photo by: Elvyn Jones

Facilitator Seft Hunter, right, speaks to Diane Silver, left, and organizer Mickey Hanna after a Community Conversation on Race forum Saturday, Jan. 26, 2019, at the Lawrence Public Library.

About 100 residents who aspire to address racial inequality in Lawrence agreed at a meeting Saturday to focus their efforts on improving the local criminal justice system.

Saturday’s Community Conversation on Race at the Lawrence Public Library was the fourth such gathering in the past five months. Seft Hunter, who serves as executive director of the Kansas City, Mo.,-based advocacy organization Communities Creating Opportunity, led the gathering, which was sponsored by the Lawrence chapter of the NAACP, Kansas Appleseed, the United Way of Douglas County and the University of Kansas Office of Diversity & Equity.

Lawrence resident Mickey Hanna organized the gatherings, and she said she’d invited Hunter after hearing him talk in Topeka about the ability of residents to make positive changes in their communities.

At Saturday’s meeting, Hunter explained to those attending that they shouldn’t be satisfied with just identifying and talking about issues involving racial inequity. Rather, he urged them to take collective action to address problems.

“None of this is outside of our control,” he said. “We cannot accept that the way public systems are supposed to work is outside of our control. Think about what happens when that is the place in which we find ourselves. Public figures get to act with impunity and without accountability.”

Hunter asked the crowd to identify the top issue in the community that needed attention from activists. In a show-of-hands vote, criminal justice got 21 votes, the most of any issue. Attendees said they were worried about law enforcement officers’ interactions with minorities and the overrepresentation of people of color in the Douglas County Jail.

Other issues the attendees identified included affordable housing, education, food insecurity, health care and civic participation.

Hunter pointed out that all of those issues were interrelated. For instance, a father with a criminal record who was ineligible for food stamps would be more likely to have hungry children, he said, and hungry students worried about eating that night might not be able to concentrate on their studies.

Hunter urged those attending the meeting to reach out to other community groups in Lawrence involved in criminal justice reform and related issues and invite them to the next meeting, which has not yet been scheduled.

“We have the power as a community to transform these systems,” he said. “I believe that to my core. Be angry, be agitated, be whatever it takes to begin to orient yourself to say, ‘That is not good enough.'”