UNC's Board of Governors is threatening to silence Gene Nichol and close his Poverty Center
Crucified in Carolina
By Michael A. Cooper Jr.
The greatest threat to North Carolina, says Gene Nichol, director of UNC-Chapel Hill's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, is a plague of wrenching poverty. Ten years ago, North Carolina ranked 26th in poverty; it's now 11th. Forty-one percent of minority children are poor, and in places like Charlotte, with the worst upward mobility of any American metropolitan, their lives will never change.But the Poverty Center is on the verge of shutting down. Nichol's criticism of Republican policies made him an enemy of the governor, a target of the state legislature and a victim of a conservative takeover of the university system.
Son of a Texas sharecropper, Nichol's worldview formed when influential boosters recruited the high school star to play college football. "My father was the most impressive person I knew, and these wealthy people thought he was inferior," says Nichol. "Even then, I knew it was fucked up."
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Then Republicans swept the 2010 election. Nichol decided, "given altered circumstances in Raleigh and Washington, it [was] essential to change directions ... we face an unfolding crisis in North Carolina for poor and working class folks." Nichol penned editorials in the News & Observer when Republicans cut unemployment benefits and refused the Medicaid expansion.
The criticism was not welcomed. On three occasions in 2013, UNC law dean Jack Boger relayed threats from the legislature. If Nichol didn't stop writing articles, they'd close the Poverty Center, move it to UNC-Pembroke, or he'd be fired. But he pressed on, accusing the GOP of an "unforgivable war on poor people," violating "our history, our ethics, our scriptures and our constitution."
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