HIS TIME TO LEAD
Council President Shannon Hardin, comfortable around City Hall, not afraid of tough issues
Shannon Hardin was furious. Hardin, the Columbus City Council president, along with Franklin County Commissioner Kevin Boyce and U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty, had just been pepper-sprayed by Columbus police at a Statehouse protest over the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis.
So Hardin called his longtime mentor, Michael B. Coleman, the city’s first African-american mayor – someone whom he had literally grown up with at City Hall beginning more than two decades ago.
Hardin vented. He told Coleman what police did was wrong.
“He was listening. He wanted me to be careful and calm in my thought processes,” Hardin said. “My eyes were still burning.”
Coleman continued to lend an ear. He later called Hardin back.
“I said something like, ’Shannon, you’re the right person at the right time to lead,” Coleman said. “You cannot choose the time to lead. The time chooses you.”
People who have known the 33-yearold Hardin for much or all of his life say he is developing a larger leadership role in Columbus.
“He has been the most courageous person I’ve seen in that seat,” said Tammy Fournier Alsaada, a founding organizer of the People’s Justice Project, which has been pushing for changes in the Police Division. She said she’s holding Hardin accountable.
“He is coming out very strong about police reform,” said Nana Watson, the president of the Columbus branch of the NAACP. “It was evident to the NAACP he was growing into his own. He’s speaking loudly. We’ve not seen that before.”
Hardin wasn’t even planning to go to the Statehouse protest May 30.
Boyce had texted him the night before that he was considering heading Downtown.
“Kevin and I talked and decided we were not going to do it,” Hardin said. He said Beatty thought otherwise. “What do you mean you’re not going to go down?” he said Beatty told them.
Afterward, Hardin wrote a column for The Dispatch that ran June 2. “I’m angry that racist violence against Black people seems to change its form but never ends,” he wrote.
Since then, he has led the charge to reform Columbus police, including proposals to demilitarize the Division, eliminate or limit “no-knock” warrants for raids, and require hate-group background checks of officers.
Not everyone approves. Hardin said has read nasty emails and comments on social media. He said someone told him they wished they could swing a 2 X 4 against his head.
“Every move we make is pissing off somebody,” Hardin said.
It’s an inflammatory environment he’s working in now. Columbus residents who might not have even known when the City Cuncil meets, or rarely pay attention when it does, are now all in.
On June 30, the City Council held a six-hour hearing on demilitarizing police by limiting military-style weapons and equipment, with residents complaining that police were too aggressive and intimidating during recent protests.
“People are paying attention to how the sausage is being made,” Hardin said.
And they are paying attention to him.
People are people
Under glass on a table in Hardin’s office behind the City Council chambers is a map of Columbus from 1936. Several of the city’s neighborhoods — the Near East Side, the South Side, parts of Linden — are highlighted in red, a practice known as “redlining” that kept minorities out and still defines and shapes the city today.
Hardin grew up on the Near East Side and in the South Side’s Southfield neighborhood, and now lives in Woodland Park on the Near East Side. He said he put the map there to remind himself and his staff every day about the issues that the city still faces and the history that led to this point.
Hardin acknowledges that he is more comfortable hashing out issues around a table. There’s a reason for that.
Hardin grew up around politics and City Hall.
His mother, Kennetha Hardin, worked for Coleman. His late father, Oliver Hardin, was a Republican who worked for the state of Ohio, and was a quarter horse trainer. His grandmother, Marie Hardin, worked as the city’s Equal Business Opportunity Commission director in Republican Mayor Dana Rinehart’s administration in the 1980s and early 1990s.
“He kind of got both perspectives,” Kennetha Hardin said. “I was a liberal, his dad was more conservative. We just shared our views and our opinions.”
Kennetha Hardin said she was pregnant with her son when she started at City Hall as a receptionist in 1986.
She worked in the Coleman administration from 2000 until she left in 2014, when she was assistant to the mayor. During that time, her son became very familiar with the building and its workings.
“He actually could get around City Hall better than I could,” she said. “He got to know the people in the building.”
Shannon Hardin said, “What that did was allow me to leave Southfield and be transported to this place, being around policymakers.”
He said he also realized that those policymakers were not that much smarter than anyone else.
Though he did most of his growing up in Columbus, he spent third-grade with his father and stepmother, Vickie, who is white, outside Maysville, Kentucky, on a 100-acre farm where his father kept quarter horses.
What he said he learned was, whether in central city Columbus or rural Kentucky, people are people. “We all are the same. We want the same things,” he said.
The moment has come
Hardin was appointed to the City Council in 2014 and was chosen president in 2018. Watson said Hardin tries to build consensus.
“I think Shannon is quiet, but I think he is effective,” Watson said. “He is coming into his own, if you will.
“I like the strength that I’m seeing.” City Council Pro Tem Elizabeth Brown said she’s seeing that growth manifest itself in his taking on police reform, where he’s taking a big-picture look that has to occur if any meaningful change is to be made.
“Simply being responsive won’t set us up for real change,” Brown said.
And she said there’s no one opinion in the debate on policing in Columbus or the exact road to reform.
“We have almost 900,000 people, and about 899,000 opinions of what should be done,” Brown said. “It’s not always our job to simply put our finger to the wind, and understand where prevailing opinions lie.
“It’s where history calls us to go. It sounds a little grandiose, but I do mean it.”
Jasmine Ayres, a community organizer with the People’s Justice Project, said she has talked frequently with Hardin since the protests over George Floyd’s death and discussions on police reforms began.
She said he calls to run ideas by her, and wants to know what people in the community are thinking and asking what they need.
“He stepped up, in my opinion,” said Ayres, a progressive who has run for the Columbus City Council.
For example, when the Council approved $1.05 million July 6 to upgrade 65 police cruisers and three prisoner transport vehicles with new equipment, Ayres said she called Hardin and “expressed my displeasure.” She said the community would rather see that money spent on things such as education or gang violence prevention programs.
“He’s willing to have uncomfortable conversations,” Ayres said.
Keith Ferrell, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Capital City Lodge No. 9, said Hardin called him before proposing the police reforms.
“I said, ’Look, you need to talk to some professionals in the police department.’
“And Shannon said he would talk to some of those people.”
Hardin joined about 50 Columbus police officers in 2019 when they toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African-american History and Culture in Washington, D.C., an annual trip where officers learn about different perspectives, Ferrell said.
Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther said the past six weeks have brought his office and the City Council closer together.
“It’s critically important to have the legislative branch and the mayor working closely together during a crisis,” he said, also mentioning the coronavirus pandemic.
“This moment has come to us,” Hardin said. “It’s our particular responsibility to lead and lead well.
“I am a young Black man. This is a generational thing.
“I’m more hopeful and committed that we can do the things we’re talking about.” mferench@dispatch.com @Markferenchik