Today's stories in print and online about the MLK marches in Durham and Chapel Hill mentioned poet C. J. Suitt, who recited "My Lovely Little College Town" on the steps of the Franklin Street post office yesterday.

In 2010, we ran Suitt's poem in its entirety after he recited it at a public meeting and spoke at a town meeting on racism in Chapel Hill. Part of the poem contrasts Silent Sam, the monument to Confederate war dead, and "Unsung Founders," a smaller statue honoring the African Americans, many of them slaves, who built the university. The two statues are yards apart just off Franklin Street on McCorkle Place on the UNC campus.

Silent Sam has been the subject of controversy off and on. The Chapel Hill Historical Society and UNC University Library will present "Silent Sam in History and Memory," a talk by Dr. Fitz Brundage and Adam Domby today Tuesday, Jan. 22, at 5:30 p.m. in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room at UNC's Wilson Library. The event is free.

In the meantime here again is the full text of Suitt's poem. (Agree with it or not, reading it does not do justice to his powerful spoken word delivery.)

My Lovely Little College Town

I live in a wonderful little college town
Where true feelings are glossed over with "PC" wax like the
floors in hospitals and the impossible's are made to seem possible
Between the "Hellos" and "How Ya’ Doings"
I feel the hatred brewing as she clutches her purse a little tighter
telling herself
“I'm no racist
I have black guy friends, it’s just the ones I don't know I’m afraid of “
as if Black men were pit bulls without Leashes
The plight of a black man in a White town
Where he's only good if he's affluent or submissive
Proper Black man:
Working a job with a dress code, no tattoos, shirt and tie,
well groomed, is a student and/or has a degree
of some sort
In this lovely little college town
Where armchair progressives are a dime a dozen and social consciousness is a
verbal state of mind
That really only lies in revolutionary cotton tees, dreads and blowin' trees
Che is great and we love and try our best to emulate Bob Marley and Gandhi
Chapel Hill
Where the predominately Black and Latino parts of the city have been reduced to a quarter of the size that they used to be or moved far away as not to
tarnish the image of the university
A university that has erected a 20 ft tall monument in the civil war SILENT Sam
And less than a hundred yards away is a slave monument that’s...a table
A table that has these 2 ft slaves holding it up
The last time I walked past there was a lovely white family enjoying lunch
What reverence we show still making them be the foundation for the nourishment of this nation
Still no bill for reparations
And me in this hospital I’m a struggling doctor I need patience
Cause it seems this hospitals real...an asylum
Where the upper "conscious class thinks there the victims of a lower class society
And the rich lend hands to there rich artistic friends and stand over the
Impoverished scratching at the insides of coffins with the lumber that built this town under their finger nails
Chapel Thrill
Where students swarm in to swap the culture they were raised on in exchange
For frats and sorrors
Kim Chee for keg stands
Tamales for top of the hill
Curry for curriculum
And until recently in March
Until Eve Carson in March
basketball games and rivalries have been more important than murder rates
It’s Madness
I live in a wonderful little college town
Where true feelings are glossed over with PC wax like the floors
in Asylums
Welcome To The Neighborhood.