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6.19.2020
“RIP Breonna Taylor. Happy Juneteenth.” — musician and Metro Council District 4 candidate Jecorey Arthur on Twitter, upon learning that one of the officers involved in the Breonna Taylor shooting is being fired
FIVE.
1. Earlier today, LMPD released the termination letter that interim police chief Robert Schroeder served to Brett Hankison, one of three officers involved in the March 13 death of Breonna Taylor. The 26-year-old Black woman was shot eight times in her apartment while officers executed a no-knock warrant.
In the letter, Schroeder wrote:
“(Y)our actions displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life when you wantonly and blindly fired ten (10) rounds into the apartment.
“You further failed to be cognizant of the direction in which your firearm was discharged. Some of the rounds you fired actually travelled into the apartment next to Ms. Taylor’s endangering the three lives in that apartment.
“Based upon my review, these are extreme violations of our policies. I find your conduct a shock to the conscience.
“Your actions have brought discredit upon yourself and the Department.”
As of this writing, the River City Fraternal Order of Police, the union that represents LMPD, has not made a statement.
Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron hasn’t set a specific date for completing the investigation into Taylor’s death. Last week, the Metro Council passed Breonna’s Law, banning controversial no-knock warrants. People in the streets have demanded that all three officers be fired and prosecuted. “Patience,” Cameron said in a press conference yesterday. The city seems to have run out of that. Tonight will be the 23rd consecutive night of protests.
2. WFPL’s Ryan Van Velzer documented the protests in a story you should listen to titled “On One Night, One Woman Negotiated Peace on the Streets of Louisville.” Two of his Louisville Public Media colleagues, Amina Elahi and Eleanor Klibanoff, covered the escalating pressure Mayor Fischer has been under. Inside Metro Hall, during a meeting in a crowded conference room, a woman said to him: “If you can’t do your job then you need to resign.”
3. For Pride Month, LEO staff writer Danielle Grady wrote about couples five years after the Supreme Court’s marriage-equality ruling. The story ran before this week’s Supreme Court decision that protects LGBTQ workers from discrimination, but in the wake of that, this quote stands out even more: “The job is not done, and so we have to keep fighting. We’ll be fighting until we take our last breaths.”
And for this week’s Business First cover story, Sarah Shadburne wrote about local LGBTQ business owners such as RaeShanda Johnson, the founder of the online boutique All is Fair in Love and Fashion. She said she’s often asked to speak in rooms where she’s “the only Black person, the only gay Black person or the only gay Black woman, or the only Black veteran gay woman. What I would love to see the city do is carve out sections that are just not gay white men. There’s racism within the LGBT community. There’s a hierarchy within the LGBT community.”
4. I meant to share this last time, and the time before that, but each of those weeks became, as Run the Jewels has taught us in this newsletter, a holy calamafuck. (Yes, I’m now using it as a noun and as an exclamation. (And, yes, apparently now ALL of the weeks are holy calamafucks.)) For a week beginning June 1, Pulitzer Prize-winning C-J reporter Joe Sonka had a zipper-mouth emoji by his Twitter handle (@joesonka, btw) because he was not allowed to comment while on furlough. On June 7, his colleague, Mandy McLaren (@mandy_mclaren, btw), tweeted, “Headed into my 3rd furlough. And, yes, it sucks. I’d rather be doing my job. Or actually using my paid vacation days.” Gannett employees have been required to take a week of unpaid leave in April, May and June, and I can’t stop thinking about what will happen in July and beyond.
A recent Forbes story about Gannett included a quote by a media analyst who said “many advertisers are on life support (and) unable or unwilling to pay their bills.” This part of the quote haunts me: “This pain coincides, ironically enough, with perhaps the most intense period of readership — and appreciation — by local news audiences in recent memory. But the irony has faded quickly as publishers, their employees, and soon their readers confront the resulting ratcheting down of the local news business.”
In this newsletter every week, I mention the work of local journalists — work that costs money to produce. Subscribe to the C-J and Business First. Donate to Louisville Public Media, home of WFPL and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. Underwrite a reporter at LEO. Our city needs its journalism at full strength.
5. This year, the Triple Crown’s COVID-disrupted order goes Belmont Stakes (June 20) –> Kentucky Derby (Sept. 5) –> Preakness Stakes (Oct. 3), instead of the traditional Derby –> Preakness –> Belmont. Does ANYTHING still make sense? 2020 is a scratch.
Support for Louisville Magazine comes from the Eye Care Institute on Story Avenue. CEO Mark Prussian, who co-wrote the book One Eye or Two?: Insider Secrets to Help You Choose the Right LASIK Surgeon, wants you to know about LASIK, which — this is going to take some asterisks, but stay with me — is now cheaper than coffee*.
*If you buy a cup of coffee every day for a year**.
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***Per eye.
The offer is good through July 31.
OH!
Something from the LouMag archive that caught my attention.
In March, senior writer Anne Marshall wrote a story about civil-rights activist Mattie Jones, who attended meetings with Martin Luther King Jr. in the ’60s and is now in her late 80s.
From the piece, titled “Ballot Blocked”:
Mattie Jones didn’t expect things to go smoothly. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, raised in Louisville, and living south of Jackson, Mississippi, she knew the algorithm of the 1960s, the South, her blackness. Her confident stride into the polling site would not be welcome.
The year was 1961 or ’62, best Jones can remember. Her husband, Turner Harris Jones, dropped her off and parked their station wagon down the road, close enough that he never lost sight of the building. Just in case. Who knew what sort of anger that strong will of hers might crack open? Mattie, who was in her late 20s and wearing jeans and a checkered shirt, entered through the back door, the “colored” entrance.
A sheriff’s deputy stopped Jones.
Deputy: What do you want, girl?
Jones: I came to vote.
Deputy: What about your poll tax?
Jones: I paid it.
He handed her a literacy test. She answered all the questions. She’s sure she did well. He looked it over.
Deputy: You got to take this other test. Do you know the song, our song?
Jones: The national anthem? You want me to sing that?
Deputy: If you know it, girl.
Mattie Jones sang. She sang in that rich voice of hers that eases and presses through freedom songs to this day. She sang clearly, buttoning every patriotic word and note into place.
Deputy: That’s wrong. That’s not the right tune. You didn’t pass. You can’t vote.
Jones: I tell you what: I know that wasn’t the wrong tune, because I know I can sing.
She walked back to her husband waiting in the car, told him what happened. Then the two of them sat for a while, waiting out anyone itching to follow the Black couple home.
Also from the piece: “2020 marks the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a measure that aimed to abolish barriers designed to prevent Black people from voting. Barriers like requiring the recitation of the Constitution or demanding the singing of the national anthem, only to declare the attempts insufficient.”
On Tuesday, Kentucky will host its COVID-delayed primary elections, which include a U.S. Senate race you might have heard about that will determine who faces off against Mitch McConnell in the fall. A recent poll, with data collected June 13 to 15, has Charles Booker at 44 percent of the vote, with Amy McGrath at 36 percent.
Please vote.
TOO...
Promise I’ll never let this newsletter become my personal journal, but the story I’m about to tell gave me a laugh I hadn’t realized I’d been needing for weeks.
Last weekend I said to Miles, my three-year-old, “Hey, buddy, I’m really sorry, but I’m not gonna be able to go with you to see Grandma and Papa in North Carolina because I have a lot of work to do on the next magazine.” He looked me right in the eye, smiled, and said, “I don’t care!”
Josh Moss
editor, Louisville Magazine
jmoss@loumag.com
Support for Louisville Magazine comes from the winery J. García-Carrión, whose Spanish Cava (sparkling wine), named Jaume Serra Cristalino, is for “celebrating the little wins.” Like, say, when your family is gone for a week and you have the house to yourself for the first time in, I dunno, SEVEN YEARS, and you and can finally watch a movie that’s not the animated atrocity that is Trolls World Tour. (I know! They somehow got away with making a sequel to Trolls!) Gravity is the last non-kiddo movie my wife and I have seen in the theater since our daughter was born in 2013, so this week I’ve been trying to catch up on some of what I’ve missed. This week I’ve watched Moonlight, Hell or High Water, Lady Bird, Uncut Gems and The Florida Project. (I’d probably rank them in that order, though I’d recommend them all. Just not sure I could make it through another viewing of the devastating Florida Project.) Readers, please help: What movie should I watch tonight?
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