Solid Ground is thrilled to announce that Converge Media’s Omari Salisbury will present the keynote address at our 50th Anniversary Gala on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, 5:30pm at SUMMIT.
Omari interviewing Seattle Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth
In just eight years, Converge Media has built an award-winning legacy telling stories about, from, and to Seattle’s Black community and BIPOC communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. As one of its pioneering cofounders, Omari has amplified the work of Black thinkers and local journalists while earning a growing audience in Seattle and beyond – at a time when so-called “traditional” news outlets are cutting back or closing shop.
Born and raised in the Central District, Omari had a globetrotting media career before returning to Seattle to help found Converge Media. The team’s reputation went global in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder as it livestreamed from the frontlines of the CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest) demonstrations on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, recapped the news on its Morning Show, and served as a vector for community groups to speak truth to power.
Omari’s keynote will be a rare opportunity to hear him reflect on his love for the community, the wisdom he has gained building a Black-owned media company, and his vision for a future where being poor might describe your circumstances but does not define your future.
The following was edited from a conversation with Omari at Converge’s downtown studio.
Q: Converge Media’s mission is to uplift stories of Seattle’s Black community. Solid Ground’s mission is to end poverty and undo racism as a root cause of poverty. How do those missions interrelate?
OMARI: Well, I think that one direct thing is, you know, we put our investment in the uplift, we put our investment in Black joy. We put our investment in showing Black people oftentimes in positions and places that people never thought they would be or in. In that sense, representation matters. And why representation matters is, a lot of times, when people see something and they know that something is possible, it kind of activates something in them.
And you know, people who are struggling right now in positions of poverty and positions of lack of enough – or lack of abundance – it’s important for them to be reinforced and see there’s something else that’s out there.
And more often than not, Black people and poor people, marginalized people, man, they catch the brunt end of negative images and negative stories in the news. And so we think that it’s important, especially for people who are who are trying to make their way up and make their way out, that they see a positive representation of themselves.
Q: Solid Ground’s approach to providing human services connects what we learn from the people we serve to advocacy working to create a more equitable society. You grew up in an activist household. How does Converge Media view its role in fostering social change?
OMARI: What I see is us impacting change but in a different route, you know, in that we’re here to educate and inform our community, and in doing so, hopefully activate them to get involved. I mean, we challenge people, for instance, to vote. We don’t tell them who to vote for, but we tell them to vote. And then also, you know, you got to talk truth to power.
I mean, we saw that a lot through the [CHOP] protests. We saw government lying, and the rest of the media willing to just run with a press release and just put something out. And so, you know, I don’t think that our exact role is activist in the way that my mom is [Rev. Harriet Walden, founder of Mothers for Police Accountability]. I think that our role is being able to get information out to our community.
Q: You’ve traveled to 65 countries and worked around the world. How is poverty viewed in our community in the Pacific Northwest differently than how poverty is viewed or responded to in other countries?
OMARI: [Working in Africa], it was never that someone wasn’t part of the community. You know, here, you’re not seeing [people living in poverty] as community members. And I think that’s the biggest difference – that there’s a disconnect.
And it’s almost like, with homelessness, that here in Seattle we see that the majority of people who are experiencing homelessness or being unhoused, they’re not visible. And so people see the tents and they see these things and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, it’s homelessness. We have to deal with that.’
But that’s the tip of the iceberg. You know, at any given time, thousands of kids in Seattle Public Schools, they’re in transition.
And I think that it’s the same thing when we talk about poverty, is that people see the lowest levels of poverty, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s what we need to address.’
And they forget that, man, there’s a lot of people out there that are barely hanging on.
“We put our investment in the uplift, we put our investment in Black joy. We put our investment in showing Black people oftentimes in positions and places that people never thought they would be or in. In that sense, representation matters.”
~Omari Salisbury, Converge Media
I would say that what’s really interesting is that we like to say America has middle-class values, right? That’s true. Great middle-class values.
There’s a lot of people in this country, a generation ago they weren’t middle class, they were poor. And believe me, they didn’t get new values when their paycheck increased some.
These values of hard work, commitment, dedication, get up with the sun, work all day – these are poor people values. Poor people have even been stripped of their value set.
You know, you got to reach a certain pay scale in this country to be considered to have a value set. And so there’s a disconnect here that man, people aren’t realizing. Man, this is our community. These are our people.
It’s hard to be poor in this country. It’s a hustle in a sense. You’re never able to get enough to take the step forward. You’re never able to make the leap. It’s almost like it’s set up like that, and you almost get there, and then the goal post moves or something changes.
When we have our community members that are facing poverty, that’s a state or a condition they might be in right now, but that doesn’t disconnect them from our community.
We need to change the way that we look at people in our community who might not have as much as us. That’s not an indication of their character, that’s an indication of the current situation.
Q: You get a lot of requests to speak at events like Solid Ground’s Gala, and you rarely do them. Why is this event a good fit for Omari Salisbury and for Converge Media?
OMARI: We know that we carry the weight and the responsibility of our community. Big Mama and them, our aunties and uncles, have an expectation that if we’re going to bring the name, Converge, bring my personal name, that the organization’s values are aligned with the values of Big Mama – the same values of our neighborhood, the same values of our community.
“The organization has to believe it, but they have to have a history of walking the talk. They have a history of good governance. They got to be the kind of people that you can bring over to my Mama’s house.”
~Omari Salisbury
And not only just the values. The organization has to believe it, but they have to have a history of walking the talk. They have a history of good governance. They got to be the kind of people that you can bring over to my Mama’s house.
And so that’s important.
And you know, Solid Ground just kind of checked all those boxes of being like, man, this is a great organization that we can get behind, that we can support, that we can uplift. That we feel comfortable that people who are viewers and supporters of Converge would agree with us that ‘OK, this is a dope organization.’ Those are all things that we think about.
Q: Converge Media really hit a flashpoint during the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. You talked to us previously about not wanting to be defined by that moment, that Converge was much more than its coverage of the protests and the CHOP. It strikes me that a similar issue is faced by people who have come through homelessness or other traumas: They don’t want to be defined by their trauma. From your perspective as a lifelong storyteller, why do you think people fixate on the trauma and not the progress?
OMARI: I think that one thing people should keep in mind is that with Converge, on paper, we’re going into our eighth year in August, but we’re actually like nine years old. And going into the protests, man, we were like four years old, right?
I only say that because some people really think that like, yeah, I was chilling at home eating a hot dog playing Candy Crush on that iconic red iPhone, and then all hell broke out, and then here I am.
Omari interviewing Seattle Sonics basketball legend Nate McMillan
I mean it was 35 days that shook up the world for sure. And at some points, we were livestreaming to hundreds of thousands of people around the world watching at the same time. You know, it blew up.
I would tell you this: What people saw on display there, that’s 10,000 hours. That goes all the way back to me being a writer at Garfield High School and the Messenger, or me being on air on WRVS in college – or as a producer for the basketball network – and for all my time overseas doing TV and radio and signal distribution and streaming platforms and everything else.
And so sometimes people are like, oh man, you showed up, and, it was almost like, ‘I can’t believe it’s the Magic Negro.’ No, it is the investment, like people invested in me for decades. Learning technology, learning how to do this, learning how to report in hectic environments and natural disasters and everything else.
What the world saw there was the 10,000 hours on display. And that’s why every day, we’re able to deliver something consistent. So things like our morning update show never stopped during the protests.
“So many times with people who’ve been through it in life, they’ve been traumatized in life and man, they’ve been upside down in life. And we want to hold them to their most vulnerable moment?”
“We have to get past that, and we got to have a whole lot of space and grace and understanding. When someone has the courage, the commitment, and the dedication to get through – man, we got to honor that.”
“We’re not going to define you by the worst time of your life. We’re going to look forward to man, what is to come? Your best time is still to come.”
~Omari Salisbury
We were one of the sole trusted sources that The Associated Press used to call me and be like, ‘Hey man, we want to fact check this.’ Media organizations around the world, they weren’t calling Seattle local media, because there was no trust there. They were calling Converge to fact check. What we said was real, was reported out to the world.
And so people meet me and, you know, it’s in the best way. And they’re like, ‘Oh man, I saw you when you were out there getting gassed. I saw you choking out there. I saw the police hit you,’ or whatever.
And they mean the best. They just don’t know how to greet me, not in a way that’s not reliving trauma for me.
So anybody reading this, please don’t greet me with, ‘Hey man, I saw you get gassed by the police.’ At least start with, ‘How are you doing today?’
And so many times with people who’ve been through it in life, they’ve been traumatized in life and man, they’ve been upside down in life. And we want to hold them to their most vulnerable moment? We want to hold them to the moment that they were most in need. We want to hold them to the moment that they were most marginalized and make that be, you know, who they are.
We got to get past that. We have to get past that, and we got to have a whole lot of space and grace and understanding. When someone has the courage to get through to the other side, and they got the courage, the commitment, and the dedication to get through, man, we got to honor that.
That moment’s not going to define you. We’re not going to define you by the worst time of your life. We’re going to look forward to man, what is to come? Your best time is still to come.
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