In both cities, outrage followed the incidents, but in Durham the outrage didn’t erupt in violence. The city has remained peaceful and has moved forward to address the larger issue of how police tactics can unfairly target specific groups.

One reason for Durham’s progress is the role played by an Aggie, Pastor Mark-Anthony Middleton, founder of the Abundant Hope Christian Church and a 1991 N.C. A&T graduate. He was one of many community leaders who came together to move the city away from turmoil and into agreement about what had to be done.

Since The New York Times came to the city last month to tell the story of its hard-earned peace, Middleton has become something like the face of the movement – a role he will not accept.

“The tendency is to find ‘the’ face and ‘the’ voice of a movement, and I’ve been very resistant to that,” he says. “I know how many people worked on this and how many people’s names didn’t get in the paper. … This was ‘we, the people’ coming together and getting this done.”

In November 2013, a Latino teenager was shot in the head while in police custody. They said Jesus Huerta committed suicide in the backseat of a police car, after being searched and handcuffed behind his back.

Huerta's death occurred in a community where police interactions with minorities were receiving close scrutiny. For example, blacks make up 40 percent of Durham’s population but were subject to 80 percent of consensual searches of vehicles. Political scientist Dr. Frank Baumgartner of UNC-Chapel Hill conducted a study of publically available statistics that found the pattern.

“The Southern Coalition for Social Justice marshalled those numbers, and what we saw was a statistical, not anecdotal, but a statistical, empirically based picture of police interactions here in our city,” Middleton says.

The death of Huerta put Durham in a bad situation with the potential to get far worse.

“What separates what happened here in Durham from other engagements – and this isn’t a critique of other activists or engagements around the country – what I think is a critical difference that really propelled us to the victories that we’ve seen here is that we decided we were going to make the research the centerpiece of our campaign, the science, as opposed to a particular family’s grievance, a particular bad arrest or shooting.”

Those specific, individual issues are important, Middleton says, but when they’re the focus of a campaign, any solutions tend to focus on that particular issue and not to the broader issues like those raised by Baumgartner’s study of police searches.

“I think the critique that we’ve got a cultural and systemic problem of racism here in the country, a lot of people subscribe to that. But at the operational level, when we actually engage in campaigns for change, the conversation devolves into, ‘We want this particular person fired, we want justice for this particular family.’”

Middleton is a leader of Durham CAN (Congregations, Associations and Neighborhoods), a prominent community organization. It is one of a broad variety of groups – some of which don’t necessarily agree on other issues, he says – that led Durham in a different direction.

“Because we focused on the numbers … we think that really disarmed our critics in many ways because it wasn’t a personal discussion. It was a scientific discussion about what the statistics say.”

The result was winning over a publically skeptical city manager and the City Council, some of whom were already convinced of the need for change. Now Durham police officers have to get written permission from motorists for consent searches in routine traffic stops, “which is major,” Middleton says. All police officers are getting racial sensitivity training. The civilian complaint review board has been strengthened. The police will conduct mandatory periodic reviews of traffic-stop data.

Middleton’s contributions to the cause are partly the result of his experience at A&T. He currently serves on the Executive Board of the Alumni Association.

“I cut my political teeth in activism there on A&T’s campus as one of the leaders of our anti-apartheid movement on campus in the 80s. … Chancellor Fort will remember it,” he says with a laugh. “We barged into his office many a day.”

After graduating, Middleton chose the ministry and divinity school at Duke over law school. He established the “non-denominational, Baptist-leaning.” Abundant Hope Christian Church in 2003.

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