My take on this racially tinged spat over a threatened march on the civil rights museum because of two rival hoteliers scrutiny of federal bond financing for a new hotel is that it's a quarrel among local lords of commerce in Greensboro. There is a narrow kind of black empowerment at stake in that some members of the consortium promoting the new downtown luxury hotel are black. (See Hayes and cohort Bridget Chisholm's thoughts on black community empowerment here.) But for the mass of black workers, or working-class people of any race, it's a wash. They win if a new upscale hotel succeeds without putting the other hotels out of business because opportunities for employment expand.
But the new luxury hotel, if it's built, will draw from the same pool of workers as the Proximity and the O. Henry, Dennis Quaintance and Mike Weaver's entities. If the Proximity or the O. Henry go under because their markets are cannibalized by the new downtown luxury hotel, former employees of the Proximity and O. Henry will be the most qualified to staff the new venture.
Cone provides some background for this morning's News & Record story on the unfolding saga.
UPDATE: More at Roch 101 here and here, and at Hogg's Blog.
UPDATE 2: A related strand from Piedmont Publius.
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