GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) - Jalen Elrod believes many people don’t understand the injustice of gentrification. He learned about it in a Waffle House.
“They know it’s a problem, but I don’t think too many people can put a face on it,” he said.
He credits the Rev. Patrick Tuttle, then pastor of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church and a community activist, for explaining gentrification to him in “academic terms.”
As the two sat in a Waffle House one day, Tuttle alerted him to one of the worst racial injustices Elrod said he’d seen happen in West Greenville, a historic Black community connected to downtown Greenville.
In 2017, five long-term tenants in a row of “quasi-mill village houses” on North Leach Street were evicted to make way for redevelopment. The tenants had lived in the rentals for decades. One tenant, Lois Jenkins, was 102 and had lived in her rental home for 80 years. She died nine months later.
Today, Elrod, 28, is a community organizer and political campaign manager. His most personal campaign is against the gentrification in Greenville’s Black communities.
He and a young, independent film maker in Greenville are making a documentary about the gentrification happening here and “how they (Black communities) are being erased while our City Council stands by and does nothing.”
Greater justice can’t happen without awareness of the destructive nature of gentrification, he says.
“I think if you ask your average Greenvillian how many people have been gentrified out of their community, they probably can’t name more than five,” he said. “So, what we want to do is really tell real stories and show the toll this has taken on so many people in our community, and in a way that the powers that be can’t hide from it.
Had it not been for the pandemic, Elrod would have been marching along with the protesters in Greenville, following the death of George Floyd. He took a different approach to activism because of COVID-19 and concerns about compromising the health of his mother, who was a social worker, and others.
So, while quarantined, Elrod wrote an opinion column titled “It Could’ve Been Me. It’s Time for Change,” for The Greenville News. It highlighted changes Elrod feels needed to be made in terms of legislative action.
Elrod’s family has lived in West Greenville since the 1920s.
His knowledge of grassroots organizing and the capacity of people to effect change was formed in his youth. He was 14 when he interned at the Greenville office of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. When Obama won the South Carolina Presidential primary, Elrod went to North Carolina and Georgia to help campaign there.
He also said he gave money to organizations that are doing “good work” in the fight for equality and against racial injustices - the Urban League of the Upstate, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama.
WHAT ELROD BELIEVES NEEDS TO HAPPEN IN GREENVILLE:
(asterisk) Line item in the City budget for affordable housing
(asterisk) Line item in the County budget for affordable housing
(asterisk) Implementation of impact fee on developments that would have a disproportionately gentrifying effect on the community
(asterisk) Passage of inclusionary zoning legislation
(asterisk) Changing the definition of affordability so it is not inextricably linked to median income
(asterisk) Rally against Unity Park (a new park planned in a historically Black community) until proper equity for disenfranchised communities can be guaranteed.
NO TIME TO WAIT FOR A HERO
Elrod’s passions include politics and comic books. He figures to draw on the strengths of both to keep a positive activism going.
His real-life heroes are local and national trailblazers who fought, marched, and were arrested or beaten in the fight for civil rights. One such icon, S.C. state Representative Leola Robinson Simpson, showed him why it’s necessary “to put up the baton and continue to fight for our communities in Greenville.”
He’s using his political involvement - as former head of a Young Democrats chapter, former first vice chair of the local Democratic Party and community involvement, and a member of the Community Remembrance Project (an initiative to honor victims of lynching in Greenville) - to speak out against gentrification and other racial injustices.
In the paraphrased words of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Elrod said correcting injustices is about “the fierce urgency of now.”
Area citizens will have to become this generation’s heroes.
“If we don’t do something significant within the next five years, all this was for naught,” he said.
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