Good day and welcome to DKos Asheville. This is the weekly DKos Asheville open thread for Saturday, October 15th. We try to get together every weekend to share with everyone what we're all up to in Western North Carolina and beyond.
We hope this group and others serve to invigorate us locally and regionally here on Daily Kos, building on the sense of community that's grown through our online engagement.
DKos Asheville and other local and state groups can give us all a better sense of connection, a better understanding of who we stand with, work with and share with. We hope this local and wider community can help leverage our orange passion for progressive politics to move the county forward.
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Daily Kos fights for a progressive America by empowering its community and allies with information and tools to directly impact the political process.
Please jump the fold for Meet up and local news. The weather is fine!
DKos Asheville October Meet Up
What: A Daily Kos meet up for DK members and interested parties before the Moral Mountain Monday rally in downtown Asheville.
When: Monday, October 24th — 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: Asheville
Why: Connecting face to face, sharing information, getting inspired and adding to the crowd that is there to support Reverend Barber the week early voting starts.
Food: White Duck Taco (Recommened by Markos)
The Downtown Duck is adjacent to Pack Square and easily walkable from any hotel or parking garage. The Biltmore Ave Parking garage is next door. There is a pet friendly courtyard seating 50 in the back of the restaurant.
12 Biltmore Avenue
Asheville, NC 28801 (828) 232-9191
Fun: Yes Family: Yes
Attendees:
randallt, Joieau, davehouck, Lamont Cranston, SteelerGrrl, SteelerGuy, Gordon20024, Otteray Scribe, Burns Lass
Maybees: TexDem, WheelieGuy
Click here to add your name
Mountain People’s Assembly
From Mountain People’s Assembly
Join us for Mountain Moral Monday 2016 at Pack Square Park in downtown Asheville.
When: Monday, October 24 – 4-6 pm
Where: Pack Square Park/Roger McGuire Green
Who: Keynote speaker Rev. Dr. William Barber, President NC-NAACP
If you would like to volunteer for this inspiring event, please email us here.
On Sept. 15, local business owner Rosetta Star Buan and a vanful of youth volunteers struck out for the Red Warrior Camp on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation with a trailer of outdoor kitchen equipment in tow. On Facebook, she explained the mission: “I have been tasked to deliver a trove of industrial-sized restaurant equipment that has previously been used to feed people on the ground during [Hurricanes] Katrina and Sandy, and many other smaller events. … We have equipment to prepare food for over 1,000 at a meal.”
Buan and her crew arrived at Standing Rock in the early morning hours on Sept. 17. Several days later, on Sept. 23, she took to Facebook once more, this time posting a video of a young Dakotas local, Herman Singh, expressing his protest of the oil pipeline. Her video went viral, garnering over half a million views by press time.
When asked why the Standing Rock protest should matter to people in Asheville, Buan replies, “The Standing Rock movement matters because we all drink water, breathe air, and eat food. …. “Our message is: We do not consent to the poisoning of the planet any longer. We need air. We need water. These are things that every human and every living being needs.’”
From the same story with permission: WNC locals support protesters at Standing Rock
The North Dakota prairies — where members of the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies have been protesting the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline since August — lie more than 1,500 miles from Asheville. Even so, the indigenous protest movement has resonated with many in WNC, and locals have found creative ways to support the protests. ‘Go back home and tell this story’
Three UNC-Asheville professors traveled to North Dakota on Sept. 2 to join the protests for a three-day period: Gilliam Jackson of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, an adjunct lecturer who teaches Cherokee language; Trey Adcock, a Cherokee Nation citizen who is assistant professor of education and director of American Indian Outreach; and Juan Sánchez Martinez, assistant professor of Spanish. “Having never been to the Dakotas,” recalls Adcock, “I experienced multiple impressions at once. The beauty of the landscape contributed to a feeling of entering sacred space. At the same time, as we got closer to Sacred Stone Camp, the roadblocks and security presence took on an increasingly militarized feeling. That’s when the seriousness of the situation really hit us.”
ASHEVILLE – After hearing from candidates, their surrogates, newscasters, reporters, chatty friends and co-workers, TV commercial narrators sounding like the voice of doom and their loony Uncle Al posting his thoughts four times a day on Facebook, voters finally get their say in large numbers starting Thursday. That's the first day of early voting across North Carolina. The early voting period will run until Nov. 5, then Election Day itself is Nov. 8. (Some voters have already cast absentee ballots.) Here's information to help voters navigate the process.
The history of the African-American vote in Western North Carolina is “a long and tangled thing,” says Dr. Dan Pierce, history professor at UNC-Asheville. In Nash’s recent book, Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), the historian chronicles the political and social struggles that arose in Western North Carolina in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Nash argues that there remains a significant gap in our understanding of this history.
When the Civil War began in 1861, African-Americans made up roughly 10 percent of the mountain counties’ populations. “That fact,” writes Nash, “led many popular observers and historians to conclude that the region was less committed to slavery, hence less devoted to the Confederacy and finally, less affected by emancipation.” Both Nash and Pierce concur that this is far from the case — that racial tension filled the valleys and mountains of Western North Carolina before, during and after the Civil War, leading to intimidation, violence, murder and eventually the disenfranchisement of the African-American vote.
This issue would not be rectified until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, before again finding its way back into the national conversation following the initial passing and subsequent invalidation of North Carolina’s voter ID law.
Have a great weekend!