Allen Buansi, left, poses with junior Max Winzelberg.
Sitting in Maureen Galvin’s APUSH class 17 years ago, Allen Buansi fell in love with history again. He’d already become enamored with the subject in first grade, when he wrote his first book report on Paul Robeson, an African-American “renaissance man” who fought for civil rights in the 1940s. However, it was Galvin’s class that inspired him to dedicate his career to reshaping history.
“I always thought of history as a static thing where it was inevitable that ‘X’ would happen; it was inevitable that the Civil War would be fought and that Black people would be given freedom, it was inevitable that Jim Crow would end—when in reality, it wasn’t,” Buansi said. “[Ms. Galvin] taught us to challenge that mindset that it was inevitable that we would advance towards equality. It wasn’t. It took a lot of sacrifice. It took folks, even in the bleakest, darkest moments, having the faith and courage to demonstrate something different about the kind of country that we could be.”
In Orange County’s closest race of the 2022 primaries, East alum, civil rights lawyer and former Chapel Hill Town Councilmember Buansi narrowly defeated former Orange County Democratic Party chair Jonah Garson by 435 votes to win N.C. House District 56.
The seat is being vacated by Verla Insko, who has served for over 25 years, and is retiring at the end of May. Consequently, Buansi will be appointed and begin representing Chapel Hill and Carrboro in the state House within the year.
“I really appreciate the district we’re in, the kind of engagement we have from voters,” Buansi said to Chapelboro. “I appreciate Jonah for running the kind of campaign he ran. Generally, our race—I think we did it the right way. I hope it serves as a model for other races that we have: keep it clean, keep the races filled with integrity, hard-fought up and down.”
The race between Buansi and Garson was neck-and-neck from the very beginning, the candidates’ similarities stark even from before they ran against each other. They both grew up in Chapel Hill in the early 2000s, attending Phillips and Culbreth Middle Schools, graduating from East and Chapel Hill High Schools in 2006, and both going on to attend law school with a focus in civil rights. Their progressive stances on issues were so similar that Indy Week couldn’t decide to endorse only one.
Growing up, Buansi says his mother inspired him to enjoy history and reading; she was the one who placed the Paul Robeson book into his hands. Throughout middle school, she continued to encourage him to read. One summer when Buansi was 13, she told him to stop playing video games and finish a list of books by the end of the break. Reading about historical figures from Thurgood Marshall to Shirley Chisholm that summer led him to get a degree in history from Dartmouth College and to go into the career of civil rights law.
“Especially in a time where Jim Crow was at its height, when hope was bleak for a lot of people of color and for women, that [Marshall and Chisholm] chose to commit their lives to moving the ball forward… something about that inspired me,” Buansi said. “It was really during that summer that I developed this notion that I want to be a civil rights lawyer, that I wanted to advocate for folks so that they can have equal opportunities with others who have more privilege.”
Another passion that Buansi’s mother nurtured in him was civic engagement and voting.
“Since I was very young, she always emphasized the importance of being civically engaged,” Buansi said. “I’ve tried to vote in every election, having in mind the sacrifice that other folks have made in the past for us to have this right to vote. It would be very disrespectful for me to not exercise that right.’
In high school, Buansi followed his mother’s advice and before he could vote, he organized voter registration events at East. He was also a sports editor for the ECHO and played football.
Coming into the state legislature, Buansi hopes to address the budget immediately, increasing funding for public schools and teachers.
Buansi served as a Chapel Hill Town Councilmember from 2017 to 2021. On the Town Council, his accomplishments include creating the first Town Criminal Justice Debt Fund in North Carolina to assist people who are working to get back to their lives but have excessive court fees to pay; passing a nondiscrimination ordinance for sexual orientation and gender identity; and passing the Townl’s first Climate Action and Response Plan.
Buansi says that he decided to run for the N.C. House after he heard about Rep. Insko’s retirement and thought about the past decade of legislation and the makeup of the House.
“This is to vastly understate things, but we’ve been going in the wrong direction for a long time,” Buansi said. “There’s certain perspectives that we’re missing at the table—we don’t have very many folks who have served on a town council in the State House, or civil rights lawyers.”
Buansi, an African-American, hopes to diversify representation in the State House, a factor he’s paid attention to in American history books since childhood.
“The Democratic Party in the state is certainly by far the more diverse party and the more that we can embrace that, the more that we can show folks that there is power behind having diversity… I think the better off we’ll be in terms of showing our children all the possibilities that there are for themselves to be in this world,” Buansi said.
Photo courtesy of Allen Buansi/Twitter.
