I am often asked why I do the work that I do. I received this from someone named Marvin and I wanted to share it with all of you today. I have not edited his words and I am incredibly grateful to him for sharing them with me…

Hi I am Marvin. I was a ward of the state since i was 10. I was in all sorts of group home settings. That was until I got in trouble and broke the law. Yeah what a scary place to be in. IYC st Charles was my first stop. Ever been to hell? You want to know what its like? You would if you spent a few days in IYC st charles. I was sentenced to do 6 months. I was there for over a year and half. Being a ward of the state (dcfs). No one wanted to accept a convict to be released to them. I did more time because i had no where else to go. I love life now. I can honestly say i wanted to die. I tried to do the deed on a few occasions. with no friends and many enemies including the staff and guards. I had no hope. I didnt think i would ever get out of there alive. they put me in a situation with 50 other ever aggressive teens in a (cottage) or wing. These people where usually able to fly of the hinges over anything and everything. especially when they didnt get there way. It wasnt safe. It was entertainment for the guards to see someone getting beat up. it was entertainment for the guards to beat up on people. (mind you the guards knew who to beat up) others might fight back. I could go on and on and on. We were even poisoned. I remember that within a few days of each time i was recommitted. My soul would sink farther into my head, as my mind became so very foggy and my body began to hurt.

Last Tuesday, all of the young prisoners at IYC-Murphysboro were finally moved out of the facility. Murphysboro will be closed as of August 30 as promised by Governor Pat Quinn. IYC-Joliet is scheduled to be closed as of October 31st but this will continue to be a fight because of the craven legislature in Illinois that uses prisons as job programs. The young prisoners in these facilities are simply being moved into existing correctional institutions. The next step is to make sure that we stop incarcerating youth all together. But that is a long-term project. In the meantime, I take some solace in the fact that we may have two youth prisons closed by the end of this year. I will continue to fight for closing the rest. I do this work in the name of Marvin and the thousands of other young people who are caged across this country. Join us as we work to close Illinois youth prisons.

I wanted to share a new pamphlet from the Historical Moments of Policing, Violence, and Resistance series that I launched this past May.

My friends Emily and Mauricio Pineda have created a pamphlet about the 1968 Democratic Convention as an illustration of systemic police violence in the U.S. You can download the publication at this site as a PDF document. My deepest appreciation to Emily and Mauricio for participating in this project. Please spread the word about the availability of this and all of the other pamphlets. They really are excellent primers for people who want to better understand the historical roots of police violence in the U.S.

Below are some sample pages from the pamphlet.

In 1961, Time Magazine published an article about what they saw as a terrifying trend: the increasing number of black prisoners who were converting to Islam, joining the Nation of Islam, and then turning to violence inside correctional facilities:

Armed guards now patrol the catwalks over the mess hall in California’s maximum-security Folsom prison—the result of two riots early this month. At San Quentin, wardens and guards have new instructions not to attempt to break up any gathering of Negro convicts without assistance. At the Reformatory for Males in Breathedsville, Md., last week, three inmates had a total of 14 months added to their sentences for savagely beating a guard. In a Washington, D.C.. prison, 38 prisoners in punitive segregation became so noisy, rattling cell doors, throwing food into the corridors, and talking and praying through the night, that tear gas was threatened to restore quiet and order.

The incidents were related. In every case the troublemakers were Black Muslims, members of the brotherhood of Negro supremacists that is dedicated to the extinction of the white race (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959). While their leaders, protected by shaved-head honor guards, are preaching cold hatred to growing crowds in principal U.S. cities, lesser Muslim agents are at work in many a U.S. prison, spreading fanatical doctrines and recruiting new brethren among Negro prisoners. A California law officer estimates that Muslims do 50% of their recruiting in prisons. The Muslim movement behind prison walls, says James W. Curran, Maryland’s superintendent of prisons, has become “steadily stronger and more troublesome. They are vicious fighters, quick to take offense and, in their self-sacrificial way, they don’t care what happens to them.” Source: Recruits Behind Bars. Time, 0040781X, 3/31/1961, Vol. 77, Issue 14

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What have I been listening to NON-STOP for two months now? Fiona Apple’s new CD, Schoolboy Q’s Habits and Contradictions, and the new CD by Killer Mike. All of these are terrific. Today I thought that I would share just one of my favorite tracks off Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music CD: it’s called “Reagan” and it’s excellent. Incidentally, I never recommend anything by Toure (it’s a long story) but he has written an interesting essay about the intersections between hip hop and the War on Drugs. It is worth reading particularly for his consideration of Reagan’s role in intensifying the War on Drugs and for his discussion of hip hop’s complicity in disseminating the “criminalblackman” myth.

Earlier this week, I read an article in the New York Times about the pilgrimage of over 400 Japanese Americans to Tule Lake, the site of a camp where over 18,000 of their ancestors were incarcerated during World War II.

There were 10 internment camps in the U.S. during the war and over 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated in them. The history of the Tule Lake camp is particularly interesting because of who was interned there:

In early 1943, about a year after Japanese-Americans were rounded up into the camps, the American authorities, seeking Japanese language speakers in the military, distributed a loyalty questionnaire to all adults. Question No. 27 asked draft-age men whether they were willing to serve in the armed forces. No. 28 asked whether detainees would “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States” and “forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government.”

Anything except a simple “yes” to the two questions meant relocation to Tule Lake, which became the most heavily guarded of the camps. Army tanks were stationed here, reinforcing the security provided by 28 guard towers and a seven-foot-high barbed wire fence.

Osamu Hasegawa, 90, recalled that his parents answered “no” after a heated family debate. Because his parents were born in Japan — Japanese immigrants were not allowed to become American citizens until 1952 because of discriminatory immigration laws — they feared that forswearing allegiance to the country of their birth would render them stateless while Mr. Hasegawa and his American-born siblings remained in the United States.

After his parents answered “no,” Mr. Hasegawa became one of the nearly 6,000 Japanese-Americans at Tule Lake to renounce their American citizenship.

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Remember what Huey P. Newton had to say about coalition building between black people and the LGBTQ (called the gay community at the time) community? No, well then you should read this.

From my collection, this is the cover page of an SDS newsletter that is full of great articles.

I really like how the Adidas Shackle shoe incident is addressed in this comic.

I’m currently reading a terrific book titled “The Eyes of Willie McGee” by Alex Heard. I am only halfway through the book at this point but it is incredibly fascinating. I will write about the case after I finish the book. In the meantime, you can listen to information about the case at radio diaries.

Lynchsong was a poem written in 1951 by a then 21 year old Lorraine Hansberry and she references the McGee case in it.

I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes

The
faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night

It isn’t possible in my estimation to understand our current epidemic of hyper-incarceration without delving into the way that race is always the organizing principle in the treatment of black people in the United States. In the coming weeks, I will specifically highlight incidents from the American past that still resonate with our current criminal legal system (particularly for black people). Some of these incidents might be familiar to you and others will be new. If you have ideas of other incidents that I should feature, please feel free to share those with me. To begin the series, I will focus on a 1946 incident of police violence involving Isaac Woodard which became nationally known and helped to advance the civil rights movement.

In February 1946, a 27 year old black man named Isaac Woodard was on his way home on a Greyhound bus after having recently served in World War II. He was leaving Camp Gordon in Augusta Georgia and heading to North Carolina to visit family.

During a stop, Sergeant Woodard asked the bus driver if he had time to run out and use a bathroom. The driver told him no and then cursed him out. Woodard cursed him back and the driver told him that he could go ahead to use the bathroom. The driver was white and this becomes an important fact in the story.

At the next stop which was Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called the police and claimed that Woodard was drunk and quarrelsome. The young veteran was taken off the bus by Police Chief Lynwood Shull, beaten with a club and then jailed. When he arrived at the jail, Isaac Woodard was punched in the eyes with the end of a billy club. When he awoke the next morning, he was blind.

The case of Isaac Woodard gained national attention and became a rallying cry for many in the black community who were incensed at the treatment that returning veterans were experiencing at the hands of white people. When Orson Welles began to talk about the incident on his ABC-Radio show Orson Welles Commentaries, Isaac Woodard gained even more notoriety. In August 1946, 20,000 people came to a rally in Harlem to raise money for his care and to contribute to his living expenses.

Unfortunately in November 1946, Police Chief Shull was acquitted of federal civil rights charges and in 1947, Woodard sued Greyhound but lost there too.

In 1946, Woodie Guthrie wrote a song titled “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard” that tells the story of this incident. Here are the final three verses of the song:

They beat me about the head and face and left a bloody trail
All down along the sidewalk to the iron door of the jail;
He knocked me down upon the ground and he poked me in the eyes;
When I woke up next morning, I found my eyes were blind.

They drug me to the courtroom, and I could not see the judge;
He fined me fifty dollars for raising all the fuss;
The doctor finally got there but it took him two whole days;
He handed me some drops and salve and told me to treat myself.

It’s now you’ve heard my story, there’s one thing I can’t see,
How you could treat a human like they have treated me;
I thought I fought on the islands to get rid of their kind;
But I can see the fight lots plainer now that I am blind.

For those who are interested in learning more about this story, I highly recommend listening to the Orson Welles Commentaries about the case which can be found here. You should click on the “Affidavit of Isaac Woodard” and “the Place was Batesburg” links to hear the commentaries.

Update: The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has just released a new report about the extra-judicial killing of black people in the United States. This is timely and incredibly important. William Faulkner is credited with having said that in the South, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” I would extend this to the entire country.

A couple of readers have emailed me in the past 5 weeks or so to ask about how preparations and planning for the Black/Inside exhibition are going. I thought that I would provide a general update today.

Regular readers of this blog are aware that Black/Inside considers how a system of imprisoning Black men and women in the United States has been sustained from colonial times to the present. I am working on the exhibition with my friend Teresa Silva who is co-curating and my friend Billy Dee who is helping to design the exhibition. Two other people, Maria and Glenance, are also providing other support.

Honestly, I am at the stage in this project where I have no idea which side is up. We have many of the artifacts that will be shown in the exhibition already since they will be drawn mostly from my personal collection. At this point, our biggest obstacles are funding, time, and too many ideas.

One exciting recent development is that I was contacted by Dawn Hancock of Firebelly Design about a month ago. She asked if my organization might benefit from some pro-bono assistance from designers. It was such an exciting opportunity and came out of the blue. I thought of two ways that her designers could help us. One was to create a publication that I had been working on for Black/Inside and the other was to create a poster for a campaign to close youth prisons in Illinois.

Ten designers who participated in Camp Firebelly worked tirelessly night and day (literally) to complete these projects. The publication/zine is simply breathtaking. I saw the printed copies a couple of days ago and I can’t wait to share the publication with everyone who attends the exhibition this Fall. Words can’t express how grateful I am to everyone at Firebelly and to the 10 designers who worked so diligently to produce the beautiful zine and wonderful poster.

I plan to spend most of my summer working on getting the exhibition ready for its opening in October. I’ll provide periodic updates over the next few weeks. In the meantime, You can read about the main questions that we are addressing in the exhibition in this previous post.