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Siler City Elementary used to be a great school, said Kay Staley, a grandmother whose grandchildren transferred this year. "Now it's suffering and it's because of the problem with Hispanics." She offered a solution. "Maybe they need their alternative schools until they learn English and then we'd be glad to have them come to this school system. We paid for this school, it's from our taxes, not from the Hispanics'."

"I don't have a problem with the Mexicans or the whites or nobody," said Annette Jordan, an African-American parent. "But I do have a problem when my daughter comes home from school and says the teacher didn't have time to teach me or show me how to do my homework because she had to take up all her time to teach those Mexicans because they don't understand." Jordan said if she had her way she would pull her daughter from the school, too.

Teachers at the schools pleaded with the school board to end the district's open transfer policy and stop the white flight. "The bottom line is they've allowed for these transfers which has taken away a lot of our white population," said Becky Lane, who's been a first-grade teacher at the school for more than 20 years.

The school board took a hard line with the transfer policy. "I don't think changing the transfer policy is going to make those white parents that are scared to death to have their kid be the only white kid in the classroom stay," said Susan Helmer, a school board member.

But there are signs that the divisions could eventually be healed. Last fall, Rick Givens, the chairman of the county commissioners, was the man responsible for the commissioners' sending a letter to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service asking for help in deporting undocumented workers. The letter complained that "more and more of our resources are being siphoned from other pressing needs so that we can provide assistance to immigrants who have little or no possessions."

The letter was like gasoline on a fire. Hispanics feared they would be deported and pulled their children from schools. The letter seemed to legitimize the townsfolk's anti-immigrant feelings.

"We just wanted to send a message to let them know we're going to start looking," said Givens, a retired airline pilot.

But then Givens and 25 state and local officials went to Mexico for a weeklong fact-finding trip sponsored by the North Carolina Center for International Understanding, a program of the University of North Carolina. Givens felt humbled by the experience and changed his position.

"I still say illegal is illegal, but I found out it wasn't just a simple black-and-white issue," he said, promising to concentrate less on immigration law enforcement and more on "how we can work with the people that are here to help integrate them to our way of living."

The turning point for Givens came when his group visited a ramshackle school 30 minutes from Puebla. There he met a crippled student who desperately wanted to continue his education but could not afford to. Givens pledged to help pay for his schooling on the spot and donated $500. He is also donating 1,000 books for another school's library.

At the February rally, Duke denounced Givens as a turncoat, and supporters brandished signs asking for the recall of "the traitor Rick Givens."

Meanwhile, some African-Americans, many of whom worked in the chicken plants and have since moved on to better jobs, decided they wanted to support the Latinos but had no way to reach out to them.

"I found it so hard to put my hands on someone in that community, even with the clergy, to say, 'This is Rev. Thompson, what's going on?'" said Rev. Brian Thompson, Union Grove AME Zion church. "I think we're just so separated at this point and are foreign to each other that there isn't enough communication." Thompson is organizing a rally to combat growing anti-Latino sentiment.

Duke did not gain a lot of new local support at the February rally. The crowd's attention wandered when his speech traveled beyond the sphere of Chatham County to places like Israel.

After the rally, I asked Duke why it was held in front of City Hall and not in front of one of the chicken plants. He flippantly replied, "Maybe we'll head there next."

But they didn't. They headed to the Golden Corral, to have a lunch meeting and celebrate further dividing the town. I showed up, and watched as Duke walked back to his table with a plate full of fried chicken. And I just watched him, thinking that despite the rhetoric, the vitriol and the trumped-up worries about Latinos destroying the town, even David Duke wants his chicken.
salon.com | April 4, 2000

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