Kevin Bott lives a double life.
In one life, he’s Ebenezer Abernathy — a fictitious character that Bott uses to provoke political discussion. In the other, he’s a candidate for mayor of Syracuse. And as Bott sees it, Ebenezer has actually helped him develop his candidacy.
“If I hadn’t done Ebenezer,” Bott said, “I wouldn’t be prepared for this mayor’s thing.” He added, “I needed the character because as a person, I didn’t feel confident in articulating a political vision.” Said Bott: “It was easy to use Ebenezer as a cloak that would allow me the space in finding my voice.”
For the Nov. 5 election, Bott is running on the Green Party ticket to become mayor of Syracuse. He faces incumbent Mayor Stephanie Miner, a Democrat, and Conservative Party candidate Ian Hunter.
Bott has an uphill battle in this race. Green Party voters are a distinct minority in the city. Of 70,696 registered voters in Syracuse, the Green Party has 344 supporters or 0.49 percent. By comparison, the Democratic Party has 38, 799 registered voters — or 54 percent — and the Republican Party has 11,362 — or 16 percent.
In his campaign for mayor, Bott’s platform includes five issues: creating collaborative leadership, decreasing poverty, improving education, making the justice system equitable and increasing the birth rate.
The Syracuse mayor’s race is Bott’s first run for elected office. He casts this as a strength, saying it has allowed him to observe and understand the issues plaguing Syracuse from an outside perspective. This, he said, allows him to bring a new type of leadership to the city. His life’s work has been creating a vision, he said, and then bringing people together to help define and achieve that vision.
“We’re trying to imagine a future or Syracuse that is kind of unimaginable,” he said. “Here we are in 2013 and we have no vision of how to move beyond that idea of the past, of what Syracuse is and what it could be. I’m someone who knows how to bring people together. I know how to work across all sorts of difference.”
Bott also uses what he describes as passion for democracy within higher education. He is the associate director of Imagining America, a collection of colleges and universities that create programs to engage artists and students to take action within their communities. Imagining America is based at Syracuse University.
In addition, Bott and his alter ego, Ebenezer Abernathy, lead the D.R.E.A.M Freedom Revival, a theater company Bott created in 2011. The performance group writes and perform songs and shows that highlight issues such as education. After the show, audience members stay and discuss the performance.
On July 1, 2013, Bott was in his office planning for an Imagining America conference when the telephone rang. After seeing him in one of his performances as Ebenezer, Bott said, members of the Green Party asked him to run for mayor of Syracuse. He agreed.
“It seemed like a really natural extension of the things I was interested in talking about,” he said, “and feeling like it was an opportunity to bring more people together around issues that impact us here.”
Bott was born in New Jersey into what he describes as a blue-collar family. His father was a boilermaker and his mother worked in real estate and local government. Bott grew up around musical theater and participated in various acting program. But, he said, he always had an interest in politics and democracy. At about the age of 31, Bott went back to school to combine these passions. He got his master’s degree in educational theater from New York University.
One of his first experiences after college, he said, was working with male and female inmates at various prisons. Through theatrical performances, Bott said, he wanted to help them express themselves and understand why they were in prison in the first place.
“I really see my work as being about opening spaces for democracy,” he said. “We’ve lost the idea of a commons in our culture, where people can come together and talk about and argue about and deliberate about the issues that affect their lives.”
Michael Messina-Yauchzy is a chorus member in Bott’s performance group. As a Green Party member himself, Messina-Yauchzy said, he was approached about Bott becoming a candidate. He easily endorsed him.
“He’s an intelligent man with the right priorities,” he said. As Messina-Yuachzy sees it, Syracuse is heading down a similar road as Detroit — the largest American city to file for bankruptcy. The city, Messina-Yuachzy added, needs someone to attack the problem differently.
“What has really impressed me was the way he responds to people,” Messina-Yauchzy said. “He’s willing to let go of his own view and listen to other people and make changes.”
Bott’s wife, Aimee Brill, is a childbirth educator and fellow activist. She has helped him unearth statistics showing infant mortality in Onondaga County is higher than in almost any other county in the state, he said. So increasing the birth rate has become part of his political platform.
Aimee Brill describes Bott as “someone who truly cares about people.” He is, she said, “very generous when it comes to working with people, respecting the different ideas that people have.”
For example, she said, this past summer Bott hosted a two-week theater workshop at Wagner College that involved primary black and Latino communities. He helped the two ethnic groups create a theater piece that generated dialogue between the members about race relations.
“It was amazing to see the end result,” Brill said. “It was beautiful, it was bilingual, it was translated and it was a celebration, really, of their own community.”
When the Green Party asked him to run for mayor, Bott said, it created a great opportunity for his family and dual passion for theater and politics. Said Bott: “This is our responsibility as human beings to use the platforms that our given to us to speak about the issues that matter.”
(Maddy Berner is a senior with dual majors in newspaper and online journalism and Spanish.)
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