Bob Herbert is a columnist who is regularly seen on the opinion pages of the New York Times. In today’s edition of the paper Mr. Herbert comments on an event that happened in Durham in 1944. Strict racial segregation was the norm at the time, of course, but a white basketball team from the Duke University Medical School who had bragged that they were the best players in the state had agreed to play an illegal game against an equally proud team from the North Carolina College for Negroes, or what is now known as NCCU.
The white players literally had to sneak through town to the NCC gym as criminal conspiritors, which is exactly what they were at the time. 50 years later, two Duke basketball teammates, Christian Laettner, who is white, and Brian Davis, who is black, became partners and backers of Blue Devil Ventures and developed West Village in Durham out of cast off properties of the old Liggett Tobacco complex.
There are currently 82 homes on the market in Durham listed for more than $700,000, an arbitrary cutoff that I established for the luxury market I started to track in this blog over a year ago. Of those only about 10% were around when that basketball game was played and there is a good chance that several of them were passed by the Duke players on the way to that game, which was played behind locked doors with no spectators in the stands.
Earlier this week at a Rotary Club meeting I enjoyed a presentation on the Research Triangle Park by Tena Valdecanas, the VP of Corporate Strategy at RTPF which has ongoing responsibility for developing the region’s largest economic engine and the pre-eminent such facility in the country. The attractive and articulate Ms. Valdecanas, who is obviously not of WASPish origins, talked about celebrating the RTP’s 50th anniversary this year. That means that the park, our foremost symbol of modernity, was founded a mere 15 years after that basketball game was played in 1944.
My explanation of why time seems to move more swiftly the older you get is that each year you live is a smaller proportion of the life you’ve led than the year before was when you were living it. This comes to mind as I reflect on these events. The first post on this blog was my recollection of seeing a fox run through Downtown Durham 25 years ago, a symbol that nature was reclaiming our inner city when it was probably at the low point before the turnaround began. When we predicted that it would take twenty years to turn it around that seemed forever but now that it’s happened it seems but a blink of the eye.
Durham is a city of tremendous character that is still developing and maybe the ten or fifteen years it’s image may still need to catch up with it’s reality isn’t so long after all. Those considering moving to the RTP area should keep in mind that most of RTP and Duke University and it’s Medical Centers are in Durham County and will consider the homes, both new and historic, as great options live in.
If you want to know who the winner of that basketball game is you can read Bob Herbert’s column at http://budurl.com/jz1002. Who won may not surprise you but the score almost certainly will.
