INC NEWS - Durham, Love Yourself (Duke Chronicle)

[John Schelp]

Durham, Love Yourself: With shirts, store sets out to
foster Durham pride
Duke Chronicle, 06 March 2007

Four years ago, two vintage store owners realized that
many potential customers were hesitant to venture into
Durham. 

In response, former business partners Jennifer Donner
and Michelle Lee decided to sell T-shirts bearing the
slogan, "Durham, Love Yourself," to improve the city's
public image. 

"Durham had gotten the rap of being a really
blue-collar town and dangerous," said Donner, who has
sold more than 1,000 T-shirts at Dolly's, her vintage
boutique in Brightleaf Square. "We wanted to do
something to show that we loved our town. With each
T-shirt I sell, somebody has a story-of moving to
Durham and how much they love it."

Donner, a Durham resident for 20 years, said the
intended message behind the shirts is to encourage
people to work toward improving the community for
posterity's sake. 

"It's not going to change the world, it's not rocket
science, it's just a T-shirt, but it really does bring
people together," she said. "People tend to get behind
movements like this, and it does change things a
little bit."

The city has acquired a reputation for having urban
problems and racial politics because the population is
almost equally divided between whites and blacks, said
author Tim Tyson, a senior scholar at the Center for
Documentary Studies and a visiting professor in the
Divinity School.

Outsiders sometimes think of Durham as dangerous,
threatening or problematic, but it is doing better
than most post-industrial American cities, Tyson said.

Rather than sounding like a Chamber of Commerce
promotional brochure or an infomercial, residents
address the city's problems, he added.

"I see other communities that sweep everything under
the rug and pretend they're just a shining city on a
hill," Tyson said. "But Durham deals with it. That's
why Durham is a great city."

Tyson added that he thinks of the city as
self-critical, ambitious and always striving to
improve. 

"Rest assured, beyond the tidy, gated communities of
the mind, where nervous people tend to think their
tidy, gated, little thoughts, Durham does love
itself," he said. "But the real, big-hearted city of
Durham loves itself in the way your sister loves
you-she loves you unconditionally, with all her heart,
but she knows you're not perfect."

Cordelia Biddle, a sophomore from Philadelphia with
family ties to Durham, said the Bull City has a worse
reputation than other urban areas with similar crime
rates.

"It's more the perception that Durham seems to be one
big, bad neighborhood,'' said Biddle, who is a
advertising representative for The Chronicle. "Whereas
other cities have good neighborhoods to balance the
bad ones, crime and poverty seem to run rampant
throughout all of Durham."

John Schelp, a 14-year Durham resident and president
of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, said
outsiders perceive Durham as a place where activists
in local neighborhoods can effect city-wide change,
such as preventing a cement plant from going into a
poor neighborhood or gaining concessions from Duke
about plans to reconstruct Central Campus.

"I'd go back to the, 'Durham, Love Yourself' -- it's
one part melancholy, one part urging, one part
activism and several parts pride," Schelp said.
"That's what the message captures
 how [people] feel
about their town."

Carol Anderson, a 30-year Durham resident and the
owner of Vaguely Reminiscent, a vintage store on Ninth
Street, attributed many misconceptions about the city
to the media attention surrounding the Duke lacrosse
case.

"The dirty laundry is all out for everybody to see,"
she said. "People around the country and around the
world have a questioning and curious view of Durham
.
We know that we've got something real special here,
but there lingers, because of the manufacturing
history in Durham, the image of blue collar."

Donner said she hopes to donate bumper stickers
bearing the motto to the city to give to new Durham
residents. She added that the slogan, which also
appears on sweatshirts, has opened up a community
dialogue by connecting people in a new way.

"That's exactly what the T-shirts mean to me-if our
community can get together and work together with all
of the resources we have and all the awesome people we
have
 Durham will be one of the best places ever,"
Donner said. "We really have to like our city before
anyone else is going to."