You may have read this story of three cross burnings in Durham, North Carolina. The police chief there assures us that Durham hasn't had a cross burning since 1968. The story does take me back, though. The local fuzz ran me out of Durham in 1962 for my work in the civil rights movement. Four years later, when I returned to the area for graduate school in Chapel Hill, one of the first things I did was to take my wife to a big Klan rally. Sure, it was in a big cow pasture out in the country, but the Klanguard were carrying flashlights big enough to use as weapons and, when they began to circle us, I steered the wife around a cow pie and got the hell out of there.

Despite the formal desegregation, which was itself a very big thing, indeed, Durham didn't then seem to have changed very much. Still, my heart swells with a little pride when the Blue Devils take to the basketball court because now so many of them are black and blue. I remember when they were all blue and white. So, I asked my virtual son, Chris at Outside Report about the cross burnings in Durham. Chris is a rising second year law student at Duke. Here's his reaction. He speculates that it may be a response to the public visibility of gay people in Durham. Unless and until we know for certain what motived the cross burnings, we can't even exclude the possibility that they are a hoax. There's an odd sense in which hoaxes anger me even more than a real cross burning. At least with a real one, you know the hate and ignorance that it represents. I don't understand what motivates people to thrill at the folly of playing with the symbols of hate and ignorance.

My colleague, Manan Ahmed, directs our attention to this report at Facing South, with a brief followup here. It argues that North Carolina has"a climate for cross burnings." They really catch our attention when they occur – not in some remote cow pasture – but in the heart of the state's wealthy and talent-rich research triangle.