NC city wrestles with echoes of ‘send her back’
Many residents say chant does not reflect their home
GREENVILLE, N.C. – “Welcome to Greenville,” the Rev. Bob Hudak wrote in an open letter to Donald Trump before the president’s visit this month. The reverend extolled Greenville as a “growing city with an extraordinarily diverse population.”
He pointed to East Carolina University, where Trump was to hold his campaign rally July 17, and to Vidant Medical Center, which serves a 29-county region. Both in
stitutions, he wanted the president to know, were among the reasons the community of nearly 100,000 attracted so many immigrants.
Hudak, who has worked with interfaith leaders to build a sense of inclusiveness, was distraught when Trump used his rally to continue his attacks on four congresswomen of color who, the president tweeted, should return to the countries “from which they came.”
Chants of “Send her back!” erupted in the arena of East Carolina University after Trump singled out Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar, DMinn.
Hudak placed his hand over his chest during an interview with USA TODAY last week.
“It’s breaking my heart,” the 71-year-old retired Episcopal priest said. “Things not only don’t seem to be getting better, but people are more entrenched, and racism is a card that’s being played whether people want to admit it or not.”
More than a week after the rally, the chants continued to reverberate throughout Greenville.
City leaders were eager to show that the sentiments are not reflective of the community.
Stunned by the backlash
Although the city’s mayor is among the Trump supporters who denounced the chants, others who attended the rally are stunned by the backlash.
“I thought it was ridiculous,” said Diane Rufino, a founder of the local tea party organization. “They see racism where it doesn’t exist.”
Greenville, once a leading tobacco marketing and warehouse center, is slightly more than half white, 38% black and 5% Hispanic. Unemployment is less than 5%.
On the grounds of the Pitt County Courthouse is a monument to “our Confederate dead.” A petition to remove the statue was circulated in 2017, sparking a counter petition to protect the monument.
At the first stoplight in Greenville, visitors are greeted by a welcome sign that boasts, “We are building an inclusive community.”
The city has grown 50% since 2000, and signs of the expansion are everywhere. There’s a new transportation hub, a new cancer center and a $30 million new road connecting the Vidant Medical Center and the university, two of the area’s major employers – along with companies that make boats, forklifts, pharmaceuticals and hammocks.
A billboard marks the future site of a $90 million life sciences and biotechnology building that ECU is constructing. The school’s new student center opened this year. ECU owns a swath of old tobacco warehouses waiting to be repurposed.
“If we want to continue to grow, we want to have a great image,” Mayor P.J. Connelly said, promoting what the city has to offer but expressing concern about possible damage from the rally.
On the banks of the Tar River in the Town Common is a new “inclusive playground” where children in wheelchairs can roll into a swing. At the park’s other end, a memorial is being constructed to the former Sycamore Hill Missionary Baptist Church. A plaza area will tell the story of a former tightknit African American community that was moved out of the 20-acre public space through an urban renewal program decades ago over which there are lingering hard feelings.
The nearby uptown has a budding arts area, brew pubs and the Scullery, a coffee house that hosts a monthly drag brunch to raise money for a local organization that helps people living with HIV/ AIDS.
On the day of Trump’s rally, owner Matt Scully and his wife announced that all the proceeds the shop earned would be donated to the American Immigration Council.
Samar Badwan, the head of Greenville’s Human Relations Council, has never had a problem walking around the city she’s lived in for 30 years wearing her hijab. But not wanting to provoke a reaction if she joined friends protesting the rally, Badwan decided to stay home. “I knew that it wasn’t going to be pretty,” the 45-year-old teacher and Arabic interpreter said. “I do a lot of praying. I was praying that maybe a miracle would happen and he would only stick to issues facing this country.”
“I would like to see the standard bearer of the Democratic Party take on the issue of race very, very aggressively,” said Keith Cooper, 53, former president of the Pitt County Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “What we are going to need when President Trump leaves is healing.”
Trump said he didn’t support the rally crowd’s comments – then called the chanters “incredible patriots.”
The mayor, who greeted Trump at the airport before attending the rally that drew participants from beyond Greenville, said there was “so much energy” in the arena that “I do not remember even hearing that chant.”
By the next day, it was quite clear the nation had.
As the former professional baseball player fielded calls and emails from around the country – including from those who said they would never visit his city – Connelly issued a statement saying he was “extremely disappointed and disheartened,” and “hate will never have a place in our community.”
‘Tell the whole story’
“It’s incumbent upon us as city leaders to tell the whole story of our city, not let it be narrated that the city is something that it’s not. We’ll continue to do that,” Connelly, a Republican elected to a nonpartisan position, told USA TODAY.
Rufino dismissed the mayor’s comments as pandering for the fall election.
She said the chants were not a response to Omar’s origins but to the Somali-born lawmaker’s criticisms of the United States. The chants were meant to suggest that if Omar didn’t like the USA, she should go elsewhere.
“You can’t say if we oppose her it’s because of her color when it’s really about what she’s saying. And we’re not able to separate that anymore in this country,” the 59-year-old lawyer said. “It just so happens that the most vilespeaking members of Congress these days are people of color or people of different origins.”
Trump narrowly won North Carolina in 2016, but Barack Obama’s 2008 victory there underscored that it’s one of the Southern states that is winnable for Democrats. Greenville backed Hillary Clinton, and she beat Trump by 8 percentage points in Pitt County.
The Trump supporters in Greenville include Shonda Edwards, 46, an African American, who said she was not bothered by the chants. “I saw how she felt about America,” Edwards said of Omar. “She hates America.”
Edwards, who works at a rehabilitation center while studying for degrees in nursing and business administration, didn’t attend the rally but voted for Trump in 2016 – for “a change” – and expects to vote for him again.
Calvin Henderson, 81, leader of the local NAACP chapter, called Trump’s visit devastating. Henderson, who grew up in the suburbs of Greenville where he saw “white only” signs, calls himself “a product of Jim Crow.” He said he thought the nation had gotten a step above that. “Are we beginning the fight all over again that we thought we had overcome?” Henderson asked.
The city’s efforts to repair divisions and fulfill its trademarked tagline – “Find yourself in good company” – include the work of the Human Relations Council that Badwan chairs. After the terrorist attacks at mosques in New Zealand in March, Badwan pulled together a vigil at which the mayor, chief of police, a rabbi and others spoke.
The Trump rally chants had extra resonance for Badwan because, like Omar, she’s a Muslim American.
“But that’s not a reflection of what our community is about,” Badwan said of the remarks. “This community is portrayed as a racist community. From my experience here, that is not true.”
The morning after the rally, the city manager reached out to her to make sure there had been no threats against the mosque where Badwan worships or against community members. There hadn’t been.
Dan Gerlach, interim chancellor of East Carolina University, took calls from parents concerned about the safety of their minority children on campus.
In response to criticism over renting the school’s arena to the Trump campaign, Gerlach said he would have done that for any presidential candidate.
Engulfed in controversy after only a few months on the job, Gerlach has been whipsawed between responding to those who wanted the university to issue a stronger condemnation of the rally and dealing with Trump supporters accusing him of wimping out for not personally welcoming the president to the campus and handing him a purple ECU Pirates shirt.
Emma Arndt, 21, a senior and head of ECU’s College Republicans, said the chants are “always going to come up in conversations about this rally” – even though many attendees, like her, declined to participate in the taunts.
“For me, as soon as I heard it, I was disappointed,” she said. “It touched a lot of people in a bad way.”
Last Wednesday, a week after the Trump rally, Gerlach had one of his better moments on his new job, he said. He attended a naturalization ceremony that the school’s Office of Global Affairs hosted for 39 people from 21 countries.
“Today, you have the same rights and responsibilities that I have, even though my people have lived in America for hundreds of years,” he said he told them. “We’re glad you’re here because you make us better.”
“It’s breaking my heart. Things not only don’t seem to be getting better, but people are more entrenched, and racism is a card that’s being played whether people want to admit it or not.” The Rev. Bob Hudak