And so I started to write columns and email them to people and began to think about starting up a newspaper with the money I had inherited from my mother, a modest sum, but enough to get things going. The newspaper couldn’t be a clone of The Madison Times. And so after a lot of deliberation, the name The Capital City Hues popped into my mind. And it would be about Madison’s communities of color, doing its best to make the African, African American, Latino, Asian American and American Indian communities feel comfortable within its pages.

It was all based on relationships that were made possible by friends, particularly Heidi Pascual who introduced me to the Asian American community beyond friends like Sharyl Kato whom I have known since 1979. It became a reality based on those relationship[s and so I sold 60 percent of the paper so that it could be an African American, Latino, Asian American and Euro-American owned, written and read newspaper.

The original owners were the late LaMarr Billups and his wife Sheryl. Greg and Gwen Jones, Al Cooper and Frances Huntley-Cooper, the late Juan José López, Heidi Pascual, Ty and Enid Glenn and myself. While LaMarr, Sheryl and Juan have left the partnership, their shoes have been filled by Dawn Crim, Ramona Natera, Oscar Mireles and Nancy Saiz.

Over the years, The Hues has continued to make friendships and connections in the Madison area’s communities of color. In my accounting business, I have worked with Hmong, Latinx and African American organizations. And through following the stories and listening intently to people all of these years, the purview of The Hues has expanded.

And The Hues has not “helicoptered in” to the different communities of colors. We have engaged in the communities through two-way streets where we have given as well as received. We have been engaged in the communities so that we can also understand the context of the stories that we write. And we have developed genuine friendships within the different communities of color.

It hasn’t been about The Capital City Hues in its drive to become a regional or national force. It’s been all about the communities of color within the Madison area and we have been content and honored to provide that coverage over the years. Our ambition has not been to someday write for The New York Times. Rather it has been to grow with the community and reflect it as best we can. Our riches have not come with money. Rather it has come through the relationships we have formed over the years.

Back in 1999, The Madison Times hoped to become a bilingual newspaper. And so it invested in Spanish tutoring for me, employing the Chilean muralist Leonel Iribarren who worked for MMSD at the time. My bilingual part of my brain had gone fallow many years before and I just wasn’t making progress, so we talked about art and his native Chile during the era of President Allende.

And Leo talked about art as revolution, that art expresses what society could be from the seeds that it was in the present. We had phenomenal discussions.

And so The Capital City Hues has been that art as revolution. It has reported on the goings on of events happening in Madison’s communities of color in one place. It has expressed “the truth” within its own limited capacity of Madison’s different communities of color. We haven’t been perfect or omniscient in that expression. But we have always given it our best, often leaving everything on the field of play feeling totally exhausted.

And while the people whom we have talked about didn’t necessarily know or interact with each other, they could learn about each other in the pages of The Hues. The Hues has been an expression of “The Truth” while the individual people didn’t know each other.