“As a public spokesperson, I instinctively knew I could do something about this.”

When the virus first started to become public, I was in Yakima broadcasting state 1-A and 2-A basketball division championships with my radio station Rainier Avenue Radio. People were there from all over the state. Information began coming through the week of March 1. They started to put up sanitizing stations and places to wash your hands. People started acting a little more cautiously.

On March 6 or 7, 2020 we came down to Seattle to do the 3-A and 4-A state championship games. There was a basketball game between Garfield and Rainier Beach. A lot of the people were young and Black, and there was an overall sense that this wasn’t an issue. That’s one of the first things I noticed.

I didn’t know at the time that would be the last high school sport broadcast from Washington State to this day. Shortly after that – I think it was March 10 – the Governor started mandating that we stay at home. Everything began to change.

They were saying that Seattle and surrounding areas were the center of gravity of this pandemic (though we weren’t calling it a ‘pandemic’ at the time). We knew it was really Kirkland they were talking about. This made it a local, as well as a national challenge.

As a public spokesperson, I knew instinctively I could do something about this. Ultimately, my ability to do what I did was the recognition that our communities were going to need communication.

When the thing that you’re not expecting – the unknown – happens, that is the most critical time when a community needs to be aware of what’s taking place, who’s in trouble, where their resources are, and where their ability to get assistance is.

So, it wasn’t the pandemic that put me in action, but rather my 20-year career working with a major market radio station where my key function was to work with the community – and where my experience in media was about watching the systematic exclusion of communities.

And that’s one of the main reasons why you should broadcast in the interest of the community. When they can hear people who sound like them, look like them, and are imperfect like them, then they’ll listen and trust you. Why is that important? Because one day there is going to be an emergency – and that’s when you need a trusted communications network to share information.

When I left for Yakima and heard something was going on, I shut down the station. The station never re-opened. Because we are a digital-functioning station, as well as a physical manifestation of our community, I said immediately, “Everybody, we’re going to broadcast from home.”

I told them that we are now going to broadcast issues concerning our health as our number one priority. It can be their own show, it can be opinion-based – but in this instance, I am going to be far more critical about the information we share.

I immediately contacted the people I thought I needed to contact. I contacted King County Public Health to have them come on the radio station and give the facts as they knew them, so I could share them. I also contacted the Greater Seattle Business Association so I could share information with businesses about if there was an organized effort so people could keep their businesses alive.

I contacted service providers who work directly with agencies that offer the kind of wrap-around services people were going to need during this time – because nobody could go anywhere. I contacted our local schools too. On March 13, I had guests from each of these local organizations on the air, sharing what was going on at that time.

We may not have had all the bells and whistles and the baubles that some other media folks have – but we had trust within the community. I may not have had the finances, but I had a ton of community capital. Finding out what the community needs never goes out of style. It’s not the most topical thing that people are engaging in. But in a crisis? That’s when our community capital really comes into play.

We were providing schools in our community with training programs – with courses in journalism, app and web design, photography, film, and broadcast. We also had kids who had learned from us and were interning with us. That infrastructure was already in place and it became an advantage for us. It allowed us to do some of the things that hampered big media entities.

It quickly became apparent that we didn’t need to pack up a truck or bring equipment. All we needed was a cell phone – and we could get right in there with the information everyone needed.

COVID-19 has clearly made me aware of the holes in our society impacting Black people. I don’t know all the $25 words that people use – BIPOC, marginalized communities or people who are on the fringes of society. COVID-19 has exposed inequities that impact our communities, our people and us – individually and systemically. And it has exposed a number of different ways inequities happen.

Of course, no one was thinking they needed computers or else how were they going to learn. That’s kind of important too, but there was a big emphasis on feeding kids.

Our Asian students – grade school, middle and high school – were already being discriminated against, spat on and called names. The Black students were saying they couldn’t get COVID-19 – and yet, that wasn’t part of our mainstream or local media conversation.

In the second week we were broadcasting, after tracking down the information that I had gathered, I realized that our community was not only not getting information, we were being told that COVID-19 was a primarily a White thing and that it happened to older people.

It also became apparent that this was not just happening in South Seattle. Because if we’re talking about Black people, BIPOC or marginalized communities, and they’re all alone, isolated, and in the dark about what’s going on, they needed to know that COVID-19 was happening everywhere.

Rainier Avenue Radio began to reach out to other local community leaders within different cultures and ethnicities. And then we started to find out early on that we were not all in the same boat.

Then shortly after that, you have George Floyd added to this whole mix of things. The pandemic at least created awareness, because it wasn’t until George Floyd that people began to say in a mainstream way, “Wait a minute. This is not all the same for everybody.”

If science is learning and adjusting to a new virus, then so is everybody else who is dealing with this. Learning is amazing and wonderful. It’s energizing.

In watching community members come together and build, in seeing folks try to address their personal inhibitions so we can be a more powerful, unified community, in watching leadership rise out of the ashes like a phoenix and with an awareness of injustices that have been in our society for hundreds of years… a number of things presented themselves as opportunities to engage and to learn.

And yes, sometimes, it’s overwhelming. Sometimes, it’s not my job. But for me the overriding factor is, it is always my responsibility to be the son that my mother raised.

There’s a lot to learn right now. It’s not status quo. It’s not paint-by–numbers. It’s abstract – and I enjoy that. When I’m feeling tired, overwhelmed and lacking energy, I take a look at the wealth of opportunities out there that weren’t available before and I address them while watching other people address them. And all the while I feel like this is a very, very cool time to be alive.

– Told to South Seattle Emerald’s Marcus Harrison Green, December 2020