5 minute read
The “Radical and Rowdy” Commissioner from Deanwood
Anthony Lorenzo Green is Willing to Fight for What the Community Needs
They call him the “radical and rowdy commissioner from Deanwood,” and Anthony Lorenzo Green says he is absolutely fine with that.
Commissioner Green, who represents Advisory Neighborhood Commission 7C04, knows people sometimes use “radical” in a pejorative way. “I am willing to be defiant in many different spaces,” Green said. “They may call it radical, but I call it being real.”
Still, Green does not want it to be a negative word. He says radical politics are necessary because the politics of the status quo have kept back so many black and brown families.
“I’m willing to start a war for my people to get the things we need,” he said.
Growing up in Deanwood, Green has been fighting for his community as an elected official since 2010, first in Fort Stanton Civic Association, then for ANC 8B04 and since 2017, for ANC 7C04 in the neighborhood where he grew up. He said that he was galvanized to action by things he saw hap-pening to the people he knew –and by the events in his own life.
“It’s about turning your pain into a fight,” Green said.
by Elizabeth O’Gorek
Bright and Smart, But Angry
Green was born in 1985 to teenaged parents. His father left shortly after he was born, and his mother pushed through her own issues as she raised Green with the help of his grandmother. They moved from Greenleaf Gardens to Deanwood, where he still lives, when he was three.
It was a struggle for the whole family, and it was not easy. But Green said he spent his childhood nourished by three sources: strong women, including his mother and grandmother; his community school, Merritt Elementary (now headquarters for Sixth District MPD); and his Southwest church, where he was raised in the Holiness denomination. His grandmother wanted him to become a preacher, and Green was a choir boy who attended every service until he was 18.
But events transpired to disrupt this path. When he was a boy, he was walking by Marvin Gaye Park when an older man pulled him into the park and raped him. While he discusses the event openly now, at the time Green did not tell anyone, not even his grandma. However, those around him saw the ways that his outlook had changed, even if they did not know why. Teachers began to report that Green was “bright and smart, but angry.”
Then, Green started high school at H.D. Woodson in the last of the “tower of power” years. Feeling alienated and angry and without a clear path to success, he dropped out of school without graduat-ing.
His uncle, the only father figure in his life, was killed in 2004 at the age of 48. Green says it is one of several examples of the ways the system failed the people around him. “He couldn’t find em-ployment because of a record started before he was an adult,” Green said. “So, he got in the life and they killed him.”
“I’ve grown from being angry at the person that pulled the trigger, for whatever reason it was, to being
Anthony Lorenzo Green has represented Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) Single Member District (SMD) 7C04, the neighborhood he grew up in, since 2017. Photo: Dionne Milli Anthony Lorenzo Green (in gray) is pictured at a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) action in October 2019. Photo: Jay Brown
Green raises his st from a vehicle in a Black Lives Matter car protest, July 2020. Photo: Dee Dwyer
angry at the system that forces people to make bad decisions like that,” Green said. “The sys-tem killed him.”
The Potential in Him
Encouraged by his grandmother, Green completed his GED in 2004 and began working for the De-partment of Employment Services (DOES) “I learned a lot about how government services function,” he said. In 2010, he moved to Fort Stanton where his ground oor apartment became some-thing of a neighborhood hangout.
President of the Fort Stanton Civic Association Barbara Jones noticed that Green was connecting with the community and sharing all sorts of useful information with those who dropped by. She suggested that he may as well attend some association meetings. Soon after, she encouraged him to run for Secretary of the association, and later to represent Fort Stanton on ANC 8B04.
“I saw potential in him, and I saw how he gravitated to the community,” Jones said. “It’s very few people, you can look at a young person and just say: oh, he is going to go far.”
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