Carolina Appeals To Black Roots

“How many of you know about Kingstree, South Carolina?” mayoral candidate Kermit Carolina asked.

“That’s my home!” called out a voice from the crowd.

“That’s your home? OK. So you understand,” Carolina replied.

Carolina, one of four Democrats running for mayor in a Sept. 10 primary, was making an appeal about roots — hometown roots, black roots, and roots in poverty — as he courted the black vote in the heart of the city’s African-American community on Thursday.

His appeal came as a second campaign’s internal poll reportedly showed Carolina in fourth place, behind Toni Harp (in first), Justin Elicker (second) and Henry Fernandez (third). All four are vying for their party nomination to replace retiring 10-term incumbent Mayor John DeStefano.

Carolina, the 45-year-old principal of Hillhouse High School, took his campaign Thursday to a place of great personal significance and personal ties: the Monterey Towers at 69 Webster St. in Dixwell. That’s the new incarnation of the former Elm Haven housing projects, where Carolina and his brother were raised by a single mom.

At Monterey, Carolina refuted the notion that he’s in last place in the race, urging the crowd not to ​“count me out.” He delivered an impassioned speech stressing his family history and framing himself as the candidate who’ll be a champion for the poor. As he has throughout the campaign, Carolina sought to leverage years of relationships he formed growing up in Dixwell, then working as a basketball coach and administrator at Hillhouse High, into support at the polls.

Carolina showed up to a community room in the elderly complex Thursday at 4 p.m. bearing grapes, cake, and a large Dunkin’ Donuts ​“Box of Joe.” Wearing a white dress shirt, he addressed a room of two dozen elderly voters, mostly African-American women, most of whom live in the housing complex. Carolina gave a shout-out to some family members in the crowd, including ​“Cousin Mildred” and ​“Cousin Max,” who was wearing a family reunion T‑shirt bearing the Carolina family name.

The candidate approached his audience by appealing first to family roots. He asked if anyone had heard of Kingstree, South Carolina.

“That’s my home!” called out one woman in the crowd.

Carolina said it’s his family home, too — his mother grew up in the small rural town.

He began an emotional account about discovering his own roots there. Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch.

“My grandmother was a sharecropper,” Carolina told the room. He recounted how, when he was in his mid-20s, his mother took him to the town for the first time to show him where she grew up.

First Carolina saw a nice house, not the house his family lived in, but a house whose television his mom used to watch through the window, because they didn’t have one. Then they went deeper into the woods to find her former home.

“She took me to the shack” where she and her brothers were raised, he recalled. ​“She showed me the land that they sharecropped, that was right next to the shack.”

“At that moment I really began to understand the level of poverty that existed, because when I walked into that shack, I saw this little heater that had heated the house during winter months. And I understood the struggle at that moment that my grandmother and my grandfather had taken us through to get to this point.”

Carolina thanked the seniors in the room for making ​“sacrifices” like his grandparents did.

Then he flashed forward to his own life.

“My mother raised me a block from here,” on Ashmun Street, he said. ​“I met my father one time when I was three years old.” His dad went away to serve in the Vietnam War, then didn’t connect with the family when he returned.

“My mother raised me” on a meager salary, Carolina recalled. He said the people in the audience and their families raised him, too.

“I want to give something back to all of you who gave me something,” he said.

As mayor, he pledged to work for the poor. He vowed to get more minorities hired on construction jobs; give New Haveners a larger advantage on civil service exams for city government jobs; and enforce a ​“commuter tax” on city workers who don’t live in New Haven. 

He described himself as the only candidate who knows poverty, and knows New Haven.

“I walk the neighborhoods. I’m among kids and families every day,” he said. He described running into a few kids from his high school out on bicycles this summer. He pulled aside one boy who he knew was going through a tough situation: The boy’s mom, a drug addict, was evicted from her home. So the boy is now crashing on his aunt’s couch, in a home without love and without three meals a day. He said the boy has allied himself with other kids in similar situations. They get together and ride bikes around town all day.

“They want to eat,” he said of the boys. ​“In the process of trying to eat, it turns into crime.”

“It’s not his fault,” he said of the boy.

He said the boy’s tale proves a point that separates Carolina from his contenders: ​“The difference between me and the other candidates” is ​“They don’t understand this. I lived it.”

Carolina said he knows what it’s like to have to go next door to ​“borrow two slices of bread,” and to take the last egg from the fridge and stretch it out into egg salad to scrape together a meal.

“I’ve been here. I hope it means something to you,” he said. He said he now makes a good salary as a principal, but remains committed to helping the poor. ​“I will never turn my back on the people in this community,” he said. ​“I want to help those who don’t have. It’s in my heart.”

The message resonated with Naomi Tisdale (at left in photo). Tisdale, who volunteers at Wexler/Grant School, connected with Carolina over a shared belief that too many public school teachers come from the suburbs and don’t connect well with urban kids.

“There are exceptions,” Carolina said, but in general ​“there’s a disconnect” culturally between suburban teachers and the city kids they teach.

Barack Carolina vs. Hillary Harp

Carolina ended his appearance with an impromptu comparison between himself and mayor’s race frontrunner Toni Harp.

The comparison came from Carroll E. Brown (at right in photo), a Hillhouse High staffer and president of the West Haven Black Coalition. Brown, who lives in West Haven, said she can’t vote for Carolina but supports his campaign. She introduced him and gave a concluding speech urging seniors to unite around his candidacy.

Carolina is like Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primary, she argued. Harp, a 20-year state senator aiming to be the city’s first female mayor, is like Hillary Clinton, she said.

“They said Hillary Clinton was going to win,” Brown noted. But Obama pulled through.

Carolina later expanded on the comparison: Like Harp, Clinton had more name recognition, enjoyed the support of the party establishment, and would have been the first female in her job. Like Carolina, Obama was seen as young and inexperienced, yet had more grassroots cred working as a community organizer, Carolina noted.

“I’m no Obama, nor do I claim to be,” Carolina later clarified. ​“However, there are some similarities between what he experienced running for president” and Carolina’s current position.

Jason Bartlett, Toni Harp’s campaign manager, later dismissed the comparison: ​“To compare himself to Obama is beyond the pale.”

Elicker Claims 2‑Way Race

East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker, meanwhile, argued that the real two-way race is not between Carolina and Harp, but between Harp and himself.

A recent poll paid for by Elicker’s campaign found Elicker in second place behind Harp, followed by Fernandez and then Carolina, according to Elicker.

“We have a little work to do on Toni,” he said, but ​“I have a little bit more than double what Henry has for support.” He noted that the race is far from firmed up: ​“The polling results were that the vast majority of likely New Haven voters are undecided.”

Elicker (pictured) said his campaign has surpassed 1,000 contributors.

“It really is turning into a two-way race,” Elicker said.

Bartlett dismissed that comparison, too.

“He’s too far behind to say that,” Bartlett said.

Carolina brushed off the news that he again had come in last place.

He said he believes standard polls don’t reach low-income voters, many of whom have government-issued cell phones instead of landlines.

“There’s no one that I’ve spoken to among low-income residents that has been polled,” he said. Elicker declined to give details on the poll, such as whom he paid to perform it, how many voters it included, and the demographics of those voters.

Carolina said the only polls he trusts are his ​“personal polls,” meeting voters face to face as he did on Thursday at Monterey.