Carol Lotz-Felix was a well-seasoned woman warrior when she volunteered to help a fledgling internet newspaper uncover systemic failures in a community she had only been part of for four years.
But it wasn’t just the investigating, reporting and smooth writing on clunky subjects that she contributed.
Carol did the hard stuff, too … like walking down the hill to the print newspaper vendor every morning to pick up and report back on the headlines. Those headlines were the only guide we had before we were able to finally get on the radar — and fax machines back then — of the public information offices in the territory.
After her arduous hike, Carol would then rewrite copy, with attribution of course, from the other papers, thus providing “content” for the first and only non-affiliated internet newspaper of general circulation in the Virgin Islands.
Carol was a change agent, a speaker of truth to power; always looking for ways to make life better for the majority while often making life difficult for those in charge.
What Carol brought to the Source was a very small thing in the large life dedicated to helping where help was needed that she lived.
It is my honor to share three of the stories in a four-part expose that Carol produced more than 20 years ago on the USVI’s offshore tourism offices. It is important to note in this age of “what’s in it for me-ism” that Carol — like so many of the early “Sourcers” — was never financially compensated for any of her many contributions to the publications.
OFFSHORE TOURISM OFFICES — PRODUCTIVE OR PORK?
TOURISM OFFICES DON’T ALL TELL IT LIKE IT IS
TOURISM PLANS: KEEP OFFICES, AVOID WEB LINKS
Among the ways that Carol, in her younger years, was trying to make life better for others was by participating in the Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina. She also wrote about that for the Source. The story focuses on her experience during a 29-day protest that took at place at City Hall in Wilmington, N.C.
Please let these all-too-brief highlights of Carol’s life be a call to those who remain to take up the battles left to fight (and win) against greed, corruption, racism, war, complacency and rampant dishonesty.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Philosopher George Santayana
