Community advocate, Mom, friend, and concerned citizen Kris Kiernan sat down with me for a delightful and engaging conversation about her involvement with a number of equality and diversity causes as well as the removal of confederate monuments and racist symbols.
Here is just some of our conversation:
Tracy Rigdon: “Amongst all the things that you’ve got going on in community advocacy and activism as well, one of the topics I wanted to touch on first in this conversation, as we discussed right before, was your involvement in the Take Them Down Jacks movement, Northside Coalition and so forth. And those good people. regularly going down to City Hall on Fridays and waving signs and, you know, make making your voice heard, uh, the removal of Confederate monuments, not only in Jacksonville, but, you know, a lot of other cities are battling that, that nonsense too. Tell us, tell us a little bit about, uh, take them down, Jax, the movement, your reasons for being involved and why it’s so important.”
Kris Kiernan: “Right, you know, this is such a multifaceted issue.” “It’s something that, we started talking about it in 2016. There was myself and six or seven different other community members sitting down at Memorial Park, actually, in Riverside. We sat together and we just were discussing how ridiculous it was that we still have Confederate monuments littered across the city on publicly maintained spaces.
“That’s the part that I think irritates the majority of us is that we have no right to say that we don’t want to maintain these spaces. But you’re also telling us that we have to have them. I would say that the reason that we have been going and doing a Friday morning picket line at City Hall is not just to put power on… to put our power out there and to show our power in numbers. But it’s also to show that activism can be something that you can just fit into your schedule. I know that that may sound silly, but at the same time, we need to understand that activism is not a hobby, it is our life.”
“…If we don’t collectively come together and stand up against it, we’re never going to have any type of movement in this city, especially because this city, Jacksonville, doesn’t like to vote. It’s something that like is like a faux pas. Like they’re like, oh, we’re upset that nothing happens, but we refuse to vote.”
“…And I think that’s the best thing that we could actually do in Jacksonville is to remove these Confederate monuments, remove these racist symbols. move forward as a community and gain the trust of the public officials again. We don’t trust them.”
“…So that’s why every Friday morning, I get my ass up and I go. I take my children. I make it a point to bring the kids out there. I wanna make people uncomfortable. I wanna make these people that asked for our votes uncomfortable.”
“…They don’t want changes. And I’ll tell you right now, this is just common knowledge. If we don’t have Donna Dengit as a mayor, we’re gonna have some trouble. we are going to have Jim Crow 3.0, 4.0. I mean, like we already have an issue with a history of, you know, walking while black, you know? That was not too long ago. I don’t forget about that. I remember going out there and holding press conference after press conference, advocating for these young black men that were being stopped and asked for their ID for no reason.”
** Coming up: The Unspoken Treasurer Society meeting at Rain Dogs – May 10th at 7:00 PM
“What we have to do… is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.”
Hillary Clinton
** Music Tracks for this Podcast by Alex Grohl on Pixabay
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