My colleague and ally, Brian Galaviz, posted some words on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. They are below. He also shared a letter written by some students at the school where he works. I asked for permission to re-publish that letter. The students and their teacher granted my request and I hope that you will take the time to read and think about what they have to say about how the media’s coverage of violence impacts their lives.

Reflecting on being part of healing after Chicago lost another warrior, the word that comes to mind is Grace. It is my favorite Christian word, though I am not. Watching staff and students deal with pain in a way to flip violence. Students using his life and transformative process to continue their trajectory for self/community-realization.

Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy – IDPL is a beautiful organism, and though we lost an Angel, we fight on in his spirit and light.

One way students responded to their friend being murdered was by calling out the Tribune for dehumanizing both our lost loved one and the young man accused of the murder. I am still struggling with sending love to the person who kills and the victim. But I am trying in struggle with students and staff. This is what they wrote:

Read more »

I read this blog post yesterday (it was published in the Washington Post):

Americans are familiar with stories of dissidents fleeing repressive regimes such as those in China or Iran and seeking asylum in the United States. Snowden is in the opposite position. He’s an American leaving the land of his birth because he fears persecution.

Sigh… Americans fleeing U.S. government repression for other countries is not new. Think Paul and Eslanda Robeson. Think of Robert Williams fleeing to Cuba to escape trumped up kidnapping charges or Assata Shakur currently exiled in Cuba…

The U.S. government has always targeted dissenters. Dozens of political prisoners languish in cages across the country. This should be well-known to most Americans. It isn’t but it should be.

The current case of Edward Snowden seems to have revived (for at least a couple of days) a conversation about dissent, ‘criminality,’ and political imprisonment. It’s a good time to revisit some history…

On January 27, 1966, an American political prisoner stood in a courtroom and delivered a speech titled “We Accuse” His name was Bill Epton. I have written about Epton on this blog here and here. He should be better known to more people.

Below are some words from “We Accuse.” I encourage you to read the whole speech; it is worth it.

Read more »

Fugitive slave arrested…and freed

“This March 17, 1858, warrant—from the only known Federal fugitive slave case tried in California—directed the arrest of a fugitive slave named Archy. His owner, Mississippian C. A. Stovall, claimed to be visiting California when Archy became a fugitive. Stovall demanded that Archy be returned to him. Archie was tried in California and Federal courts and eventually freed.”

Jerry rode his bike on a sidewalk. He was arrested. At the police station, an officer said that Jerry kicked him in the shin. He was sent to jail. At Jerry’s hearing, the judge ordered a $20,000 bond. He has no money and could not post $2,000 bail.

So the community rallied in record time to raise the funds to bail him out of jail. Since the funds were not immediately available, Ethan, co-founder and facilitator of Circles and Ciphers, offered to use his personal credit card to post the bond.

At 10 am this morning, Ethan arrived at Cook County Jail and paid $2,000 to free Jerry. He stood in line with dozens of other people waiting for the release of their friends and loved ones. Minutes turned into hours. People who were waiting began to talk about being disrespected and feeling dispirited. There was radio silence; no information about when anyone would be released. The system dehumanizes.

Seven hours later Jerry walked out of jail and Ethan was there to meet him. He waited those long hours for Jerry’s release. Standing with the others who were anxiously and apprehensively waiting the (perhaps temporary) return of their missing…

I’ve been really sick for days and decided to leave my house because I was going stir-crazy. I returned to hear Jerry’s voice on my answering machine and for the first time in days, I felt the knot in my stomach begin to loosen just a little.

Jerry’s next court date is June 24th. He is like countless young men in Chicago ensnared in the web of a corrupt criminal legal system intent on devouring him. The system is voracious and insatiable.

Jerry is unlike countless young black men in Chicago because he had a community who could and did rally to his support. A community that refused to allow the system to feed on his body until he was fully consumed.

As Jerry sat in jail for days, he contemplated his “choices” — plead guilty to a crime that he didn’t commit or sit in jail until his next court date nearly three weeks away. Jerry would have pleaded guilty had he not been informed yesterday that funds had been raised to post bond. He said that he didn’t think that he would have lasted much longer in jail.

So for now, the system has not succeeded in abducting another young black man. Jerry will survive to fight another day against the bogus charges he faces. And I can only say thank you to each person who made this outcome possible. As I sit here tonight to write these words, I am also shedding a few tears for the thousands of Jerrys sitting in Cook County Jail facing a similar ‘choice.’ They’ve been accused and are waiting for their cases to be heard. They are behind bars in a jail that is a living hell. They are mostly black and brown bodies who don’t have a community and who must face the beast alone.

I breathe deeply and recommit to resisting the injustice of this criminal legal system. I vow to continue to fight for all of the Jerrys and the Jennys in this city and I hope that you will too. Thank you and peace to you all.

This is a 1906 antique postcard from my collection…

As some of you know, my organization incubates a terrific program called Circles and Ciphers that is run by two amazing men, Emmanuel Andre and Ethan Ucker. This week a young man who is part of Circles had a hearing. Bob Koehler who volunteers with Circles wrote a wonderful and infuriating essay about Jerry’s case. Please read it and share the story with others. Also, we need to raise $2,000 to bail Jerry out of jail. You can contribute here. [Thanks to everyone’s generosity, we raised enough to cover Jerry’s bond. Jerry was released from jail on Saturday.]

“Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.” — chorus of an 1828 minstrel song

“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.” — Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Yeah, it’s called mass incarceration. Our jails are filled with black and brown men and women. The number of inmates, primarily people of color, has soared sevenfold in the last three decades, according to Alexander, from 300,000 to more than 2 million, the largest number, by far, in the developed world. Many millions more are on probation or parole. And no matter what their crime, the inmates never get their citizenship back. The stigma of being an ex-felon brands someone for life as a second-class human being.

But even before the ex-felon label is attached, certain people — young men of color, in particular — are targeted as society’s losers by the police, judicial bureaucracy and prison system. They face the possibility of police harassment, invasion of privacy and arrest, often on the smallest pretext possible, pretty much any time they step outside.

I live in a vital, racially and ethnically diverse Chicago neighborhood and I watch it happen — racial profiling, the stop-and-frisk game. This is not making my neighborhood safer. It’s wrecking lives at enormous public expense and, of course, like the insane war on terror, creating enemies. We don’t need a justice system based on stereotypes and armed bullying.

Read more »

No one has yet written a biography about Madame Stephanie St. Clair and I can hardly believe it. I was introduced to Madame St. Clair through watching the “Cotton Club.” She’s only mentioned in passing. I was born and raised in New York City and even worked for a couple of years in Harlem. Yet I heard nothing about this amazing black woman’s life and legacy. Her Wikipedia page is woefully lacking and describes her as “a female gang leader who ran numerous criminal enterprises in Harlem, New York in the part of the 20th century.” This description of St. Clair doesn’t do justice to her life.

I am very interested in Madame St. Clair because as LaShawn Harris (2008) has written:

“St. Clair’s life symbolizes the often untold narratives and experiences of black men and women who used the informal economy and crime as ways to creatively confront race, gender, and class oppression (p.70).”

Read more »

Tapwater Coffee
by Diane Hamill Metzger

They took away our coffee pots;
You know the type:
Big forty-cup, with chrome,
Black plastic spigot and feet;
The kind you’d never use at home.
They said a weapon
Potentially lurked there,
Were it heaved or water thrown.
Now in the land of synthetic dreams,
Of cup-a-soup and instant tea,
Another compromise
Slips in to burden me.
I may suck the caffeine
Of paper packets and sleepless nights
And write endless narratives
Of wasted years and trampled rights,
But, try as I may, as I burn midnight oil,
And heat up my verses and curse my toil,
My thirst is room temperature —
My water won’t boil.
Ah, what emotional masturbation
Brews in the grounds of this pleasure dome;
Drinking tapwater coffee.
And thinking of home.

Diane Hamill Metzger has been serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania and Delaware state prisons since 1975. She is a widely published creative writer.

The New York Times reports on a new ACLU study about marijuana use and enforcement:

Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data.

The Times story includes the following map which illustrates the disparities in marijuana arrests.

Please read the entire interactive ACLU report HERE.

I have written very briefly about Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern America” here. For those interested in understanding the historical evolution of the idea of ‘black criminality’ in America, I recommend the book. Muhammad suggests that crime statistics were used to reinforce and “condemn” the idea of black criminality especially after the publication of the 1890 census. The idea of ‘black criminality’ was then used to limit black people’s rights and to exclude us from opportunities for social, economic, and political advancement. [As an aside, the most interesting part of the book for me is Muhammad’s contention that black reformers like DuBois and Wells-Barnett inadvertently “contributed to the racialization of crime prevention by linking racial progress to crime fighting” (p. 193). This is a point that I plan to return to in a future post.]

As I’ve been continuing my reading about lynching in the U.S., I came across a book published in 1913 titled “Judge Lynch’s court in America: the number of negro convicts in prison in America” by Rev. Elijah Clarence Branch. Rev. Branch cataloged various injustices against black people and republished several newspaper articles and editorials to document these incidents.

The following editorial caught my attention as it conflates alleged ‘black criminality’ with a need to establish a separate “negro reservation” in the U.S. It’s a wonderful illustration of the way that anti-blackness manifested in the early 20th century and supports claims made by Muhammad. The editorial relies on crime statistics to buttress its exclusionary policy prescription for the “Negro problem.” I think that the echoes of these ideas remain with us today. In some ways, the U.S. has suceeded in creating a “negro reservation;” it’s called the American Prison System.

From the Houston Chronicle, March 3, 1903 (Source: Judge Lynch’s court in America: the number of negro convicts in prison in America p. 24-26 – reproduced as it appears in the book)

Read more »