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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45 She stops at the prayer group she often checks on near the Academy at Shawnee. A woman asks if the ofcer would like them to say a few words. ���I could use it,��� DD says. DD and three others form a circle and lock hands. ���Protect her from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, father God. And all the kids she comes across. She���s your warrior down here, father God.��� T he Jaguar glides through the California neighborhood, past Miller Tyme���s Barbershop, where the driver, the Rev. Kevin Cosby, goes each Wednesday, keeping his short black hair and mustache manicured. His wristwatch has Roman numerals at 12 and six. He wears a dark-blue Reebok jumpsuit, has a box of unworn sneakers on his backseat for the pick-up game he has scheduled later this afternoon at one of St. Stephen Baptist Church���s indoor basketball courts. His license plate, R828, stands for Romans 8:28, a verse about God causing all things to work together. Cosby is almost 55 and has been the pastor of St. Stephen since he was 20. Since Jimmy Carter was president, he likes to say. ���West Louisville is in the worst shape I���ve seen during my tenure,��� he says. Cosby���s grandfather was one of the frst black men to graduate from the Southern Baptist Teological Seminary and also the frst pastor of St. Stephen, founded in 1926. Fourteen people attended that frst service on 15th Street. Now, membership is at 14,000, and the St. Stephen facilities, on a few city blocks��� worth of acreage, dwarf the original you���ve been conditioned to think you���re second class. Yes, there are poor whites! But no white was disadvantaged because of their color. ���During segregation, even if you were poor you could see a black professional and realize what was possible. Now, all the professionals have left,��� Cosby continues. ���I do not believe in legalized segregation. It���s ruthless. What makes this worse, though, to some degree, is we still have segregation. At one time, it was only by race. So you still lived near doctors and lawyers. Now it���s race and economics. What does it mean when you���re segregated racially but not economically?��� One of Cosby���s earliest childhood memories is of his mother telling him to apologize for tripping over the feet of a man named Martin Luther King Jr., in town visiting his younger brother A.D. Williams King, who lived on Southwestern Parkway not far from the Cosbys. Cosby quotes MLK often and is doing so, with spit fying ��� ���social isolation leads to economic depreciation leads to emotional frustration!��� ��� as he pulls up to the corner of 28th and Greenwood streets, the site of the 1968 race riots. It���s not far from the frst house he lived in as a boy. Cosby���s father, Laken, was in real estate and was the frst black chairman of the Jeferson County School Board. Cosby points at the buildings with plywood windows. ���I remember eating pancakes there. Tey did tap dancing there. Tis was Zigart���s drugstore. You got your fowers there. Tis was the Chickasaw Barbershop. Tey joked they���d put a saw in your head,��� he says. ���Tis was all booming, man. And now it���s boarded-up. My childhood is boarded-up. ���I remember eating pancakes there. They did tap dancing there. This was Zigart���s drugstore. You got your ��owers there. This was all booming, man. And now it���s boarded-up. My childhood is boarded-up.��� ��� the Rev. Kevin Cosby church bell. ���God gave us the land of the Hittites, the Jebusites and the Bud Lights,��� Cosby says. ���We purchased every last liquor store and tore them down.��� Now, there are racquetball courts, a ftness center, a restaurant open three days a week. ���West Louisville does have a sitdown restaurant,��� Cosby says. In the car, Cosby talks history. Slavery in 1619. Te 13th Amendment that abolished it in 1865. Legalized segregation. ���A total of 350 years!��� Cosby shouts, sermon spittle spraying my notebook. ���We���ve only had 40 years to correct what took place! Te hurricane is over, but the legacy is what we have to address. It���s hard to function as a frst-class person when 12 6 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 ���Having to leave your community for quality of life is almost like apartheid,��� Cosby says. ���You feel worthless. You feel so worthless.��� He squeezes his eyes shut, cheeks pufed as he tries to suppress the tears. He weeps, the sobs forcing themselves through his pursed lips, sounding if he���s warming up to play a trumpet. I know pastors can be an emotional lot, but these tears are genuine. I ask Cosby if people outside west Louisville care about west Louisville. ���Generally speaking? No. I do not think they care. At all.��� He pauses. ���Let me rephrase: Te ones who do care don���t know what to do.��� Cosby wants suburban churches to help him, to go door-to-door with him, to let people know about open enrollment at Simmons College, where he is president. He says he has reached out but that there has been little interest. I ask him why he needs help from churches in the suburbs. ���So folks can see people who know what a vacation is,��� he says. ���So they can see that something else is possible. ���If Louisville is going to go up, west Louisville cannot be left behind,��� he says. ���If coach goes down, frst class is going down, too.��� Our fnal stop is his current home, on more than fve acres right on the Ohio. His back yard is Shawnee Park. Full-court basketball out front. A loop in the driveway means Cosby doesn���t have to put his car in reverse. Gerald Neal, the state senator, is his next-door neighbor. ���How much would this be worth in the East End?��� Cosby asks. ���Same river! Same ground! I let segregation work for me.��� He has lived here with Barnetta, the mother of their two adult children, for 15 years. ���You can���t get any farther west ��� physically but also psychologically and emotionally,��� he says. ���I want people to know that they don���t have to leave, that you can have something good in the ���hood.��� ���W here do you start, man? Where?��� Tat���s what Eric Hansberry said at the barbershop as I started working on this piece. And when I asked Attica Scott, the councilwoman, to list the problems facing west Louisville, she said, ���It���s all a big knot, and I think people can feel overwhelmed. We need small victories before we can get to the big stuf.��� Tis reminded me of a story. A woman named Jessica Kelly and her two children live on Date Street, not far from Victory Park. She can���t remember what caused the fre next door ��� a faulty electrical system or a space heater ��� or the exact demolition date, but for more than four years, all that remained of the house was an exposed basement. Weeds and trash flled the cavity. Rainwater turned it into a sickening pool. It became a hiding spot for men running from the police. Kelly maintained the basement the best she could. Eventually, she got in touch with a group that does work in the neighborhood. At one meeting, kids suggested what the basement should become: garden, the White House, football feld, park, pool, basketball court, community center. By the end of 2011, their voices had the attention of the city, which flled the hole and planted grass. Now it���s an empty lot. ���It���s not a movie theater or a palace,��� Kelly says. ���But it���s no longer a basement. And that���s a start.���