Articles
In Florida, Fighting One Public Nuisance with Another
(June 3, 2012) In Florida, they are as much a part of the landscape as palm trees and oceanfront hotels: plastic signs cluttering roadsides with messages like “We Buy Houses!” “Junk Cars!” and “Avoid Foreclosure!” But now, worried about the impact on tourism and the state’s natural beauty, some coastal communities have begun aggressive campaigns against the signs — by robocalling the advertisers’ phone numbers. “It’s the only crime I know of where a person deliberately leaves their phone number behind,” said Mayor Peter Bober of Hollywood, which uses computer software to call the phone numbers, up to 20 times per day, until offenders pay a $75 fine. “They want us to call. So let’s call. And keep calling.” Think of it as fighting one nuisance with another.
read moreSlave Graveyard May Block a Walmart’s Construction
(May 16, 2012) FLORENCE, Ala. — Dianne O’Neal still lives on the rustic cattle farm that her husband’s family has owned since his great-great-great-grandfather purchased the land in the 1830s. She still stays in a log cabin built from chestnut trees that his ancestors chopped by hand. But one aspect of the family’s long history here in northern Alabama is not so well preserved: Coffee Cemetery, an overgrown one-acre graveyard where the ancestors of her husband, Edward O’Neal, and their slaves are buried. That has become a pressing matter in Florence because Walmart plans to build a store right next to the graveyard. The O’Neals’ biggest concern is that nobody knows exactly where their ancestors’ 80 slaves are buried.
read moreAt This Atlanta Barbershop, the Conversation Goes on 24/7
(April 29, 2012) ATLANTA — It is 1 a.m., but the night is young for Dre Rosenberg, a 22-year-old clothing stylist here. Later, he will grab drinks with friends and hit the nightclubs in Atlanta’s wealthiest neighborhood, Buckhead. But first he needs a haircut. So Mr. Rosenberg goes to one of the few places still open at that hour: the 24-hour barbershop Anytime Cutz. “Three a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.,” he said. “It’s where you find your friends before the end of your night.” This is the barbershop that never closes. And that has made it something of a cult institution in this Southern capital that relishes its fashion and night life.
read moreRepublican Primary Creates a Rift at The Citadel
Here's a video produced for the Times with Ben Werschkul about how the 2012 Republican presidential primary divided students with different political beliefs at the normally united Citadel campus.
read moreCitadel Split by Republican Presidential Primary
(Jan. 21, 2012) CHARLESTON, S.C. — At the Citadel, cadets wear matching uniforms, march in lockstep and endure rigorous physical training together. But these days, the Republicans among them — and they are overwhelmingly Republican — are divided on a crucial issue: whom to support as the next commander in chief. The Citadel, a public military college, is an almost mandatory stop for presidential candidates, especially Republicans. Its fortress-like buildings and clean-cut students make an ideal backdrop as politicians court South Carolina voters, 9 percent of whom are veterans. But unlike in the 2008 election, when the Citadel and its powerful alumni united behind Senator John McCain, the current cadets are still making up their minds.
read moreBefore Presidential Primary, Republicans Reach Out to Black Voters
(Jan. 17, 2012) MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — On Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Newt Gingrich spoke to black voters about growing up in segregated Georgia. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said he had appointed a “descendant of slaves” as the Texas Supreme Court’s first black justice. And Mitt Romney said “we must never rest” until Americans are judged for their merits, not their race. The Republican presidential candidates spent the holiday on Monday reaching out to wary black Americans. In the struggle for every last vote, some candidates were hoping to appeal to a small number of black voters in the South Carolina primary on Saturday — even if those voters end up supporting President Obama in the fall. The King holiday gave the all-white Republican field an opportunity to speak about race — and their work on civil rights — as the candidates try to unseat the nation’s first black president. But it is a challenge to reach black voters in South Carolina, where they made up only 2 percent of Republican primary voters in 2008.
read moreUneasy Neighbors in a Southern Gothic Tale
(Jan. 13, 2012) LAURENS, S.C. — The Redneck Shop has been selling Confederate bikinis and white satin robes on the historic courthouse square in this former mill town for so long that most people have learned to ignore it. “The only people who really get caught up and interested in the store are from out of town,” said Sharon Brownlee, the mayor, who is white. “The store causes no problems that I’m aware of.” That is a matter of perspective. Since 1996, the Rev. David Kennedy, who is black, has been fighting the shop and the Ku Klux Klan leader who runs it. Now, in a quirk of fate laced with lawsuits, religious conversions and a small-town Southern narrative Harper Lee might deliver, a black pastor will eventually control what just might be the most famous white supremacist shop in America.
read moreAt Waffle House, a Side of Drama with Breakfast
(Nov. 27, 2011) AVONDALE ESTATES, Ga. — The two men accused of robbing a string of Waffle House restaurants in Georgia and Alabama had a routine. They placed to-go orders, and after the food was cooked, the police say, they pulled out guns and demanded all the store’s cash. Sometimes they ate, sometimes they did not. “Another day, another Waffle House robbery,” began one article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as 18 Waffle Houses were robbed this summer. Throughout the South, it was not so much the three-week crime spree that caught people’s attention. It was the location. Waffle House, a ubiquitous chain of yellow-roofed diners, is as much a fixture of Southern life as the grits, hash browns and crispy waffles that it serves all day, every day, even on Christmas. In Georgia, where the 1,600-store chain originated, it is hard to find an Interstate exit without the restaurant’s yellow block-letter sign nearby. In the Atlanta area alone, there are 230 locations, all offering heaping portions, strong coffee and jukeboxes that play songs about Waffle House. And federal emergency officials even use what they call the Waffle House Index to determine how severe natural disasters are in the South. If a local Waffle House is closed, along with a Home Depot or a Wal-Mart, it indicates a longer recovery process. But in recent weeks, bad news has kept coming for the restaurant chain.
read moreZombie Apocalypse? Atlanta Says Bring It On
(Oct. 19, 2011) ATLANTA — Welcome to the Zombie Capital of the World. That, at least, is what Atlanta magazine, the glossy monthly, has called this Southern city. It is not only that “The Walking Dead,” the hit zombie show that began its second season on AMC on Sunday, is filmed and set here. Or that Atlanta holds some of the nation’s largest zombie film festivals, zombie parades and zombie haunted houses. Or that even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that staid Atlanta-based federal agency, joined in the fun with a tongue-in-cheek guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse. It is mainly that there are Atlantans like Kevin Galbraith, 24, a Georgia State University student who is one of the 6,000 people who applied to be zombie extras on “The Walking Dead.” The pay is meager, the hours are long, the weather is steamy and even their friends barely recognize them staggering around in the background, coated in fake blood and corpse-gray paint. And only 200 will be chosen each season. “You have to be the sort of kid who grew up practicing your zombie walk in the mirror,” said Mr. Galbraith, a lanky, 115-pound horror fan who beat the odds and was cast in both seasons. “I feel more alive than ever when I’m dead.”
read moreBlogger for Al Qaeda Killed in Drone Strike
(Oct. 1, 2011) CHARLOTTE, N.C. — From his parents’ basement in a part of town where homes have lots of bedrooms and most children go to college, Samir Khan blogged his way into the highest circles of Al Qaeda, waging a media war he believed was as important as the battles with guns on the ground. His parents — by all accounts a low-key, respected couple who had moved south from Queens in 2004 — were worried about the increasingly radical nature of their son’s philosophy and the increasing media reports that exposed it. They turned more than once to members of their religious communities to impress upon their college-aged son the perils of such thinking and behavior. It did not work. In 2009, he left his comfortable life in Charlotte for Yemen, started a slick magazine for jihadists called Inspire that featured political and how-to articles written in a comfortable American vernacular, and continued to digitally dodge government and civilian efforts to stop his self-described “media jihad.”
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