Race For Justice with the Future Ancestors

After chatting with this teenagers, I was left with great hope, and the feeling that in this social media obsessed world that we live in today, with great leaders such as these, we will be alright. These young ladies will impress you with their quest to keep Breonna Taylors name alive, their fight for equality, & LGBTQ+ equal rights.

On June 18, 2022 they are putting on their very first race titled Race For Justice.  This race is designed by a woman led group, takes place in Louisville KY, and is to honor the memory of Breonna Taylor who was brutally murdered in her home by the police on March 13, 2020. Registration is now open, and we hope that you will support these youngsters who are doing great things in their community.

Meet the future ancestors:

Kim: Tell me a little bit about Future Ancestors. What exactly is this organization?

Nubia: We are a woman of color and students of color led social justice group from Wagner High School in Louisville, Kentucky and have been active since December 2020 We have been working to get justice for Breonna Taylor, the tragedy that happened to her in the city of Louisville, as well as other injustices that we see such as civil rights, LGBTQ plus matters, immigration, and prison reform.  These are all things as a group that we are passionate about.

We created this project to just encompass all of that and bring all of these causes together in one space. There are 10 of us, and we are mainly seniors but we have like a few juniors as well.

Jamia: We were like formed based out of the Justice Now Initiative that they're doing in JCPS right now. We were all recommended by teachers. Students joined this group who have been vocal and passionate about social justice issues.  It was very random the way that our group came together.  We didn't all really know each other that well going into it

Kim: Future ancestors, is it an organization that is based in your school system did you start it outside of school?

Nubia: We were born out of the justice now initiative that was brought to Jefferson County Public Schools, so we kind of started as an extracurricular club. We were mainly virtual and everything happened in December of 2020 with COVID. So everybody was at home and it wasn't an after-school thing.  After our classes we would just hop on a meeting for maybe two and a half hours, and just start planning and working things out of how we wanted this to look.

I will say it definitely was something that we had to do outside of school, but thankfully, as we were able to transition back into the building, and we were able to get formed into a class. So we had that dedicated work period between 9:30 and 10, Monday through Friday, to work on our project and just see each other really outside of a computer screen.

Kim: Do you have support from any teachers or faculty members in your school?

Jamia: Yes. A lot of the teachers are really supportive of our group.  Most of the teachers that we have at our school and the faculty are definitely really supportive of our project and they do like to go out of their way to vocalize that. Our school in general is supportive. Sometimes we need to, you know, drag them out a little bit to kind of help to spread the word about our project but we have been able to do a lot of things through this group and through this project that has really highlighted some positive aspects of JCPS as well.

Kim: You’ve mentioned JCPS, what does that stand for?