By Scott White
Woodford Sun Staff
Report for America corps member
The Woodford County Chapter of the NAACP held its Annual Gala on Saturday night, celebrating a consequential year with continued growth and impact, while challenging the community with this year’s theme: “United by strength, inspired by service ‘for such a time as this.’”
The event, held at KCTCS in Versailles, continued its string of sell-outs, with just over 150 in attendance.
The NAACP is the country’s oldest and largest civil rights advocacy group with a long history of success in fighting for a just and equal society. But, as chapter president, Rev. Larry Blackford pointed out in his welcoming remarks, “There is an incorrect perception that the NAACP is only a black organization focused on black issues. We are a diverse group of Woodford Countians working to educate and unify our community to be a just and fair community for all of us.”
Larry Smith, award-winning broadcast journalist and news anchor at WLEX-TV in Lexington since 2020, emceed the evening with a mixture of light-hearted banter and deep understanding of the mission of the NAACP and how it is not just a national organization, with much of its work taking place via local chapters. (Smith won an Emmy Award for his reporting on the opening of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, and a Peabody Award for his reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.)
Unlike many catered banquets, the dinner elicited more than a few smiles, with folks enjoying ribs or turkey with a range of sides. One attendee said the food was like a wonderful Sunday dinner, and it would be a challenge not to doze off during the keynote address.
He had nothing to worry about.
Before the keynote speaker, there was a big surprise for a very special Woodford Countian.
Blackford presented Sioux Finney with the chapter’s Community Service Award. Finney is a retired, longtime social studies and history teacher at Woodford County High School, who was recently inducted into the Woodford County Public Schools Hall of Fame.
However, this award was in recognition of her leadership and work in the establishment and growth of Huntertown Community Interpretive Park (HCIP). HCIP is located on the site of one of Woodford County’s historic and significant African-American “free communities” that was established soon after the Civil War by emancipated slaves and veterans of the U.S. Colored Troops who fought for their freedom in that war. Huntertown remained a vibrant community well into the 1970s.
Finney, remarking on how the idea of the park was planted by Woodford County Magistrate Mary Ann Gill several years ago, began the work of creating the park by organizing and bringing together former residents, lobbying local government, securing grants, fundraising and creating a supporting board, to where now HCIP is one of the premier jewels of the county’s park system.
“I am humbled and honored, and this means so much,” Finney said, who had no clue she was receiving the recognition. “Our community, in building this park, recognized that this is our story; we are all connected. This cannot be erased; (HCIP) represents the American story.”
Finney’s remarks, unknowingly, presaged the keynote speech of Dr. Kilen Gray, DMin. Gray, soon after starting his speech, noted that Finney’s work at HCIP was a perfect illustration of the kind of work he would exhort folks to engage in.
Gray is a pastor at Bates Memorial Baptist Church in Louisville and a co-founder and C.E.O. of Creative Spirits Behavioral Health Center, working in the batterer intervention program, and a former professor and dean at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
In his address, Gray built from the theme of “erasement” of people, groups and history in “such a time as this.”
Using the Book of Esther as his primary vehicle for the speech, Gray reminded listeners that a desire to erase a whole people from history, as seems to be happening now with the attempts to erase or minimize Black and Brown history, is nothing new, but was also Esther’s story three millennia ago – when the King sought to eradicate the Israeli people and its history in the Kingdom. Gray pointed out that to erase a specific group is really no more than trying to erase a part of yourself.
“I want you to just touch your neighbor and just say, ‘What’s up, cuz? What’s up, cuz? What’s up?’ Because you’re not lying. You just told the truth. We all… derived… from the same gene pool. . . . All of us started when you traced your lineage all the way back to the very beginning. Every one of us in here can trace our lineage to Mother Africa,” he said.
“We know that our differences are arbitrary. They are contrivances of economics. of economic rules that somebody created sometime. All crafted to separate God’s children.”
He continued making the point of unity and commonality.
“Just go back to Genesis 1. And be reminded that we all derive from the same divine heart. The same creator God. All of us. We started from the same thing,” he said. “(But) what happens to us? It causes us to create categories, divisions, sections. Places and people that can’t come into our neighborhoods. Wow. Jobs that are only crafted for certain groups of cousins. Yeah. And when we rise up in the morning, every one of us all say, or should, God, thank you for another day.”
Gray then made the clear point that we are living, “in a time such as this,” in an “Esther time,” where our collective history risks erasure.
“I used to serve as one of the commissioners of the Kentucky African American Heritage Commission. And our work was to try to preserve the very stories that now people in power are trying to dismiss,” he said. “You can’t erase history without erasing me.”
He then warned, “Then after my history is erased, then you come next. Because this room is a room full of immigrants. Just say your last name. And you will be reminded that none of us started here.”
Gray concluded that hope abounds, yet there is work for everyone to do, not just the Woodford Chapter of the NAACP.
“Try it again. Look at your neighbor, say, ‘What’s up, cuz?’ I think tonight we are united by strength, inspired by service for such a time as this. And that last phrase was not written by a marketing committee. It comes from the mouth of an old man named Mordecai speaking to a young woman named Esther. In a moment when everything that people had ever been was on the edge of being wiped off the record and wiped off the earth,” he said.
“And, like this, ‘just a time’ is just like that time – a people without a story is easier to destroy. And that’s why we work hard to preserve our stories, because our stories are our life.”
This story attempts to summarize the main points of a remarkable speech by Dr. Kilen Gray, DMin. As a community service, a recording of his full keynote address will be posted on the Sun’s Facebook page.