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1.22.2021, No. 38
“Never stand up when you can sit down; never sit down when you can lie down” — Louisville Mayor Charley Farnsley in the inaugural issue of Louisville Magazine, March 1950
FIVE.
1. Metro Council president David James, who retired as an LMPD detective in 2003, announced this week that he’s running for mayor in 2022. In our most recent print issue, published in December, James talked to Josh Wood for a piece titled “We Didn’t Join Just to Be in the Club,” about what it means to be a Black LMPD officer. James called the department’s transparency “horrendous. They even have a transparency page (on their website), but the reality is, that transparency page isn’t very transparent. And the (Fischer) Administration is probably the least transparent I’ve ever seen.” (Next week on the redesigned Louisville.com — which will be experiencing some technical difficulties over the weekend — we’ll share the story, and the profile I mentioned in the last newsletter about activist/2022 mayoral candidate Shameka Parrish-Wright.)
Wood writes about how James grew up in Chickasaw and Shively and “developed a ‘huge distaste’ for police. He associated them with his neighbor’s broken arm during unrest in the ’60s and for smacking him in the face with a slapjack when he was 14, walking home from a football game in his Butler High School marching band uniform. ‘I wanted to become a police officer to stop the police from hurting people who looked like me,’ James says.
“‘We have a police department that’s extremely young, and a lot of the officers have not come from an urban area, and they have not been talked to about the history of African Americans and the Louisville Metro Police Department. So many of them, they’re like, Why do people hate me? I just got hired on the police department. I haven’t done anything to anyone.’
“James says he’ll often see white officers in the West End driving with their windows up, while Black officers will keep them down so they can say hi or talk with people as they go by.
“‘That interaction is important. In African American culture, being close to people is important. So when officers drive around in their police cars with their window rolled up talking on their cellphone, what you’re really transmitting is: I’m not interested in you, I don’t care about you. Now, that may not be what the officer means to transmit, but that’s how it’s perceived,’ James says. ‘Twenty years from now, when I look at the police department, I want to see officers out here, no matter what color they are, with the window rolled down and talking to folks and being part of the community.’”
2. Read or listen to the piece “Louisville Police Routinely Busted Down Doors in Hunt for Drugs,” by Jacob Ryan of the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. Ryan writes, “The LMPD conducted 72 forced entries from September 2019 through March 2020, according to a review of police records by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. They kicked in doors, broke windows, and picked locks. They used battering rams and sledgehammers and, in one case, a concrete planter.” One expert called it “a cowboy, Rambo approach to prosecuting the war on drugs.”
I said this a lot in 2020 and will sound like a broken record this year too: Please support local journalism, including Louisville Public Media’s work.
3.
Last week I included a Where Am I?, which used to be a small bit that ran in the magazine. Just a little pic, and readers would guess where it was taken. More than a dozen of you recognized the turtle sign, including reader LB Gregory from Anchorage, Alaska: “Near soon-to-be Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s house.” The first to send me the correct answer was Cynthia Lee, who lives in the Belknap neighborhood near Douglass Loop. “I’m just a few blocks away and pass the sign frequently,” she says. “It was the talk of the neighborhood when first noticed.”
4. Yes, I watched the FOX sitcom Call Me Kat AGAIN (OMG, do I secretly like this show?!?!) because I’ve become obsessed with how it portrays Louisville. (It’s set but not filmed here.) From last night:
“Color of the year: classic blue.”
“First of all, that is University of Kentucky blue. That is the cruelest thing you can do to a Cards fan!”
Speaking of the C-A-R-D-S Cards (and how about that U of L women’s team and its No. 1 ranking for the first time ever?!): Billy Across the Street, my former neighbor who has appeared in the newsletter before, had this to say about a previous episode: “Did you notice the two fingers held up by the lead actor in the Kat show? When he shouts out ‘Go, Louisville!’ from behind the piano in the bar, his thumb to complete the Cards ‘L’ is nowhere to be seen!” Then he followed up, saying, “J, it’s worse than I thought! Just saw promo on WDRB. He holds up both hands with two fingers and no thumbs and says, ‘Go, Cards!’ Yikes!”
5. “They don’t have the ability to be healthy at home,” Danielle Grady writes in a LEO story, titled “Homeless in a pandemic: fractured services, a recent outbreak.” She reports about how, because of the pandemic, only 24 men, for an hour at a time, are permitted inside the St. John Center for Homeless Men. About one man she writes: “After his time is up, he will go outside to wait in line again. He repeats the process until he can go back to the Healing Place, where he has been living since October.”
It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share this Know Homelessness site again, designed by our collaborators at Kertis Creative.
OH!
A little something from the LouMag archive.
Over the summer, poet-activist Hannah Drake told me about “The (Un)Known Project,” an art installation that will include a bench along the Ohio River and footprints on the sidewalk. “For Black men, women and children — unknown names of the enslaved,” Drake said. “At the narrowest point of the river, which is in the West End, if the river was low you could walk across to Indiana. If they would catch Black people, they would kill them and put them in the river and cover their bodies with limestone as a deterrent. The bench will be made out of limestone to bring awareness to that fact.”
Drake recently announced the project’s sculptor: William M. Duffy. In a March 2013 magazine story, writer Jon Lee Cope wrote about Duffy: “Near the house where Duffy was born on 36th Street and Magnolia Avenue sat an empty lot, and as a child he remembers picking up a rock and having a life-changing realization. ‘Something went through me,’ he says, ‘and I felt that God was speaking and saying that someday I would be using stone to make my own shapes.’
“Working in a variety of stone, bronzes and wood, Duffy…allows the viewer to see not only the grace of everyday life but also the challenges rooted in the West End. ‘When I’m creating a piece, I don’t consciously focus on telling that (West End) story, but I believe it comes out in my work,’ he says. ‘Strong, broad-shouldered mothers holding and protecting their babies are a recurring theme because I have seen so many mothers who have to carry the load. This is not a condition unique to our community, but it is part of our story.’”
TOO…
Last Saturday, after the Bills knocked U of L Heisman winner/Baltimore Ravens QB Lamar Jackson out of a playoff game with a concussion, Buffalo’s fans, known as the Bills Mafia, launched a campaign that so far has raised roughly half a million dollars for Jackson’s preferred charity, the Louisville chapter of Blessings in a Backpack, which provides food to children who need it over the weekend.
👏…👏 …👏👏…👏👏👏…👏 👏👏👏👏👏👏
Josh Moss
editor, Louisville Magazine
jmoss@loumag.com
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