Black Yarn organizers Regina Lewis and Kristen LaRue Bond (L-R) have been building a multi-faceted organization that shines a light on often unspoken historic racial injustices and a path toward resilience. Photo by Madylin Goins
Kristen LaRue Bond hadn’t planned to found a nonprofit — or co-produce a documentary — when she walked into a Bluegrass Realtors Board of Directors meeting in August 2023. But what she heard that day struck a deeply personal chord.
Led by community organizers Rona Roberts and Barbara Sutherland, the presentation “Lexington, Kentucky: Segregated by Design” explored the history of housing segregation in Lexington, through data, maps and personal stories. For Bond, a Lexington native and realtor, the presentation wasn’t just historical. It was family history.
“They talked about St. Martin’s Village, where my grandparents bought their first home,” she said, referring to the West End Lexington neighborhood that’s known as the first Lexington subdivision dedicated for Black families in the 1950s.
Many of the stats featured in the presentation were staggering.
“The number of loans [available for Black homeowners in that time] was so small compared to the number available for white homeowners, which was close to 14,000 or 15,000,” LaRue said. “For Black homeowners there were only around 200.”
That disparity wasn’t abstract. It was her grandparents’ reality and one she had grown up hearing about.
“They were telling the story of my family, their friends, the people I knew,” she said. “It hit home.”
That moment sparked a much larger vision. Bond encouraged the presenters to begin recording those stories of the generation who had carved out paths to homeownership despite systemic barriers, to accompany the data in their presentation. From that idea grew Black Yarn, a nonprofit dedicated to collaborative storytelling and research around systemic harm in Lexington — and eventually, a feature-length documentary: “Lexington: Resilience in the Redline,” which will debut this month.
A Story of Harm and Resilience
Set to premiere on Aug. 23 at the Lyric Theatre, “Resilience in the Redline” focuses on the history of residential segregation and its impact on Black land ownership and wealth in our community, as well as potential paths to a more equitable and just future. The film explores what the organization calls “The Three R’s”: racially-restrictive covenants, realtor steering, and redlining, which is a discriminatory housing practice that began in the 1930s that denied loans or insurance to people living in certain neighborhoods — usually those with large Black or immigrant populations.
The film is deeply rooted in Lexington’s history, but also in lived experience.
“It’s about the Black community in Lexington, specifically speaking to the hardships of homeownership trying to get homes and encountering policies that made it pretty difficult. But it’s also about the resilience that they show overcoming those barriers and obstacles,” said Regina Lewis, Black Yarn’s Data Research Scientist. “We see how these communities came together.”
The premiere event includes more than just a screening. Guests are invited to “Research on the Rocks,” an immersive pre-show experience with drinks, food, interactive art stations, and a walk-through of Lewis’s research on how federal housing policies have contributed to the racial wealth gap both nationally and in Kentucky. A panel discussion will precede the documentary debut.
With regards to Black Yarn's mission, Regina Lewis stated, "Our tagline is ‘Our Story Is Your Story, Too.’ We want to continue having those conversations with as many people as possible, because everyone is impacted by the past. We all have a role to play in what happens next.” Photo by Madylin Goins
Mapping the Restrictions
The documentary may be Black Yarn’s largest project to date, but it’s far from the only one. The team is currently working on a massive research initiative to examine Lexington’s property deeds for racially restrictive covenants — clauses that prohibited selling or renting homes to people of color.
While these covenants were certainly a national issue, Lewis’s research has found that they were particularly widespread here, she said. “After examining about 60 subdivisions — roughly 25% of the total — we found racially restrictive covenants in every one of them.”
Shockingly, many of those covenants still appear in modern deeds. Even though the Supreme Court voted to make them unenforceable in 1948, the language wasn’t stricken out of many deeds. “We’ve even found this language in deeds of homes built in the 1950s. People were still trying to include restrictive covenants even after they became unenforceable.”
The team’s goal is to create an interactive online map where residents can search for their home or neighborhood to see whether redlining, deed restrictions, or other forms of systemic discrimination were present.
Beyond Housing
Though housing is at the forefront of Black Yarn’s current work, the team sees it as just one thread in a larger tapestry.
“It’s not just about housing,” Bond said. “We are really looking at systemic harm. So, it is housing, but it’s also education. It’s also healthcare. It’s also transportation. It’s all the systems that interplay in all of our lives, [and] how they were designed and structured to often disenfranchise people of color.”
For Bond, that work is about more than policy. It’s about people.
“One piece of our mission and philosophy is humanizing Black people and people of color. A lot [of harm] happens because we ‘other’ each other , whether it’s Black people ‘othering’ each other, white people ‘othering’ Black people, people ‘othering’ immigrants, whatever the case is,” she said. “And that’s because we see each other through a lens that’s provided to us, instead of really getting to know one another. Collaboration is one of our pillars, and collaboration is just relationship building.”
Lewis echoed that sentiment: “Our tagline is ‘Our Story Is Your Story, Too.’ We want to continue having those conversations with as many people as possible, because everyone is impacted by the past. We all have a role to play in what happens next.”
Red Carpet Premiere: “Lexington – Resilience in the Redline”
The Lyric Theatre • Aug. 23, 5:30-10 p.m. • www.blackyarn.com
This immersive evening includes a food and drink reception, participatory community art installation, expert-led panel discussion and the premiere screening of the Black Yarn-produced documentary “Lexington – Resilience in the Redline.”
