Alamance County

Council for Criminal Justice says police are poorly trained to de-escalate tense situations. Implicit racial bias is widespread. Black people were twice as likely to be killed by the police in North Carolina than whites from 2013 to 2021, according to the Mapping Police Violence Project.

Biracial.’ ‘Artist.’ ‘Supporter of social justice.’ Nic Cassette could think of many labels describing his identity. ‘Rioter,’ however, was never one of them. An Alamance County prosecutor, however, saw it differently. Cassette was among a group of demonstrators who were charged under the state's rioting statute after a succession of demonstrations in Graham. 

Nearly 40 years ago, Yolanda Strickland felt the sting of racism for the first time. She was 10, a fourth-grader at Haw Elementary School in Alamance County. Her “best friend” rescinded an invitation to a sleepover after the friend’s parents learned that Strickland was Black.

Decades after the enactment of civil rights laws, people of color remain largely excluded from the county's political power structure To go to Alamance County is to step back in time, to the days of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.   More than a half-century later, law enforcement officers pepper-sprayed and arrested anti-racist protesters.

Part one: A troubled history of racism, violence and repression On a cold and drizzly February night in 1870 a mob of Klansmen came for Wyatt Outlaw, the first Black town commissioner of Graham. Wearing robes and hoods, and armed with torches, swords and pistols, some 20 men broke down the door of his home on Main Street.