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Race Hustling on the U-46 School Board Part VI
Part VI
As we wrote last week, the deeper we look into the background of School District U-46 trustee Traci O’Neal Ellis, the more shocking her audacity becomes, the more clearly defined her character flaws appear, and the more urgently we feel that she needs to be purged from public office.
In this final installment (for now), we concede that The Examiner has covered a wearying expanse of ground over the past five weeks. Yet, what follows—though still incomplete—is a litany of new information. We hope to convince our readers, if we haven’t yet, that Ellis is a deplorable race hustler in the mold of Al Sharpton. She fails to pay her taxes, defaults on mortgages, creates racial turmoil in order to leverage the threat of more racial turmoil into personal wealth and political power, and complains all along the way that she is a victim.
A good place to start has us turning back the clock a few short years to January 2011, when Ellis’ name appears in the records of the Clerk of the Superior Court in Cobb County, Georgia. Those records indicate that Ellis was practicing law in Georgia in the early 2000s, but her movements are quite difficult to track. The court records make clear, however, that Ellis had taken out a $96,800 real estate loan in 2005 and somehow managed to turn it into a $104,478.69 foreclosure five years later. Anyone can have bad luck, of course, and we would hesitate to draw conclusions from this one instance of failure to pay her debt—even if she occasionally holds herself out to be a talented attorney selling her expertise to businesses. But, Ellis is not a one-foreclosure type of gal. Just seven months later, Ellis’ name again appears on Georgia court records in another foreclosure action. This time, Ellis borrowed $345,000 to purchase a home for which she paid $427,260 in 2002. A nice lifestyle if you can afford it—especially if, in the case of Ellis, you seemingly have no intention to pay for it. By the time the lender chased her down, a principal balance of $308,220.64 remained unpaid.
If that wasn’t enough, Ellis somehow managed—despite structural racism—to secure yet another $175,000 in real estate loans for a limited liability company: Skyjay LLC. Ellis was the sole member of the company, which she organized in 2007, and which the State of Georgia dissolved five years later for Ellis’ failure file statutorily required documents. Guess what happened during those intervening years? Ellis defaulted on that third of three loans. Oh, and the same year the State of Georgia dissolved Ellis’ Skyjay LLC, the State of Illinois involuntarily dissolved Traci D. Ellis, LLC. (Traci D. Ellis, by the way, is an alias name Traci O’Neal Ellis continues to use today, and surely must come in handy for a person who leaves behind such an impressively wide swath of interstate financial destruction.)
Three large defaults in a few short years, defaults totaling well over half a million dollars, are not bad luck. They represent bad faith, the bad faith of an antisocial bad actor of breathtaking audacity, and her audacity does not end with private contracts. Ellis also seems to consider herself above paying her federal income taxes. During the same time she was defaulting and being foreclosed upon all over Georgia, Ellis was also not paying what she owed in income taxes. Apparently, private contracts and federal laws—like the American Flag—are little more than toilet paper to Traci O’Neal Ellis/Traci D. Ellis, Attorney at Law. Here is a copy of the federal tax lien attached to her foreclosures in Georgia court filings:
Quite understandably, Ellis quickly got out of Dodge, returning to her hometown of Elgin. A sketchy work history suggests that Ellis, despite her demonstrated charm, had a difficult time holding a job. For a short time, she held what seemed to be a dream job for a race hustler: Assistant Director of Affirmative Action Investigations for Northern Illinois University. We don’t know why she separated from the university, but perhaps she overachieved by indulging her habit of seeing racism everywhere. Regardless, she landed on her feet, once again—securing another sweet government job at IMSA. As we reported in Part III of this series, her total IMSA compensation package amounts to $133,987. And racist America didn’t come through only for Mrs. Ellis. Her husband Rickey, whose name you also see on the federal tax lien, above, hauls in another $101,674 from the City of Elgin for his work at the Bluff City Cemetery. According to the city’s job description, Rickey’s position doesn’t even require a college degree, which doesn’t offend us, but we do wonder what U-46 CEO Tony Sanders thinks about it. After all, if Sanders is outraged by corrections officers with only high school degrees making half that much money, he must be disgusted by Rickey’s compensation. Perhaps, in his discussions about structural racism with Rickey’s wife, the subject never comes up.
Now, some folks may argue that pulling down nearly a quarter of a million household dollars every year does not contradict, necessarily, Ellis’ self-portrayal as an oppressed victim who can still feel the heave, pitch, and roll of the slave ship. But, what if those folks found out that Ellis’ mother was not a domestic servant, but rather a school principal in U-46? What if they found out further that Ellis’ father was not a field hand, but also a school principal in U-46? What if they found our further yet, that while Ellis occupied her current seat on the school board, that same school board changed the name of Sheridan Elementary School to Ronald D. O’Neal Elementary School, in honor of her father?
Those folks would then know what we wrote at the start: Traci O’Neal Ellis is the Al Sharpton of U-46—a phony, shameless racial bomb-thrower, tax cheat, and self-promoting, self-serving grifter who is willing to hurt anyone and everyone to cash in.
Many of us who comprise of the more that 50 percent of U-46 students of Hispanic heritage can scarcely imagine the privilege Ellis enjoyed as the silver-spooned child of two school district administrators.
Many of us at whom Ellis sneers because we are white, whose parents or grandparents were spat upon immigrants from Italy, Ireland and elsewhere, and who are first generation high school or college graduates, fail to see our privilege relative to hers.
Many of us who are of Asian descent, representing roughly the same percentage of the U-46 student body as black students, and who are affirmatively discriminated against by colleges admissions offices in favor of black students, would love to be oppressed if being oppressed is living the life of Traci O’Neal Ellis.
As The Examiner has stated more than once, we do not like writing about identity politics because identity politics are destructive to the republic, the same republic for which the American Flag stands—the same flag for which Ellis holds only contempt. Yet, our hand has been forced by Ellis’ disgraceful behavior on and off of the U-46 school board. If any doubt remains, for any of our readers, after six weeks of fact-laden editorials, we urge those readers to pursue a sampling of Ellis’ greatest racial hits—in her own words—on the page below.
Otherwise, we will conclude by stating simply: Ellis is a blight upon the public square. Voters would do well to remember this blinding truth and be motivated to do what lies within their power to ensure that Ellis’ current term on the school board is her last term on the school board.
For six weeks now, we have offered our response to School District U-46 trustee Traci O’Neal Ellis’ Sept. 24 Facebook post equating the American Flag with toilet paper, and her subsequent full-throated public defense of that comparison.
The graphics to the left represent a small sampling of how Ellis represents herself and, inescapably, our school district to the world—including the 40,000-plus students who must live by the policy decisions rendered under her temperament and judgment.
We offer them without further comment, trusting that they speak for themselves.
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