North Carolina Mayor’s Wife Yvonne Doughtie Says City Lost Its ‘BackBone,’ Blames Black Residents for Housing and School Problems

ROANOKE RAPIDS, N.C. — Roanoke Rapids Mayor Emery G. Doughtie has spent five terms leading the North Carolina city, but statements posted by his wife have pulled his family into a racially charged dispute over housing and school problems.

Yvonne Doughtie blamed some of those problems on Black residents in a Facebook discussion preserved in screenshots. Her comments were reported by local news outlet RRSpin, which detailed an exchange that began with rental-property owner Jim Garrett discussing economic differences between the east and west sides of the city.

Garrett wrote that the east side generally has more prosperity, working taxpayers and better-maintained homes. He described some west-side neighborhoods as having more poverty, abandoned buildings, drugs, homelessness and violent crime.

Doughtie entered the discussion by recalling her childhood in Chaloner Park, describing a middle-class neighborhood filled with working families. She listed lawyers, teachers, police officers, nurses, bookkeepers, truck drivers and business owners among those who lived there, writing that everyone worked for what they had with “no handouts of government give aways!”

Her post then turned explicitly to race. Doughtie wrote that Black residents had moved into Roanoke Rapids and RRHS and linked that change to problems involving housing and schools.

“I am not saying all Black Citizens,” she wrote before asserting that many Black renters do not properly care for their houses.

She also faulted landlords, writing that Roanoke Rapids has numerous “Slum Lord Rental People” who fail to keep properties repaired.

Roanoke Rapids soon separated its government from Doughtie’s comments. A written statement identified the mayor’s spouse as a private citizen who does not speak on behalf of municipal government.

Administrators said they had not independently verified who authored the social media posts or whether they were authentic. The statement rejected tying the city’s problems to racial, political or socioeconomic stereotypes and said every resident should be treated fairly, respectfully and without discrimination.

In one of her strongest assertions, Doughtie wrote that the “BackBone” of Roanoke Rapids was gone and accused some present-day residents of being unwilling to work. Her Facebook post contrasted those residents with the working families she remembered from Chaloner Park.

City Manager Kelly Traynham declined to comment beyond the written statement. Emery Doughtie, first elected mayor in November 2009 and now serving his fifth term, had not publicly addressed his wife’s comments as of Sunday.