Curb Your Incredulity — In last week’s column, I wrote about the dustup between New Hanover County school board members Pat Bradford and David Perry. As we had reported earlier, Perry had texted Bradford and essentially offered to trade votes: Perry wanted a committee he’d spearheaded to become permanent and hoped to get Bradford’s support in exchange for his backing of an agreement with LifeWise, a controversial program that offers Bible instruction during school hours, for which Perry assumed Bradford wanted to whip votes.
Bradford texted back that she was “shocked” by Perry’s offer.
I wrote that I found it very hard to believe Bradford, who is well-schooled in politics from both her time on the dais and behind an editorial desk, was actually shocked – comparing her, perhaps too snarkily, to Casablanca’s infamously insincere Captain Renault.
To her credit, Bradford got the movie reference (not everyone did), but resolutely reaffirmed that she was, in fact, authentically shocked. She qualified that this was ‘not her first rodeo,’ but that for several reasons she was both offended and surprised (the recipe for shock, I’d agree). For one, Bradford was clear that she had not made up her mind about LifeWise. For another, Perry’s open distaste for Bradford made her a strange choice, in her estimation. But primarily, Bradford told me, she felt that her integrity should have left no room for Perry to gamble that he might sway her.
I stand by my initial incredulity, but I also appreciate Bradford's openness to conversation. So, let the record show that she has stuck quite steadfastly to her guns, and that I admit, hard as it was to believe that she was truly shocked, perhaps I should have tried harder.
Capacity — This week, my colleague Aaleah McConnell covered the latest in the criminal case against Nigel Max Edge, the man charged with the tragic shooting in Southport last fall. On Tuesday, District Attorney Jon David was slated to hold a Rule 24 hearing, where the state decides whether or not to pursue the death penalty – instead, the issue of Edge’s ‘capacity’ to stand trial took precedence.
Expert witnesses for the defense and the state’s independent evaluation both found Edge incapable of standing trial – but, importantly, the state believes this capacity can be restored using counseling and medication. That doesn’t mean that any underlying mental illnesses are ‘cured,’ only that Edge has the cognitive ability to understand what’s happening during a trial. For now, Superior Court Judge Jason Disbrow has ordered that Edge will remain in custody, first in prison and then in a state mental hospital, while experts attempt ‘restoration,’ that is, trying to get him in mental shape for court.
A similar decision came this week for Decarlos Brown, Jr., who is awaiting trial for the brutal murder of Iryna Zaruska, a Ukrainian refugee who was attacked on Charlotte’s Blue Line.
Both decisions prompted understandable frustration, especially from victims’ family members. But it’s also been grist for the conservative mill, blaming ‘liberal prosecutors and judges’ for letting violent criminals free. (In Edge’s case, David and Disbrow are both Republicans.)
There’s plenty of debate to be had about pre-trial release of people charged with violent crimes, but that’s not what’s happening in this particular case. Defendants who are found incapable of standing trial aren’t released; they stay in custody. And they’re not found ‘not guilty’ for reason of insanity – that’s a totally different process which requires court hearings (it was the outcome in the tragic killing of Larry Dean Ripa, owner of the Serpentarium in downtown Wilmington).
Incapable defendants remain in custody or detention until they can stand trial, a poorly understood process that can trap people for long periods of time (sometimes unconstitutionally long), stuck between a broken mental health system and a criminal justice system that is ill-equipped to handle the mentally ill. A few years ago, Charlotte’s public media station WFAE and PBS’s FRONTLINE tackled the complicated issue in a series; we interviewed lead investigative reporter Dana Miller Ervin for The Newsroom, if you want to take a deeper dive.
The obvious lingering question, for both Brown and Edge, is: what if they’re never restored to capacity?
If state evaluators eventually come to the conclusion that a defendant will never have the cognitive ability to stand trial, a judge or prosecutor then has to dismiss the charges. (Technically, the state can’t take longer than the maximum sentence length for the charges being faced – but because Brown and Edge are facing murder charges, that could be the rest of their lives; the state will undoubtedly come to a conclusion before that.) That doesn’t necessarily mean being set free, however. If a defendant is found to be a danger to themselves or others, they can be involuntarily committed.
Wilmington City Council votes down affordable housing project — Council members unanimously shot down a proposal to rezone the Studio 6 extended-stay motel at 4118 Market Street, which developers say they would turn into affordable housing. Given the affordability crisis that continues, seemingly unabated, the vote raised some eyebrows.
The bottom line: the conversion would provide a roughly 250-square-foot apartment with minimal amenities, no full kitchen (just a hotplate, microwave, and mini-fridge), and a projected rent of around $1,100 for the majority of the units. Council members all felt this was just too little, for too much, to be considered affordable housing.
Councilwoman Salette Andrews, who made the motion to deny, included a pretty thorough explanation of her vote in a recent Substack, but I think Councilman Kevin Spears summed it up aptly when he said, “almost $1,100 a month to live in a hotel room is insane to me.”
Not everyone will agree, of course. I’ve seen some arguments that any new housing at lower price points is good news, and some saying that ‘beggars can’t be choosers,’ or variations on that. Certainly, things are so tough in the housing market that I suspect some people would deal with the indignities of hotplate dinners and cramped quarters rather than, say, hot-bunking in a flophouse. And if it were a by-right project, we could put that theory to the test. But asking council to essentially give this a thumbs up, and not question the standard of living that’s being provided for the cost – well, obviously that didn’t go over well.
Reasonable people can disagree on this, but I’ll say two quick things. First, there have been plenty of communities that have bought out motels and used them for short-term shelter, including FEMA-funded programs during Covid. Because of the success of those programs, cities like Asheville and Charlotte looked into utilizing these units long-term, in many cases converting them to proper apartments, with more room and fully functioning kitchens or kitchenettes. Not every motel conversion has worked out – funding and oversight are often issues – but a common theme is renovation. In Ventura, California, where the conversion program has been cited as a promising example, the housing authority took hotel units down to the studs.
Second, living in a motel might not sound that bad, until you see it up close. When I first heard that displaced Wilmington Housing Authority tenants were living in hotels and motels due to the mold crisis, I thought, “could be worse.” But my ignorance was dispelled by spending some time with folks actually living that way for months, even a year or more. What I saw in those rooms, and this is just my opinion, is that you can call it whatever you want to, but a motel is not a home.
Azalea Belles — Dating back to the late 60s, the Azalea Belles were a highly visible symbol of the Azalea Festival (although I’m often reminded it’s technically its own event, not part of the festival proper). For decades, it features high school seniors, done up in 19th-century debutante gear: hoopskirts and hairdos, pastels and parasols.
In 2020, during the summer of racial reckoning, the Cape Fear Garden Club, which hosted the Belles, decided to end the program. There was a lot of cautious language used at the time, but essentially dressing up in Antebellum-inspired garb was, for too many people, tantamount to celebrating the Antebellum era, inextricable from chattel slavery and the plantation system.
They were nice dresses, but a bad look, to put it mildly.
Covid kept a tamper on things for a couple of years, and then Belles reemerged as Azalea Ambassadors in 2022. Right now, the program is steadily growing, although not as popular as the Belles once were, according to a nice overview of the history and next steps by StarNews’ John Staton.
Flash forward to 2026, and under the second Trump Administration, many of the socio-cultural changes of 2020 have been forcefully rolled back or at least passively allowed to fade. And, while the official decision to stick with a more future-facing program hasn’t budged, there’s a small but growing call on social media to ‘bring back the Belles.’ There’s even a Change.org petition – though I do doubt it will be successful.
I’ll say there hasn’t been much actual communication in the comment-section crossfire, but some of the positions being staked out tell us a little bit about where we are right now.
Some of the arguments in favor of the Belles are framed as conscious pushback against the ‘cancel culture’ of the last decade, folks who are clearly upset over having been labeled ‘racist’ for what, in their view, is nothing more than some harmless merriment. Others conflated the debate over the moral valence of the Belles with the divide between Wilmington natives and transplants from northern states – a common refrain was, ‘if you don’t like it, take I-40 out of here.’ (As a Yankee, I don’t really take offense, but I would note that the local vs. expat divide does not map neatly on top of the Belles debate.)
Some are deeply entrenched in the Lost Cause myth, trying to put daylight between southern tradition and the horrors of the plantation system. Others avoided the issue of the Civil War and slavery entirely in favor of Gone With the Wind romanticism, aesthetics over history, offering deliberately superficial dismissals of ‘it’s just fun’ or ‘it’s just fashion.’ A few have posted current and historical photos of Black women in garden party attire, often without additional comment, presumably as proof that Belles aren’t and have never been racist (there are analogous arguments made, often with equally little historical context or nuance, that the existence of Black enslavers somehow mitigates or dilutes the evils of slavery).
There’s been plenty of pushback, with people quick to point out that Antebellum cosplay isn’t really a full depiction of history: it’s a picture cropped to exclude the nightmare of slavery, right out of frame, while showcasing the wealth it made possible. Some have argued that we ‘shouldn’t erase history’ – but it struck me, and many others, that there's a fairly significant difference between preserving history and turning it into a festive event. If it’s just fun, then we’re not talking about a studious recreation; if it’s not the whole story, it’s a rosy-eyed rehabilitation of a brutal era.
Another, sharper level of tension has come from debates, not just over what garden party garb meant in the mid-19th century, but what it means now in the early 21st century. I haven’t seen anyone actually defending slavery itself in the arguments over the Belles, but I have seen the typical chestnuts about the ‘past being past.’ These folks haven’t read their Faulkner, and they seem disinterested in listening to some of the thoughtful explanations from Black commenters, who are trying to lay out what Plantation-era costumes might mean in Wilmington, last holdout of the Confederacy, home of the 1898 coup and massacre, the Wilmington 10, and no small measure of present-day racial disparities
