Morning, gang.

Today, we bring you two pieces by guest writers who should be familiar to most Greensboro readers.

Jordan Green is now an investigative correspondent for Raw Story. But he spent many years as a writer and editor at weeklies in Greensboro, including Yes! Weekly and Triad City Beat, which he helped found.

Back in 2006, when Jordan was at Yes! and I was at the News & Record, we found ourselves covering the Minuteman Project, a group of self-appointed “border watchers” who were visiting Greensboro in a caravan of RVs on a nationwide tour. The group thought then-President George W. Bush and Karl Rove were insufficiently conservative, were armed to the teeth, and their supporters were pretty loose with a lot of incendiary racist language. This being Greensboro, a protest of the group was quickly organized, and there were fears of another Greensboro Massacre.

In the end, the event remained peaceful, and Jordan I ended up interviewing group founder Jim Gilchrist in his RV, because he wouldn’t come out. I remember being squeezed into that small space, surrounded by hostile men with guns and the stink of man odor and Manwich, listening to Jordan calmly tell these guys that just because he wrote for an alt-weekly didn’t necessarily mean he was a communist who would twist their words and pervert their cause.

That’s the thing about Jordan and his base level of cool. He can be in situations like that, and his heart rate never gets above that of a lizard lazily sunning itself on a rock. As you’ll read in his piece for The Assembly, he needed every ounce of that cool when the militant white supremacists he’s spent the last few years investigating showed up on his lawn. Somebody give this guy a book deal already.

Edward Cone wrote a column for the News & Record for many years. I used to read it back in college, before I joined the newsroom there—along with his popular blog. When I read what he had to say about a recent survey on the future of downtown Greensboro, I reached out to ask if he’d turn it into a guest column for us. He was happy to. So, of course, I rewarded him by running it next to Jordan Green’s harrowing tale of journalistic heroism. Being Ed, he laughed.

Let’s get into it.

Illustration by Jack Snyder.

I’ve Seen How the Neo-Nazi Movement Is Escalating. You Should Worry.

After the attack on two electrical substations in Moore County in December 2022, reporter Jordan Green became obsessed with figuring out who was behind it. He had spent years covering right-wing extremism, and here was an incident right in his home state that may be linked to some of the same groups.

He didn’t realize then how much the pursuit would upend his life, and his family’s. Today he writes about the two years he spent under threat from the people he was writing about, and the unique insights that gave him into how these groups work.

Read the story here.

Thanks for reading The Thread, a 3x week newsletter written by Greensboro editor Joe Killian and reporters Sayaka Matsuoka and Gale Melcher. Reach us with tips or ideas at greensboro@theassemblync.com.

A view of downtown from The Depot. (Photo by Ed Cone)

Downtown Greensboro Inc. conducted a survey about what our center city should “look, feel, and function like” in the years ahead. 

My vote was for more town in downtown. 

More housing at reasonable prices. More shops. Good transit that leverages an increasingly relevant train station and ties together our two large public universities and peripheral assets like the restored Revolution Mill.

A few years back, Conde Nast Traveler put the Gaylon Depot on a list of the “14 Most Beautiful Train Stations in the U.S.,” which, eh, it’s nice, and the big map mural is legit for sure. Over the decades, standout design has been perpetrated sporadically in our downtown. The 19th-century streetscape along South Elm Street is great. A pair of Jazz Age beauties, the Jefferson Standard tower and the Carolina Theater, still rule. The last interesting architecture, our brutalist governmental complex, was completed in the early ‘70s. Expecting the next big thing to be breathtaking as well as functional may be asking too much, but a girl can dream.

Downtown needs investments that swell the resident population, generate foot traffic, and sustain a sense of community. 

We’re good for now on fun and games for privileged visitors from other neighborhoods. 

I say that with appreciation for the most notable run of major downtown projects in my lifetime—a nice baseball stadium, a couple of sweet parks, a performing arts center—and I’m old enough to have been taken shopping at Thalhimer’s and watched the movie Ben at the Center Theater. Throw in the more serious Civil Rights Museum in the historic Woolworth building and the more commercial ballpark-area Carrollplex, and the first quarter of the 21st century has seen impressive growth.

The name “Carrollplex” for the spate of downtown projects by developer Roy Carroll is not common usage, but it should be.

The fact remains that quality-of-life stuff is necessary but not sufficient to create a great downtown. A city needs life itself. 

What happens next is a big deal, and there is a location to match the occasion: the large site once occupied by an unlamented building that housed the much-lamented News & Record, one block east of the main drag on Elm Street, fronting Market Street, the city’s traditional x-axis. This is the focus of DGI’s Thrive35 project, a joint effort with the City of Greensboro, the Chamber of Commerce, and local foundations.

Dedicating that space to pickleball, breweries, luxury housing, and other nice-to-haves when this city and its people have so many needs would be a crime. We need more real downtown neighborhoods, not more playgrounds for people like, um, me. 

The area requires a grocery store, too, something affordable but nice. This should go somewhere walkable for the locals and accessible by automobile—one of the few accommodations to suburban culture necessary, because the people who complain about trekking a couple of blocks or paying for parking are not coming downtown very often anyway. 

By the same token, downtown needs to be safe for everyone, but people who think “urban” is a scare word should not be the target demo. 

Greensboro has a unique chance to build out downtown’s dimensionality, add essential housing stock, and create a genuine city vibe. Let’s not screw it up!

– Ed Cone


Edward Cone lives in his hometown of Greensboro. His urban experience includes over two decades working from an office on South Elm Street as a magazine journalist, newspaper columnist, and blogger; and several years living in New York City (in both its lawless and Disneyfied eras) and Paris.

Fly Around Fest is hosting this music festival to celebrate Appalachia’s natural beauty and rich musical traditions while raising funds to support the recovery from the historic floods from Hurricane Helene on Aug. 1 & 2.

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