Interview: W. Mondale Robinson

Pissing off the Klan and running a majority-black rural town in the South.

Today I bring you an interview my co-author Tom Schaller and I did with W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project and mayor of Enfield, North Carolina. In the chapter of White Rural Rage focused on non-white Americans living in rural areas, we wrote about Robinson’s struggles to lift up his home town, which demonstrate how the challenges faced by white rural people are often even deeper and more difficult to overcome in minority rural areas.

Though Enfield is a town of only about 2,000 people, Robinson gained widespread attention when soon after taking office he had a Confederate monument in the town bulldozed. As a result, he was targeted with harassment and death threats, and for his and his family’s safety he now has to run the town without ever sleeping in his own house.

In this interview we discussed the Confederate monument controversy, the still-evident effects of Jim Crow, the gender gap in turnout among black voters, and more. 

As a bit of background, here’s a news report showing the destruction of the Confederate monument and the fallout: