Just a lot of bull?

• Author: Gurley, Margot Lester
• Position: Durham, North Carolina

Numbers don't lie. But when it comes to image, Durham has discovered, sometimes they don't count.

FJ's Emporium at Durham's Five Points is as busy a downtown business as you'd want to find. Owner Francis Jackson makes a few bucks selling Millstone Colombian coffee and newspapers to the suit-and-tie crowd, but the heart of his business is day laborers who want to wash down vienna sausages with a tall boy or two.

FJ's thrives, Jackson says, because he recognizes what downtown boosters won't. "The beautiful people will tell you there are 5,000 to 8,000 office workers down here as potential customers," he says, "but that's a falsehood because only about 5% of those workers actually support downtown businesses." Jackson knows who his bread-and-butter customers are: low-income blacks.

"The African-American population is 46% within the city limits," explains Isaac Robinson, a Durham native and N.C. Central University sociologist. The black population countywide is 37%, compared with 22% statewide.

Robinson says the dominance of blacks - rich, poor and middle-class - "makes Durham decidedly different from other cities in our state." (In Raleigh, for instance, blacks make up 28% of the population; in Charlotte, 32%; and in Greensboro, 34%).

"Durham is a black city," says Ken Niebling, president of Data Solutions NC Inc., a Durham-based biotechnology consulting firm. "That's not bad, but a lot of people won't recognize that. They just won't recognize the needs of downtown's black population."

But the decidedly black character of much of Durham's downtown and the high percentage of blacks in the city as a whole does color its reputation in the eyes of many North Carolinians. And that reputation is poor - far poorer than the city deserves, based on the numbers at least. Durham has its problems, among them its schools and crime, but as a whole it stacks up well compared with other Tar Heel cities. As Bill Shore, a Durham native and director of community affairs at Glaxo, says, "What kills Durham is word of mouth."

Confirmation of that came in a 1993 survey showing that 60% of Wake and Orange county residents viewed Durham poorly compared with Raleigh or Chapel Hill. In the same survey, just under two-thirds of the respondents said they'd heard bad things about Durham from family, friends and co-workers. "The negativism is assaultive," admits Reyn Bowman, director of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.

But attributing Durham's rough rep purely to racial prejudices is too narrow a view. Durham's difference - and its poor reputation - predate blacks gaining demographic or political influence. Back when Durham was nothing more than a crossroads, neighboring communities had reason to look down their noses at it.

Its development as a gritty tobacco town and manufacturing center did little to improve its image in the eyes of the gentry living in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, says Jean Anderson, author of Durham County. "I feel all this has sort of cast a cloud over Durham's reputation from the beginning," she says.

What's more, the absence of a privileged few who run things makes for fractious politics. "Durham is very fragmented politically - probably more than any city its size," Shore says. The number of coalitions, from the conservative Friends of Durham to the liberal People's Alliance and the Committee on the Affairs of Black People, is bewildering to an outsider.

"There's tension on every issue," says Mayor Sylvia Kerckhoff, who adds that it's "democracy with a little'd.'" And that makes it hard for the chamber to woo and placate business: "Charlotte has a top-heavy power structure that allows the leadership to say, 'We want to move in this direction,'" Robinson says. "Not in Durham. You'll never see a big initiative in this city that's got everybody marching to it." Instead, you find political voting blocs that are basically equal in power. "It's like giants doing battle. They beat the heck out of each other. The one left standing, staggering and bleeding after the battle has won the prize for that day."

Before there was Durham, there was Prattsburg, a crossroads a little east of what is now the center of downtown. Prattsburg had a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop...