Ben holder was
reviewing some of his greatest hits from the “speakers from the floor”
segment of greensboro city council meetings. He dragged the cursor over
a file on his computer and played the video from his opponent,
incumbent District 1 councilwoman Dianne bellamy-small’s first term.
this particular episode showed Holder describing the need for a
coordinated community and police response to crack-cocaine-related
homicides, and former mayor Keith Holliday listening intently and then
responding thoughtfully.
A tattered map of District 1 lay
before the computer monitor in the study at the house Holder recently
moved into in glenwood. agreensboro native and former winston-salem
resident who calls himself the troublemaker, Holder’s back. He hopes to
snatch the championship belt from bellamysmall, a resilient incumbent
with strong grassroots support who survived a recall election and then
handily defeated three opponents in 2007. “i’m going to be using
everything i learned from watching professional wrestling,” he said.
“i’m going to be talking shit and swallowing spit.”
Today,
he was wearing a kaleidoscope-colored tie-dye that his 8-year old son
and 5- year-old daughter disdain and a wrestling-inspired red Fu manchu
anchu moustache with white highlights. come early next month he
promised to organize his supporters into a formal campaign organization
and refine his appearance. the Fu manchu moustache will have to go. but
isn’t that part of the wrestling strategy? “wrestling is all about
marketing,” Holder said. “You have to look the part.” He later added,
“growing up watching wrestling, that was the only time you saw a white
guy, a black guy and a Hispanic guy all cheering for the same person.”
The
campaign action has been mostly pillowstrikes so far, but Holder has
made a modest gambit. on July 23, he used his blog to challenge a city
policy holding that all information requested by candidates should be
provided to their opponents. “it all but eliminates the element of
surprise,” Holder complained. “the art of blindsiding is a big part of
american politics and should not be taken away.”
As anyone who reads
Holder’s blog knows, he spends a considerable amount of his time
driving around. A recent run took him on a circuitous route around
Glenwood. At one corner he slowed his car and watched with interest as
a woman knocked on the door of what appeared to be an unused
storefront. The woman opened the door and stared balefully back in
Holder’s direction before he eased the car around the corner. Then he
drove to a duplex on Union Street that has recently been condemned by
the city and whose door was standing wide open. Someone had taken a
Sharpie and wrote “crackhouse” on the doors of two houses around the
corner on Gregory Street.
“The kids in this neighborhood don’t
need to see that,” Holder said. “This wouldn’t happen around the
Friendly Center. It’s not fair, and it shouldn’t be this way.” Blighted
properties, the sale of drug paraphernalia, asbestos removal, illegal
massage parlors and police protection are a few of the issues Holder
has addressed through his activism. The through-line of these campaigns
has been his conviction that the city’s powerful and privileged allow
these scourges to afflict the areas where poor blacks, whites and
Hispanics live, and that the same leaders would never stand for such
nuisances in exclusive neighborhoods such as Irving Park. Holder’s
relationship with the Greensboro Police Department has been complex and
conflicted.
He said that in 2003 he began mapping the
homicides and correlating them to convenience stores where cheap
flowers were sold in plastic tubes. Crack-cocaine users would throw
away the flowers and use the tubes to smoke their drugs. Holder
presented these drug stems to the vice-narcotics division, and the
police soon sent undercover officers to make buys, with arrests
following.
Holder noted with relish that one of the
convenience stores implicated in the sweep was owned by Isa Abuzuaiter,
the husband of at-large candidate Marikay Abuzuaiter. Subsequently, the
store stopped selling the cheap flowers enclosed in plastic tubes.
Holder said he has maintained a friendly relationship with the
Abuzuaiter family.
Isa Abuzuaiter said one of his clerks
pleaded no contest after selling one of the tubes, and that he as the
owner of the store was found not guilty.
“I don’t know why
he’s talking about our store,” Abuzuaiter said. “I think he should go
find something else. I think he should leave the small business people
alone and go after the drug dealers. We’re trying to make a living like
everyone else.” For his part, Holder seemed eager to mend fences.
“I
support Marikay, and I’m planning on voting for her,” he said. “I
didn’t know he owned that store. The police chose that store; I didn’t
bring it to their attention. In the at-large contest, I think Nancy
Vaughan is going to be mayor pro tem, Robbie Perkins is going to come
in second place, and it’s going to be a dogfight between Marikay and
Sandra Anderson Groat. I’m voting for Marikay,
and I’m encouraging everyone else to, also.” Another time, in 2003,
Holder wore a wire for the police during an interview with a nightclub
operator while purporting to gather information for a newspaper story.
(Somewhat ironically, the location of the former nightclub, called the
Game Time Lounge, now houses the Hive, an anarchist community and
activist center that is on the candidate’s list of places to visit.)
Though at one time he acted as a police agent, Holder is hardly a
booster of the department. He supports giving subpoena power to the
city’s complaint review committee, which investigates citizen
complaints about police abuse. Bellamy-Small, his opponent, rejected
the idea in January.
“I’ve always agreed with that,” Holder
said. “I like to watch and instruct [the police]. I look at myself as
their supervisor. A complaint review committee without subpoena power
is just another way to pacify a community.”
Under a proposal by the human relations commission, the complaint
review committee would have the power to subpoena civilian witnesses.
Why, Holder asks, should police officers worry about civilian witnesses
testifying if they haven’t done anything wrong? And besides, he adds,
police officers should welcome testimony from civilian witnesses
because it could end up showing they comported themselves
professionally.
Much of Holder’s recent notoriety has come
from his prolific blogging on the subject of an ongoing police
controversy revolving around former Chief David Wray’s resignation, the
numerous investigations of the special intelligence section and
lawsuits by black officers alleging racial discrimination. Holder has
consistently argued that the special intelligence section properly
investigated black officers because of credible allegations of
misconduct, including improper associations with drug dealers.
The
candidate said he anticipates that the matter will come up during the
campaign, but he would be just as happy if it didn’t. Bellamy-Small has
hinted that she has no plans to shrink from the subject, listing among
her accomplishments on her campaign website that she “advocated for
fairness in [the] treatment of black officers involved in the police
scandal.”
District 1 has the heaviest representation of
African Americans in the city, and many of those aligned with Holder on
the controversy live in the city’s three majority-white districts. The
candidate is savvy enough to know this issue isn’t likely to weigh in
his favor.
“I’ve always been on the left side with the
have-nots,” Holder said. “That David Wray thing was like a civil war.
Brothers stopped talking. I had to look at the facts, and say, ‘Hold
on.’ I made some sacrifices. I went to hang out with the white boys on
the right.”
To black voters in District 1 who may not agree
with him, Holder has this to say: “How has Ron Rogers been
discriminated against when he’s the assistant chief of police?” He
continued by asking whether they would want the police department to
ignore numerous allegations of corruption by black officers.
Holder
said he sees a city cursed by a split, with both sides lying to each
other. He may be a polarizing figure, but he does have some diversity
credentials as a widower and single father to two mixed-race children.
“We
are a city that has gays, gay haters, blacks, racists, blacks who hate
white people, Hispanics, Mexicans that hate black people — we got it
all here,” he said. “We can continue to gather our belongings and build
fences around ourselves, or we can start working together to make a
better city for everyone. We can look out for our own needs in the
short term or we can prosper together in the long term.”
D1 Voter
