Who Gets to Belong?
From Winston's segregation ordinance to the contested memory of the Bridge of Flowers
By A.I. Slopworth
A community does not have to build a wall to establish a boundary. Sometimes it passes an ordinance. Sometimes it appoints a committee. Sometimes it simply allows a story to harden until the people inside it can no longer get their own words through. The language changes, but the question underneath it stays recognizable: who has the authority to decide who belongs, whose contributions count, and whose account of events becomes the official version?
In early-twentieth-century Winston, North Carolina, that authority was exercised through a residential segregation ordinance backed by prosecution. In contemporary Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, a dispute involving an artist, a petition, and the stewardship of the Bridge of Flowers raises a different set of questions about cultural authority, public memory, and institutional accountability. I am that artist, and I have tried to hold my own account to the same standard I ask of everyone else: where it is my account, I say so, and where the record does not support a claim of mine, I do not make it. These histories are not equivalent. A racial ordinance criminalizing a Black family's choice of residence belongs to the machinery of Jim Crow. A dispute over an artist's standing and work at a public landmark is not the same injury, does not carry the same historical weight, and should not borrow that weight carelessly. But a comparison need not declare two things identical to reveal something important about both. The useful connection is accountability: what happens when an institution treats its claim to represent the community as sufficient authority to determine another person's place within it?
The ordinance that made a home an offense
The chronology matters. Winston's board of aldermen adopted its residential segregation ordinance on July 5, 1912, not in 1914. The ordinance prohibited a Black person from occupying a residence on a street segment where more homes were occupied by white residents than by Black residents, and a corresponding provision imposed a similar restriction on white residents moving into predominantly Black street segments. That reciprocal wording did not change what the ordinance did: it made race a municipal qualification for living in a particular place.
In 1913, William Darnell, a Black man, moved his family into a house on Highland Avenue, on a block where white families occupied the greater number of homes. He was prosecuted, convicted, and fined. He appealed, was convicted again in the superior court, and appealed once more. On April 8, 1914, the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed his conviction and dismissed the prosecution in State v. Darnell, 166 N.C. 300, 81 S.E. 338 (1914). The city's justification rested on its charter authority to enact ordinances for good order, good government, and the "general welfare," and the court rejected the claim that this broad language authorized the aldermen to impose residential segregation.
The decision was not a modern, comprehensive declaration of racial equality. Its reasoning centered on the limits of municipal authority and interference with property rights, and that distinction matters, because history becomes less useful when an actual ruling is replaced with the ruling we wish had been written. Yet the court identified a danger that extended beyond the immediate ordinance. If a bare majority of aldermen could assign residential space by race under the banner of general welfare, the court asked, why could it not separate Republicans from Democrats, Protestants from Catholics, or residents of German descent from residents of Irish descent? The question exposed the reach of the claimed power. The aldermen were not merely managing streets. They were claiming the authority to sort human beings.
The public good is not a blank check
The enduring lesson of Darnell's case is not that every objectionable local decision is segregation in disguise. It is that invoking the public good does not settle whether an institution possesses the authority it claims. An institution may sincerely believe it is protecting harmony, and it may describe its actions as orderly, necessary, or beneficial. None of those descriptions answers the next questions: where the power comes from, what limits it, who can challenge its exercise, and what remedy exists when it is used unfairly.
Darnell's prosecution makes those questions concrete. A family's home became an offense because local officials decided that their understanding of community welfare authorized a racial boundary, and the court's intervention established that the city's general claim to govern did not grant unlimited permission to prescribe where people belonged. That is the historical bridge worth crossing: not a claim that all exclusions are the same, but an insistence that authority must answer for itself.
A public bridge and a narrower circle of decision-makers
The Bridge of Flowers occupies a different legal and moral landscape. The structure belongs to the Shelburne Falls Fire District, a unit of local government independent of the town governments of Shelburne and Buckland, and it carries a water line serving the Buckland side of the village. The gardens' day-to-day maintenance is overseen by a committee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club. According to the bridge's own description, committee membership proceeds by nomination and a vote of the existing committee, members take on responsibilities that include maintenance, publicity, budgeting, and liaison with area businesses, and the committee supplies monthly reports to the Women's Club. Eligibility to serve is itself limited: the committee is drawn from a club whose membership, by its own statement, is open only to women. That is a question of sex, not race, and a private club may set its own membership, but it bears directly on who can take part in governing a public asset.
That picture is more specific, and more revealing, than simply calling the committee an absolute government. The committee does not own the structure. Its authority is not identical to that of a municipal board. Its members perform volunteer work that helps sustain a much-loved place, and those facts belong in any honest account. But they do not dispose of the governance question. A committee can be conscientious about flowers and still need clearer procedures for decisions affecting public art, attribution, memorialization, and the reputation of a contributor. An internally selected membership can provide continuity while also leaving the wider public uncertain about how to challenge a consequential decision.
The issue is not whether volunteers should be appreciated. They should. The issue is whether appreciation has become a substitute for a visible account of authority. Who decides what is installed? Who decides what is removed? Who keeps the record? Who hears an objection? When the owner and the day-to-day steward are different entities, which one must answer? Those questions do not attack the bridge. They take its public significance seriously.
I was there before the controversy
My relationship to the bridge did not begin with a petition. I made the Trolley Gate in 2010, collaborated on the Pothole Fountain in 2011, and made the River Bench in 2014. The fountain was a shared effort. Julie Petty chaired the committee then, stoneworker Paul Forth and his assistant Jason built it, and my part was developing the drawing the committee approved. Those details matter because this is partly an argument about how contributions are remembered, and an essay objecting to erasure should not reproduce it by compressing several people's work into a single heroic signature. The polished black stones set into the paving in the shape of Africa were Paul's idea, an homage to his daughters. That element belongs to his contribution, and it should not disappear inside a generalized claim that I alone created a racial memorial.
Independent reporting confirms my connection to the site. At the bridge's reopening celebration in August 2025, WAMC described a nearby fountain as designed by me and noted that I had taken part in creating several of the bridge's pieces. None of this makes me immune from criticism. It does establish that the person later subjected to a removal campaign was not an interchangeable outsider. I had helped make the place people were arguing about, and that fact should complicate the story rather than be treated as an inconvenience to it.
When a petition becomes an institutional occasion
In June 2020, a petition titled "Remove John Sendelbach's art from Shelburne Falls" sought the removal of my work following a disputed incident at a June 6 protest on the Iron Bridge. The Greenfield Recorder reported that the petition received more than 600 signatures in three days before being removed from Change.org, that it specifically identified my bench on the bridge, and that the Bridge of Flowers Committee had not yet decided how to proceed. I dispute the petition's characterization of my conduct and the completeness of the account that circulated about me. My objections are my account, and I identify them as such, just as the petitioners' accusations should remain identifiable as theirs. The petition's existence is documented. Its accusations are not transformed into findings merely because people signed it.
What happened next matters because the committee described its own response publicly. On June 18, 2020, it installed a sign honoring victims of racial or ethnic violence and hate crimes near the memorial water feature and stone bench in the Shelburne-side entrance garden, and reporting published the following day explicitly connected the decision to the petition. Committee chair Annette Szpila explained:
"We wanted to honor the anti-racism spirit of the petition and began looking for appropriate ways the bridge might reinforce that ideal, without damaging the peaceful atmosphere of the gardens."
The report also stated that the committee contacted the petition's creator and others involved in the protest while considering its response. It did not contact me. That is a firmer foundation for scrutiny than speculation about secret motives: the institution itself connected a memorial intervention to a petition seeking to remove my work.
The immediate question is not whether an anti-racism memorial is a worthy thing. It is. Nor is it whether a committee may add meaning to a public garden. The question is what process accompanied this particular act, in this particular dispute, beside these existing works. Did the committee distinguish support for an anti-racist message from endorsement of the petition's allegations? Did it invite and consider my account? Did it explain the relationship between the new memorial and the contributions already present? What record allows the public to answer those questions? The contemporary report establishes the installation and the committee's stated connection to the petition. It does not establish that my bench was removed, and it wasn't. An argument about erasure becomes stronger, not weaker, when it refuses to claim a physical removal the record does not show.
Erasure can concern meaning as well as objects
An artwork can remain in place while the story around it changes. That does not mean every new plaque is an act of erasure. Public places accumulate meanings, and new memorials can deepen a site rather than displace what came before. The distinction lies in the record, the attribution, and the process. Does the new interpretation acknowledge existing contributions? Does it distinguish documented events from disputed claims? Does it allow a complicated person to remain complicated, or does it reduce that person to the accusation that prompted the institutional response?
My argument is that my work and my standing were recast through a public narrative I could not meaningfully correct. That claim requires examination of specific actions and records. It should not be assumed true in every detail simply because I state it forcefully, nor dismissed because I am angry. The same standard applies to the committee: its stated intentions deserve to be reported accurately, but good intentions are not a substitute for explaining what it did. A garden's peaceful atmosphere cannot settle a dispute about whether someone was treated fairly. Sometimes peace means that a conflict has been resolved. Sometimes it means that the person still objecting has become easy to ignore.
The human cost is not a footnote
For an institution, a controversy may appear as an agenda item, a statement, or an unanswered message. For the person at its center, it can become the atmosphere of daily life: the repeated explanation, the anticipated encounter, the uncertainty over whether a stranger knows the work or only the accusation. For me it has been six years of reputational injury, stress, medical difficulty, and conflict involving local authorities. I now live with atrial fibrillation, and I have had episodes I believe were life-threatening. I want to be precise about that, because precision is part of taking it seriously: my experience of what happened is not, by itself, a medical finding that a particular committee decision caused a particular cardiac condition.
No such causal shortcut is necessary to make the underlying point. A person should not have to prove that an institution caused a medical emergency before receiving a substantive answer about its decisions. Nor should illness become an excuse to dismiss the questions. The validity of a request for records does not depend on whether the person asking sounds calm, and the accuracy of an attribution does not depend on whether its author is popular. Institutions should respond to the evidence before them, not make composure a qualification for being heard.
Where the parallel holds, and where it stops
William Darnell faced prosecution under an explicitly racial residential ordinance. His family's choice of home became a legal offense, and the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned his conviction because the municipality had exceeded the authority available to it. My dispute concerns public art, reputation, memorial interpretation, and the governance of a landmark. Its legal questions, available remedies, and historical significance are different, and keeping those differences visible is essential.
The comparison is useful at the level of institutional reasoning: the tendency to treat "the community" as though it speaks with one voice, and to treat the institution's preferred account as though it requires no further examination. Darnell's case demonstrates the danger of an expansive claim of authority backed by law. The Bridge of Flowers dispute raises questions about a less formal authority: the power to confer civic legitimacy, choose a public response, and leave some accounts outside the institutional narrative. One history cannot prove the allegations in the other. It can sharpen the questions we ask.
Stewardship should leave a record
The answer is not to abolish every committee or assume every volunteer organization is malicious. It is to make consequential decisions easier to inspect. For a publicly owned landmark, a credible governance arrangement should make several things clear:
- The respective responsibilities of the public owner and the organization managing the site.
- The procedures for selecting decision-makers and reviewing their authority.
- The criteria governing public art, memorials, attribution, alteration, and removal.
- The record of significant decisions and the reasons supporting them.
- A way for affected contributors to submit corrections and receive substantive responses.
- A review process that does not depend entirely on persuading the people whose decision is being challenged.
These are standards to establish, not assertions that every one is already legally required of this particular committee. Their value is practical. They protect contributors from arbitrary treatment, volunteers from unsupported accusations, and the public from having to choose between competing stories without access to the decisions underneath them. A defensible decision should become easier to understand when its reasoning is disclosed.
The right to remain in the story
A community is not made only by the people currently authorized to speak in its name. It is made by families who live there, workers who build it, artists who give it form, volunteers who maintain it, and dissenters who insist that its preferred story is incomplete. No one is entitled to immunity from criticism. No committee is entitled to immunity from questions. No petition should become a verdict merely because it travels quickly.
William Darnell's case belongs to the history of resistance to racial segregation. The dispute at the Bridge of Flowers belongs to a different history, one still contested, concerning cultural stewardship and the treatment of a contributor who refuses the account given of him. I am that contributor. The connection is not that the injuries are interchangeable. It is that the phrase "for the good of the community" should begin an explanation, not end one. The bridge can remain beautiful while its governance is questioned. An anti-racism memorial can express a worthy principle while the process behind its installation is examined. An artist can be difficult, angry, or unpopular and still deserve accurate attribution and a fair account. The flowers do not answer those questions. The people entrusted with the place should.
A note on the byline. "A.I. Slopworth" is short for Artimus Intellego Slopworth, the pen name I use for writing done with the help of artificial intelligence. Artimus stands for artificial, Intellego is Latin for "I understand," which a machine can't do on its own, and Slopworth is what the internet now calls the flood of empty machine-made text this work is meant not to be. The research, the documents, the judgment and the final word are mine. — John F. Sendelbach