Irving Allen's Next Stage

Few people are better living examples of the phrase, "history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes," than Greensboro native Irving Allen.

Not just because of the obvious alignment between the community advocacy that has marked his adult life and the civil rights legacy of his uncle David Richmond, one of the Greensboro Four. Not just because of the way his grandfather's nickname, "the mayor of Greensboro," echoes forth to the present, as Allen makes a run for a formal position in that same city's local government today. But also, and especially, because of the nature of his first foray into public life in his home town, more than 15 years ago: as rapper and promoter Young Rush, one third of the Flight School Music crew ("NC's the state, FSM's the movement!").

Some lives and family histories rhyme figuratively, others do literally.

"I used to host the open mics so I know all of the hip-hop heads and the groups that passed through," he tells me over a late-August Zoom call, as he reels off Gate City hip-hop greats from those I know, to those I don't but probably should: Ski Beatz, E. Sudd, Phonte, P-Wonda, Frank Flair, Gav Beats.

As seriously as he was pursuing the rap dream in the late 2000s ("I thought we were going to be big. I thought we were going to be touring everywhere," he says), Allen was also taking notes along the way. Particularly on the economics of touring and the business side of music, and how laws and regulations from state to state had an impact on his team's overall finances. A couple years later, when his sister needed volunteers for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, he signed up, leading him down a path of community organizing that later turned into starting the Gate City BLM chapter and hosting the first BLM national convening in 2014. In 2017, he mounted a campaign for city council that was ultimately unsuccessful. Since then, he's continued to work in community advocacy, training other organizers and representing victims and their families in cases of police violence. Now, eight years after that first run, he's making a push for a council seat once again.

When we go over the reasons why he's running a second time, and what Greensboro's facing, he talks about his own police accountability work that was rolled back because of insufficient buy-in from city government. He talks about the city's affordable housing crisis, about kids not having enough programs to do outside of school, about the perpetual brain drain when graduates of Greensboro's many colleges largely depart for (even) greener pastures around the state.

Most urgently, he talked about how the ever-relevant adage of "all politics is local" now carries even more weight than ever: "We've lost the protections of the state and the federal government. All we got is each other now."

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In your launch video, you talked about the footsteps you're following in, with your uncle [David Richmond] being one of the Greensboro Four and your grandfather being so involved in the community that some called him the "mayor of Greensboro." What lessons did you pick up from them and take into your work?

My uncle, I always heard the stories through my aunts and my family about the sit-ins and I've actually got to work with some of the organizers who helped him organize in the '60s. He passed when I was about five or six, so I never really got to know him well, but I know that he started that movement. He saw what his community was going through and what people were going through and took a leap of faith. And his wife, my aunt Janice, was part of the sit-in movement as well. She joined the second day.

Her father — my grandfather — he wasn't really political. He was a janitor with a third grade education, but during that time it was difficult, particularly for Black folks, to have well-paying jobs in good conditions. He was one of the folks that always had a stable job and looked out for the community around him. So if folks needed food, they would eat at my grandma's house. If they needed to ride, my grandma was going to take you somewhere. They were just that anchor of that community. So that's where the nickname ["the mayor"] kind of came from, because especially during that time, it was really a separate world for black folks and white folks.

My whole life's really been about community and being accountable to other people. When I started organizing and learning about the history and context that we're living in now, that kind of inspired the work that I do because it unraveled the conditions that I was seeing. I did music, and a lot of my friends were either at the time getting arrested or dying, going to jail, selling drugs, doing music, couldn't find a job, had early felonies and things like that. So the history and reading and learning about that gave me this wider view of the system that we were living in and some of the unfinished work from the time that my uncle had organized. Even with my father who was the first Black superior court justice elected after Reconstruction — he was a civil rights attorney, one of the first classes of Chapel Hill, one of the first Black folks to graduate from [UNC] Chapel Hill Law School. So it's a long history, and I'm just trying to live in that long line. I had to walk my own path and I did the music and was successful with that, but it all led me back to here and to the work that I'm doing now.

I noticed in a video of a speech you were giving, you were talking about how "we've lost a lot, but there's still a lot to fight for," and that "we haven't lost democracy yet." It made it sound like the campaign comes from a place of not just being about Greensboro, but also caring about just our society in general, beyond that. And I wanted to see if that felt accurate to you and if it's a mix of those motivations. It's Greensboro, but there's also bigger things you're thinking about.

Absolutely. I think it's a broad connection that we have in community. Everybody in New York's got a cousin in North Carolina, especially if you Black. If you from Chicago, your cousins are in Mississippi, Alabama. It was a whole migration of Black folks moving from the South to the North, so there's connections everywhere. I've traveled across the country, both organizing and doing music, and been accepted and introduced to the same types of communities that I live in in the South. When I'm in Detroit, Michigan, I feel at home because they're riding cars like we do down here. So I see the connections, not only through the history but through the life that folks live every day.

Once we can see ourselves in each other, then we can see that we're all wanting the same things, but there's also a deep history that we have to address that kind of keeps us from getting to that space. I think a lot of people are concerned that the history is going to lead us to being angry or divisive and things like that, but I think that the only way that we'll be able to learn and enlighten — the reason I'm organizing and not rapping and doing the things that I lost a lot of my friends to — was because of the history that I learned and how I learned to apply it. And so I think it's all connected and we got to start locally where we are, especially because we've lost the protections of the state and the federal government. All we got is each other now.

It feels like the faith people have in electoral politics and its ability to change lives for the better is at a real low point. I was wondering, given the work you've been doing and success you've had through direct work outside of that system, what made you want to run again, and use electoral politics as an avenue?

I mean I think that's just where all the money and power is. I'll tell you a story. We organized here in 2018 around stopping regulatory stops. So traffic stops around taillights and stuff — a violation, but not a moving violation. Tags being expired, stuff like that, that they can take your tags, mail you a ticket, you won't get pulled over. We fought for that because a New York Times article came out about Greensboro specifically and how the disparities in our traffic stops were wild. They were pulling over Black people I think at a 70% clip and we're 40% of the population; 70% of the stops and searches, 2% hit rate on finding stuff.

And so we pled our case, organized, got support of the city, went to the city council, and the police department ended up [ending] regulatory stops for eight months officially in the city. So nobody was getting pulled over for those things. But they also commissioned another study through the city and then after eight months they released their study and started doing regulatory stops again. So all the organizing work that we did was wiped away because we didn't have the electoral power in government to make it sustainable and to make it institutionalized. So yeah, we had a moment, but in order to get those things institutionalized, then we've got to start having these positions of power.

"Hip-hop and the influence it's had on America, including politics, is super expansive and I don't think we talk about that enough. If we did, artists would have a union and these high-dollar artists would be paying politicians just like these other businesses are paying politicians... take that money phone and hand it to somebody to get a law passed or something."

Coming from that background with Flight School Music and hip-hop in Greensboro, I just wanted to ask how that journey has intersected with this kind of work and how you see those two things as intertwined.

Man, what really got me interested in it, and me and my homies used to talk about this all the time, was traveling. We weren't making no money really, but every state you travel to, you were going to have to pay different rates. You're a cash business, so you're affected by tax stuff that, depending on where you at, you either going to be up or down. And so I was trying to understand that because I thought we were going to be big. I thought we were going to be touring everywhere. But I think that played a big part in it, just the financial piece and understanding the business of music and knowing that the folks that are elected are making the decisions that you're paying into and paying out of.

And then just the consciousness of the music. Growing up, Little Brother was big around here. Rapsody's huge, J. Cole, and folks like that and the things that they talk about — how their communities have been impacted, what they've seen in the culture of hip-hop. I think that hip-hop and the influence it's had on America, including politics, is super expansive and I don't think we talk about that enough. If we did, artists would have a union and these high-dollar artists would be paying politicians just like these other businesses are paying politicians—

Like rapper PACs.

Yeah. You take that money phone and hand it to somebody to get a law passed or something. I mean it's so intertwined because music is business at the end of the day and we need to start taking advantage of that more so that we can do things locally. You look at what Nipsey and them did in Cali — they got involved in local politics, they speak in the city council meetings, partnering with developers, and now they got a studio in the hood and all of those things.

"I'm really sick of people leaving here. They come to A&T, come to UNC-G, come to Bennett, and get an education and then they go to Charlotte, they go to Raleigh, they go to Atlanta."

Who do you think of when you think Greensboro hip-hop?

Gav Beats. He was featured on the Beyoncé album before this last one. He's a local legend. IllPo. Tigo B — he's from Raleigh but he was here for a minute. P-Wonda, Frank Flair. I mean, I go deep. I used to host the open mics so I know all of the hip-hop heads and the groups that passed through. But I think Gav did something real special. J White and Brandon D, too. So yeah, it's a lot of guys that I can think of — Mont and them from Kosmic Kickz, that was the first real studio that I recorded in, back when they were a record store and we used to record underneath the record store.

Ski [Beatz] pops out from time to time. DJ E. Sudd, he's from High Point, that's my guy — 2 Chainz's DJ — he's done incredible stuff for the city. Phonte's from Greensboro, I went to school with his little brother. There's so much talent in the city, both hip-hop and R&B. Vanessa Ferguson is on Broadway now, she's doing Hell's Kitchen with Alicia Keys.

Successful, by Young Rush

from the album First In Flight, Last To Land

Jones AndrewsBandcamp New & Notable Jan 29, 2025

Greensboro's got the textile industry background and the civil rights legacy we talked about. I was wondering what you think the identity of the city is today, and also what it'll be going forward.

That's what we got to figure out right now. I think we were really relying on textile, and right now we've got a lot of big corporate interests coming. So we got [aerospace company] JetZero, we got Toyota building in Reidsville, so it's big companies that are coming in, but that's not going to be our identity. My feeling is we've got to take advantage of the resources that we've got. We've got colleges, universities, trade schools, all over the city. And so we've got to start bringing them into what we want this city to look like, so that they can see it as a home and keep their talents and their money here and their business here. And that could be our identity.

I mean, I'm really sick of people leaving here. They come to A&T, come to UNC-G, come to Bennett, and get an education and then they go to Charlotte, they go to Raleigh, they go to Atlanta, because they got the banking in Charlotte and they got the capital in Raleigh and a lot of tech, Epic Games and all of that. And so we got competition, but we also have the ability and the space and the people to be able to turn things around because we're the third-biggest city in the state. So we're just looking to invest in retaining our talented folks—

It's always No. 3/No.4, with Durham. I don't know what the latest count is...

I got love for the Bull for sure. But we're bigger than y'all.

"You can learn a budget, you can learn those things, but you can't learn the trust that folks [like myself] have been building for 13, 14 years."

What do you see as the biggest issues facing the city today? And also maybe as a secondary part of that, what if anything is needed on the city council that's missing right now?

Right now the most pressing thing is the housing crisis. We used to be affordable, but now folks are getting priced out. We have inventory, but that inventory isn't affordable and you've got to fix it up when you get in it. They've got a plan to build 10,000 homes by 2030 and they've laid this whole thing out, but the issue is that we've got to make sure that it's equitable. A lot of times they've been putting these affordable housing units in District 1 and 2 — that's the east and north side of Greensboro, which is where the Black side of town or the low-income side of town [is]. If you continue to stockpile affordable housing, you've got low property income, low property tax, underfunded schools, and then you got hyper-policing because it's the "bad" side of town. So we got to spread those things around, but that means tough conversations with communities that are organized and affluent and don't want that stuff over on their side of town.

That's really what we're going to be fighting about over the next 2-3 years, is what this plan and rollout looks like, where it's going to happen, and are we going to stay to our city's mission and be equitable or are we going to do what's convenient? We need to solve that problem, because we can't keep making East Greensboro the affordable living, low-income side of town. Those folks deserve to flourish and to have upward mobility in the city too. So the housing issue is going to be big and electing the right people to take care of it is going to be bigger.

In a lot of areas part of the issue is people in leadership positions not being as familiar with that community or not being from working class or low-income backgrounds. Is that true of Greensboro?

Historically we've had business and real estate people — I think right now we have a better balance, but it could be [even] better. We've got folks on there that are doing good work and trying to grow some of that community partnership. I just think we need folks that are of those communities and already have the trust to be in office. You can learn a budget, you can learn those things, but you can't learn the trust that folks [like myself] have been building for 13, 14 years. And so that's something that folks need to think about because when we're making these decisions and it comes to that back room that nobody else is allowed in, is the person you voted for going to be thinking about you or are they going to be thinking about the developer that funded them through their campaign and kept them in office?

Ryan Cocca is the founder/editor of Super Empty, a former furniture entrepreneur, and a resident of the fourth-largest city in North Carolina — only 6,000 residents behind Greensboro. He (I) can be reached at ryan@superempty.com.