Happy Hanukkah!

Hanukkah officially began on Sunday night, and Cabarrus County's only Jewish congregation, Temple Or Olam, celebrated with a party. Below, 5-year-old Caleb Malin lights the menorah with help from his father Judah.

Estelle Wiley has been registering voters for about 50 years

Now the 89-year-old wants to get to Barack Obama's inauguration. Hear her talk about her experiences as an African-American in the South and her work to register Kannapolis' voters.

14-year-old cuts jazz album...

... and it's pretty good.

Steven Vaughn Ray is a freshman at Northwest Cabarrus High School and traveled to France for a weekend to cut his first jazz album. He had his CD release party at Midtown Sundries in Cornelius.

Brooklyn bridge

Cannon School students attempt to break Guinness record for stacking

This video was produced for IndependentTribune.com. Cannon school students participated in the World Sports Stacking Association's third annual Stack Up!, in which students stacked 12 cups in different formations against a clock or in a team relay. The event sought to win the "World's Largest Sports Stacking Event" title in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Obama campaigns in Charlotte the night before the election

Video: Barack Obama stops in Charlotte the day before the election

The day before being elected president, Sen. Barack Obama made a campaign stop in Charlotte, N.C. at UNC-Charlotte. The A.P. reported that 25,000 people attended Obama's second to last rally before election day. While N.C. has not been claimed either a red or blue state, Obama has claimed 62% to Sen. John McCain's 37.5% of Mecklenburg County's votes.

Kannapolis' last faces of segregation

photos by James Nix

"The Miss Kannapolis float is one of the firsts to pass in the Christmas parade. A short time later the A.L. Brown Marching Band will make its way down Main Street, blowing John Phillip Susa marches while keeping perfect form. It was the tradition.

George Washington Carver High School performed near the end of the cavalcade. Their presence was a crowd favorite and they practiced more than normal to keep expectations high. The low-hanging midmorning sun cast shadows as large as the egos of the drum lines.

Drummers riff on complex syncopated rhythms while the majorettes throw their batons higher than they ever did in practice and catch them without looking up.

Audience members bundled up in their wearing heavy winter coats move with the beats, applauding uproariously and cheering madly.

Moments later, cleaning crews hired by the Cannon Mills Company begin sweeping up the streets and the crowd dissolves. The all-black G.W. Carver band, wearing beaming smiles on top of their white and blue uniforms, puts away their equipment and push down the last remaining anxiety about their performance.

This will be the first and last time a white audience applauds them this year, because in 1960 Kannapolis, blacks sit in the backs of restaurants, enter through a separate door at the mill and go to black only dentists. The races rarely interact unless there’s a downbeat.

But that was 1960. "

-Josh Lanier, Independent Tribune

This was my first big multimedia project for the Independent Tribune. I'm really proud of it- in one week, we interviewed 9 alumni of Carver High, the last all-black school in Kannapolis, about their experiences during segregation, racism today and Barack Obama.