CHARLOTTEANS OF THE YEAR
K A SS OT TL EY
She’s walked the walk as an activist since she was a child in New York City. She’s talked the talk, too, even with the cops. But she and the people she leads in the streets are tired of talking BY GREG LACOUR // PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOGAN CYRUS
KASS OTTLEY WAS MARCHING once again, this time on the evening of September 23, a few hours after the attorney general of Kentucky announced that he wouldn’t charge any Louisville police officers in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor in March. Ottley walked about eight miles that night, leading a column of about 100 protesters through uptown despite a nagging case of plantar fasciitis that had hobbled her for months. “I’ve just kind of been ignoring it,” she tells me two days later. Ottley estimated she had walked 83 miles on the streets of Charlotte since police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd on Memorial Day. By the time you read this, she likely will have marched even more. Ottley’s been at this since she was a child in New York City. Her mother, a telephone operator, took her to a protest during a phone company workers’ strike in 1971, when she was 6. She kept up her activism in New York even as she worked a corporate job in sales and marketing but put it aside to raise her two children and establish herself in Charlotte; she and her husband moved here in 1997 when his job transferred. But after a decade or so, she says, she began to sense that not all was quite right in her adopted city. It intensified after the 2013 Charlotte-Mecklenburg police killing of Jonathan Ferrell—a case that went to trial but ended two years later with a hung jury and dismissal of charges against the officer who’d shot him. The result fed the
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often-violent reaction to the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott in 2016. By then, Ottley was back on the streets, marching and shouting with hundreds of other Charlotteans. But it’s how Ottley, who works as an administrator for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, has approached her interaction with—and often passionate opposition to—CMPD that distinguishes her. Activists here and in other American cities often don’t engage with law enforcement at all. (“F--- 12” is a common exclamation, here and elsewhere.) Ottley understands completely. But she’s been willing to talk at length with CMPD leaders, including former Chief Kerr Putney and new Chief Johnny Jennings, about her issues with the department and its policies and practices. “We gotta get honest before we can change things,” she told Putney and department spokesman Rob Tufano during a CMPD vidcast in May, a few days after police killed Floyd. Tufano asked if she condoned the property damage and destruction during the Floyd protests. “We’re talking property over people,” she shot back. “There’s a huge difference. And I hate to say it, but a lot of these companies and businesses in the Black community do absolutely nothing for the Black community except drain their resources and take them back to their communities. So do I condone the violence? No. But I definitely get it.”
I interviewed Ottley in late September. Here are some of her answers, edited for space and clarity. I’VE BEEN HERE 23 YEARS. I was born and raised in East Elmhurst, Queens. We lived one block over from where Malcolm X was; we lived on 96th Street, and he lived on 97th Street and one avenue over. Malcolm X was a huge influence in my neighborhood. The first Muslim school was in my neighborhood, on 108th Street, and at that time, that was something that wasn’t even really heard of. Elijah Muhammad, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong—they all lived in that community. BACK IN THE DAY, everything was Black-owned. So I know what it’s like to come from a neighborhood where everything is Black-owned, the money is kept in the community, and the community thrives. And I also know what it looks like, you know, when that changes. I WENT TO MY FIRST PROTEST with my mother. She was an operator for the telephone company, and I guess there was something going on with their salaries. And I remember I was six, and I had a sign, and I was yelling, “Ma Bell, go to hell.” (laughs) My aunt was not happy. She was like, “You got that baby out there?”
