very least, look at it differently.