On March 1, 2014, eight-year-old Relisha Rudd went missing from a homeless shelter in Southeast DC. Twelve years later, her disappearance remains unsolved. Every year, community members have gathered to distribute flyers, T-shirts and renew the search for answers. Also joining in that search: The Ma ryland-based Black and Missing Foundation, which for nearly 20 years has been working with newsrooms and law enforcement in the DC area and beyond to bring greater attention to missing persons cases involving people of color. “When Relisha Rudd went missing, we were the first call from DC police,” says foundation co-founder Derrica Wilson, a former police officer who lives in Maryland. “We were one of two organizations invited to go out and search.” The foundation was created by sisters-in-law Derrica Wilson and Natalie Wilson following the 2004 disappearance of Tamika Huston, a 24-year-old Black woman, in Derrica’s hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina. That case, Derrica says, initially struggled to receive media attention.  Around the same time, the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old white woman from Mountain Brook, Alabama dominated national headlines—reflecting what Derrica and Natalie describe as stark coverage disparities between missing persons cases involving white people and people of color. The Department of Justice reports that as many as 100,000 people are reported missing in the US at any given time, with as many 600,000 reported yearly. Roughly 40 percent of missing persons are people of color, and the overwhelming majority of those people are Black. In 2022, a Columbia Journalism Review analysis of 3,600 news stories about missing people over an 11-month span found that young white women residing in large cities were far more likely to receive coverage than anyone else. For example, the disappearance of a Black man in St. Louis could be expected to generate 12 stories, while the disappearance of a young white woman in the same location could generate 10 times that amount. The late journalist and PBS anchor Gwen Ifill once dubbed this phenomenon “missing white woman syndrome,” telling a panel discussion in 2004 that “if there’s a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that, every day.” “We hear from families all the time, ‘I need media coverage, we need visibility for our missing loved one,’ and that’s why we created the [foundation], so we can create stories that tell about the missing person in an authentic, and truthful and human way, to humanize them,” Natalie Wilson says. Drawing on her background in public relations, Natalie Wilson says that raising public awareness of missing people can be the first step to finding them—or finding out what happened to them. To that end, the foundation produces a podcast, Untold Stories: Black and Missing, aimed at keeping cases in the public eye. Last October, the foundation also released a short docuseries about Rudd’s case on her 20th birthday, with the hope that it might “lead to new information, and ultimately, resolution,” Natalie Wilson says.  According to Derrica Wilson, an uptick in media coverage contributed to law enforcement dedicating more resources to the cold case of Pamela Butler, a DC native who disappeared in 2009. In 2017, Butler’s former boyfriend pled guilty to second-degree murder; while investigating that case, police linked him to the murder of his former wife in 1989, which he later pled guilty to. In addition to bringing more attention to missing persons cases, the foundation seeks to change how those cases are covered. Recently, it released guides for media and for law enforcement, designed to help journalists and police departments report on cases more fairly.  Research has shown that Black missing children are disproportionately labeled as runaways by police departments. In general, AMBER emergency alerts are not issued for runaways, who also tend to receive less media coverage and few police resources devoted to their cases. In 2018, Jholie Moussa, a 16-year-old girl from Virginia, went missing. Police initially considered her a possible runaway and did not immediately put out a public notice about her disappearance. Two weeks later, she was found dead less than a mile from her Alexandria home. “The media tends to adultify our young girls, or say that they are runaways,” Natalie Wilson says. “Those stereotypes influence how cases are reported and how seriously they are taken.” The foundation’s work is also reflected in a television show, Found, which centers around a character named Gabi Mosely. The founder of a DC-based crisis management firm, Mosely’s team takes on missing persons cases for Black children and others who fall through media coverage cracks. Show creator Nkechi Okoro Carroll has said the series was initially inspired by viral social media posts highlighting how missing Black children rarely receive mainstream media attention. As the show developed, she drew direct inspiration from the foundation. “At the end of the day, what we do is make believe,” Carroll said in a previous interview with the foundation. “And yet here are these two women who voluntarily picked up this mantle and are doing God’s work.”The post “We Need Visibility”: This DC-Area Foundation Is Bringing More Attention to Missing People of Color first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less