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Louisville Voters Elect Pro-Reparations City Council Member, Jecorey Arthur

Louisville Voters Elect Pro-Reparations City Council Member, Jecorey Arthur

Louisville
Jecorey Arthur, a music professor, community and ADOS activist, won a seat in the Louisville Metro Council with a top priority to “fix Black Louisville.” A voter fills out her ballot during the Kentucky Primary at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, Ky., June 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

Jecorey Arthur, a music professor, community organizer and ADOS activist, has won a seat in the Louisville Metro Council with a top priority to “fix Black Louisville.”

While running for the council seat in December, Arthur said if he won, he’d be one of the first elected officials who identifies as ADOS — an American Descendant of Slavery. He promised to start a metro council committee for reparations “so that we can address the true way to put a dent in the Black-white lineage racial wealth gap.”

Louisville, Kentucky was home to Breonna Taylor, a front-line medical worker who was shot and killed during a botched police raid on March 13. The 26-year-old emergency medical technician wanted to be a nurse.

Arthur, 28, is part of the national ADOS movement, which focuses on policy and social change to address slavery, its lasting effects and reparations. ADOS held its inaugural conference in Louisville in October.

In a district with a Black majority, Arthur beat six other candidates in the Democratic primary for the seat representing downtown Louisville and nearby neighborhoods. He faces no opposition in the general election, according to WDRB.com.

Arthur participated in the protests that blanketed downtown Louisville after the death of George Floyd, murdered by police while in custody. He said he “noticed a change in how people approach a campaign message that has focused on Louisville’s deep history of segregation, racism, inequality and police brutality,” HuffPost reported.

“Early in his campaign, Arthur said, people ‘told me not to speak about race as much as I was because Louisville was not ready to have that conversation.’ But as we see in this moment, everyone is having the conversation,” Arthur said. “Everyone is willing to listen.”

Arthur earned the nickname “1200” after teaching himself to produce hip hop on a KORG D-1200 digital recording studio at age 12. Ten years later, he became a classically trained musician, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education at the University of Louisville, according to 1200LLC.

He has provided workshops and lectures educating people about the conditions of Black America, specifically ADOS. He is the professor of percussion studies at Louisville’s HBCU, Simmons College of Kentucky, and director of the college’s Ida B. Wells ADOS Center for Social Justice. He’s an artist roster member of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. In 2019 he became a BMe Genius Fellow, using his $10,000 reward to help open the Parkland Plaza, an outdoor gathering space in the neighborhood where he grew up.

Arthur won Hip-Hop Artist Of The Year at the 2015 Louisville Music Awards and was named an emerging leader in the arts at the Jennifer Lawrence Foundation’s 2016 Awards in the Arts, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. He was recognized as Elementary School Teacher Of The Year at Campbellsville University’s 2017 Excellence in Teaching Awards.

The youngest person ever to hold a seat on the Louisville Metro Council, Arthur has argued that the area needs a young representative who understands what residents want and need. Louisville needs a new approach to policing and must make economic investments in Black communities, where poverty rates have risen along with the city’s growth, he said. 

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.

Louisville’s Metro Council is considering an incremental police reform bill that has disappointed activists, HuffPost reported.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer recently fired the city’s police chief after discovering that police officers did not record body camera footage while shooting popular Black business owner and restaurateur, David McAtee, in cold blood.

“Police reform does not reform the issue of race, because as long as we are living in poverty, we will have crime. And as long as we have crime, we will have a heavy police presence,” Arthur said. “So we can fix policing all day long. We can fire these cops and do all sorts of work in the police department itself. But until we address poverty, we will never address racism. The police are just really a symptom of racism, and it’s going to take a full-fledged approach. That includes reparations. That includes investing in our communities and divesting from our police department.”