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🧵 In Today’s Edition
1. The Agenda: Your guide to the week in local government
2. Siembra NC sorts fact from fiction on ICE and deportations
3. Rhiannon Giddens looks to the past to face the challenges of the present
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The Agenda:
This Week in Local Government
Attending local government meetings is a good way to stay on top of what’s happening in your community. There’s a lot going on—and we’re here to help you make sense of city-speak and stay engaged and connected.
Let’s dive into this week’s agenda.
Guilford County
The school board’s legislative committee has a meeting on Tuesday, April 22, at 2 p.m. at 712 N. Eugene St. They’ll be talking about the Guilford County Council of PTAs’ legislative priorities and will discuss federal legislative priorities. Go to the meeting in-person or watch live on their YouTube channel.
High Point
The city council is scheduled for a special meeting at 4:30 p.m. at 211 S. Hamilton Street to hear a presentation from staff on the city’s fair housing activities. Their regular bi-monthly meeting is next. Same day, same place at 5:30 p.m. Watch both meetings in-person, or live on the city’s YouTube channel.
They’ll be voting on:
- A $3.5 million contract for annual street resurfacing.
- Considering a request from Project Insulation, a solar panel engineering and manufacturing company, for $71,127 for “performance-based incentives.” The money would be doled out over five years and be drawn from the city’s economic development incentive fund. Plus, the company plans on creating 32 new full-time positions and anticipates investing $17 million into the area.
- Staff is seeking approval of the 2026 Urgent Repair Program policies and procedures required by the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency. The changes for the 2026 program year include increasing maximum assistance to $15,000 per unit, plus the deferred loan will be forgiven at a rate of $5,000 per year until the balance is zero.
- Establishing a public hearing date of May 19 for the annexation of 8.6 acres of land at the intersection of E. Springfield Road and Ingram Road.
- Demolishing a home at 3213 E. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. A public hearing will be held as well.
- The appointment of Phillip Middlebrooks to the Citizens Advisory Council, with a term starting June 1, 2025, and expiring on May 31, 2027.
Then, city leaders will go into a closed session in accordance with state law for attorney-client privilege.
Down the road…
Greensboro’s city council has a special meeting on May 1 at noon; they’re convening in the Founder’s Lounge at the Steven Tanger Center for Performing Arts. The meeting’s agenda hasn’t been published yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
Guilford County – Board of Commissioners
Guilford County – School Board
– Gale Melcher
Read this newsletter online or contact The Thread team with tips and feedback at greensboro@theassemblync.com.
A Message from our Sponsor, Carolina Forward
Housing is where it all starts. It’s most people’s biggest single budget item. It’s where we start and raise our families. It unlocks opportunity, security, and growth. But we’re not building enough housing to go around these days. When that happens, not only do lower-income communities get hit the hardest, but it slows down our dynamism as a state. It’s time for us to build again. We have some ideas.
How Siembra NC Sorts Fact from Fiction
The grassroots organization that advocates for immigrant workers’ rights saw a flood of calls about rumored enforcement actions after President Donald Trump took office again.
About two months ago, a Greensboro-based advocacy group got a call from two Durham residents who had seen unfamiliar vehicles looping around their Northgate Park neighborhood. They saw law enforcement officers with their faces covered, and they thought they knew what was happening: an ICE raid.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement put three men in handcuffs and drove them away, the pair said. They sent in video of someone wearing a Customs and Border Protection badge.
Alisa Cullison and Emily Ingebretsen had called a hotline run by Siembra NC, a nonprofit organization that works to support Latino residents across the state. Members of Siembra NC’s administrative staff jumped into action. They drove to the neighborhood to speak to the families of the men, who the organization said were from India. The team offered support and referrals for immigration lawyers, the organization told The Assembly. The names of the men have not been made public, and it’s unclear where they were taken. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Siembra NC’s hotline service, which launched in 2018 after the organization formed the year before, has served as a resource to help immigrants and other community members sort fact from fiction when it comes to raids and deportations. That’s especially crucial as panic-inducing misinformation has spread through social media posts in the months since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for a second term.
Read the full story here.
— Heidi Perez-Moreno
For Rhiannon Giddens, Music is All About the Throughline
“I’m interested in the throughline. That’s always what I’m interested in.”
Rhiannon Giddens is speaking from her home office in Ireland, stacks of books and skeins of yarn piled on a shelf behind her.
She’s speaking about reviving traditional music from the past—specifically, in this conversation, songs honoring German student protester Sophie Scholl, who was beheaded in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets—and finding its resonance in the present.
Giddens has made a career of excavating these historical acts of resistance—from Scholl, whose example has clear historical reverberations today, to Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar trafficked into slavery in North Carolina, and whose memoir Giddens turned into a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera—and drawing them into the present. Recently, Giddens was in the news for her own moment of defiance, deciding not to play the Kennedy Center after it fired its longtime president, appointed a Trump loyalist in her stead, and installed President Trump as chair.
As a devout student of history, it’s no surprise Giddens’s next act also has a throughline to the past: Biscuits & Banjos, a three-day “exploration of Black music, art, and culture” takes place in downtown Durham April 25–27. The event marks 20 years since Black Banjos Then & Now, an old-time gathering, took place in Boone.
Read the full story here.
— Sarah Edwards
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