Man of the People

It was almost 10 a.m. on a typical Tuesday when Ben Frazier sat down for the first of several interviews in what would be a very busy day, even by his standards. By the time I arrived, he had already been up for nearly six hours, and that’s normal for him.

“I’m an early riser,” says Frazier, who’s up around four every morning. He showers and dresses before heading out for his first stop of the day-Washington Estates Barber Shop on Soutel Avenue, where he gets a daily razor-shave and chops it up with the community. “Fella’s been cutting hair out there for about 50 years. His name is James McKenzie, and you can find out what’s going on in the community; I’m there almost every day.” From there, he’s off to Jack’s Sandwich Shop for breakfast: grits, eggs, sometimes pancakes, and his first coffee of the day, with cream and just a little sugar. That same cup sits abandoned hours later, barely half-consumed, on the edge of his desk. It’s more of a formality than anything else. Frazier has energy to spare.

Frazier gets to work around nine, at a nondescript office suite near Lem Turner Road. He sits out front for a little while, to “get my head in the right place, and pray, and listen to motivational tapes. I do that every morning. I always listen to motivational tapes.” It’s a long walk from the building’s front door to his office, near the back. He says hello the other workers, councilors and telemarketers and the staff at a nearby dialysis clinic. His door is covered with pictures of Frazier fishing with his two children, Kelly and Benji. Fishing is a pastime he got into as a child; last year, he got his captain’s license.

His Northside Coalition office is sparsely furnished, no windows, no nonsense, with brown carpet, well worn by feet that never stop moving. The walls are yellow, mostly empty except for some motivational posters and framed certificates, and a Take ‘Em Down Jax banner in the corner. There’s a wooden cane propped up against a cabinet; it’s the only residual evidence of the stroke that nearly killed him a couple of years ago. He was in a bed on Saturday when it happened. He spent three months in the hospital, and it was almost a year before he was fully back to normal. He hasn’t stopped moving since.

He turns on his computer, checks his email and gets started. By this point, his assistant Megan Reese is racing up I-95 in a green BMW convertible. She’s the daughter of his late older sister, an English major at FAMU who moved back from Atlanta to work with her uncle just a few months ago. She zips in and out of traffic, marveling at the ineptitude of her fellow drivers in the morning rush. Tardiness is not an option. Her boss is a genial taskmaster, a perfectionist for whom time is of the essence. And no wonder: He wasted a lot of time in his former life, and he’s keen to make the most of the second chance life has given him.

It’s been a rough week already for the Northside, which is reeling from its most recent murder, a seven-year-old caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between adults. Frazier situates this specific case in the broader sociopolitical context, using language he will repeat throughout the day: “The Northside Coalition believes that the violence that is presently wreaking havoc on the city of Jacksonville is something akin to an infectious disease. So, then, the question that begs to be asked, and answered, is ‘How are we going to treat it?’ To prevent violence, you’ve got to vaccinate, and you’ve got to focus on preventing the spread of the disease. It spreads because of the culture of violence, which must be changed around here.” He returns to such stock phrases often, but that makes them no less true.

He pokes his desk for emphasis; the tips of his thick fingers reverberate the way most people’s knuckles would. “We’ve got to stop glorifying violence. We’ve got to stop making it cool. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it can be done.” He references the C.U.R.E. model, “which has to do with what they call ‘Operation Ceasefire,’ which has found some success in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore, Richmond, reducing violence in certain areas anywhere from 40 to 70 percent.”

“We cannot simply react by having the same tired news conference where the mayor and the sheriff wring their hands and express their dismay and disgust with whatever just happened. Our reactionary position is fine, and fitting and proper. But if we’re going to make any progress, we’ve got to start talking about new solutions to old problems, and that’s what I’m into. We don’t [want] to simply be an organization that raises hell. Rhetoric has its place, but we want to be known as a solution-oriented organization.”

“The other part of that narrative with regard to crime, obviously, is economics. Every study in the world that’s been done, all of the surveys, the studies, the polls, show that there is a direct correlation between economics and crime.” And here he returns to a familiar theme: “We know that economic injustice is the civil rights battle of today. We can, in fact, connect the dots between crime and unemployment, crime and poverty. It’s time for someone to address that issue and stop turning their heads the other way. We need to start giving people jobs. Jobs will keep families together. The bottom line is that jobs will keep relationships between husbands and wives together, will secure relationships between mothers, fathers and their children.”

“Our people need jobs, so the cry that we make is the same cry that Moses made to Pharaoh: ‘Let my people go!’ We make that plea to America, to the state and to the city, and it’s not just rhetorical-it’s real. People are trapped right now in an economic cycle of bondage, and they need to be released. The only way they can be released is to share in the redistribution of wealth and to give poor people, many of whom are black, their piece of the economic pie. If you don’t share it, then we stand the risk of the whole pie being destroyed. Somebody left the cake out in the rain.”

“Our organization is diverse. The people working on these issues are not just black people. We have old people and young people, white people and black people, people with gray hair and people with purple hair.” The rise of social media has changed the face of social activism in this city and every other, enhancing connectivity and streamlining the path to action for smaller groups that might have had trouble gaining traction in any other era. For folks like Ben Frazier, with a background in the protest movements of the 1960s, the time and the technology work together to create a perfect storm.

He gives credit to other elder statesmen in the black community, people like James Sampson, Juan Gray, Kent Stokes, Archie Grant, Wells Todd and Rodney Hurst, among others. “There are a number of thought-leaders who I think are now beginning to accept the baton in the relay race of history,” says Frazier. “There’s a need for people who are beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Movement to speak out, because they [have] certain gifts and talents. I think more of them will.”

“We’ve been able to accomplish a great deal in the past year,” he says. Their major efforts have been in the realm of pedestrian safety. “We are No. 4, nationally, in pedestrian fatalities. I say it’s time for this city to wake the hell up and do something about it.” They’ve also been active in regard to “Walking While Black” (the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is investigating and considering filing suit against the city for ticketing black pedestrians at disproportionate rates) the lack of investment in urban areas, and the push to remove Confederate statues and replace them with statues of local historical figures of all races and, of course, the violence problem, which has utterly confounded everyone, everywhere, nationwide.

Benjamin M. Frazier Jr., who turns 68 on June 12, has roots in the community that run deeper than a lot of the trees in our parks. “I was raised off Kings Road, in College Circle,” he says, “down from Edward Waters College. I went to James Weldon Johnson, went to S.P. Livingston-the same elementary school where this kid who was killed went to. My experiences are in the Northwest Quadrant.”

A middle child, with sisters on either side, Frazier spent a year at Stanton High School, but ultimately graduated from Raines High School in 1968, where his uncle, Dr. Andrew Robinson, was the principal; Robinson later became president of the University of North Florida. “Those were good times,” he says. Frazier then attended Jones College, majoring in broadcast management, before making the rounds of radio and TV stations in Atlanta, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and New York City.

His career highlight came in 1979, when WJXT tapped him to anchor its Eyewitness News at Noon, the first African-American to hold down such a spot in Northeast Florida. “They had some other guys who were street reporters, doing the morning cut-ins, but they’d not invested in any man of color as a full-time anchor.” These were the glory days of local news, and Frazier loved every minute of it.

He moved to Detroit in 1980. “It was a lot for a guy from Jacksonville to move from the nation’s 66th media market to its sixth,” he says. “It came with certain trappings,” and like many of that era, he fell prey. He won three regional Emmys, but picked up some bad habits along the way, habits that ruined a thriving career and almost destroyed his life.

By 1984, he was deep into drugs, a darkness that lingered for years, characterized by violence, arrests and broken promises to friends, family and employers. His demons led him to “crash and burn,” cost him a lucrative career, his reputation and his marriage. “I lived the life of a drug addict,” he says. “I had the experience of sleeping in abandoned houses, abandoned cars, under bridges, sometimes in cardboard boxes; that was after the high life of big parties on Capitol Hill and having drinks with congressional representatives and presidents.”

“To slip is one thing,” he says, “but to slide is another.” It was no great epiphany that turned him around, no bright light that led him out of all that darkness. In his words, “Ben got tired of getting beat up on. He got tired of doing the same things over and over again, and the same things happening.”

“And I also like some of the nicer things in life,” he adds with a smile. He diligently attends 12-step meetings, anonymously. “I don’t even tell my family where I’m going,” he says. He also gives special credit to his place of worship, the venerable Bethel Baptist Institutional Church in Downtown, led by Pastor Rudolph McKissick Jr. It’s been a centerpiece of the spiritual and political life of the city’s black community since the 1800s.

The Northside Coalition began two years ago, when Ben Frazier witnessed an altercation between a convenience-store owner and one of his customers. “They were cursing out a black woman. I was appalled,” he says. “I was immediately compelled to say something. There’s no way I could just walk out and act like I didn’t hear what I heard.” Tensions between foreign-born shop owners and their African-American customers have been a problem for years, and this had become the latest flashpoint.

“I called them out on the carpet about it,” he says, “and they started cursing me out. So I went back to Facebook and explained about the experience, and suggested that it was time to boycott that station. We initiated the boycott, and one month later, the service station owners were meeting with us.” From that moment, the organization took on a life of its own, and now Frazier finds himself to be a sort of pundit-at-large, much in demand on days like this, with local media seeking out some context for the most recent tragedies.

Parts of our talk are filmed by Terence Cook, a local filmmaker working on a documentary about Frazier, and that’s only the first camera of the day. It’s around 11 when the second crew arrives-Tenikka Hughes from Action News. Elizabeth Campbell from WJXT follows a couple hours later. Each time, he walks out to meet them, talking points at the ready. He leaves his cane behind in the office, but the outline of a heavy brace on his left knee is visible beneath the suit.

He stays on message, and it makes for effective TV. His broadcasting background gives him a sense for the rhythms and pacing of soundbite culture. “My suggestion is that we need to reinvent ourselves as a city,” he says. “We are no longer a sleepy Southern town. I suggest that we need to be so busy with business that we become too busy to hate.”

Having already put in a full day’s work, Frazier finally feels ready for lunch. Before that, though, he takes us on a field trip through his territory, narrating the drive with stories from his darker days. “I’m familiar with street life,” he says, “and I’m uniquely suited to deal with issues affecting street people in this city, because I was one of them.”

We drive down the block where the child was killed. He rolls down his windows, trying to start conversations with the neighbors, who regard him with skepticism and palpable fear. In his full suit and fedora, driving a black Toyota Camry, he looks like an aging homicide detective, a character straight from The Wire, and no matter what’s going on out there, no one is talking to the police, or anyone who looks like police, period. But he is not deterred; if anything, their reluctance spurs him on. “I’m not afraid to walk the streets,” he says. “Many of the people I walked the streets with are still out there.”

He goes all the way down the street to the school nearby, then loops around and does it again, making sure the people know he’s out there. The drive continues for another half-hour, winding through Norwood Avenue, Brentwood and Golfair Boulevard and into the former Gateway Mall, now Gateway Town Center. He stops to buy a tracksuit from an old family friend who’s selling clothes and shoes at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Kings Road.

He continues down Myrtle, past the expressway, stopping at Families of Slain Children Inc., a nonprofit organization that reaches out to parents and children left behind in the wake of this wave of violence, providing material and emotional resources to help get them through the hardest moments in their lives. Outside, there’s a prayer garden with stone benches, flowers and a long, white, wooden board topped with crosses and inscribed with victims’ names; inside, hundreds of their pictures cover nearly every available surface.

We stop to talk with CEO Beverly McClain and a couple of her volunteers; she’s well overdue for a double hip replacement, but that doesn’t stop her from lugging boxes of groceries out front, to be availed of by passersby. Her shuffle stirs the spirit, and it’s hard not to get angry when she laments the lack of support she’s gotten from city leaders, none of whom have ever even bothered to visit. As we talk, dozens of people stop to pick up muffins, water, chips and canned goods; several stick their heads in to say thanks. She regards them all with familiarity. The energy of this location is palpable; the sense of loss that radiates through the space is almost overwhelming.

We arrive at last at our final destination, the legendary Potter’s House. The place is crowded, even at midday, but Frazier is greeted like a regular. It’s only now that he begins to slow down a bit. Even a mind as sharp as his will glitch on occasion; in this case, it means forgetting his wallet, which he doesn’t discover until he’s at the checkout. But it’s cool: The staff waves us through to dig in, while his son drives it over from the office. He sits down, and we say grace in reverential silence.

“I’m a classic example of God’s grace,” he says. “I’m a living miracle. I appreciate what God has done for me, and I give Him the credit.” He proceeds to plow through three pieces of fried chicken, rice, greens, candied yams, carrot salad and sweet tea, pausing to exchange pleasantries with his fellow customers. For the first time since he woke up hours earlier, he’s able to really relax, as the weight of the day’s subject matter begins to sink in. Being a voice for the voiceless is really hard, no matter how adept you are at it.

The meal is done, and the questions are answered, so we part, as Ben and Megan are off to tie up some loose ends before their day is finally over, to whatever extent it ever really is. Activism is exhausting work, but those for whom he advocates can be grateful that Ben Frazier has energy to spare. No one knows what tomorrow may bring, but he’s not worried about that. “Just for today,” he says, “I’m doing just fine.”