“I thought I had rejected God,” he adds, but in 1969, after studying a variety of religions, he “came to Islam,” attracted by its emphasis on meditation and its spiritual tradition.

Now an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky, Bagby conducted a ground-breaking study in 2000, The Mosque in America: A National Portrait, that established him as an expert who is quoted in The New York Times and cited in scholarly studies.

He sees Muslims in America merging two traditions: African-American and immigrant. They are becoming politically active and bringing social justice issues to the fore. Muslims need to respond to post-9/11 Islamophobia and to undercover police playing “dirty tricks” on their community, Bagby says. If Muslims are going to be accepted, “we’re going to have to fight for that,” he says.

Bagby expresses optimism. Muslims, like ostracized groups before them, work hard, pursue education, seek economic advancement and believe in the values associated with America. Those other targeted groups—such as Jews and Irish Catholics—have overcome the kind of prejudice in America that Islamophobia represents, he says.

As Dan Tham’s video excerpt indicates, Bagby also sees Islam evolving, committing to equity—the right to a basic standard of living and to health care—and to equality. Bagby says, “No one has a right to cut people out of decision-making.”

He says American Muslims are leading the way in Islam: Acting as agents of positive change and empowering women. He notes that for four or five years females have headed his university’s Muslim Student Association.

Marriage of Muslim women outside the religion, however, is still not allowed. And homosexuality is not accepted, though Bagby sees “a softening of the position toward interacting with the gay community.”

“What’s happening in Islam in the United States,” he says, “is the future of Islam in the world.”

Loren Ghiglione

Lexintong Herald-Leader columnist Merlene Davis

On a Friday afternoon, Merlene Davis is playfully cussing out John Carroll, her former editor. We’re in a cold first-floor conference room of the Lexington Herlad-Leader, and Carroll had recommended we talk to Davis during our stop in Lexington. Davis—a gregarious, warm woman who pretends to be ornery—is worried about the interview. She’s furiously wiping her forehead, afraid she’s going to be too shiny on camera.

“Lord have mercy!” she cries, several times.

Davis really had no need to worry; she’s a natural storyteller and one of our most powerful interviews. Davis has been a columnist at the Herald for almost 20 years, and during our conversation, she expressed her pessimism about ever truly ending prejudice.

Simply inquiring about her background invites her to tell a story. Davis, born and raised in Kentucky, flirted with education all her life. In college, she was studying to become an English teacher when she “somehow got wrapped up in the civil rights era.” “I decided ‘I don’t need college!’” Davis says. She started a family. Then at 28, she went back to school and, not satisfied with a specific program, bounced around different possibilities. Eventually she attended a summer program for minority journalists and found her career.

Although Davis has studied a variety of subjects in several different settings, she has never seen the fifth grade and doesn’t know what the curriculum is like.

She skipped fifth grade not because she could, but because she had to. Davis was one of a few students to integrate Mary Lee Cravens Elementary School in Owensboro, Ky. (Watch the video to hear Davis tell the story.)

“We all ended up in the sixth grade because as far as I could tell, Mrs. Olive Bopp was the only teacher in the school that would take us,” Davis said. “So I have no idea what the fifth grade’s like.”

Instead, she sat through two sometimes painful years of sixth grade. In the classroom, Davis developed a severe stiff neck. It never happened on the weekends. Her mother suggested that she was probably holding in a lot of tension.

Davis’ mother, who had wanted her to integrate the school system, then told her something that she has never forgotten.

“She said, ‘You know you’ll be okay as long as you remember you cannot be as good as your white classmates,'” Davis recalled. “‘You have to be better than.'”

“Better than” is a motto that Davis has adopted.

“I have not seen when I’ve been able to react to an issue or be involved with something on the same level as a white person,” she said.

She raised her three children to be “better than” as well. She said her daughter took her advice, became trilingual and spent time in Japan. She excelled. One of her sons didn’t. He chose drugs and is about to enter the prison system, Davis said.

Davis is not optimistic about the future of prejudice. “I don’t see it as improving,” she said. “I see it as changing. We just gotta step on somebody to make ourselves taller, and I don’t know why.”

Lexington marked our trip’s entry into the South, and Davis explained some of the differences between adjusting in the North and the South. For one, it’s less diverse and less accepting. Despite the South’s reputation for hospitality, it’s not the reality. “All I know is we’re not hospitable, we’re not welcoming,” Davis said. “We will do it publicly, but behind closed doors, what are we saying?”

It’s not strictly the dynamic between blacks and whites, either. Jews, Native Americans and Hispanics have all faced or continue to face prejudice. The black community, Davis said, is not accepting of gays and lesbians. “Why would you stomp on somebody else when you’ve been stomped on?” Davis asked. “I don’t understand.”

Davis is frustrated with all groups. She said, “I keep hearing little tidbits, little slights, that make me go, ‘I thought we crossed that barrier.’”

Alyssa

Video by Dan Q. Tham

Carroll, 69, spent much of his childhood in Winston-Salem, N.C., where his father edited the Journal and Sentinel. He recalls as a boy not knowing any African Americans, “except for people who were household servants.” He says, “The blacks were completely shut out of the world that I inhabited and it was a world that had money and opportunities and political power.”

But dramatic change has transformed Winston-Salem. While the city still has “a long way to go,” Carroll says, it has its share of black business and political leaders, doctors and lawyers.

In 1979, Carroll began a dozen-year stint as editor of the Lexington Herald, in a Kentucky city as much Southern as it is Appalachian. He soon learned about a skeleton in the paper’s closet from humiliated journalists who regretted the paper’s history: During the 1960s the publisher of the morning Herald and afternoon Leader had limited coverage of the African American community to little more than a “Colored Notes” column and reports of crimes by “Negroes.”

The papers “hadn‘t covered the civil rights demonstrations in other cities or had reduced them down to little briefs and put them so far back in the paper that nobody saw them,” Carroll says. The publisher “didn’t want to give local blacks ideas,” Carroll adds, “didn’t want them to be misbehaving and demonstrating and getting violent.”

Even worse, the Herald and Leader downplayed the early Main Street sit-ins in Lexington, 50 yards from the papers’ front door, Carroll says. The demonstrations, as early as July 1959, occurred more than a half-year before those in Greensboro, N.C., that inspired young people nationwide. The Lexington newspapers swept the local effort “under the rug and it didn’t become part of history,” Carroll says.

Later, during Carroll’s time as the Herald’s editor, a staff member proposed as a joke that the paper make up for its enormous lapse by running a brief correction on page 2, where the Herald usually acknowledged inconsequential errors of fact and spelling.

The correction would read: “It has come to our attention that the Herald and Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.”

In 2004, the Herald-Leader chose the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to publish a detailed account of Lexington’s overlooked civil rights history. The article recounted Audrey Grevious’s memory of taking part in one of the city’s first lunch counter sit-ins—“the cold, wet shock she felt as a waitress poured a glass of Coca-Cola all over her, while the whites standing behind her hissed, ‘Nigger!’”

As our interview at Carroll’s Lexington home nears its end, he recalls a 1980s Herald-Leader public opinion survey that reminds me of a continuing racial divide today. The whites polled said they loved Lexington. The blacks, filled with hurt, recalled personal slights—not being able to attend major Lexington events, including University of Kentucky basketball and football games.

Exactly a week after our conversation with Carroll, we are driving south through Natchez, Mississippi. I pick up that day’s Natchez Democrat, which suggests what happened in Lexington is not unique. A front-page Veteran’s Day article recounts the eight-year wait of Shane Peterson to have his master’s thesis research acknowledged by the addition of four bronze plaques on the Natchez federal courthouse.

The plaques update the local World War I memorial. That memorial, erected in 1924 during the Jim Crow era, omitted the names of 699 soldiers, 85 percent of them African-American.

The Democrat quoted the statement of General Services Administration Administrator Martha Johnson at the plaques’ unveiling. “No matter when you served or for how long and no matter your race, gender or creed, you country will never leave your side,” Johnson said. “Where once there was a wrong, there is a right.”

Loren Ghiglione