Rodney Dennis walked to the edge of his south Akron neighborhood and stopped.
Across Archwood Avenue, he pointed to a park, a library, a church and a old brick schoolhouse, kept pristine in a community of proud homeowners. Behind him, where he opened a barber shop, sits a row of boarded up houses, blighted properties, two bars and a liquor store.
“If I’m paying the same tax dollars, why does Firestone Park look like that and my neighborhood looks like this?” he asked, standing in a barber’s apron as rain rolled over his hood and dripped from a large diamond in his left ear.
The Army veteran often contemplates the plight of South Akron. Few there vote. That’s a problem, he said.
His customers, like him, are black. They complain daily about how Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, attends black churches by morning then, hours later, promotes what they say is racial profiling with policing tactics like stop-and-frisk. They talk about black man killed by cops.
“But they can’t get past the protesting, because they don’t want to vote,” Dennis said. “They don’t believe in voting.”
Dennis said progress seems to come more slowly to them, if it’s felt at all.
“But even if you don’t feel like the system works for you, vote,” he said, “so you don’t lose the right to.”
Lowly voting
Voting isn’t as high a priority in South Akron.
“I hear it all day long,” Dennis, a precinct official in the Democratic Party, said of his clients.
The 29-year-old entrepreneur keeps a stack of voter registration forms at his business, Grant Street Barber Shop. In one week, 32 customers filled them out. He dropped them off after work at the county board of elections up the street.
Khyree Sincere, 26, a friend and fellow barber, explained that many residents in the area live in poverty. They must satisfy basic needs before even thinking about voting.
The struggle keeps people apart instead of building a sense of community that inspires voting.
“It’s easy for us to turn on each other,” said Sincere, who grew up Youngstown. “It’s the poverty.”
The men credit Beyond Expectations Barber College, a barber program for at-risk African-Americans, for giving them a broader perspective in business and life.
Tough neighborhood
As his six-year contract in the Army expired, Dennis completed barber school for a soft transition to civilian life.
He found a building in South Akron and decided to buy it. But the bank, which offered him a $36,000 loan for a car, denied him a $10,000 business loan.
Lack of access to capital and credit, Dennis noted, is just another reason why his neighborhood struggles to create opportunity.
He had no one to turn to for the cash. So, he took a smaller loan for a used car and saved up for a year before signing a rent-to-own contract for a building to house his barber shop. Guided by Youtube, Dennis taught himself to wall paper and install flooring.
“I had to get people to believe that I wasn’t here selling drugs and shooting dice,” he said of the first few weeks in business. “I had to persuade them that I wasn’t here doing anything wrong.”
In the past year, Dennis can count 10 clients now in jail and six killed. The Reporter, a black newspaper, covered his grand opening, which was attended by black city council members. The Beacon Journal didn’t cover it. Dennis said the major newspaper did publish most of the killings, including a 25-year-old man shot an hour after Dennis cut his hair.
The barber shop bustles in the afternoon as Garfield high school students play video games on a TV in the parlor. Dennis laughs thinking about how drug dealers, cops, businessmen and college basketball players wait together.
He knows who’s who, even if they don’t. Together, it just looks like community.
Walk around the block
As the warm rain in late September drizzled the broken sidewalks and boarded up homes of Grant Street, Dennis stepped out into his neighborhood with a reporter to ask residents about voting.
A young black man said unenthusiastically that he’ll do what he must “to support my country.” An older white woman said “be careful in this neighborhood.”
Dennis, who grew up in Garden Valley, a tough neighborhood in Cleveland, kept walking.
On a porch, Doug Miles, 33, said the African-American vote has been taken for granted.
“Voting is not for us,” Miles said. “Voting is an illusion. We’re made to believe that voting matters.”
Miles condemned U.S. aid for Israel while 38 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. He criticized the media for favoring Hillary Clinton, and Clinton for labeling some black youth as “super predators” after her husband signed the punitive 1994 Crime Bill. He blamed the Democratic Party for covert opposition to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a man he said “always has stood beside people in times of injustice.”
He said he can’t be coerced to vote because of the color of his skin.
“I just feel like black people came together because Barack Obama is black,” Miles said of record African-American turnout in 2008 and 2012. “That’s not why you should vote.”
After more venting, Miles cooled off and agreed to stop by Dennis’ barber shop and register to vote before the Oct. 11 deadline.
Dennis gets it. Blacks, he said, feel prized then forgotten every four years.
“Everyone always talks about how they wanna help or how they’re going to do this. We appreciate that, but nobody really does anything,” Dennis said.
Continually put down by stories of crime and violence in the media, Sincere said patience is wearing thin in the black community.
“They’ve been putting their trust in politicians for so long but haven’t seen results. So it’s like why even vote when we’ve marched, hands up, and we’re still dying?”
Rain on hope
Down the street, a reporter bumps into Stephen Williams, 59, who said neighborhood youth have more pressing concerns than voting. Growing up in a children’s home, he can relate.
Dennis walked ahead and stopped in front of a dilapidated apartment complex to speak with a group of black youth. They scattered as the reporter and photographer caught up.
“What’s going on here?” Eric Duck said, cupping a hand-rolled cigar from getting wet in the rain.
Duck, 23, said he’s eager to vote “because of the economy. And there’s a lot of racism going on,” alluding to how most on the block read Trump.
But Duck thought he could walk into a polling booth on Election Day and pull a lever.
“You gotta get registered,” Dennis explained.
After inquiring about a bald streak left by a bullet in Duck’s hair, the barber offered a free haircut and a dry place to fill out a voter registration form.
Duck declined the haircut.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.