In the lead up to the release (on May 7) of several new resources that I have been developing with new and old friends, I will be previewing several items on Prison Culture. Today I am sharing a page from a pamphlet that my friend, talented artist and dedicated educator/activist Mauricio Pineda, has illustrated and designed. He and I have collaborated on a publication to share the stories of individuals who filed affidavits about law enforcement violence in Mississippi during the early to mid-60s. The pamphlet features six affidavits collected by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) which was a civil rights era organization.

Even people who only have limited knowledge about the black freedom movement are aware of the fact that Mississippi figured prominently in many of the primary struggles of that era. The page that I am sharing below is from volume 1 of a pamphlet series about policing, violence, and resistance. I am certain that you will be as stunned by the power of this visual image as I was when I first saw it yesterday:

Stop the Criminal-Black-Man Narrative 2012
by nancy a heitzeg

“Trayvon Martin was killed by a very old idea..”
~ Brent Staples, New York Times, 4/14/2102

The Black Man as Dangerous is a lethal idea, ironically, not to those who perpetrate and fear, but especially to those to whom it is attached. It is indeed also a very old idea, one that has evolved over centuries. The Savage, The Brute, the Defiler of White Women — honed and solidified in the Post Civil Rights Era into an archetype that scholars and activists now refer to in aggregate short-hand:

The Criminal-Black-Man.

This image is ubiquitous — it is the text and subtext of all crime-reporting and “reality” cop/prison programing. It shapes the contours of everyday racism, the school to prison pipeline, police patrols and profiles; it offers the framework for both creating and then perversely justifying the demographics of both the prison industrial complex and the face of death row.

At times, as in the Trayvon Martin case, the archetype and its’ consequences are, at least briefly, openly examined and discussed. More often, as with the noxious Kony 2012 campaign, it looms just below the surface with an eerily subconscious pull.

The Criminal-Black-Man is the visible yet untouchable specter that lies at the center of fear and violence. It is personal and yes it is political.

Read more »

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an essay by Brent Staples titled “Young, Black, Male, and Stalked by Bias.” The piece has made the rounds on social media. Below are some of the relevant words for me:

Young black men know that in far too many settings they will be seen not as individuals, but as the “other,” and given no benefit of the doubt. By the time they have grown into adult bodies — even though they are still children — they are well versed in the experience of being treated as criminals until proved otherwise by cops who stop and search them and eyed warily by nighttime pedestrians who cower on the sidewalks.

Society’s message to black boys — “we fear you and view you as dangerous” — is constantly reinforced. Boys who are seduced by this version of themselves end up on a fast track to prison and to the graveyard. But even those who keep their distance from this deadly idea are at risk of losing their lives to it. The death of Trayvon Martin vividly underscores that danger.

I write, think, and act consistently against the systematic and systemic oppression of young people of color. I think that it is important though that we listen to and elevate the voices of these young people as they narrate their own experiences for us. As part of a terrific volunteer-led and run project called Chain Reaction, young people are doing exactly this as they recount their encounters with the police. Storytelling is only the first step of this project but it is important. Listen to Anthony as he describes his encounter with the police. Listen and then figure out what you can do to interrupt this type of oppression in your community.

Yes, yes, I already know what you are thinking…

You are thinking: “What is it with this woman and her obsession with James Baldwin?” Well, I won’t give you the one million reasons why Baldwin is awesome. I’ll save that for another post. I will only say that Baldwin was and remains incredibly relevant to understanding America. That should be a good enough reason for my near constant citing of his work. He was one of a kind. Think about it: “Who is our Baldwin today?” It’s a rhetorical question.

Because I am working on something about Harlem community members’ resistance to police violence (set to be released on May 7th), I have been immersed in reading about the neighborhood. Today, I am moved to write about a long-forgotten incident that took place in 1964: the case of the Harlem six.

Baldwin writes about the case in an article titled “A Report from Occupied Territory” that was published in the Nation magazine in 1966. The article opens with these paragraphs:

On April 17, 1964, in Harlem, New York City, a young salesman, father of two, left a customer’s apartment and went into the streets. There was a great commotion in the streets, which, especially since it was a spring day, involved many people, including running, frightened, little boys. They were running from the police. Other people, in windows, left their windows, in terror of the police because the police had their guns out, and were aiming the guns at the roofs. Then the salesman noticed that two of the policemen were beating up a kid: “So I spoke up and asked them, ‘why are you beating him like that?’ Police jump up and start swinging on me. He put the gun on me and said, ‘get over there.’ I said, ‘what for?’ ”

An unwise question. Three of the policemen beat up the salesman in the streets. Then they took the young salesman, whose hands had been handcuffed behind his back, along with four others, much younger than the salesman, who were handcuffed in the same way, to the police station.

The incident that Baldwin writes about took place two years before he published his essay in the Nation and came to be known as the “Little Fruit Stand Riot.” The young salesman that Baldwin quotes in his piece was Frank Stafford, a 31 year old door-to-door salesman, who was arrested and brutally assaulted by police when he and a 47 year old Puerto Rican seaman named Fecundo Acion came to the aid of three black teens charged by the cops with overturning a fruit cart owned by Edward DeLuca. A young man named Wallace Baker also witnessed the incident and jumped in to assist a young man who was being beaten by police; Baker found himself assaulted and arrested too.

Several days after this incident, a white couple who owned a second hand store in Harlem was attacked. Frank and Margit Sugar were both stabbed several times. Mrs. Sugar died from her wounds while her husband would be saved by doctors at Harlem Hospital. Within just a few hours, the police had rounded up several young people who they had identified as having been at the scene of the “Little Fruit Stand Riot” that had taken place days earlier. Included in the group were: Wallace Baker (who had been a witness to the “fruit stand” incident) and a few of his teenage friends – Daniel Hamm, William Craig, Ronald Felder, Walter Thomas, and Robert Rice. Police also brought in Robert Baron, a former prisoner who lived in the community.

The NAACP declined to take on the case, even though it seemed clear from the beginning that the young men were in the process of being railroaded, so a local attorney named Conrad Lynn tried to assemble a defense team to handle the trials of the young men. William Kunstler, who would later become famous for defending Black Panther Party members and Attica prisoners, volunteered to represent the young men at trial. However, the young men were instead assigned public defenders. This fact would prove very important later.

The trial for the young men who would come to be known as the Harlem Six began in March 1965. Harlem was a community that was still roiling from the aftermath of the 1964 riots. It was against this backdrop that the young men were being tried. A black reporter at the New York Times falsely claimed that the six young men had “sworn a blood oath to murder white people.” The Harlem Six then became known to the wider community as the “Blood Brothers.” They were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

William Epton, who I have previously written about, helped found the Harlem Defense Council, which took the lead in the struggle to free the Harlem Six. The Defense Council raised money and tried to keep the case in the news.

Three years after the young men were convicted, Lynn, Kunstler and others mounted an appeal and were thrilled when the convictions were reversed and new trials ordered. However, Lynn and his associates were again not permitted to represent the young men at their new trials. Two of the six were tried separately and found guilty again. The other four went on trial in February 1971. The trial ended with a deadlocked jury so the judge declared a mistrial. Another trial also ended with a deadlock. Bail was set at $75,000 for each defendant. They could not afford to post this amount and had by this time already spent 8 years in prison. In the end, all of the young men were released from prison after having lost years of their lives unjustly locked behind bars. James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, and many others had played a role in helping to ultimately free the Harlem Six.

For those who want to learn more about this case, you can read Truman Nelson’s article published in Ramparts Magazine in 1965 titled “Torture of Mothers.”

Baldwin always wrote with passion and moral clarity. For me the power of his work is that it always seemed as if he had a deep investment in what he was writing about or commenting on. Below, for example, he explains his interest in the case of the Harlem Six:

This means that I also know, in my own flesh, and know, which is worse, in the scars borne by many of those dearest to me, the thunder and fire of the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face, and I know what it is to find oneself blinded, on one’s hands and knees, at the bottom of the flight of steps down which one has just been hurled. I know something else: these young men have been in jail for two years now. Even if the attempts being put forth to free them should succeed, what has happened to them in these two years? People are destroyed very easily. Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many?

As Baldwin writes about the tactics that law enforcement deployed against black people in Harlem, I dare you not to find echoes in our current situation:

But the police are afraid of everything in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they consider to be guerrilla outposts. This means that the citizens of Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour in the streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very air. They are safe only in their houses—or were, until the city passed the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will, at any hour, and search him. Harlem believes, and I certainly agree, that these laws are directed against Negroes.

There is nothing else to add. If you’ve never read, Baldwin’s “A Report from Occupied Territory,” what are you waiting for? Do it today, do it now.

Below are some inchoate thoughts from me…

Some people spend their spare time reading “The Hunger Games.” I spend mine reading about the history of lynching. Potato/Potato. A couple of weeks ago, a reader reached out to me to ask why so many people were analogizing the killing of Trayvon Martin to a lynching (in particular to the lynching of Emmett Till). I haven’t had time to respond to the e-mail so I thought I would try to do so in this post.

I personally don’t see the killing of Trayvon Martin as perfectly analogous to lynching. Lynching is a historically specific form of racial terrorism as I see it. Usually it involved mob violence. However I do understand the temptation to return to the concept of lynching when thinking of the killing of unarmed black people. There has been a historical debasement of black bodies in the United States. We have always been considered killable and disposable. In the late 19th century, a remark was attributed to a Southern police chief who suggested that there were three types of homicides: “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger (Berg, 2011, p.116).”

The devaluing of black life is baked into the cultural cake of America, so to speak. I recently read an excellent book by Manfred Berg titled “Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America.” In the book, Berg makes a convincing case that: “The slave codes singled out blacks for extremely cruel punishment, thus marking black bodies as innately inferior (p.11).” Folks, it is impossible to understand our modern criminal legal system without probing its origins in Colonial America. Berg argues that: “Colonial slavery set clear patterns for future racial violence in America (p.11).” Unfortunately, since it has been proven that American students’ most disliked subject is “history,” we seem doomed to operate as though everything old is new again.

Berg provides several examples of black lynchings for perceived and real slights. For example, when a young black person named Sandy Reeves dropped a five cent piece which was picked up by his employer’s 3 year old daughter, he snatched the coin out of her hands. He should probably have thought twice because the little girl ran crying to her parents telling them that Reeves had harmed her. The parents assumed that Sandy had sexually assaulted their daughter; he was lynched the next night. Apparently Sandy Reeves’ story was not an isolated case.

Black people who were lynched were usually first tortured and then once they were dead, their bodies were often mutilated. Sometimes the lynchers would drop the dead black person’s remains on the doorsteps of other blacks in the community as a warning that they too could meet this fate. This is a period in American history (from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century) that many people think they understand and yet have never actually studied.

I have several friends who are healers and they often talk about the fact that as black people we are dealing with ancestral traumas that are actually unexpressed. I think that there is something to this. Every time we hear of a young unarmed black person meeting with a violent and brutal death, something in our collective historical memories must be triggered.

So while I don’t believe that Trayvon Martin was lynched, I do appreciate the efforts that people have made to try to place his killing into some sort of historical context. Often we treat these incidents as though they are simply individual tragedies. The truth is that Trayvon Martin’s killing is unfortunately not exceptional rather it is part of a long line of injustices. This means that we should not mainly be focused on seeking individual redress (which is unfortunately where the preponderance of the efforts have understandably been focused). Trayvon Martin falls within a history of unarmed black people who have been victimized by racist terror in this country.

Modern day racial profiling is a form of violence that engenders constant vigilance in its victims and makes us afraid and uneasy. It keeps the idea at the forefront of our minds that we are potential targets and can always be objects of unlimited (and unaccountable) violence.

Finally, it always seems in America that punishment is in the service of the dominant culture’s interests. Recall the words of the anonymous Southern chief that I quoted above:

“If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger (Berg, 2011, p.116).”

Do we feel that this sentiment applies in 2012? If yes, then the legacy of lynching remains alive in 21st century America even if Trayvon Martin wasn’t a victim of this type of extra-legal violence. What matters is that we still have a culture in this country that sanctions the violation of black bodies often with impunity.

I’ve written in the past about the issue of false confessions. Well the good folks at the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth have released an interesting paper (PDF) titled “Convenients Scapegoats: Juvenile Confessions and Exculpatory DNA in Cook County, IL.” Read it to learn about the role that false confessions played in the Englewood Four and Dixmoor Five cases.

I wanted to revisit the idea of false confessions today because of a new documentary that is out. Scenes of a Crime is described as follows:

“[The film] explores a nearly 10-hour interrogation that culminates in a disputed confession, and an intense, high-profile child murder trial in New York state. Police video-recordings allow directors Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock to unravel the complicated psychological dynamic between detectives and their suspect during a long interrogation. Detectives, prosecutors, witnesses, jurors and the suspect himself offer conflicting accounts of exactly what happened in this mysterious and disturbing true-crime documentary.”

“Scenes of a Crime” Trailer from New Box on Vimeo.

I haven’t had a chance to see the film yet but I will look for it when it comes to Chicago.

George Zimmerman does not exist in a vacuum. It seems important for me to restate this fact at this time.

As I predicted would happen, we have now entered the CSI or Law & Order phase of the Trayvon Martin killing. We are being subjected to a trial by media with reports by Nancy Grace about grand jury testimony, DNA evidence, and whether they will move the venue of any possible future trial. Unfortunately Law & Order Trayvon Martin won’t have a quick nor I predict satisfying ending for the public, the vast majority of whom will soon move on. After all, reality television can only hold the public’s attention (those who are even paying attention in the first place) for so long before people start to change the channel to watch something else.

Ultimately what will be lost in all of this is the memory of Trayvon Martin. However this episode will once again underscore the fact that most people do not actually care about antiblack violence in America. This is as it has always been; nothing new to see here. By virtue of our blackness, we are always perceived as disposable (even more so in the 21st century now that our labor is superfluous to the functioning of capitalism) and as “suspect.”

Larvester Gaither (2000) writes that the “adjective ‘suspicious’ expresses the historical and fundamental status of Africans in American society and partly explains American ambivalence toward the question of black victimization (p.192).” In other words, as Kanye West might say: “America does not care about black people.” It certainly does not care about black pain.

There is something more too. Our citizenship as black people is never taken for granted. It is consistently under assault. Black people are in a perpetual struggle in America not to be disenfranchised. For example, currently the right is pushing new voter ID laws across the country which are specifically intended to suppress black votes. People have called Arizona’s SB1070 the “papers please” law. It’s an apt characterization. However it should be pointed out that black people in America (including our current President) have been and continue to be asked to produce “our papers” regularly and usually there is no “please” attached to the demand.

In the 18th century, slave patterollers were empowered to demand documentation from any black person they came across as proof that they were actually “free.” W. Marvin Dulaney writes about slave patrols in his book Black Police in America (1996):

“By the middle of the eighteenth century, every southern colony had a slave patrol. Although in some communities all white males were required to serve some time as patterollers, their ranks were usually filled with poor whites. The patrols were authorized to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any African slave caught off the plantation without a pass, engaged in illegal activities, or running away. The patterollers policed specific geographic areas in southern communities called “beats.” Paramilitary in nature, the slave patrol often cooperated with the militia in the southern colonies to prevent and suppress slave insurrections. To facilitate the rapid mobilization of the patrol and to ensure that every white man supported its activities in emergencies, colonial governments granted all whites the authority to detain, whip, and even kill slaves suspected of illegal activities or conspiracies. The colonial slave patrol exercised awesome powers which were often abused [emphasis mine] (p.2).”

Does this sound eerily familiar? If not, it should. I repeat: George Zimmerman does not exist in a historical vacuum. He felt it perfectly within his rights to demand to know what Trayvon was doing in his gated community. [Please don't mention the fact that Zimmerman is half Peruvian to me as a way to suggest that he cannot be a racist. We all swim in and internalize the toxic soup of American racism on a daily basis.] Political scientist Robert Gooding-Williams, writing in the New York Times, makes an explicit connection between Zimmerman and slave patterollers:

If it seems a stretch, finally, to paint Zimmerman in the image of the slave catchers of yesteryear, recall that he himself invited the comparison when, while stalking the African-American teenager against the advice of a 911 dispatcher, he complained, using an expletive to refer to Trayvon, that they “always get away.”

Fast forward to 2012, our President is asked to produce his papers on an almost daily basis, when stopped for driving while black we are asked for our licenses and registration, standing on the street corner minding our business we are told to show identification, and walking back from the store with ice tea and Skittles in hand we are questioned about where we are going and asked to prove that we belong in this particular neighborhood. It is within this context of blacks as ‘perpetually criminally suspect’ that George Zimmerman felt empowered to act as an antiblack vigilante. He had historical precedent on his side and he must have known this.

I’m hard at work today planning an upcoming exhibition about the history of black captivity/incarceration in the U.S. As part of my research for the exhibition, I came across this article (PDF) written by social reformer and social scientist Florence Kelley in 1914. She writes about the plight of a “4 year old burglar” in Memphis Juvenile Court. Read this if you want to better understand how disproportionate treatment for black children in the legal system is historical and endemic.

May 8, Gainer _______, 10 Tin Cup Alley, 4 1/2 burglary, larceny, prowling 2:50 a.m., police, probation to Sanderlin.

This post is going to be pretty disjointed as I am still trying to formulate my ideas…

I have been in and out of town for the past ten days but have still been hooked to social media intravenously. So I found out via Facebook last week that an unarmed young black woman named Rekia Boyd was shot by an off-duty police officer on the West side of Chicago and subsequently died. The officer claims that another person in her group pulled a gun out and aimed it at him. There was no gun found at the scene however except for the one that the officer used to fire at and (unintentionally) kill Rekia who just happened to be standing with the group. Below is a video that describes the incident.

Today is Rekia Boyd’s funeral. May she rest in power.

In the past few weeks, a number of examples of unarmed people being gunned down by police have come to public attention. The truth is however that there is nothing new about police violence in America. I am currently living, breathing, and reading about the history of policing, violence and resistance as I prepare to release a set of resources that I have been working on for the past year. My work on this project has led me to think quite a bit about how I have personally framed the issue of police violence over the past few years.

I become incredibly exorcised about incidents of stop and frisk, police shootings, and other forms of violence when the targets are young men of color and in particular young black men. As I interrogate the reasons for this, I think that perhaps it is because I have brothers, cousins, nephews, and friends who are black and male. Could it be that simple? The answer has to be “no” because I also have sisters, cousins, nieces, and friends who are black and female but I don’t find myself getting as outraged over their senseless killing and assaults at the hands of law enforcement. Why is this? Is it the result of internalized sexism? Do I think that young women’s lives are less valuable than young men’s? How could that be when I have spent a lifetime fighting for the right of girls and young women to live lives free from violence?

I seem to be a bundle of contradictions on this matter. I know that by virtue of living in this society I am swimming in the waters of sexism and have therefore internalized it. Yet I am also living in a society that is racist too. But I still feel a visceral sense of loss and dread when I hear about another young black man gunned down by the cops. Is it because the numbers are unbalanced? It is true that young men of color do more often find themselves targeted by police in the streets than do young women of color. However that doesn’t explain the depth of the feelings of pain that I experience when I hear that another young black man has been shot or assaulted or killed.

So I am left to attribute my asymetrical response to the killing of Amadou Diallo and the killing of Rekia Boyd to the sad fact that I have indeed internalized the belief that my life is perhaps less valuable than that of my brother. Somehow his survival has come to mean more to me than my own. I partly blame this on the fact that most of the images of public violence that I have been and am bombarded with on a daily basis are distinctly male. When I watch movies about war, the people who are dying on the battlefields are men. When I see photographs of lynchings, those bodies are also male. When I notice incidents of police violence in the media, the victims are overwhelmingly men (and so are the killers). Public violence is male while private violence is colored female. The rampant street harassment that young women are subjected to which is in fact a form of public violence is almost always made invisible by calling it “flirting.” Young women who are raped, abused, etc… are most often harmed in “private” spaces away from the glare of the spotlight. And we are harmed by the millions in this way. I feel this “private” harm in a visceral way yet in terms of the public violence that girls/young women experience, my emotions are duller.

I am not proud of this admission. It proves how much work I still have to do to overcome my internalized sexism. I wonder if others have thoughts about this…