Southern Road
by Sterling Brown

Antique chain gang photograph (from my collection)

Swing dat hammer — hunh —
Steady, bo’;
Swing dat hammer — hunh —
Steady, bo’;
Ain’t no rush, bebby,
Long ways to go.

Burner tore his — hunh —
Black heart away;
Burner tore his — hunh —
Black heart away;
Got me life, bebby;
An’ a day.

Gal’s on Fifth Street — hunh —
Son done gone;
Gal’s on Fifth Street — hunh —
Son done gone;
Wife’s in de ward, bebby,
Babe’s not bo’n.

My ole man died — hunh —
Cussin’ me;
My ole man died — hunh —
Cussin’ me;
Ole lady rocks, bebby,
Huh misery.

Doubleshackled — hunh —
Guard behin’;
Doubleschackled — hunh —
Guard behin’;
Ball and chain, bebby,
On my min’.

White man tells me — hunh —
Damn yo’ soul;
White man tells me — hunh —
Damn yo’ soul;
Got no need, bebby,
To be tole.

Chain gang nevah — hunh —
Let me go;
Chain gang nevah — hunh —
Let me go;
Po’ los’ boy, bebby,
Evahmo’…

I should probably take some time before I write about this but writing helps me figure out what I think. So here goes…

We are told that Hadiya Pendleton’s killer has been apprehended and has confessed to her murder. I am not a friend or family member of Hadiya’s. Perhaps those closest to her are feeling relief amidst their pain today. Understandable. Perhaps they are eagerly awaiting the trials and a guilty verdict. I don’t know. Maybe they are hopeful that the young man who killed their sister, cousin, friend and daughter will spend his life in prison. I haven’t heard or read anything to this effect but perhaps…

I anticipate the angry emails that are sure to come after I post this here. It won’t be the first time that something I have written provokes anger. I’ll surely be accused of coddling murderers. That’s OK. I might be accused of never having been victimized by violent crime. I have but that’s not important. Here’s what I have to say.

When I heard that two young black men had been arrested and charged with Hadiya’s death, I felt nothing but soul-deep sadness. No relief. No joy. Nothing but sadness. After my friend Dara posted their mug shot photos on Facebook, my sadness intensified in a way that was suffocating.

There are many reasons for my sadness. I will share a few. First, I am sad because of headlines like this one: “Chicago Teen Killed After Performing At Inauguration Was Victim of Gang Violence.” Why is this headline problematic? Because the reader will assume that he/she now understands what happened. The ThinkProgress post attributes shootings in Chicago to “rampant gang violence.” This is asserted as an incontrovertible fact. [Incidentally, the attorney of one of the suspects says that his client was not a gang member.] Still it’s the gangs, stupid.

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This is an excellent fact sheet about the drug war, mass incarceration, and race.

So I came up with another idea and have enlisted some help from my terrific friends and we are on our way… If you live in Chicago, please participate and please spread the word. It is simple and not time consuming. Raise and add your voice!

As residents of Chicago, many of us feel overwhelmed by the constant drumbeat of news and personal experiences of interpersonal and structural violence.

In 2012, we learned from Census data that the poverty rate in Chicago has continued to increase. For example, the child poverty rate in the city rose from 33.1 percent in 2010 to 35.8 percent in 2011. The extreme poverty rate rose from 10 percent to 11.2 percent (source).  The poverty is concentrated in black & brown communities in Chicago which means that it is all too often ignored. Poverty is violence.

In 2012, there was a police shooting of a civilian about once a week. These were 50 shooting incidents involving 57 individuals (8 of whom were killed).  The vast majority of those people shot by the police were black (about 88%). 3 of those shot were identified as Latino (source). This too is violence.

More than half of Chicago public school closings announced since 2001 occurred in the 21 majority black or Latino communities on the South, Southwest, and West sides with the highest numbers of youth homicides (source). This too is violence.

Between July 2011 and June 2012, over 700 victims of sexual violence were served by rape crisis centers in Chicago hospitals (ICASA).

In 2012, 506 people were killed in Chicago; this represented an 11% increase over 2011 (source).

Some of us feel powerless in the onslaught of violence. But we can use our voices to speak out about how we feel about what’s happening in our city.  We invite Chicagoans of all ages, all races, orientations, genders, and communities to share how you feel about what’s happening in our city with respect to violence IN ONE SENTENCE.

We invite you to participate in our audio collage project.  Call (872) 216-1735

Listen to instructions of what to do:
1.      Say your first name
2.      Say your age (if you’d like)
3.      Say the community that you live in here in Chicago.
4.      Share IN ONE SENTENCE how you feel about the violence taking place in Chicago.

The voicemail will be open from February 11 to 17, 2013.

We will then collect all of the responses and create an audio collage which we will share with the Mayor and others across Chicago.  Everyone will be able to listen to this audio collage at the following site: http://uproarchicago.wordpress.com/

Our goal is to provide a forum for those who want to share their voices with others.

We are thinking of this project as a collective uproar, a “primal” scream, and potentially an emotional catharsis for those of us who live in Chicago in this moment in history. We hope that you will add your voice and spread the word to others.

Also, please contribute your twitter and/or facebook status to our Thunderclap as well.  We need to collect 100 people by Thursday February 13th to make it happen! Help us meet our goal.

I live in Chicago. Regular readers of this blog already know this. A lot is always happening in this city. On Saturday, Hadiya Pendelton was buried. My condolences to her family. May she rest in power.

Hadiya’s death has unleashed something. It is inchoate but tangible. There has been an outpouring of grief, sadness, bewilderment, and anger at her murder. Some have lashed out at the killer, others have blamed the police for not “stopping the violence,” and still others are railing against gangs. There is something else too; below the surface, festering.

I have heard some young people lash out at the media coverage of Hadiya’s death and at the specific focus on this one young & by all accounts wonderful 15 year old black girl. My Facebook page for the past few days has included questions about why the other children who have been killed in the past few years & days haven’t garnered this type of media and national attention. One young person wrote:

“Shame on everyone who jumped on the media bandwagon with this! her death is not the first it wont be the last and it’s no more important than other Chicago child[ren] who lost their life too damn soon!”

This sentiment was echoed by other young people who I’ve spoken to in the past few days. Why is Hadiya’s life more valuable? What is it that is special about her? Do people only care because she attended a “good” school and performed at the Inauguration?

Within these questions, I hear an underlying anxiety from young people about whether their own deaths would produce such an outpouring. And if not, what does this convey about the value of their lives? There’s a nagging sense that there is an invisible hierarchy of worth and that their lives don’t measure up.

Amid the churning of emotions, a young organizer named Fresco (who I love and respect and have known since she was in high school) took to Facebook to share her thoughts. She wrote:

Hadiyah Pendleton is one of many young black children that are dying from the violence in the world. The remarks I am seeing that are rooted in frustration are that she Is not special and no more important than anyone else. I believe we need to reverse that. We as black young movers and shakers need to recognize that all of our young people are important. And we can’t stand to lose a single one of them. We need [to] respond to each and every death with this same momentum and passion as we feel right now. I think the frustrations we are expressing are misdirected. You might be angry because there an underlying. To get our community to care about the young black generation they need a savior. And that savior has to go to one on the top high schools of the city and perform for Obama. How do we get our community to care about the young people they are faced with fighting the conditions of our communities and do the best they can to survive.

There is so much love in Fresco’s words. Love for Hadiya who is dead, love for the other faceless hundreds who’ve also died, love for a community that is struggling to assign equal worth to all of our children, and love for those young people who are deemed by some to be unlovable.

Some young black people who are lashing out at what they see as disproportionate attention being afforded to Hadiya are, it seems to me, really asking: “Aren’t I a person too? Am I going to be seen as unworthy if I am killed?”

I have reminded some young people that Hadiya was not immediately seen as worthy of public grieving. At first, there was some suspicion that she may have been “gang-involved” and therefore not fully “innocent.” This should not be surprising since as I often write on this blog, black bodies are ALWAYS considered criminal. The onus is on the dead black person to prove him or herself “innocent” and therefore worthy of being publicly mourned. We’ve seen this with Trayvon Martin and countless others. Hadiya’s family and friends were forced to rush out photographs of her beautiful smiling face and post PSA videos of her uttering anti-drug & anti-gang messages. This made it safe then for strangers to start publicly eulogizing her. This is the price of the ticket to respectability for black families. In America, black children are guilty until proven innocent.

The black youth who I work with already know that white people don’t value their lives but they also suspect that most black adults don’t either. Watching from afar as hundreds of people (mostly black) gathered in a church to mourn the life of Hadiya Pendleton, some who have lost their own brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends remember that few attended to the death of their loved one. Few marked the occasion of their loved one’s passing. Few publicly grieved their loss. So the frustration and sadness turn into anger and rage. It’s unfair, they say. We deserve love too, they say. The suspicion is that only those who are exceptional while living in black skin are valuable. And most of us aren’t particularly exceptional. So where does this leave them?

Some black youth tell me (once we get past the bravado) that they feel abandoned by adults in their own communities. I usually feel profound shame in those moments because I know that it is true. So many grown black folks are themselves in struggle. Some of that struggle involves breaking the chains of both systemic and internalized oppression. The internalized oppression can manifest itself as harshness and contempt for black children. We need to do some communal healing work around this and fast.

The question hanging over all of us this week is what would the response have been if Hadiya hadn’t performed at the Inauguration and had been killed by a stray bullet while sitting on her stoop. We already know the answer since there are many such cases that have happened here in Chicago. Her death may have gotten a passing mention in the local media and then quickly faded from public consciousness. And this, you see, feels like a grave injustice for many young people in this city. And they are of course right that it is unfair, immoral, and unjust… For every death is a loss and should be mourned.

Below is a short video of Fresco speaking about the issues facing black youth in Chicago:

Fresco Steez for BYP from Kamalkiddo. on Vimeo.

Below is an image from the Migration Now portfolio. This image was created by artist Molly Fair.

Fair’s image calls for an end to the detention system and an end to the abuse of immigrants’ rights. With the proliferation of laws and enforcement policies that seek to criminalize immigrants in the U.S., immigration detention has become a fast growing form of incarceration. The for-profit detention industry is growing, in spite of the fact that detention facilities have been found to subject people to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. ICE and its supporters continue to defend the substandard conditions of detention centers, denying that people’s human rights are being violated.

See the entire portfolio of powerful images here.

by Molly Fair

I really love this wonderful comic titled “Girls in the System” created by my friend Rachel Marie-Crane Williams as part of a project that I co-organized called the Cradle to Prison Pipeline Zine Project. You can read about the process that Rachel used in working with some youth from the Chicago Freedom School here. Because I really love this comic and think that it underscores many of the issues facing girls in the juvenile justice system. I am going to share some images from the publication here over the next few weeks…

I begin with some of the family traumas that some girls in the system face…

Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) 2012 report, Old Behind Bars, found that, between 2007 and 2010, the number of sentenced prisoners aged 65 or older grew 94 times faster than the total sentenced prisoner population during that same period.

I’ve written quite a bit about aging in prison on this blog. Here’s one example that includes some striking photographs by Tim Gruber.

Every day is Black History day on the Prison Culture blog. But I do want to acknowledge February as Black History Month. Unlike others, I am not ambivalent about the month. I think that it is a good thing that we have it and I acknowledge that it took over 100 years of work by scholars like Carter G. Woodson among others to make it a reality. I am one of the beneficiaries of that hard work, organizing, and scholarship. I am grateful. I’ve settled on Thursdays as my regular day for posting something related to the history of the PIC on the blog. I will of course continue to weave historical moments in other posts but you can always be assured of finding something history-related on Thursdays here.

“That there was no simple crime with one indictable perpetrator makes it all the more universal.” – Ron Hollander

There once lived a man. He was a very good man. If he were alive today, Tom Brokaw would be touting him as one of the “Greatest Generation.” His name was Clyde Kennard and he was killed by the state. His story has been called by historian John Dittmer “the saddest of the whole [Civil Rights] Movement.”

Mr. Kennard is not a household name even among those who know a lot about the Black Freedom Movement. He should be. I only learned about Clyde Kennard’s story in 2000 when I read David Oshinsky’s “Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm, & the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.” I then heard more about the case in 2006 when the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School won his posthumous exoneration with the help of three local high school students: Mona Ghadiri, Agnes Mazur and Callie McCune.

Born in Hattiesburg Mississippi in 1927, Kennard was according to all who knew him quiet and smart. At 12, he moved to Chicago and at 18 he joined the Army where he spent 7 years as a paratrooper. He served in Germany and in Korea. After he was honorably discharged from the Army, he used some of his savings to buy a chicken farm for his parents in Hattiesburg. In 1952, Clyde moved back to Chicago and enrolled in the University of Chicago.

After three years at U of C, his stepfather died. Clyde decided to move back to Mississippi to help his mother with the chicken farm. Because he had already finished three years of his political science degree requirements, he decided that he would enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now called University of Southern Mississippi) to complete his studies.

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I couldn’t sleep last night…

The New York Times published an article yesterday that profoundly disturbed me. I haven’t been able to shake it. Even though I’m an insomniac, thinking about it kept me up so I decided to write about it here. The article opens:

In a darkened classroom, 15 eighth graders gasped as a photograph appeared on the screen in front of them. It showed a dead man whose jaw had been destroyed by a shotgun blast, leaving the lower half of his face a shapeless, bloody mess.

Next came a picture of the bullet-perforated legs of someone who had been shot with an AK-47 assault rifle, and then one of the bloated abdomen of a gunshot victim with internal injuries so grievous that the patient had to be fitted with a colostomy bag to replace intestines that can no longer function normally.

Temple University hospital in Philadelphia is sponsoring a program called “Cradle to Grave.” Again, I turn to the Times for a description of the program:

The unusual program, called Cradle to Grave, brings in youths from across Philadelphia in the hope that an unflinching look at the effects that guns have in their community will deter young people from reaching for a gun to settle personal scores, and will help them recognize that gun violence is not the glamorous business sometimes depicted in television shows and rap music.

The program is open to all schools in the city, but about two-thirds of the participants were referred by officials from the juvenile justice system. Children younger than 13 are not normally admitted. So far, about 7,000 teenagers have participated since it began in 2006, and despite the graphic content, no parent has ever complained, said Scott P. Charles, the hospital’s trauma outreach coordinator.

This program sounds like another offshoot of the “ Scared Straight” programs from the late 80s and 90s that used to take black and brown children to visit prisons to show them how “terrible” they were in order to “prevent” them from ending up behind bars. Besides the fact that “Scared Straight” programs have proven to be completely ineffective and even counterproductive, they are also profoundly cruel.

I often say that our society hates black & brown children. I am always accused of generalizing or of hyperbole. But I can point to a pile of evidence that I am in fact right. I think that people who protest at this characterization are focused on whether individuals are mean to other individuals. They look at themselves and think I don’t have any personal animus towards individual black & brown children. That’s fine. What I see, however, is a set of policies and programs that harm children of color consistently and disproportionately. I count this Temple University Cradle to Grave program as more evidence of how much we despise black and brown youth in this country (especially if they are poor).

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