‘She loved everyone in this room.’ Remembering activist, advocate Anita Franklin.
For Anita Franklin’s children, the outpouring of love since her death on Monday has been little short of overwhelming.
“It’s been pretty incredible,” her daughter, Laneshia Conner, said shortly before the vigil on Thursday evening began.
“It’s been bittersweet,” said her son, Ricardo Franklin, who’s getting ready to graduate from UK. “It’s made me realize what I can do for people now.”
Franklin always cared for everyone, Conner said, for lost souls or stray animals that she would bring into their house. But it was the death of her elder son Antonio from a stray bullet that made her an activist and friend to so many people.
More than 200 of those friends showed up to the Fayette Circuit Court House Thursday to honor Franklin, from fellow gun control activists in Moms Demand Action to her sorority sisters, friends, judges, police officers and Mayor Linda Gorton.
“We lost a good one,” Gorton said. “She made a huge difference.”
That difference was on the national front, when she would lobby Congress for common sense gun control to the local, when she took fellow survivors under her wing.
Deana Howard lost her son in 2017, and said she would not have survived without Franklin.
“She took me everywhere,” Howard said. “She was changing laws and making people listen to her. She was my best friend.”
Kenya Ballard met Franklin after her sister in law was killed, and Franklin accompanied her to every court date that followed.
“She wasn’t everything to just me, she was something to everyone in this room,” Ballard said.
Conner, who is joining the University of Kentucky College of Social Work, said Franklin’s constant schedule was wearing on her. “All the marches, all the phone calls, it was taxing on her.”
Conner and Ricardo Franklin are extensions of their mother, and they will continue the peace walks she began, but her mother’s absence will also be a call to the rest of the community to continue her work.
Ricardo Franklin added “We challenge the next person to step up.”
Services for Franklin will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday at Consolidated Baptist Church. Visitation will begin at 10 a.m.
This story was originally published February 27, 2020 at 9:23 PM.
