I’m running for Congress in North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District. It’s where I’m from and a part of the state I know well.
I was born and raised in Anson County, the heart of the district. My parents still live there, and when we buried my brother there in April, he joined two centuries of my relatives whose final resting places are scattered across the district.
Anson County shaped me. I entered school with the first fully integrated class in Anson County history. At 8 years old, I was selling newspapers for 10 cents each on the streets of downtown Wadesboro, making a nickel for each one I sold. I played Little League baseball and learned to shoot basketball on a dirt court with neighbors who are still part of my life today.
I caught bass in ponds, shad behind the powerhouse at Blewitt Falls and catfish on trot lines in the Pee Dee River. I hunted dove in cut-over fields and climbed tree stands on cold winter mornings where I found that I was a terrible shot. I learned to drive on country roads and developed a lifelong love of old pickup trucks.
It’s also where I learned that politics is supposed to be more about public service than about power. For more than 25 years, my father served as a judge in four of the counties in the 8th District. His brother represented Anson and Richmond counties in the legislature in the 1960s and 1970s. A plaque in the Old Capitol Building in Raleigh lists Absalom Myers, my great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side, as representing Anson County in the state Senate in 1840, the year that building was completed.
The county is so much a part of me that my son’s middle name is Anson because I always want him to know where his people came from.
But it’s not just Anson County. I know the rest of the district as well. I caught the train in Hamlet. I spent days and nights with friends in Laurinburg. We visited the Town Creek Indian Mound in Montgomery County where we could see the bones of ancient residents. On my birthdays, my father took me to the qualifying rounds at the Rockingham Speedway back when the pits were open and drivers and their crews mingled with fans like us.
For first-run movies, we went to Monroe and when we went to the beach, we drove through Maxton, Rowland and Fair Bluff. I learned to water ski on Lake Tillery, I hiked at Morrow Mountain in the Uwharries and my dentist was in Albermarle. My sister-in-law is from Salisbury and when my great-great grandfather marched north to die at Gettysburg, he left from Concord, leaving behind his infant daughter, my great grandmother.
There’s very little of that district that I don’t know, but it’s much different today than when I grew up there. Back then, the district was a patchwork of small towns with healthy business districts fueled mainly by textile mills and cotton farms. Today, the western edge of the district benefits from its proximity to Charlotte, with former textile towns transforming into suburbia.
Towns like Concord, Kannapolis and Salisbury are growing with new neighborhoods and new businesses. Much of the rest of the district is struggling. The mills moved out, the Walmarts moved in, and the towns dried up.
To add insult to injury, NASCAR moved the races out of Rockingham, leaving the famous track idle and falling into disrepair.
Over the past quarter-century, much of the 8th Congressional District has been sold out by government and slapped down by the invisible hand of the free market. Unfair trade agreements sent the manufacturing jobs that fueled the district to other countries. Profits from those deals went to investors and Wall Street, not to the infrastructure needed to attract new industries.
Several counties are losing population and many still suffer from high unemployment — and have since before the Great Recession. If people have lost faith in government and corporate America to help them solve their problems, who can blame them?
The 8th District has a proud history — but much of it’s being left behind. The road to recovery is long and uncertain. Solutions will take commitment, ideas, infrastructure and money. The district needs leaders who will honor its past and fight for its future. I’ve never backed down from a fight.
Thomas Mills is a Democratic candidate for Anson County’s U.S. House seat and is editor of the blog Politics North Carolina.