Letter writer: Coleman has devoted his life to justice

Posted on by Letters
Graphic by Lori Deaton

There are three good candidates for the District 1 seat for Buncombe County commissioner, but there is only one best choice.

Your vote should go to Isaac Coleman.

Isaac’s life has been devoted to justice. As a student in the ’60s civil rights movement, he worked as a field secretary with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi.

After moving to Asheville in the ’70s, the list of his commitments to and achievements for our community are too numerous to list here. A visit to his website (http://isaaccoleman.org/) is an amazing catalog of his community work.

Justice is the theme that forms the backbone and soul of his life.

I personally know Isaac from his environmental work for Clean Water for North Carolina, the pre-eminent environmental justice organization in North Carolina. His leadership on Clean Water’s board has been his central environmental focus for the past decade.

But Isaac is not a one-trick pony. Justice for children and their education (he is the founder and board chair of Read to Succeed), justice for fair and affordable housing (chair of the Asheville-Buncombe Fair Housing Commission), justice for a living wage (co-founder of Just Economics), justice for voting rights (a lifetime of work) — all inform his daily life.

Isaac received the Asheville Living Treasures Award in 2014. He is a true elder. We need his wisdom on the county Board of Commissioners, and he needs your vote in the primary on Tuesday, March 15.

— Richard Fireman
Mars Hill

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One thought on “Letter writer: Coleman has devoted his life to justice”

  1. Alan Ditmore

    For now I hope Coleman wins the primary because I think he is the least enthusiastic zoner, though Young sure fooled me at this stage as Young is far more antihousing than I though he would be.

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