Over the past year, restrictive and discriminatory legislation has proliferated across North Carolina. At the end of March, the HB 2 bill swept aside the state’s laws protecting LGBT residents against discrimination; a bill signed in October by Governor Pat McCrory limited acceptable forms of identification and deregulated police investigations into a person’s immigration status.
Still, messages of acceptance are appearing throughout the state. At the beginning of this year, some local businesses hung graphic posters in their windows, bearing the words “Refugees Are Welcome Here.” Initially posted in response to the anti-immigration bill passed in the state last fall, the messages also resonate in the wake of the more recent discriminatory policies, says Noah Rubin-Blose, a member of the Triangle, North Carolina branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, the national organization behind the posters. In the midst of the refugee crisis playing out across the globe, the signs are especially potent: the artist Micah Bazant based his design for the posters on an image of a Syrian father and child seeking refuge.
[For more of this story, written by Eillie Anzilotti, go to http://www.citylab.com/navigat...rth-carolina/478746/]
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