Carolyn Coleman has built a life speaking out.
As a young black woman, she fought racism throughout the South at the peak of the civil rights movement. Decades later, she battled David Duke's bid for governor of Louisiana and won. As a Guilford County commissioner, she has pushed to get government contracts to businesses owned by women and minorities.
But if Coleman the Fighter is to succeed in her new post, she must become Coleman the Peacemaker. The 63-year-old Pleasant Garden resident will spend the next year as the commissioners' chairwoman, presiding over a famously insubordinate group that directs much of its wrath through its leader.
There's nothing like leading this board; just ask outgoing Chairman Bruce Davis.
"It is the epitome of being promoted to the level of incompetence," said Davis, whose yearlong tenure was pocked by controversy over the budget, two investigations of the tax director and a taxpayer-funded conference trip to Hawaii. "You have to really step up to that learning curve real quick."
Like every recent chairman, Coleman, a Democrat, wants to quell the bickering that has become the trademark of the 11-member board. She'll set the agenda and run meetings, responsibilities that will prompt gripes from those who don't feel like they're being heard.
Her strategy: Keep 'em occupied with meaty debate over the proposed jail and budget reform, among other topics.
"It's almost like children," she said with a laugh. "If people aren't busy, they tend to get into mischief."
Coleman was elected Thursday evening after she, Davis and Democrat Melvin "Skip" Alston cut a deal with Republicans Steve Arnold, Linda Shaw and Trudy Wade that gave Coleman the job over Democrat Paul Gibson. She is the board's first black chairwoman.
In return, Republicans received more control over appointments to various boards and commissions and a pledge from Democrats to work more cooperatively with the minority party. The most public part of the agreement was the election of Arnold as vice chairman. The chairman's salary is $24,300; the vice chairman's is $21,000, just $300 more than the other commissioners.
The annual chairmanship battle divides the commissioners like virtually nothing else, and this year's fight was no different. This time, it was Gibson who was denied the job. He had talked about the post for months but lost it when Arnold sided with Coleman.
Arnold picked Coleman because he saw a deal he liked. From Gibson, he got nothing.
Arnold and Gibson never spoke about Gibson's candidacy in the weeks leading up to the vote. Gibson said Republican Billy Yow, perhaps Arnold's closest ally on the board, offered to do some of the talking for him. But Gibson didn't offer the Republicans the vice chairmanship or control over the boards and commissions, as Coleman did.
On Thursday, when the deal became known, Gibson ended up supporting Coleman, but three commissioners, including Yow, did not. On Friday, Yow expressed dismay that Arnold, Shaw and Wade had "sold out" their Republican roots.
"History was made last night," he said, "when the board went more liberal than they ever did before."
Coleman said she planned to chat with the commissioners who didn't vote for her. She even pledged to contact Yow, whom she likened to a Ku Klux Klan member in 2003 after he criticized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization that Coleman has been tied to for decades. In response, Yow called her "the worst racist in Guilford County."
"I'll call Billy," Coleman said Friday. "I think you can't build a relationship if you don't communicate."
People haven't always liked what Coleman's had to say. In 1960, a few weeks after four black N.C. A&T students sat down at an all-white lunch counter in Greensboro and refused to leave, Coleman and some friends marched through downtown Savannah, Ga., stopping at every lunch counter.
Finally, they were arrested.
Five years later, she was at the bloody marches in Selma, Ala. She was in Memphis, Tenn., as an NAACP worker in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In the early 1990s, she rallied black people in Louisiana to defeat Duke, an ex-Klansman who wanted to be governor.
Coleman spent much of the 1990s working for Gov. Jim Hunt, putting together his 1994 trade mission to South Africa and building support for Smart Start, his early-childhood education program.
Coleman is now retired from the state, but she remains active in the NAACP as a member of the national board and as the state chapter's first vice president. She was elected to Guilford's board of commissioners in 2002.
She uses a walker and said she will have surgery this month to repair a knee problem. With a few months of therapy, she said, she expects to be back to her "old self with mobility," though she acknowledges it won't be perfect.
And 2006 will be a particularly engaging year for Coleman because she's up for re-election in District 9, a diverse area that stretches from northeast Greensboro to Pleasant Garden. But Coleman doesn't see a potential conflict; she sees an opportunity.
"Some of the places that I'll go as chairperson, I'll certainly help myself in the campaign also," she said. "So I certainly don't see those as two separate entities."
Contact Nate DeGraff at 373-7024
orndegraff@news-record.com
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