Asked what motivated her to run for High Point City Council, Jill Harwood flipped through a three-ring binder containing written talking points, photographs and other materials. “I had gone to Virginia to do a little skit,” she recalled. “I’m related to a missionary that went to China. After I got done with that, I started to think of this campaign as being like that — a journey.”
A 66-year-old retired Target sales clerk, Harwood is making her first foray into politics as one of three candidates in High Point’s Ward 2, a majority black subdivision that stretches from struggling parts of the core city out to a southeastern portion of the city butting up against the corporate limits of Jamestown. She faces another challenger, Chris Williams, and incumbent Foster Douglas, who is completing his first term after replacing the late Ron Wilkins.
Sitting for an interview on the third floor of the High Point Public Library, where she serves on the board of trustees, Harwood displayed a personable style, as if describing what it was like to be involved in a political campaign to a family member rather than engaging in politics in a media interview. She hugged the reporter when he answered affirmatively to her question about whether he had ever lived on a budget.
Despite her lack of polish, Harwood is a ubiquitous campaigner with an outgoing personality. During a rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” last week at a reception hosted by the Triad Real Estate and Building Industries Coalition, the candidate grasped a young woman’s hand and placed it on her heart. Harwood said she was only trying to instill a sense of patriotism in the woman, but she appeared to take offense.
Other fragments from the political biography and CV cobbled together by Harwood include the self-applied descriptor “concerned Christian” and a stated concern that High Point’s young people shouldn’t have to go to “the busy highway cities” for recreation — meaning Greensboro.
She described what she had planned to say tonight at a forum hosted by the High Point NAACP for candidates in wards 1 and 2 that has been postponed until next week.
“At the end, I was going to say, ‘This is why I’m running for council — the young children growing up.’”
Then she held up the binder, which displayed pictures of her grandchildren, repeating a gesture made during her presentation to a group of women civic leaders in Greensboro earlier this month.
Recounting her experiences in candidate forums with her opponents and canvassing what is the city’s poorest ward, Harwood preached a political philosophy of self-reliance. Harwood said she and her husband were disheartened to find broken glass on the ground along many of the streets in the ward. She produced a photograph of a sidewalk lined with grass badly in need of edging.
“Somebody that’s not working could do that instead of depending on the government to do it,” she said. At another point, she said, “I saw men just sitting on the porch, and they want jobs. But if they see something wrong with their neighbors, go and clean it for them.”
At one household, Harwood said she and her husband met a woman whose heat had been turned off. Harwood’s husband went home, unplugged the couple’s bathroom heater and brought it to the woman.
“That’s a hands-on-hands,” Harwood said. “That’s what I’m about — doing, not saying you’re going to do it.”
The candidate argues that the outlying portion of her ward deserves more resources, compared with the more impoverished core city. She takes a critical view of her two opponents’ calls for additional public transportation options and extended services hours. She produced five HiTran route schedules and noted that the nearest stops to her house are at Main Street in Jamestown and Kivett Drive, adding that she thinks a route should be added along Dillon Road, an artery that passes through her neighborhood. Similarly, she said her opponents are pleading for more sidewalks and bicycle trails in the core city, and observed that both are in short supply in her neighborhood. Incidentally, the incumbent lives in the same neighborhood as Harwood near Jamestown.
Harwood talked about an African-American man at a business meeting who attempted to pin her down on whether she agreed that transportation alternatives were needed for the ward’s residents.
“I said, ‘Yes,’” the candidate recounted. “A lot of the sanitation department had to reduce. This library had to cut back. I was thinking about the safety of the bus drivers at 11 o’clock. I think more businesses would be in town if we didn’t have so many unemployed that would rob the place.”
Harwood treads gingerly around the topic of race, hinting at her meaning but limiting her use of terms such as “black” and “white.” During the interview today, she pulled out a brochure for the Macedonia Family Resource Center, a nonprofit supported by the city of High Point and the United Way of Greater High Point that serves a historically black neighborhood.
“I would like to see one of those closer, to be right here,” Harwood said, indicating a location on Triangle Lake Road near Business 85. “I would feel safe there. [It would be a place] where kids in both areas would have a chance. There were zero white folks in this center. We need it for all children.”
Harwood said she was at a loss to come up with ideas to address the challenge of high unemployment in Ward 2. She said she has observed that other candidates appear to be preoccupied with job creation, acknowledging that her priorities lie elsewhere.
“Mainly, it’s not jobs,” she said. “It’s the children — trying to find them ways to finish school, and learn responsibility, and help their neighbors. I guess I should have run for something different.”
A conservative who wants to avoid burdening future generations with debt, Harwood suggested her ability to represent the ward is tied to her humble status.
“There’s the mayor, and below her the city clerk,” she said. “Both of them are higher up. I’m just on the low totem pole. If I fail at that, I’m a people person.”
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