Issue date: 3/6/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Luke Sharrett Warren Central High School sophomore Quinton Beck raps during the final act of Kaleidoscope's Voices4Justice program. The event raised awareness of fair housing injustice throughout Bowling Green.

Media Credit: Luke Sharrett Kaleidoscope leader Bonny McDonald performs a poem advocating fair housing during the Voices4Justice program at Broadway United Methodist Church Tuesday night.

Media Credit: Luke Sharrett Bowling Green High School sophomore Chris Barnette plays the drums in the drum circle during the opening act of Kaleidoscope's Voices4Justice program Tuesday night.

For months, the pounding bass drum beats, the acrid spray paint, the soft steps and words permeated the neighborhood wedged between Veterans Memorial Parkway and Old Morgantown Road.

Tuesday night, they finally crossed the tracks.

The youth art program Kaleidoscope exhibited its multimedia performance called Voices4Justice last night at Broadway United Methodist Church before an audience of about 50.

Bowling Green youths exhibited visual art pieces, dances, songs and poems dealing with fair housing issues.

The location of the low-income community can make it difficult for it's stories to get out to the rest of Bowling Green, said Dana Brown, a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Without living there, many residents have no reason to go there to see what life is like.

Outside of many people's vision, poverty and the inequality of opportunity that it brings seem to breed across the tracks, according to a study conducted by Alan Anderson and his students released last spring.

Bowling Green's City Commission is elected at large. This community doesn't have its own representative on the city commission.

"If they don't vote, if they don't raise their voices to injustice, then the commission has no political motivation to make their lives better," Brown said.

Tracy Owens told his family's story about housing across the tracks in one of the video pieces.

Owens said that he spoke out in the video and came to the performance to see change.

"I want to make somebody nervous," he said. "I want to make people think about what the hell they are doing. When groups of people get together, people in the wrong get nervous, and they should."

Chris Barnette lives across the tracks in Bowling Green and performed music with other youths last night. Barnette said he got involved "because I've been going to the same church for my whole life, talking about God, who I haven't seen telling me not to hate my neighbor, who I see every day."

Previous Voices4Justice performances dealt with racial reconciliation and global poverty.

Ben Kickert, Kaleidoscope's community youth development coordinator, said when Kaleidoscope was thinking of issues to address for its third Voices4Justice, officials wanted to address issues within their community.

Brown surveyed people in the same neighborhood across the tracks where Kaleidoscope is based.

Through months of interviews and forums, Brown discovered the community was most concerned about issues with housing.

Kickert, another KFTC member, heard about what Brown was doing and with her information, began gathering some of his own to use in the performance.

One of the women in the video pieces complaining about her housing actually lives across the street from Kaleidoscope's office.

These stories formed the basis for last night's program at Broadway United Methodist Church.

Patricia Linder lives in Alvaton and attended last night.

"It's shocking to know the kind of discrimination that you don't know takes place unless you sit down and talk to somebody," she said.

She said she would use the information she learned last night to contact elected officials and push for the fair housing legislation discussed by Brown and Linda McCray, director of the Bowling Green Human Rights Commission.

Linder said she didn't understand why some of it hasn't passed.

"It just seems like a no-brainer to me," she said.

Brown said reactions like Linder's are why this event is so important.

"To me, if it's just a bunch of rich white people talking about this, then politics can become just about the few and the wealthy," she said.

Reach Greg Capillo at news@chherald.com.