Our Voices Project: A community forum on race, justice and the problems that keep plaguing us.
Back in 1995, after the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager by a white police officer sparked protests and civil unrest in Lexington, the Herald-Leader ran a series of first-person essays called “Voices: A Monthlong Look at Ourselves.”
Here’s how the project was described by Timothy M. Kelly, the editor at the time: “We’ll hear Voices that are black, white, Asian and Hispanic. Voices of females and males. Voices of all ages. Voices of people who’ve lived here their whole lives and of people who haven’t. We’ll hear familiar Voices and Voices we’ve never heard before. We’ll hear Voices of frustration and conciliation. Of hopelessness and hope. What we hope is that you’ll listen to the Voices.”
What followed were personal, first-person pieces from people throughout the community about tough, important issues facing Lexington: Racism, divisions within the community, justice, educational and economic challenges, the city’s lack of diversity, and much, much more. They were passionate, plaintive, raw.
Fast forward 25 years, and many of the issues that were described and debated in those essays persist. So many of the community concerns that were raised then came into stark focus again throughout the summer of 2020, as nightly protests here mirrored those around the country on policing, racism, justice, diversity, equity.
Today, we begin a new project, the Our Voices Project, with a strong group of community partners, to refocus attention on many of those issues, as described by members of our community who’ve experienced them first-hand. This new project is focused more specifically on highlighting diverse voices: People of color, immigrants and those most affected and marginalized by racism and injustice in our community.
With our community partners – CivicLex, Key Newsjournal/Key Conversations and RadioLex — a call went out for writers several weeks ago, and the responses to that call appear on these pages today, focused on our first topic, race, housing and gentrification. The project is funded through a grant from the Facebook Journalism Project and the Lenfest Institute.
Future Our Voices Project topics will focus on the intersection of race and health, economic opportunity, education, and policing/justice. Applications for the second round, focused on economic opportunity, will go out Monday. If you are interested in applying, you can download the application and make a submission at civiclex.org.
At the Herald-Leader, we hope this project brings new focus to these issues, but we also have another goal: to help cultivate and elevate a new generation of voices to appear more regularly on these Opinion pages. In reviewing our own work at the Herald-Leader, we know we need to not only do a better job of bringing diverse voices to the Opinion page, but also featuring them throughout the newspaper. We know these voices and perspectives will help us bring important stories to light and make sure the community stays focused on these critical issues into 2021 and beyond. We are committed to that work going forward, and hope this project will inspire others in the community to do the same. (You can contribute to this ongoing project and others like it through the Bluegrass Civic Journalism Fund, hosted by the Blue Grass Community Foundation).
We hope you will take time to read this work, and to contribute to ongoing productive, civil discourse on these issues, another goal of this project. Borrowing again from Tim Kelly’s introductory column from 1995: “Because if we can’t talk with one another, we can’t possibly find solutions to what ails us as a community.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 8:55 AM.
