Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

Erasing lines, breaking down barriers

Posted on April 16, 2009April 16, 2009 by Staff

By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer

Once city lines are drawn, they become fences, says Mark Dorosin of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, fences that isolate communities and deny their residents basic amenities. Dorosin and the center aim to help communities break down those fences.

The UNC Center for Civil Rights was founded in 2002 by pioneering civil rights attorney Julius Chambers and Jack Boger, current dean of the UNC Law School, with which the center is affiliated. The center, now located in Carrboro at Carr Mill Mall, provides advocacy, litigation and research in defense of civil rights and social justice. Chambers and deputy director Charles Daye provide tactical and strategic leadership; Dorosin is a senior attorney.

“By being affiliated with the university,” Dorosin says, “the mission was always to help train the next generation of civil rights lawyers to go out and do this work after they left law school.”

Dorosin came to the center last April via a circuitous route. He arrived in the South from Long Island in 1983 to attend Duke, where he gathered both an undergraduate degree in political science and a taste for progressive politics (divestment from South Africa was the rallying issue on campus at that time).

“I grew up in a fairly homogeneous community, socio-economically,” Dorosin says. “At Duke, I was exposed to a much different range of folks and became acutely aware of the impact of class and what I felt was the ability and responsibility to make some direct and meaningful social impact with my life.”

He’d always intended to be a lawyer, but decided that to go straight from undergrad to law school would be a sell out. And though he wanted to teach, he felt that “if you were going to teach, you should be a master of your subject.” So he earned a master’s in history at UNC-Greensboro, writing his thesis on COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program, and the New Left, then taught high school history in Asheboro.

Though the work with students was rewarding, Dorosin was disillusioned with the “shocking” bureaucracy, and left teaching after a year to manage a video store in Greensboro.

Then came law school. He subsequently became, in order, a partner in a civil rights law firm (McSurely, Dorosin & Osment, in Chapel Hill), bar owner/manager (Hell, also in Chapel Hill), Carrboro alderman, interim director of the UNC’s Community Development Law Clinic, loan servicing officer at the nonprofit Self-Help in Durham and supervising attorney at the Duke Law School Community Enterprise Clinic.

Throughout, Dorosin never lost his dedication to the pursuit of civil rights and social justice. In the UNC Center for Civil Rights, he came upon an opportunity to do work that offered both the immediacy of working with clients and the potential for having a broader impact.

‘Conscious’ exclusion

The center has two primary areas of focus.
The first is education, addressing “the lingering effects of school segregation and combating what we have seen as the re-segregation of public schools,” Dorosin explains on a recent weekday afternoon, seated behind the desk of his appropriately cluttered Carrboro office.

The second area is community development, Dorosin’s purview.

“As cities have grown and expanded,” he says, “they’ve made conscious decisions on where they want to go to annex property, and in many cases those decisions have, I would say, deliberately excluded low-wealth and minority communities.”

He cites work done at the nonprofit Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities in Mebane: “They’ve done some really great maps about this phenomenon, where they’ve mapped municipal boundaries, where water and sewer lines are, and then how the racial demographics match up.”

What they show,” says Dorosin, are examples from around the state where cities have extended water and sewer lines around minority communities to annex wealthier, white communities.”

What then happens, he says, is that these lower-income communities remain underdeveloped.

“These lines become fences, and these communities become invisible.”
Dorosin says that often these communities are immediately adjacent to city boundaries: “It’s not a joke that it’s the wrong side of the tracks. The railroad track is the line.”

Such is the case with Midway, an historically African-American community on the outskirts of Aberdeen in Moore County. But through grassroots organizing, and with the center’s assistance, the Midway community worked with the town of Aberdeen to gain a federal grant to install water and sewer lines.

Many excluded communities are within a municipality’s extraterritorial jurisdiction (EJT). This gives city governments some land-use and zoning control over them, but residents can’t vote in municipal elections.

“There was a legislative study commission on ETJs in the ‘50s,” says Dorosin, “and it seems clear … that what was envisioned was that one reason to justify giving cities control beyond their boundaries was that these areas would eventually become part of the cities.”

But: “What happens, in fact, is that they have this control and they don’t have any intent to annex them,” leaving them in a “sort of netherworld.”

“So not only do you not have positive development in these communities, they’re also ripe for the siting of negative-impact development, like a landfill. And then you have your Rogers Road situation.”

Dorosin refers to the Rogers-Eubanks community, and its demand for public services after more than 35 years of living alongside the Orange County Landfill, as “a textbook example” of exclusion.

“It’s really the same pattern,” he says. “It’s a low-wealth community that’s between these two municipalities that no one really wants to take responsibility for – and then it’s exacerbated by the fact that [the landfill] was placed in the middle of the community.”

Dorosin has held preliminary discussions with Rogers-Eubanks community residents about what assistance the center might provide.

The issues the community faces, he says, “are not situations that sprang up overnight.”

And, says Dorosin, while the consequences of institutionalized discrimination are often just as severe as they ever were, that discrimination is less overt. So claims of discrimination are more easily dismissed out of hand.

“You can’t draw a line at yesterday and say, ‘Well, from here everything looks fine. We’re not going to do anything based on race anymore.’”

The center’s work, he says, is focused on raising public awareness of the “continuing disparate effects” of “ongoing institutionalized discrimination” and in developing remedies for that discrimination.

Attempted remedies that don’t take discrimination and its effects into account, he says, will ultimately fail to create a more equitable society.

No formula

Dorosin says that the center never goes into a community saying, “This is what you should do; we know what’s best.”

Though patterns emerge, and lessons can be learned from them, “Each community is different; each community’s needs are different.”

“I think the most important thing is that there is some organic community momentum and desire to work together to make some kind of change.”

The center has recently worked with three Moore County communities – Midway, Jackson Hamlet and Waynor Road – and in all three cases, community-born organizations have convinced the local governments to seek grants for requested services.

“I think that all of those community organizations have done an outstanding job of really educating the local governments in understanding the nature of this issue and its effect on these people who are their neighbors.”
The communities are now seeking annexation. There are two ways for that to happen: voluntarily and involuntarily.

Under voluntary annexation, property owners initiate the process. A significant hurdle, though, is that 100 percent of property owners must agree to it – which can be particularly difficult in communities where property sometimes passes down without a will, often to multiple heirs, who might not even be known.

Several bills recently have been introduced in the state Legislature. One proposal is to lower the 100 percent requirement for communities that fall below a certain economic benchmark.

There are a couple of potential formulas, but the general idea is that if, say, a majority of the community is below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, the signature requirement is lowered to 75 percent.

That’s a good change, says Dorosin, but it doesn’t go far enough.

He points out that another problem with voluntary annexation is that after annexation it’s within the city’s discretion of whether, and when, to provide services. A service-provision requirement is needed, he says.

“There’s no incentive for a community to voluntarily annex if what they want is access to water, sewer and other services, and a voluntary annexation doesn’t guarantee that you get any of those.”

When Dorosin spoke before the Legislature, he suggested that for distressed communities a change to the involuntary annexation requirements mandating specified levels of existing development prior to annexation would be appropriate.

He’s also concerned that there are communities that are completely encircled by incorporated municipalities, islands, where, as is the case in Midway, “Garbage trucks drive right down the road. They don’t pick up anybody’s garbage, but they drive right through the community to get from one side of the town to the other.”

He’s recommended a provision to require annexation, regardless of density, of those islands.

Breaking down fences and erasing lines is the Center for Civil Rights’ mandate. Such work fuels the faith that Dorosin has nurtured since his first days in the South: a belief that “dedicated individuals and organizations committed to the struggle for a more equitable society,” can realize true change.

“I’m always amazed and really encouraged, and have great faith, whenever I go to a meeting in a community and a bunch of folks come out on a weekend or a weeknight to get together and say, ‘We’re not being treated fairly and we want to make some change.’”

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme