Continuing with my roll out of the resources that we will share with supporters on Saturday and with the broader public on Monday, I have written a pamphlet about a history of resistance to police violence in Harlem. This is part of the historical moments in policing, violence, and resistance series. Thanks to Eric Kerl for designing and laying out the publication.

In February 2012, over thirty community-based organizations in New York City came together to form “Communities United for Police Reform .” The coalition has launched a campaign to address the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) “Stop and Frisk” policies which disproportionately target innocent black and brown community residents. Police violence especially against black people in New York City is endemic and historical. As early as the 1920s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was filing complaints about police violence against the NYPD.

From the early 20th century through the 1960s, police violence was one of the most visible symbols of racial oppression in the North. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, in a survey of attitudes held by residents in cities where riots broke out, reported that police practices were the major grievance, followed by unemployment and inadequate housing.

This pamphlet illustrates how police violence in fact engendered resistance from Blacks in cities like Harlem. Harlem became the epicenter of black New York and perhaps even black America at the turn of the 20th century. In Harlem, tensions with the police were a permanent part of life. In 1943, a riot was triggered by a police officer’s mistreatment of a young woman. In 1957, Malcolm X came to national prominence following an incident of police brutality. In 1964, Harlem once again went up in flames after another incident of police mistreatment of local residents.

This pamphlet focuses on these three episodes to provide some perspective about the history of police violence in New York City and particularly in Harlem in the mid-20th century. The topics are covered in an introductory manner and additional information is provided at the end for those who want to focus more in-depth.

You are the first to be able to download a copy of the pamphlet here. I’ll be talking about this publication and other resources on Saturday. Details about the event are here. If you are in Chicago, feel free to stop by.

I’ll be back to posting again on Monday. Hope you have a good weekend!

In honor of May Day, I wanted to share a pamphlet about the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre written by my friend Samuel Barnett and designed by Madeleine Arenivar. This is part of a set of new resources that will be released to supporters this Saturday and to the broader public on Monday. My goal in launching this series of pamphlets is to inject some historical memory into our current discussions and considerations of policing and violence.

Sam introduces the story of the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre below:

What we today call the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 occurred when Chicago police officers opened fire on a group of 1000 protestors attempting to establish a picket line in front of Republic Steel, on the city’s southeast side. Similar to the Haymarket Tragedy fifty years earlier, no direct documentation exists from which to ascertain how the violence began that Sunday afternoon. A Paramount news cameraman filmed much of the march and the brutal beatings police laid on injured and fleeing protestors, but he was changing lenses at the moment shots rang out, leaving open questions of interpretation about what sparked the violence. In the days and months that followed two narratives emerged, strikingly different in the way they explained the cause of the massacre and the events that led up to it.

The story of how this became known as the Memorial Day Massacre is one of how the victims of police violence, with their allies in law and elected office, in the labor movement, in their communities, and in radical political organizations countered a hostile and wildly inaccurate report of details to reframe public perception and reveal a brutal display of class violence perpetrated against working people by state and capital through their agents, the police.

This much was certain: Around four o’clock in the afternoon at 117th Street the protestors encountered a line of Chicago police officers, 200 in number. By the end of the day four protestors were dead and nearly 100 hospitalized with serious injuries. Another six men would die before the week’s end. The police sustained no major injuries. Many of the 65 people they arrested were seriously wounded.

The Chicago Tribune immediately built a narrative which established the protestors as the provocateurs, justifying the police’s use of lethal violence to stop an enraged mob, led or inspired by communists, intending to invade the mill and forcibly halt production. Coroner Frank Walsh personally declared to “fix the blame” on “the mob.” His report ruled the death of the ten men as ‘justifiable homicide,’ despite the fact that the deceased’s wounds were on their backs or sides, indicating they were trying to flee, not attack, the police. Together with police testimony, forces loyal to the Republic Steel corporation engaged in Red-baiting as a means to shape public and legal perception of the incident.

Read more about the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in the following new pamphlet (PDF) by Samuel Barnett. Readers of Prison Culture are the first to access the publication (lucky you!).

If you are in Chicago this weekend, join us on Saturday from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. at UIC and listen to Sam talk a bit about this pamphlet. Details about the event are here.

Yesterday, I saw this article about the abuse of women prisoners in Oregon. Since I am currently immersed in reading about the history of women in prison, I thought that I would write something about the role that “reform” has played in the history of female prisoners.

In the mid 19th century, female reformers pushed the states to establish new facilities that would house women separately from male prisoners. These would be called “reformatories.” This proposal was in response to some of the scandals that were uncovered in the treatment of female prisoners who were housed with men in penitentiaries. I wrote about some of those scandals in a post last week. Additionally, female prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment in custodial facilities.

The new reformatories would particularly cater to young (white) first time offending women between the ages of 16 to 30 who were convicted of misdemeanors. Reformers believed that these wayward young women had the capacity to change. This was a shift from the previous societal view which held that female criminals were “fallen” women who were basically evil and irredeemable. For late 19th century prison reformers, certain female criminals could be rehabilitated into future wives and mothers. All these women needed was the proper training. Women of color, of course, were not afforded the benefit of being seen as redeemable. They were considered inherently immoral and basically beyond rehabilitation.

From the beginning, the Reformatory movement ran into trouble. States felt that these facilities were too expensive. Marie Gottschalk (2006) outlines several unintended consequences of these separate women’s prisons. Chiefly she makes this important point:

“Previously, women who committed transgressions like vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, and giving birth out of wedlock served short sentences in local jails, if they were incarcerated at all. Reformers successfully made the case that it was now acceptable to ignore the norm of proportionality because the aim was to treat offenders, not punish them (p.117).”

So what the reformatory movement actually succeeded in doing was to widen the net for incarcerating more women. Nicole Hahn Rafter (1985) suggests that “reformatories extended government control over working-class women not previously vulnerable to state punishment” and used the power of the state to “correct women for moral offenses for which adult men” were not incarcerated (p.158).

In reading about women prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I came across an interesting essay by Cheryl D. Hicks (2009) about how the state regulated working-class black women’s sexuality in Harlem at the turn of the 20th century. Many young black women were hounded and falsely charged with prostitution in Harlem. Their sexual behavior was the subject of intense surveillance by their families but also by the police. Hicks reviews prison records of young black women who were incarcerated in the Bedford reformatory in the early 20th century to learn about how these women and prison administrators described their sexual behavior. It is a really interesting read and adds a great deal to our collective understanding of how gender and race discrimination became institutionalized as justice.

I return to Marie Gottschalk (2005) to summarize the limitations of the reformatory movement:

“The reformatory movement generally took an uncritical view of the state in penal policy. It did not question the fundamentals of the prison system nor whether many of these women ought to be considered criminals at all. It authorized the state to police new areas of behavior and to sanction tougher punishments for acts that previously had been overlooked or subject to mild rebukes. It contributed to the spread of indeterminate sentencing and to erosion of the norm of proportionality in punishment. It also legitimized the practice of using institutions like reformatories to “correct” deviations from traditional roles (p.118).”

This should give current criminal legal reformers pause. We should always be vigilant that our proposed reforms do not serve to widen the net of the prison industrial complex. This should be the test of any new proposal.

Next Monday, I will be releasing to the public a set of resources about policing, violence, and resistance that me and my friends have been working on for over a year. Regular readers of Prison Culture are aware of this work since I have been previewing some of what I have learned about the history and current manifestations of oppressive policing here.

Today (as a preview of coming attractions), I am excited to share a new zine by my friend Rachel Marie-Crane Williams titled “Blue & Black: Stories of Policing and Violence.”

I’ve waxed poetic about Rachel at length here so I won’t embarrass her by gushing any further. I have already expressed my gratitude to her and she knows that I am in awe of her talent. So thank you, Rachel.

I hope that everyone reading this post will take the time to share the zine with someone else who you think should read it. For those who are in the Chicago area, we will be unveiling the zine and many other resources on Saturday May 5th at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Details of the event are here and we will have a few printed copies of the zine on hand.

I am swamped this week with work and several other projects so I will only post if there is any breaking news or if I feel an urge to rant. I hope to be back to regular posting next week.

I cannot believe that today is the 20th anniversary of the L.A. rebellion. To commemorate the incident, I am sharing this poem by one of my favorite poets Lucille Clifton. Look for this and other poems about policing, violence and resistance in the next couple of weeks in a publication that I have developed.

4/30/92
For rodney king
By Lucille Clifton

so
the body
of one black man
is rag and stone
is mud
and blood
the body of one
black man
contains no life
worth loving
so the body
of one black man
is nobody
mama
mama
mamacita
is there no value
in this skin
mama
mama
if we are nothing
why
should we spare
the neighborhood
mama
mama
who will be next and
why should we save
the pictures

A new study in the Spring 2012 issue of the Sociological Quarterly makes the connection between lynchings and recent prison admissions. The authors find that “U.S. jurisdictions with the highest lynching rates now seem to imprison more of their residents (Jacobs et. al, p.167).” They offer a number of hypotheses for this association including the political climate of the states and the racial concentration of people of color. One of the conclusions is that racial antagonism is enduring and can basically take new forms in different eras. Today’s mass incarceration “may be employed to achieve the same ends as the illicit killings used in the distant past (p.170).”

My friend Jane went to the National Archives a few days ago. She was researching something else but came across this document that lists the numbers of people lynched in America between 1900 and 1945. She kindly took a photo of the document to share with me and I decided to share the images with you. [Some may be surprised at the numbers of white people who were lynched.]

I spent over three hours yesterday afternoon facilitating a circle. I feel compelled to write about it and I have generously been given permission by the principal participants to do so here. I will use pseudonyms and won’t divulge any confidential information. I want to write about this experience because there are too few (in my opinion) first-hand accounts about circle-keeping.

Teachers are my favorite people and teaching is the most difficult profession to master. I would say this even if I weren’t an educator myself. Lately, teachers have become the whipping posts for all interests. The union-busters in state government are taking aim at long-promised pensions and are imposing a plethora of ill-conceived reforms. Parents bitch and complain while few if any offer any praise or encouragement. Many students who are suffering from the impact of neoliberal economic policies are coming to school hungry, poor, and pissed off (with good reason). With this as their backdrop, many teachers are trying to go about their daily work with hope and professionalism.

Ms. P is 30 years old and has been teaching middle-school math for 7 years. She is white, progressive and hails from Georgia. She has a masters degree in education and a huge heart. She also happens to be a friend of mine so I can personally attest to her character. Jamal just turned 14 and is very big for his age. At 6 foot 1, he towers over his peers. He is older than his 7th grade classmates because he had to repeat the 6th grade. He is new to the school this year; this is the third school that Jamal has attended in three years.

Things did not get off to a good start between Ms. P and Jamal this September. On the second day of class, he sat on his desk instead of his chair. After repeated requests that he take a seat on the chair, Ms. P sent him to the disciplinarian’s office. Jamal decided to make Ms. P public enemy #1. The situation escalated and earlier this week Jamal pushed Ms. P as she tried to get him to move when he was blocking the supply closet. He pushed her so hard that she fell and hit her head. This is cause for an immediate expulsion and even arrest. Ms. P did not want this for Jamal.

She reached out to me on Tuesday and I spent part of Wednesday speaking with her and with Jamal to see if he would consent to a peacemaking circle. He agreed to participate in large part because I think that he was afraid that Ms. P would press assault charges against him.

So we found ourselves yesterday in a neutral space sitting in circle. We began by having everyone introduce themselves by telling us one thing that we couldn’t tell about them just by looking at them. We then got right into the reason that we were all in the room by responding to the question: “What happened that brought us here?” Everyone had a chance to tell the story of what happened from their perspective. The subsequent questions were:

For Jamal: What were you thinking when you pushed Ms. P?
For Ms. P and the bystanders: What did you think when you realized what had happened?
For everyone: What has been the hardest/most difficult part of this incident for you?
For everyone: What do you think needs to happen to repair the harm that has been caused?

Needless to say, this was an extremely emotional process. Almost immediately, the tears began to flow. Jamal’s eyes were dry until he responded to the question of what he was thinking when he pushed his teacher. “I was thinking that from the first day of school,” he said, “you looked at me like you know I ain’t shit.” You could hear a pin drop after he expressed these sentiments. He had the talking piece in hand so he had the floor. He continued by telling us that he believes that Ms. P is afraid of him. “In my head, I said if she already be thinkin’ I’m a scary black man, then I’m gonna be that – a scary black man,” he continued.

When it was Ms. P’s turn to speak, she told Jamal that she was in fact afraid of him. That he had earned her fear by being disruptive and that he had confirmed her fears by pushing her. Then she stopped and took a deep breath and said something that was to my mind incredibly brave. “I have to be honest with myself though too. I was afraid of you from the start. From that first day and I can see now that I did not hide it from you at all. I am deeply sorry for that.” She went on to explain in very personal terms some of the reasons that he triggered her fears even though he had not yet done a thing. It was a powerful moment and it was a moment of deep connection between Ms. P and Jamal. As the circle proceeded, more personal stories were shared and more bridges were built.

This is the power and the value of the circle process. Do I think that Jamal won’t act out again? Of course not. Circles are not a panacea or a miracle cure. However, I think that Ms. P and Jamal now have a foundation from which to build trust and to address future infractions. During the circle, we set some rules for how we will behave with each other. We have a contract listing some expectations, responsibilities and consequences. Jamal will have to stay after school until the end of the school year to assist Ms. P with several projects and also to get extra help for his math deficiencies. I don’t know what today will bring for Ms. P and Jamal but I felt privileged to be able to support the process of repairing harm in a restorative way.

A couple of months ago, I wrote that I was going to be co-curating (with some friends) an exhibition about a history of black incarceration in the U.S. titled Black/Inside.

I haven’t had much time to think about planning the exhibition because I have been consumed with work and other projects. As I come to the end of a major project about policing and violence, I can now turn more of my attention back to Black/Inside.

Some updates on where things stand…

First, I am happy to announce that the exhibition will premiere at the African American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago in October 2012. We are designing the exhibition so that it can travel and we hope that other cultural spaces in the city will want to host the exhibition past November.

Next, I am happy to say that my friend Teresa is serving as the co-curator on this project. She was formerly a curatorial assistant at the Jane Addams Hull House museum and is just an all-round terrific human being. It’s a pleasure to be collaborating with her again. Also, I am thrilled to be working with my friend Billy who will be offering design and artistic support for the exhibition. Billy will be designing one of the interactive features of the exhibit and helping with other things too. It’s always fun working with Billy. Over the weekend, I met a new friend, Maria, who is an artist, a friend of Teresa and is also supporting this exhibition.

All of us are volunteering our time to organize Black/Inside because we strongly believe that mass incarceration is a huge waste of resources and also more importantly for us an “immoral destruction of human lives.” We also believe that there is a desperate need to engage more people in the movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex. We need to find multiple ways to capture the public’s attention and to marshal a base of people who will feel empowered to challenge this pernicious epidemic. We need to educate more people about mass incarceration in this moment but we must ground our discussions in a historical context.

Our exhibition is framed by a set of questions that were posed by Michelle Alexander when she was interviewed for a recent article in Rethinking Schools:

1. How did we get here?
2. Why is this happening?
3. How are things different in other communities?
4. How is this linked to what has gone on in prior periods of our nation’s history?
5. And what, then, can we do about it?

There are other related questions that we want to explore too; they are inspired by the late great Manning Marable:

1. Why do black people continue to be marginalized in the U.S.?
2. Who benefits from this marginalization?
3. Who is responsible for maintaining the structure of power and privilege that makes this marginalization an enduring fact of American life?

Over the next few weeks, I will periodically use this space on Prison Culture to muse out loud about various aspects of Black/Inside. For those who may want to more regularly follow the ideas that will eventually form the basis of the exhibition, I have started a Tumblr that will serve as the “container” for my musings. I have no doubt that a lot of what appears on the Tumblr won’t necessarily make it into the final exhibition. I am using the space as a kind of journal since I don’t usually know what I think about anything until I see it written down.

The bulk of the artifacts that will make up this exhibition are from my personal collection. I have not scanned the vast majority of the items that I have collected over the years. Regardless, I have started a Pinterest board that features some of the artifacts from my collection. The board will expand as I have an opportunity to scan and include more artifacts over time.

It should be an interesting next few months and I look forward to sharing some of the journey with you.

I have refrained from writing this post for almost two years but I cannot hold back any longer. Bill Clinton is without a doubt my least favorite President of the last 40 years. You read that correctly. But, but, but, what about Ronald Reagan you might ask? What about George W. Bush you might protest? Well for me, the truth is that I expect Republicans to be detrimental to people of color’s prospects. They do not pretend to be interested in our survival.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, has actively tried to ingratiate himself to black people by appropriating black culture. Think back to his appearance on Arsenio Hall, playing the Sax. Think back to his post-Presidency move to Harlem to locate his Clinton Foundation office there. Think back to the fact that we are incessantly told that Bill Clinton was the “first black” President. What a massive insult! People who speak this nonsense, say it without irony.

There are so many ways that the Clinton Presidency was toxic to black people in particular and people of color in general. I will periodically highlight some of his greatest hits against black people in the coming weeks. Today I want to focus on one piece of legislation that the U.S. Congress passed in 1994 which is still reverberating in 2012. The 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill (spearheaded by Joe Biden and Bill Clinton) cost $30 billion dollars and helped to accelerate the growth of the prison industrial complex in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. The bill’s provisions included:

1. $10.8 billion in federal matching funds to local governments to hire 100,000 new police officers over 5 years.
2. $10 billion for the construction of new federal prisons.
3. An expansion of the number of federal crimes to which the death penalty applied from two to fifty-eight (the bill also eliminated an existing statute that prohibited the execution of mentally incapacitated defendants).
4. A three strikes proposal that mandated life sentences for anyone convicted of three “violent” felonies.
5. A section that allowed children as young as thirteen to be tried as adults.
6. The creation of special courts able to deport noncitizens alleged to be “engaged in terrorist activity” on the basis of secret evidence.
7. Established guidelines for states to track sex offenders. Required states to track sex offenders by confirming their place of residence annually for ten years after their release into the community or quarterly for the rest of their lives if the sex offender was convicted of a violent sex crime. [This sex offender registry law has caused havoc in the legal system]

These are just a few of the greatest hits from the 1994 Crime Bill.

Progressives who are loudly complaining about President Obama’s record on civil liberties (which is abysmal) were overwhelmingly SILENT about Clinton’s dramatic expansion of the prison industrial complex. I remember that period of time clearly. I invite you to send me your own examples of the many ways that Bill Clinton’s presidency was destructive to people of color and I will happily post them here. I think that this is a period of history that many people either don’t know about or are willfully choosing to forget. It should NOT be forgotten since we are living with the consequences of that era today.

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: