The Triangle Bridge Club. A falafel place called Mediterranean Grill and Grocery. A convenience store and the Al-Huda Academy. To their left, baseball fields and to their right, the modest office of the Parkwood Homeowners Association. A church stands across the narrow bend of Revere Road, and the Parkwood Elementary School is a few steps away. The model community designed for the scientists and engineers is not the same place it was when, in the 1960s, it was an award-winning all-white suburb.
Nazeeh Z. Abdul-Hakeem helped bring a masjid and Islamic academy to Parkwood’s small and declining shopping center in the early 2010s. Abdul-Hakeem, a native of Goldsboro in eastern North Carolina, had studied geography at Durham’s North Carolina Central University and, later, urban planning at UNC-Chapel Hill, before converting to Islam in 1979.1 He enjoyed a fruitful career as a planner with the City of Durham in the years that followed, but he also played a central role in transforming what began as a small prayer group at Duke University into a robust Muslim community in Durham, centered on the masjid Jamaat Ibad Ar-Rahman. The community had grown and flourished among African Americans in greater Durham, as well as the many newcomers from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere who practiced Islam and had relocated to work in the Triangle.2
Yet growth brought challenges for Abdul-Hakeem’s community, changes that captured in miniature the broader demographic shifts of the metropolitan Triangle since the 1970s. Muslims from different ethnic and national backgrounds took on a greater presence within the Jamaat community, creating tensions with an older base of support that was predominantly African American. Meanwhile, moving into Parkwood presented its own potential for conflict; Jamaat’s leaders sought to develop a second location there (the original masjid being in Durham’s Hillside Park), and the neighborhood had its own complicated history with racial prejudice. Parkwood was already home to a number of Muslim residents, largely of Pakistani origin, but some locals feared that Jamaat’s purchase of the shopping center would end the ability of the Christian church across the street to use its lot for parking or as a beginning and ending point for the neighborhood’s annual Christmas parade. Muslim leaders provided assurances that such activities would not be prohibited in the future, though anxieties persisted on both sides.3
Parkwood’s journey paralleled the rise of a new multiethnic suburbia throughout the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as the collapse of formal segregation and a steady of influx of new Americans reshaped not only cities but, increasingly, their suburbs as well. But the Triangle’s progress toward racial integration—including neighborhood desegregation, city-county school consolidation, and the rise of a new generation of black elected leaders since the 1960s—could not always mask the continuing antipathy between its cities and suburbs or the desire among some to police boundaries of identity and privilege.
The trajectory of Parkwood was uniquely symbolic, given the neighborhood’s history with the City of Durham. When Durham sought to annex the community in the 1990s, residents waged a vociferous and determined campaign of opposition. Becoming part of the city meant higher taxes and poorer services, they argued, and the motives of Durham’s leaders were questionable. (“This is just another ploy for the city to raise their tax base to get a better bond rating,” resident and developer Sol Ellis and his wife Helen wrote in 1997, “so they can make low interest loans to developers for downtown projects that keep on raising the tax rate for it’s [sic] citizens.”4) Parkwoodians, perhaps unsurprisingly, wished to enjoy the benefits of suburban life between Durham and RTP without paying city taxes—much as the park itself wished to remain a shiny citadel beyond the grasp of city voters and tax collectors.
But a deeper animus abided as well. Amid American flags and garbage cans adorned with a skull and crossbones, middle-class white residents expressed their disdain for the majority-black city, with a child holding up a sign reading, “Is This What We Are to You?” They even posed for a picture holding up letters that spelled out “Durham City Symbol” behind the overturned trash cans—an arresting assertion of both suburban privilege and racial and class identity.5
Ultimately, efforts to block annexation failed in 1997, and the community became part of Durham.6 In the early twenty-first century, the formerly all-white Parkwood was increasingly diverse; by 2015, the community around Al Huda Academy remained nearly two-thirds white, but black, Latinx, and Asian residents accounted for 25.26 percent, 9.25 percent, and 4.27 percent of the population, respectively. The neighborhood had been 81.25 percent white as recently as 1990. Notably, the white population of Parkwood declined by over 19 percent between 1990 and 2000, whereas the number of black residents increased by nearly 70 percent—a change that might reflect white opposition to annexation by the City of Durham or the merger of city and county school systems in the 1990s.7
The story of Durham and the greater metropolitan Triangle parallels communities across the United States that have become more broadly diverse since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. That act lifted racist restrictions on migration from abroad and led, at least in part, to the influx of workers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the tech industry. Scholars such as Mike Davis and Wendy Cheng have documented this transformation in books such as Magical Urbanism and The Changs Next Door to the Diazes, in studies that center largely on the West Coast. Similarly, anthropologist Stanley Thangaraj has explored the increasing diversity of Arab and Asian communities in the suburbs of metropolitan Atlanta in his study, Desi Hoop Dreams.8
However, North Carolina’s part of this story of cultural, demographic, and economic change has rarely been told. Notably, anthropologist Hannah Gill and sociologist Sarah Mayorga-Gallo have begun to narrate the story of the massive demographic shifts that have reshaped North Carolina in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing largely on the profound in-migration of Latinx people since the 1980s in both rural and urban quarters of the state. Such change has prompted fresh encounters and sometimes uncomfortable adjustments in the urban neighborhoods of Durham as much as smaller, agricultural towns like nearby Siler City in Chatham County, which saw its population grow by 75 percent between 1990 and 2016.9
The arrival of Asian, Latinx, and other immigrants to North Carolina was particularly pronounced in the Triangle, although it remained part of a larger story: the transformation of a biracial apartheid state into a multiethnic polity starting in the 1960s, not long after the founding of RTP. “In 1970, the racial and ethnic composition of the Triangle could be described as either black or white,” planning scholar William Rohe noted. “At that time 71 percent of the Triangle’s population was white, 28 percent was black, and all other racial and ethnic groups made up slightly more than 1 percent of the area’s population.” Employment opportunities in RTP began to change this demographic, by small steps, in the 1960s and 1970s, but the Triangle’s multiculturalism flourished from the 1980s forward. Its Latinx population grew by 561 percent in the 1990s, compared with a simultaneous 159 percent in the area’s Asian population. Although the region boasted a lower proportion of Asian residents than the nation as a whole—4.3 percent in Raleigh versus 5.1 percent nationwide—it had developed a more ethnically diverse community than the state as a whole. Morrisville, a small community near RTP, saw a 1,036.9 percent increase between 2000 and 2010, when Asians made up least 27 percent of the town’s population.10
The Islamic school in Parkwood’s shopping center is a small detail in the overall mosaic of the Triangle’s transformation since the 1950s, but it is a telling one. It was a bellwether of the promising cultural efflorescence of the region as well as the potential for contention between people and communities with different priorities and interests across the metropolitan landscape. Boosters had enticed corporate investment and skilled workers to the Triangle by playing up a reputation for tolerance and moderation that was more aspirational than factual in the 1960s, and it seemed sufficient to satisfy executives at IBM or Burroughs Wellcome. But the metro area faced new challenges by the dawn of the twenty-first century, when the dual prospects of high-tech growth and gentrification once again shuffled the deck of race and class, opportunity and inclusion, as a new kind of city and a new kind of suburbia grew among the kudzu and loblolly pine of the Triangle.