When April Parker moved to Greensboro in 2010, she didn’t have political office on her mind. A New Jersey native, she followed her twin brother to the city, looking for an affordable and supportive place to raise her young daughter.
She found what she was looking for in Greensboro, earning her Master’s degree in Library Science from UNC-Greensboro and becoming deeply involved in racial equity work and activism in a city with a rich civil rights history.
Parker worked in academic libraries as a graduate student and then for Guilford County Schools, becoming a media specialist at Gillespie Park Elementary for seven years. She also became a Moral Freedom Summer organizer with the state NAACP.
“I helped raise up some generations on the South side,” Parker said in a recent interview. “But I was this librarian by day, organizer by night. I was always movement-minded.”
Among other work, Parker was a co-founder and lead organizer of the Queer People of Color Collective of the Triad and co-founder of Greensboro’s Black Lives Matter chapter in 2014. She helped get the city to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday and founded the Juneteenth Black Food Truck Festival, an annual tradition that draws more around 10,000 people to Greensboro each year.
She’s now doing political and cultural education and organizing full-time through Architect of Black Space, but said she still considers herself a librarian.
“I’m more of a community librarian,” she said. “I think librarians are more than just like, ‘Here’s a good book.’ I think that it’s about information dissemination, and so I still do a lot of that. I think that people still contact me when it comes to being a conduit of resources.”
Parker served on the Board of Trustees of the Greensboro Public Library and the steering committee for the Windsor Chavis Nocho Community Complex.
This year, she decided to take the leap into elected office with a run for the Greensboro City Council’s District 3 seat. The district, which includes the Greensboro Country Club and some of the city’s most expensive homes, has traditionally leaned more conservative. It’s now represented by Zack Matheny, the council’s only registered Republican. Matheny has never lost a council election and says he’s confident he’ll prevail again this year. But the district is changing, Parker said.
Though she prefers not to discuss the incumbent by name and to concentrate on her own campaign, Parker has said Matheny’s focus on downtown and his dual role as President and CEO of the non-profit Downtown Greensboro Inc. means he isn’t representing the entire district or the city as a whole.
Parker’s candidacy offers a stronger contrast than any opponent Matheny has ever faced. If elected, she would be the council’s first queer Black woman and only the second out LGBTQ member in the council’s history.
She’s also campaigning harder than previous Matheny challengers, appearing at local candidate forums and knocking on doors in the district almost daily. Though city council elections are technically non-partisan, Parker, a Democrat, has leaned into her political affiliation. She touts endorsements from fellow Democrats like High Point Mayor Cyril Jefferson and N.C. Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-Guilford) and is holding events with elected Democrats at the local and state levels.
“It’s really interesting who doesn’t want to say their party affiliation right now,” Parker said. “I think everyone should examine that. It’s not about a political ideology. It’s about practices, priorities, and principles.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When you decided to run for office, you had to decide between running in District 3 and running at-large. I know you have some friends, allies, and fellow organizers running at-large, and that was a consideration. But how did you ultimately make that decision?
I live in District 3 and I’m really proud of District 3. I think our current representative doesn’t represent District 3 as a whole and is not an example of who is District 3. We are District 3.
People in District 3 are protesting [the policies of President Donald Trump, Senator Thom Tillis and unjustified detentions by ICE]. They believe in education, even though they might not have had a child in their house for decades. Houselessness and affordable housing is important to them, even though they may have been in their homes for 10 to 30 years. They care about other people. They care about fairness. They care about justice. And they understand that everybody deserves to be safe. And so those are my people.
I think that because of the affluence that is in District 3, people can get a lot of preconceived notions about the people in District 3. But that’s just not authentic to who they are. I am so thankful that I had this experience on the campaign trail for all of 2025 to get to know the diversity of our people. And not just diversity of identity, but the diversity of thought. And so I know that those folks believe in equity and justice and fairness, and understand that there’s a difference between Bingham Park and Fisher Park. And they’re ready for a change.
I live in District 3 myself. If you go a few blocks from where I live, you’re in front of some of the most expensive homes anywhere in Greensboro. But if you go a few blocks in the opposite direction, you will see unhoused people asking if you can buy them some food as you go into the Food Lion on Golden Gate Drive.
I think you have to see both and represent both, right? I live proximal to downtown. I have a large investment in downtown with the Juneteenth Black Food Truck Festival. But I also believe in shopping and supporting local. Our small businesses should get just as much support and care as a larger industry coming into Greensboro. They’re the backbone of our community. People should be able to have wonderful amenities throughout the city. It shouldn’t necessarily always be central. Because I do not believe that the health of a community is just in its downtown. The health of our communities is in our neighborhoods, right?
I can sit on the council and do the governance of District 3 as a whole and the city as a whole. Unfortunately, we have experienced someone who has underprioritized the rest of the city. And so I think that people are excited about somebody who can represent us holistically,
There’s a lot made of Greensboro’s growth right now, but there have also been a lot of conversations about whether we’re ready for that growth, in housing and beyond. What role do you believe you can play on council in addressing that?
There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors right now, where we’re stuck on the celebratory. Our growth, when I examined the February 12 work session, where all the departments kind of give their 2025 reporting, our growth is on par with Fayetteville.
There’s a lot of talk of, “When workers from this project or that project move here…” but right now, as things stand, we’re about to lose being the third-largest city in the state to Durham.
And that’s unacceptable. But we can’t improve if we’re not strategizing from a place of reality. We have a huge wage gap. So people that work downtown can’t afford to live downtown. That is the incongruence and the unhealth that we should be examining as a city. And so yes, downtown should be thriving, and the people who work downtown should be able to live and play downtown just like everybody else. That is something that I think needs to be examined.
These businesses are coming in, they’re looking for good schools and good neighborhoods. I think that we can’t just focus on one specific location, like a downtown location. We need accessible housing for everyone, everywhere. And I think everyone should be excited because it’s not just about me. We have so many good, community-centered people on the ballot this year. We also have to be mindful of the slate against us. Because there are going to be people on this ballot who are prioritizing hotels over housing.
There are nine [council members] that vote on every issue in every district. We should be thinking about the five votes that we need to really advance us as a community. There are a [Republicans who], because they want to see increased representation, for the first time in a while they are highly motivated to vote.
One of the largest issues we’re dealing with this year is increased homelessness. I often see this framed as people who think visible homelessness is bad for business, but I also hear a lot of discussion of getting at the roots of homelessness. What do you believe the council can do?
We can’t just talk about behavior. We have to talk about systems. We have to think holistically. When I went to the District 3 budget meeting, the incumbent said we have not looked at homelessness holistically in the last 15 years. Well, sir, you have been in office over the last 15 years. And so you have not looked at things holistically.
This visible poverty, this difference between one side of town and the other side of town when you’re driving through? That’s a warning. I want to say seniors, Black seniors particularly and Black babies, are the canaries in the mines. If you have Black people that are not living beyond their optimal life expectancy and Black babies who are not living to their first birthday, then it should concern all of us that those are the conditions in which we’re living. We’re going to keep on experiencing this until you have people in office that are willing to look at examining consistently, relentlessly, chronically root issues of these systems.
In the land of the Civil Rights Movement, I really want everybody to start getting curious about what justice can look like in this lifetime. We will always have to take care of each other, but we cannot have Band-Aid approaches. We have to be more justice-oriented at this time. Yes, please take care of that one person’s belly. Take care of that one family’s needs. But I’m interested in the systems and the structures that keep people in need.
In Greensboro, North Carolina, where we have changed the world before, we are on fertile ground to do that again.
April Parker Says District 3 Needs a New Voice
