THE BATHROOM AND THE BALLOT BOX
“OH, YOU’RE TAKING a freedom ride,” a North Carolina organizer said when I mentioned I was going to catch the NAACP bus to Virginia. The chartered coach that pulled into the parking lot of Raleigh’s Martin Street Baptist Church at 4:30 a.m., half full of people who had woken up even earlier in Goldsboro, was cushier than the interstate buses civil rights activists took back in the 1960s. Air ride suspension, air conditioning, plush upholstery. The crowd that settled into the seats and bowed their heads as the Reverend Curtis Gatewood stood in the aisle and invoked those who’d died struggling for voting rights, for civil rights, was different, too. More homogeneous. While waiting outside in the dark to board, Bob Finch, the community affairs chair of the Lee County NAACP, had asked me, one of the very few white people, to identify myself. He’d wondered if I was one of “Pope’s people.”
There’s been a war on in North Carolina, to hear locals tell it, since uberconservative Art Pope brought his Variety Wholesalers fortune into state politics. In the mid-2000s, Pope, who’d previously served in the Statehouse himself, began an ambitious campaign to turn a purple state deep red, a showcase of interlocking conservative policies. He began by contributing to ad campaigns against moderate Republicans and later Democrats, as well as funding think tanks and advocacy groups. Then, in 2010—helped by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and in concert with a national Republican redistricting project known as REDMAP—his network spent millions to turn the Legislature Republican for the first time in 140 years. Two years later, Pope helped fund Pat McCrory’s successful campaign to become governor. McCrory appointed Pope to be his budget director, and Pope and the politicians he helped elect went on a cutting spree that didn’t stop at slashing education and welfare but went after obscure programs like the University of North Carolina’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, shuttered for failing to adequately explore free-market solutions to poverty and for being too political. Pope no longer holds office, but the shadow he casts over political life remains large, mentioned in minimalist passing by liberals here—“since Pope,” “after the takeover”—because, duh, everyone knows about it.
Outside the state, the Pope takeover is political trivia—did you read that Jane Mayer piece?—an early but largely forgotten allegory of the Citizens United epoch. But this spring, the battle for North Carolina’s political soul spilled over state lines when, on March 23, a General Assembly stocked with Pope’s people passed House Bill 2, which required transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender assigned to them at birth. HB2 also banned any minimum-wage increases or anti-discrimination statutes local governments might pass, but, in the wake of gay marriage victories, the “bathroom bill” is what lit the media firestorm. Musicians from Beyoncé to Bruce Springsteen boycotted or spoke out; PayPal canceled plans for an operations center in Charlotte; the NBA pulled its All-Star Game; at least 68 tech companies, including Apple, Cisco, and Salesforce, signed on as supporters to the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the law. All told, the bill is thought to have cost the state $400 million. Though Pope denied having anything to do with
