race

Tennessee’s Supreme Court says it wants to eliminate racial discrimination in the state’s judicial system. A new initiative follows the recent groundswell of protests against systemic racism in policing.

But accusations of racial bias are not new in Tennessee’s court system.

As far back as 1997, a report by the Supreme Court’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Fairness found multiple examples of discrimination, including harsher sentences for minority defendants.

When a historically Black church in Louisville’s Shelby Park neighborhood was damaged by gunfire last week, it had all the elements of what is usually called a hate crime.

The Little Flock Missionary Baptist Church was founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. It was damaged by gunfire in the early morning on June 3 amid historic protests against anti-Black racism. According to police, eyewitnesses saw four white men firing shots in the area. 

Hate crimes — or crimes motivated by prejudice or bias — have what the FBI calls a “devastating impact” on families and communities.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear says the state will take some concrete steps to remedy some of the racial inequities laid bare by both the coronavirus pandemic and the recent protests of police treatment of Black people in Louisville and across the country.

Beshear says the state will begin an effort to extend health insurance to every Black person in Kentucky.

“My commitment today is we are going to begin an effort to cover 100% of our individuals in our Black and African-American communities. Everybody,” Beshear said. “We’re going to be putting dollars behind it, we’re going to have a multi-faceted campaign to do it. But it’s time, especially during COVID-19 when we see what happens when you don’t have coverage; we’re going to make sure everyone does.”

David McAtee had a running joke with a group of young men that would frequent his small barbecue stand.

When the police would show up for a meal, the men would retreat inside the shop to avoid the officers. McAtee, though, would laugh and cut up with the officers, sneaking glances at the men taking cover inside.

Afterwards, McAtee would step into the shop, beaming with a big smile on his face, asking the men why they didn’t like good friends.

“I’d tell him, ‘What you mean, why I don’t like your friends?’” said one of the young men, who goes by Snow. “I don’t like the police.”

A new report says black Kentuckians are more than nine times as likely than whites to get arrested for marijuana possession.  That’s much higher than the national average, according a study by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The study from the ACLU found the commonwealth ranks second in the nation for the largest racial disparities in arrests for marijuana possession.  That’s based on arrest data from 2010 to 2018, which updates the ACLU's 2013 report The War on Marijuana in Black and White.  Nationally, blacks are more than three times as likely to go to jail than whites.

Keturah Herron, a policy strategist at the ACLU of Kentucky, says law enforcement disproportionately targets black communities while sending hundreds of thousands of people into the criminal justice system at a high cost.