Durham

That year 125 people gathered to denounce the attack and to demand justice for the murder of Ronald "Sonny" Antonevitch. That gathering is considered the first public demonstration for gay civil rights in North Carolina. [Discover Durham] It was followed on 28 June 1986 by a march led by the Triangle Lesbian and Gay Alliance on Duke University's campus — the state's first NC Pride March. A thousand people walked from Ninth Street to the Durham Reservoir on Hillsborough Road under the theme "Out Today, Out to Stay". [Discover Durham] Kym Register wrote the song "Little River" in 2016 about the 1981 killing and recorded it with Meltdown Rodeo. Michael Penny appears in the video, which began a friendship between them. [Discover Durham] By 2025 what began as that first march had become Pride: Durham, NC — three days each September of performances, pop-up markets, a parade and gatherings at venues across the city. [Discover Durham] In the 1990s the city's music scene ran on flyers stapled to phone poles and word of mouth, through house shows and clandestine DIY rooms. Most of the Triangle's musical attention was on Chapel Hill, and Durham was treated as the scrappy sibling. [Discover Durham] Local squats hosting shows included the Stronghold, The Couch House and The Layabout. In the late 1990s and early 2000s squats, house shows and warehouses were pivotal to the punk scene, and a touring circuit ran exclusively through DIY spaces across the South. [Discover Durham] Bull City Headquarters was a venue and community space open only from 2007 to 2008, run by a collective including Kym Register and Chaz Martenstein of Chaz's Bull City Records. It held local and touring bands — the Mountain Goats, Des Ark, Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship?, Kimya Dawson, The Screaming Females — and also a bike co-op, workshops, classes and community meetings. [Discover Durham] Mr. Lady Records was founded in Durham by Kaia Wilson of The Butchies with Tammy Rae Carland, ran from 1996 to 2004, and released national acts including Le Tigre, Tara Jane O'Neil and Tracy and the Plastics. OutSmart magazine once called it "queercore's strongest label". [Discover Durham] Register puts weight on making that continuity visible. [Discover Durham] As of 2015 Cat's Cradle and Local 506 were the bona fide clubs a Triangle band would try to get booked at. [INDY Week] In the early twentieth century Parrish Street in Durham was a four-block business district propelled by the city's African American businessmen, nationally recognised under the nickname "Black Wall Street". It complemented the Hayti community just to the south, which was the principal residential district for Black Durham residents and the centre of the city's educational, cultural and religious life. Urban renewal in the 1960s had a destructive effect on the Black business community, especially on Hayti, though by then the heyday of Parrish Street had passed. [NCpedia] John Merrick, Dr. Aaron Moore and C. C. Spaulding — the "Triumvirate" at the head of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the nation's largest Black-owned insurance company — moved their headquarters to Parrish Street in 1906, joined in 1907 by Mechanics and Farmers Bank, founded by R. B. Fitzgerald and W. G. Pearson. The Mutual leaders had other ventures including real estate and textiles. W. E. B. Du Bois recorded an unparalleled level of Black entrepreneurship when he visited in 1912. [NCpedia] A North Carolina state highway historical marker, G-116, was cast in 2003 and stands at US 15/501 South Business (Mangum Street) at Parrish Street in Durham, recording that businesses owned by African Americans lined Parrish Street in the early decades of the 1900s. [NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources] The factory later known as "Old Bull" was completed in 1874 for W. T. Blackwell and Julian Carr. An L-shaped masonry Italianate structure, it was the first brick tobacco factory in the United States, built in a town of predominantly small frame buildings and muddy streets, with a factory whistle said to sound like a bull and a bell tower that rang on the hour. [Open Durham] American Tobacco shut down its Durham operations in 1987 and three separate redevelopment attempts failed before Capitol Broadcasting took an option on the complex in 1999 and closed on the property in April 2002. The renovation was planned in two phases around a central pedestrian area with a 'river' running along the former rail passage through the campus, and the first tenant, Glaxo, moved in by June 2004. [Open Durham] The original W. T. Blackwell & Company factory building, portions of it built from 1874, was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1977 and forms the historic core of the American Tobacco site. The $200 million redevelopment of the campus helped jumpstart the revitalisation of downtown Durham; anchor tenants have included North Carolina Public Radio, Duke University, Burt's Bees and the Durham YMCA, and the American Underground was added as a tech hub for startups in 2010. [NCpedia] The Golden Belt Manufacturing Co. began in 1887 inside a portion of the Bull Durham Tobacco Factory, making the cloth bags the tobacco was sold in. The bags had been sewn by hand by dozens of independent bag-makers, primarily women working out of their homes, until Julian Carr funded William H. Kerr to develop a machine, patented in 1885, that cut and sewed the cloth. [Open Durham] In 1901 a new factory was built for Golden Belt across from Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery Mill No. 1 at Angier and Main Streets, divided into a cotton mill (Building 1) and a bag mill (Building 2), with fifty mill houses constructed to the east to house families. The company employed 700 people, predominantly female, and much of the finishing work — stringing and tagging bags — was still done at home by women and children until the operation was mechanised by 1912. [Open Durham] Golden Belt closed and, after its owner Brown and Williamson failed to attract a buyer, the facility was donated to the Durham Housing Authority in 1996. The southern portion of the complex was sold to Andy Rothschild of Scientific Properties in October 2006 for $2.6 million, for an adaptive re-use as artist studios, apartments, retail and office space; renovation began in mid-2007 and in July 2008 the complex opened with 35 artist studios and 37 apartments alongside office space for the city of Durham. [Open Durham] In 1868 Edian Markham, an African Methodist Episcopal missionary and former slave, and five others established a church on the Fayetteville Street land the Hayti Heritage Center now occupies, buying the property from Minerva Fowler. Their first place of worship was a brush arbour, then a log structure that appears to have served as the first school of any kind for African Americans in Durham. The cornerstone of the present brick church was laid in 1891, to a design by the architect Samuel Linton Leary, with bricks from the Richard Fitzgerald brickyard, and the historic inventory describes it as a highly eclectic work combining Richardsonian Romanesque massing with Gothic Revival and Neo-Classical elements. [Open Durham] Along with the rest of Hayti the church was slated for demolition by Urban Renewal, and the congregation moved south on Fayetteville Street. Efforts to save the structure produced the St. Joseph's Historic Foundation, incorporated in 1975 to preserve the sanctuary and adapt it for cultural and civic events; the building was placed on the National Register in August 1976 and demolition was averted. Voters approved $2 million in bond money in 1996 to convert it into a performance hall, and after a restoration designed by Durham's Freelon Group it reopened in 2001 with a capacity of 450. [Open Durham] From the late nineteenth century until the 1940s the Hayti District was prosperous both socially and economically, and carried the reputation of "The Black Capitol of the South". The construction of Highway 147 and the urban renewal initiatives that followed displaced or disrupted over 4,000 homes and 500 Black-owned businesses; St. Joseph AME Church survived and is today one of Hayti's oldest original structures. [Discover Durham] The Hayti Heritage Center's main floor holds the St. Joseph's Performance Hall, the Lyda Moore Merrick Art Gallery and the Claronelle K. Trapp Brown Community Room; the second floor holds the balcony added in the 1999 Freelon Group restoration, two classrooms and a historic dance studio named for Baba Chuck Davis, founder of the African American Dance Ensemble, which found its home within the building. [Discover Durham] Julian Francis Abele, an African American architect who was chief designer of the Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer from 1908, designed the buildings of both new Duke University campuses in Durham: the Georgian Revival Woman's College on the original Trinity site, now East Campus, which opened in 1927, and the Collegiate Gothic campus for undergraduate men and the professional schools, now West Campus, which opened in 1930. He had been the first of his race to earn a degree from the School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania, in 1902. The Duke commission was the Trumbauer firm's only work in the South and its largest project. [NCSU Libraries, North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary] West Campus was built of native volcanic stone from a quarry in Hillsborough, chosen for its varied hues and for the economy of its proximity, and its signature building is the Duke Chapel, sited on the highest point with a 210-foot tower placed unusually at the front of the building over the narthex and faced in Indiana limestone. Towers of various designs mark the important buildings and no two are alike. [NCSU Libraries, North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary] The Carolina was segregated, with African American patrons allowed only in the balcony. Through 1962 a rolling line protest ran for months, as African Americans would attempt to buy tickets to the whites-only section and, when refused, return to the back of the line to try again. The theatre closed for renovation by 1989 and reopened in the early 1990s, with a separate movie theatre built to the south of the original, which primarily hosts live performances. [Open Durham]

“That was what Pride in Durham was born out of. The protest is now a parade. And so, when I wrote a song about it, it became a way to spread this info and we got Michael Penny to be in the video and that started a relationship between us and it was very sweet. And now people have learned about that story through that song.” [Discover Durham]

“There were house shows then because houses were more affordable back then,” [Discover Durham]

“BCHQ came together because we were all looking for something. Some people were focused on studio spaces while I booked hardcore and punk shows and then there was the bike co-op…. all of these things just came together.” [Discover Durham]

“I feel the importance of uplifting a historical connection to queer resistance and community spaces in Durham because I know that especially for young folks, it always feels like it's happening to you first and there's a loneliness in that, but just having these roots, and all of these people who've been here forever, fighting to make Durham a safe queer place, it is important to lift up those stories and histories.” [Discover Durham]

“it is precisely the opposite spirit in places like Atlanta” [NCpedia]

“did the work of 42 women.” [Open Durham]

“never in all my travels have I seen a church as great as St. Joseph’s.” [Open Durham]

“harmonious marriage of seemingly incongruous elements—the regular Beaux Arts plan of intersecting axes and open and closed quadrangles, and the irregular forms and varied motifs of the late Gothic Revival style.” [NCSU Libraries, North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary]