Pat McCrory Compared Losing Out on Duke Job to Lunch Counter Segregation

North Carolina’s former governor, now a U.S. Senate candidate, made the comments in 2021 on his radio show. 

So, Pat McCrory says missing out on a Duke University gig is like Black Americans denied service at lunch counters in the 1960s. 

Yep, he did. 

McCrory, for those not aware, is a Republican and past Charlotte mayor who spent one term as North Carolina’s governor from 2013 to 2017. As governor, he signed the controversial H.B. 2 bathroom bill, a compendium of anti-LGBQT proposals that spurred widespread criticism and boycotts of North Carolina. 

He now hosts a Charlotte talk radio show and is one of several Republicans running for the open U.S. Senate seat that we’ll all be voting for later this year. 

It was on that radio show that McCrory made his comments in January 2021 about being “blacklisted” for his conservative politics and denied a prestigious position at the university’s public policy school, CNN reported Thursday.

“You know what I said to him, I said, ‘If I come back to the, if I come back to the campus, will you serve me at the lunch counter?’ And I meant it,” McCrory said, according to CNN. 

McCrory, who is white, went on, comparing his slight to what occurred in nearby Greensboro where four Black NC A&T students started a 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter that was a major turning point in the modern civil rights movement. 

McCrory said:  “Speaking about the ultimate blacklisting was the African American students from North Carolina A&T University who wanted to eat at the counter at Woolworths, the lunch counter. And they refused them. They were blacklisted because of the color of their skin. Other people are now being blacklisted because of our politics. And it’s both wrong. It’s both deplorable. And we’ve got to speak out against it.”

McCrory made the comments a year ago, but they were reported on Thursday by CNN as part of a larger effort to examine McCrory’s rhetoric in recent years. 

You can listen for yourself here.