Andrew Barksdale Staff writer| The Fayetteville Observer
In the 1980s, Charles Evans' life spiraled into alcohol and drug abuse - addictions that led him to steal from his employer.
Evans was a ticket agent for one of the airlines at Fayetteville Regional Airport when he was busted in 1992 on two charges of felony embezzlement and one count of cocaine possession.
Evans had hit the proverbial rock bottom, and even lost his right to vote until he completed five years of supervised probation.
Evans would go on to shake off his troubled past and win seats on the Fayetteville City Council and the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners.
Fear, he said, drove him to clean up his ways.
"Fear of being locked away," Evans said. "I just couldn't continue to do that."
In 1994, his father, William Oscar Evans, died. His death was another wake-up call.
"He wanted to make sure Mom saw him in a better place before he left," said one of his sisters, Betty Crawford.
Evans, who is 56 and has never married, has become a champion of the poor, ex-felons and addicts - people who don't give campaign contributions and fall off most politicians' radars.
As a city councilman in 2007, Evans started the Fresh Start program that helps convicted felons find work, housing and public assistance. After he become a county commissioner in 2010, he successfully led a "ban the box" campaign to remove a question on county applications that asks about past convictions.
Evans said he has walked in their shoes.
"It's just terrible," Evans said. "Some individuals who have felonies are not bad people. They've made mistakes."
He hasn't strayed from his Christian faith. Although a member of Second Missionary Baptist Church, he often visits other churches to see his constituents.
Billy King, who was a county commissioner from 1990 to 2014, said Evans brings a different perspective.
"He champions the crowd that has been left out," King said.
"When you are an advocate, you can't always save everybody, but Charles tries," King added.
Evans is a partially disabled veteran, after a three-year stint in the Army. He enlisted after graduating high school in 1977. Compared to his colleagues on the Board of Commissioners, Evans has more modest means and less education.
"I'm one of those little people," he said in an interview this month in his Savoy Heights neighborhood home he inherited after his mother, Queen Esther Evans, died in 2005.
Evans, who has a short-cropped head of hair and a clean-shaven face, paused, his eyes reddening. He said God has allowed him to be in a position to help the least.
A reporter asked him how it felt sitting alongside the county commissioners. He sighed, sitting pensively in a living room unchanged since his mother's death. Gold drapes cover the living room windows, and large, framed paintings of hunting dogs or pheasant hang on the wall.
Finally, Evans spoke.
"You know what, sometimes, I wonder why I am sitting with those individuals," Evans said. "They are tremendously blessed, but I feel I'm tremendously blessed to be sitting there."
In 2010, Evans become only the second black person in modern times to win a countywide Cumberland County commissioner seat. Four years later, when he was re-elected to a second term, he led the ballot with more than 38,000 votes.
On the board, Evans found an ally in King, who is also a registered Democrat. The two went on several county commissioner trips together and became friends.
"I kept an open mind regarding Charles, even though some may have criticized him, and I would always try to ensure that he do what was in his best interest," King said.
The commissioners historically rotate the chairmanship every year, but Evans has never held the gavel.
King chalks up Evans being passed over for the chairmanship to "probably not playing enough politics. He was outside the norm, and that's just the way he was."
Evans has ruffled more than a few feathers as a politician. In 2008, he railed against the then-county schools Superintendent Bill Harrison over a co*ckroach infestation at Teresa C. Berrien Elementary, a school in a poor neighborhood near downtown. In 2011, Evans accused Commissioner Kenneth Edge of shoving him aside after a testy, three-hour meeting in which Edge banged the gavel several times for quiet. More recently, he waffled and flip-flopped on whether to support tax incentives for the controversial Sanderson Farms chicken processing plant that went to Robeson County last year.
While at Terry Sanford High School, Evans was bit with the political bug when he campaigned for the late John Henley Sr., a state lawmaker from Hope Mills.
Evans' eldest sister, Febra Miles, remembered him pulling her along to help with the campaign.
"He was like, 'You've got to hand out these handouts,''' said Miles, who is 54. "'You need to know about it. Read it.'''
"He was very particular about this stuff," Miles said.
He delved into politics again in the early 1990s when he helped persuade the City Council to rename the G.B. Myers Recreation Center in Savoy Heights after community activist Geraldine Myers, who had sought to have it built.
Evans mounted his own campaign in 2003 when he took on a well-known incumbent, Mable C. Smith, for District 2 on the Fayetteville City Council. His family was worried for him at the time.
"We just didn't want nobody to hurt his feelings," Betty Crawford, a sister, said.
Evans lost that year, but defeated Smith two years later after part of the district was redrawn.
In 2009, Evans was upset for re-election by a 26-year-old political novice, Kady-Ann Davy.
"I was really surprised" Evans said. "I worked my tail off for the district."
He was undeterred and ran the following year and won an at-large seat on the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners.
Evans said he plans to seek a third term in 2018, and he would like to be the board chairman one day. The position would given him a broader platform for his causes, he said.
"And I think I would be a chairperson that would be caring for each and every person in this county," Evans said.
"And not just a select few," he said.
Staff writer Andrew Barksdale can be reached at barksdalea@fayobserver.com or 486-3565.
