After two months of research, gathering FOIA-ed military documents and interviews with more than 60 people, my feature profile on Anniston’s most polarizing city leader finally ran. Check out this past Sunday’s edition of The Anniston Star or click here to read the story.
Anniston City Councilman Ben Little's senior picture from 1975 Hemingway, (S.C.), High School yearbook.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Benjamin Little arrived in Anniston in 1984, driving a silver Chevrolet Chevette and sporting the close-cropped haircut of an Army man.
He drove alone. His wife of one year, pregnant with their son, followed in another car.
Little took exit 185 off Interstate 20, drove straight through Oxford and Anniston without noticing much of anything and stopped only once he reached “the woods.”
Back then, Anniston was nothing more than another “regular Army assignment” to the man who has years later become its most polarizing city figure.
“I had no idea I would be staying here,” Little said in a recent interview.
He would stay. More than that, he would come to see himself as a leader for black residents, a champion of individual rights, a whistleblower on political wrongdoing.
It’s a vision of himself that overlooks what his political foes frequently point out: his inability to compromise, use of intimidation to get what he wants, racial rhetoric when he does not.
But before all of this — before the councilman, before the pastor, before the drill sergeant — there was the boy. The boy running wide open down a dirt road, swinging up onto his aunt’s porch, sneaking bites of sweet homemade preserves. The boy cropping tobacco and hitching a mule cart to the family dog. Going to church on Sundays, basketball practice in the afternoons. Dreaming at nights about seeing the world.”
