I gave a keynote speech at a conference yesterday about youth violence and trauma. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to say so I procrastinated until the night before and then tried to put pen to paper. Since I was struggling, I took to Facebook to share my troubles. A friend of mine recommended an interview with Lupe Fiasco that had just been published in the Chicago Sun Times. He suggested that I watch it for inspiration. The video of the interview is below:

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If you live in Chicago and have any interest in the arts, you are likely to have heard of Dr. Margaret Burroughs. She co-founded several local arts institutions including the Southside Community Art Center (when she was still in her 20s) and perhaps most importantly the Dusable Museum of African American History.

Dr. Burroughs was born in Louisiana in 1917. She moved to Chicago as a child. She was an artist who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, a historian, an educator, and an activist. Basically, Dr. Burroughs was a powerhouse and a Chicago legend.

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Rare footage of a Chain Gang from Charleston, South Carolina in 1902. You will notice that all of the prisoners are black.

A few weeks ago, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics released its annual “America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being” report. I always look forward to reading the report because it usually challenges the popular conceptions (especially those advanced by the media) that our children and youth are all in deep trouble. Nothing could actually be further from the truth. In fact, these reports usually paint a portrait of a resilient group of people who are thriving IN SPITE of adult malpractice. Despite the fact that more children and youth are living in poverty, less teens are having babies and less of them are committing violent crimes. One might not know this if you simply relied on the mass media to learn about how youth are faring in our society.

Below is a chart that I think can’t be published enough. It highlights the fact that since around 1993, the percentage of serious violent crimes that involved youth has been steadily declining from a high of 26 percent in 1993 to 18 percent in 2010. In other words, the vast majority of the people in this country who commit serious violent crimes in the U.S. are adults.

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I am reading about the first Black heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson right now. His story is featured in a bus tour that I am leading in November as part of the Black/Inside exhibition. Anyway, as part of my research, I stumbled upon an editorial (PDF) published in the Los Angeles Times on July 6, 1910. It was published after a series of riots left over 25 black people dead after Jack Johnson won a highly promoted fight against a white undefeated former heavyweight champion named James K. Jeffries. Jack Johnson, an unrepentant black man, had defeated America’s “Great White Hope.”

The L.A. Times criticized the post-fight riots in the editorial but the part that really stands out is the section titled: “A word to the black man.” I think that it is instructive to look back at history in order to understand our current circumstances. It won’t come as a shock as you read the words below that the editorial writers of the L.A. Times were racists. After all, they were simply products of a racist society in 1910. Still, the words are jarring and deeply vexing all the same.

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I am honored to be an advisory board member of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project.

Today is the opening reception of the exhibition and everyone is invited to attend. I will unfortunately have to miss the reception because I have a previously scheduled event.

The show is the result of a year’s worth of work by the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project, which seeks to reckon with the torture of over 100 African American men and women under Police Commander Jon Burge. The project’s goal is to better preserve the history of the torture and activism to hold Burge accountable, to share this history with new audiences and to engage them to work on behalf of torture survivors.

The show will run October 4-December 21st at Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St, 7th floor.

The opening reception is tonight, October 5, 4:30–8:00PM.

The following article is a nice description of the project and the exhibition.

According to a new fact sheet (PDF) released by the Sentencing Project last week, the number of women in prison increased by 646% between 1980 and 2010, rising from 15,118 to 112,797. Including women in local jails, more than 205,000 women are now incarcerated.

The chart below depicts the rise in number of women prisoners from 1994 to 2008. Still stunning to see…

Several months ago, I contributed to artist Katie Yamasaki’s Kickstarter project “If Walls Could Talk.” Katie describes the project below:

Children from the East Harlem Community and the greater NYC area worked to design a mural that I painted with the mothers inside of the women’s jail in Rikers Island. The women also created an image and message dedicated to their children and the East Harlem community. Last month, I worked with their children and other members of the East Harlem community to bring their message to life.

Below is the first video that I saw of Katie describing the project in her own words.

The project is now complete and there was a mural dedication celebration on September 14. Since I no longer live in NYC, I was unfortunately unable to attend. But thanks to the magic of technology, Katie shared photographs and regular updates about the progress of this project. Below are some photographs of the East Harlem mural:

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Well, I can’t believe it but the Black/Inside exhibition will officially open on October 23rd. If you are in Chicago, you are invited to our opening reception on the evening of October 22nd from 6 to 8 p.m.

Over the past few months, I have provided sporadic updates about the progress of the exhibition. Regular readers will be familiar with my original goals in taking on such a project so I won’t revisit those again.

The statistics about mass incarceration are overwhelming and belie a grave injustice. For example, One-third of black male high school dropouts under age 40 are currently behind bars. Among all African American men born since the mid-1960s, more than 20 percent will go to prison, nearly twice the number that will graduate college. Young black women are also finding themselves coming into contact with the law at an alarming rate. It is difficult to convey the scope of this problem without reducing the story to a set of numbers or to individualistic anecdotes.

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