Saturday At Centre

Saturday morning found me and Dawn jumping into my ride at 6:45 AM EDT and rolling 85 miles toward the Bluegrass country in central Kentucky and the picturesque town of Danville.

Our destination was the campus of Centre College for the Statewide Fairness Summit. We were going to spend all day at Centre's Young Hall in a classroom with the state's GLBT leaders and some straight allies formulating our political strategy for the next few years.

It was appropriate that we were holding the meeting here. Danville was the cradle of Kentucky's emergence as a state. This used to be the entire western portion of Virginia back during the Revolutionary War period as Kentucky County. Ten constitutional conventions were held in Danville that led to Kentucky becoming a state in 1792.

If Centre College is vaguely ringing a bell in your minds, it's because the vice presidential debate was held here back in 2000. It's a liberal arts college of 1215 students which over the last 50 years has produced two thirds of the Rhodes Scholars from Kentucky. It has also produced 27 Fulbright Scholars over the last 10 years.

Our arrival was slightly humorous. There was an air guitar competition being held nearby and as we parked the car in the lot, the dueling banjos song from the movie Deliverance was blasting over the speakers.

I noted several cars with Texas license plates in the lot, and ironically one of them also had a bumper sticker for Carnegie Vanguard High School. I'm an alum of HISD's Vanguard gifted and talented program, which was housed at my alma mater Jesse Jones HS until it was controversially moved to its own campus in 2001.

We had a facilitated meeting in which we hashed out the initial seeds of the game plan we'll use over the next five years and beyond. We also took steps to exorcise the ghosts of the 2004 Kentucky marriage amendment defeat and have a little fun in the process.

I'm part of one of the working groups that was formed to do more detailed planning concerning one aspect of our plan. There are other leaders from various parts of the state who are part of working groups responsible for formulating other aspects of the plan.

While this was technically a business trip, it's always great to see some old friends in the civil rights community, meet new ones and meet our up and coming youth leaders. Once I get the okay from our communications group to reveal exactly what we were working on this weekend, you TransGriot readers will definitely be kept in the loop and advised what's up.

It was also a pleasure to meet psychology professor Dr. Mykol Thompson and some of our gracious student hosts at Centre. I'm looking forward to seeing them again in the near future.

It was also cool to get gas for $3.49 a gallon.