OPINION | An Emerald Built on Faith

by Cynthia Green

Founded in 2014, today marks the 10th anniversary of this publication. We asked Cynthia Green, one of its founders and past board members, to share what reaching that milestone means to her.

Faith will take you far. That phrase was on my mind as I woke up this morning and reflected on the 10th anniversary of the South Seattle Emerald.

Ten years ago, I sat at the dining room table of my old home and watched my exhausted 30-year-old son furiously type away on a new article. I edited the one he had just finished five minutes ago, and I would soon transcribe an interview for him so he could write another story early the next morning.

Those were the early days of the Emerald. It was just the two of us and his father Phillip back then. Marcus would juggle part-time jobs at the League of Women Voters and Big Brothers Big Sisters and then go out to report, write, and post articles on the Emerald. Phillip would financially support the paper, so Marcus could pay the occasional contributor he could find $50.

I would stay up most of the night transcribing, editing, and copy editing. I'd even sometimes accompany him on interviews and assignments. Now, I think back to how strange it must have seemed to some people: a novice reporter and his 65-year-old mother showing up to press conferences and protests to represent a paper few had ever heard of, while we handed out flimsy homemade business cards we printed at Kinko's.

But we didn't care.

We were beyond tired and frustrated with how mainstream media constantly portrayed our community. If you believe the depiction most often found in most media outlets, then our community produced nothing but drug addiction, domestic violence, and crime.

Rarely was that portrayal challenged, and even rarer were there actual voices present in media from our community to speak for themselves, to talk about the beauty, life, and positive aspects of our collective home of South Seattle.

Too often absent from newspaper columns and television screens were the authentic voices of those who have made our community the uniquely vibrant and sensational place it is: People of Color, seniors, youth, working-class residents, activists, educators, and our immigrant, Jewish, Islamic, and LGBTQIA+ community members.

Too often, their lives were reduced to soundbites and statistics. Too often, their concerns were dismissed and deprioritized because of where they lived.

Whether the Emerald lasted 10 hours, 10 days, or, now, 10 years, we knew it needed to exist to tell the stories no one else would tell, either because it wasn't feasible for them to do so or because they just didn't care.

Telling those stories and doing it in a way that tells the full story, where human beings are holistically portrayed — and not the fast story that decomposes soon after you finish reading it — remains the vision for the Emerald.

That vision has led us to share the stories of people like Bill Austin. No other media outlet wanted to chronicle his years-long fight to liberate his wrongly convicted son Nathan — who was struggling with drug addiction — from incarceration. Nathan needed treatment, not imprisonment. As Bill would tell me and Marcus, most media viewed his son as "just another Black drug addict," unworthy of any concern.

It also allowed us to tell the story of Michael Flowers, who was killed during a home invasion. Following his death, most media reports painted him, the victim of an act of murder, as a man deserving of his fate. They resurfaced negative aspects of his past, none of which had any bearing on his murder. His family was infuriated, as no media was willing to correct the record of his life — none but the Emerald.

We presented the story of Michael's life as a full human being, not a man defined by his worst mistake. To this day, his mother Mary reads our story about Michael whenever she finds herself missing him.

This vision of the Emerald that began as late nights at a dining room table has only endured because of the contributions of so many people from our community through the years. During our early years, people wrote for us, photographed for us, edited for us, reported for us, marketed for us, and advertised for us, while either not getting paid what they deserved or not getting paid at all.

They did this because our vision became theirs: a community claiming its power to tell its own story. A community unwilling to accept falsehoods about itself anymore. A community unafraid to challenge the powerful. A community that will no longer tolerate a muffling of its voice, its concerns, and its brilliance.

This is why I'm not surprised that in our 10 years of existence, so few of our local large foundations and philanthropic organizations (with the acceptation of the Inatai Foundation) have ever given any significant support to the Emerald, despite giving to larger outlets and their proclamations of "prioritizing organizations that serve marginalized communities."

It's because we speak too much truth. We challenge systems that produce disparities and inequities. And we don't pretend that wrong is right, no matter whom the wrong is being done by.

I recently saw a woman about my age while waiting for the bus. She started to talk about the Emerald and said she reads it because it's where she can find the truth about the community she's lived in for decades. She only had $5 to donate to us per month, but it's people like her who have allowed us to persist.

It is our community that we have had to depend on. It is our community that has not let us down in these 10 years, even at times we may have disappointed them.

Though we founded the Emerald, Marcus, Phillip, and I were only ever stewards of its vision. We were never owners of it. The Emerald does not belong to us. It belongs to you. That is why it endures.

It belongs to all those who once lived in South Seattle and have been dispersed throughout King County and Washington but still cling to the Emerald as a point of connection to the sweetest of words: home.

Sacrifice, labor, and, most of all, faith — in and from our community — is what built this home we call the Emerald. And this home will never be for sale, never displace you, and always keep the light on for you.

It has for 10 years. It will for so many more.

The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.

Cynthia A. Green is a lifelong South Seattleite. She currently works as a kinship care navigator for Catholic Community Services, helping King County kinship caregivers (including grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and others caring for family members' children when circumstances prevent their parents from caring for them) find resources and support. Cynthia is also a volunteer tutor with the Lake Washington Youth Tutoring Program. Extremely modest, she will never tell you that the Cynthia A. Green Family Center in Skyway is named after her.

📸 Featured Image: Cynthia Green managing the raffle table at the Emerald's first anniversary party in 2015. (Photo: Hannah Letinich)