Photo Credit: Khadejeh Nikouyeh
Note: The following is an article submitted to us by a local worker and is unedited. Have a story you’d like to submit to us? The Working People’s Press aims to be a voice for workers in Charlotte, and we encourage you to get involved and send in your own experiences to our email: WorkingPeopleCLT@proton.me
I do not believe in relying on the law and the decisions of courts and judges to determine what is just or morally correct, because these laws were crafted from a foundational philosophy of rugged individualism that is bolstered by the right to cease all resources of the natural world and claim them in service of capitalism; in other words, exploitation of the masses for the benefit of the few.
This is why I believe that speaking to the city council and acting as if they have a magic wand to arbitrate the rule of law for themselves is, essentially, speaking to a brick wall.
Charlotte city council has never responded in a positive way, at least in the past legislative year, to the demands of the broad working class of Charlotte. They outlawed sleeping, lying, urinating and defecating in public; specifically uptown, while housing scarcity has ravaged the city, if not entirely by their own decision-making, in favor of developers, because the wealthy First Ward residents were uncomfortable explaining to their young white children the reality of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. They refused to pass a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza, which would be a liberal answer at best to the ongoing genocide happening in Palestine. They voted to give billionaire sports capitalist David Tepper $650 million dollars to renovate a sports stadium that has a known expiration date. These are just a few examples of the stunning decisions this council has made in the last year.
That the council is majority Black is negligible, as the Board of County Commissioners is majority-Black, Charlotte has a Black police chief, Mecklenburg County has a Black Sherriff, and the Board of Education is majority-Black; yet Black people in Charlotte are at the forefront of oppression in the city. Because the Black members of this city and county government have failed to pull the Black community – arguably one of Charlotte’s oldest communities, and, like many cities across the South, the backbone of labor that is responsible for the city’s success – out of the legacy of the Jim Crow South, it would be a stretch at best to expect them to take any realistic action towards equity in this situation. To add, attacks on “DEI” and representation or expression of identity outside of a strictly White, Christian, upper-class and educated norm from the federal government will likely further limit local government’s “progressive” decisions.
Speaking locally, Mr. Eury seems to believe in the superiority of members of his race and gender, as he has told to Mr. Walker that this neighborhood is going to “stay a White neighborhood;” currently acts as a landlord to Black tenants and has harassed Latino landscapers when they’re working in Mr. Walker’s yard. He has posted on the Grove Park neighborhood’s Facebook group expressing disdain for “illegals,” a common term used against Latino people invoking the perceived crime that immigrants of color bring to this country, along with a sense of entitlement to dictate who deserves the rights and dignity of being seen as human, and verbally bragged about having a cache of weapons; going so far as to brandish and even once draw a firearm in confrontations with Mr. Walker while standing on his property. As has been repeated in city council and the press many times, Mr. Eury has used gendered and ethnic slurs repeatedly to Mr. Walker and his wife. Mr. Eury has also made sure to never retrieve his dumpster from his curb without also being armed with a baseball bat or golf club.
I recently started reading “Bring the War Home” by Kathleen Belew, published in 2018, which is a detailed exploration of the White Power paramilitary movement in the United States. It explains how White power ideology tells of a “disappearing Aryan race,” who believe wholeheartedly in the right to live separately from people of non-European descent for fear of having their pseudo-scientific concept of their heritage “dirtied” by “race-mixing.”
Mr. Eury has bragged that he spent much of his career as a photographer for a news outlet. After a negative confrontation between himself and Mr. Walker (in which Mr. Walker confronted Mr. Eury over a previous incident in which he used a racial slur and his two pet dogs to intimidate a Black woman who was walking down the street with a baby in a stroller), Mr. Eury took a photograph of Mr. Walker and made a large sign, which he displayed in his front yard. The sign, which was seen by passersby and motorists in the neighborhood, showed Mr. Walker legally carrying his firearm on his own property with the caption “BEWARE LEWD NEIGHBOR” in capital letters. As a result, Mr. Walker reported that neighbors stopped visiting and being friendly to him; others would stop him in the grocery store and ask him about the sign.
In Belew’s book, she reports that White supremacist publications used sensationalist images and rhetoric to depict people of color, especially Black men, as rapists, touching upon historically racist rhetoric of people of color as sexually deviant or violent (even though the most violent perpetrators of sexual assault are usually white men, including uniformed law enforcement.) Even putting aside the white supremacist rhetoric, it’s clear that Mr. Eury has used the cheap tactics of tabloid magazines to propagandize about this elderly Black man’s character to otherwise uninformed onlookers.
Belew’s book chronicles the way that the United States federal government, including the FBI, hesitated to prosecute or publicly acknowledge the full extent to which White Power terrorist groups posed a threat to American domestic security. Belew wrote how some of the most heavily armed and widely organized white power cells were in North Carolina. The existence and looming threat of White power cells, by several creative and patriotic names, cannot be denied.
While the most property totaling an estimated $130 billion in equipment was stolen from Fort Bragg in Fayetteville during the 80’s, weapons continue to be stolen and sold illegally from active-duty officers at Fort Bragg: as recently as last year, items totaling $1.8 million in materiel were found to have been stolen from an officer stationed at the military base. In 1980, a group of 40 Klansmen and Neo-Nazis who massacred five organizers for worker’s rights and wounded at least twelve others were found not guilty, having acted in self-defense, by a rushed jury in Greensboro. Recently, the blatant ties between active-duty and retired military personnel, alongside Klansmen, White separatists, and neo-Nazis participated in the January 6th anti-state insurrection, a violent attempt to take revolutionary control over the government of the United States.
While Mr. Eury may not be connected to a white power cell, or agile enough to carry out violence himself, allowing this type of behavior on an individual level is not only abhorrent and reprehensible but could possibly pose a greater precedent for further emboldened reactionaries in North Carolina.
Mr. Walker shared with me the time that a white man in a red sedan trespassed onto his property, using his driveway to access the backyard, and verbally threatened him saying that he had a nice property and implied that he and/or a group of individuals would “get rid of” Mr. Walker and using a slur to refer to all Black people.
Belew’s book also details the way that the United States legal infrastructure is not equipped to fully prosecute or defend its populace from white supremacist terrorist cells; but it was published in 2018. Since then, there have been several white supremacist and far-right terrorist massacres against children, women, Jewish people, trans and queer people, people of color and Israeli people believed to be Palestinians. The press and the federal government purposefully obscured the threat and organization that White supremacy poses to the public by calling the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber, the 2015 San Bernardino shooter, 2018 Parkland High School Shooter, and The New Orleans New Year’s Day shooter, “lone wolves,” or invoking mental instability as justification for these violent actions.
Neighbors in Grove Park have also told Mr. Walker to just ignore Mr. Eury or to even pity him because he is also, unconfirmed, suffering from mental illness. Mental illness is not an excuse for threats and intimidation.
I would also like to understand why Mr. Eury’s multiple calls for service, in which he continuously blatantly lies about a threat to his personal safety have not been fielded for fraud. Certainly, after the first ten calls resulted in no threat to Mr. Eury’s safety or danger, there would be some sort of review process to field his future calls for service? Does the city have no review process to see whether these calls are fraudulent or a waste/abuse of public funding and resources?
While others have urged Mr. Walker to seek a restraining order against Mr. Eury, Mr. Walker reports that police officers and a former police chief discouraged him from doing so. In similar situations of intimate partner violence, for example, obtaining a restraining order significantly increases the likelihood of the victim being murdered. This alone should trigger the public to question the legal system’s ability to protect people from violence in any capacity.
We have been forced to accept so many things as normal that are not indicative of a great nation. They are indicative of the exact principles on which this white supremacist and imperialist nation-state was founded. If a majority-Black government cannot act on something this simple, the public must turn its back on elected officials and organize for their own self-defense and justice. Things are not going to change for the public of Charlotte if we continue to expect those that have continuously wronged us and smiled in our faces while violating our dignity as the working class to make decisions that are in our best interest.
Mr. Eury’s actions touch upon much larger concepts of who deserves to live in peace. Right now, it’s obvious he believes that he alone has a right to determine who deserves to live across from him, going so far as to shine his SUV’s LED floodlights into the Walkers’ living room windows at all hours of the night.
I must ask the council and county government to reevaluate why the law does not give them the power to stop this one, elderly, and possibly mentally unstable man’s actions; and the impact that this man’s constant harassment has on the psyche of an elderly Black retiree.
To go further, it is an insult that the courts ruled that it is Mr. Walker who must go through anger-management therapy for practicing civil disobedience after being fed up with having Mr. Eury weaponize local law enforcement against him; and it is absolutely asinine that the county’s pathetic response was to ask the two parties to come to the table as equals for mediation.
For Mecklenburg County to ask the victim of ethnic intimidation to come to a mediation table as equals with a man who laughed when the Black woman’s stroller holding a child fell over as she ran in fear from his two dogs, is purely absurd.
Continued reliance on the legal system, in today’s current political landscape of repression and outright fascist symbolism in the White House, will lead us nowhere as a community. It is up to the masses of Charlotte to organize their own forms of community and tenant defense by any means necessary.
Working People's Press 
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