For March 14, 2022
Interlude
March 16, 1870 – Hiram Rhodes Revels, first Black federal legislator, gives his first speech on the floor of the senate, advocating the admission of 29 Black Georgia state legislators to the Georgia legislature.
Like to the Rushing of a Mighty Wind, by Tracy K. Smith. A found poem based on the language from Revels’ speech. “If our dead could speak,/ what a voice, like to the rushing / of a mighty wind, would come up/ from the ground.”
September 15, 1883. Ida B. Wells has paid for a first-class train ticket from Memphis to Woodstock, TN, but is kicked off the train when she refuses to sit in the front car with poor Blacks. She sues, wins at first, but the TN Supreme Court overturns the ruling.
no car for colored [+] ladies (or, miss wells goes off [on] the rails). By Evie Shockley. A poem about this event that argues that Wells became a hero not when she put on a fancy dress and bought a ticket for the ladies’ car, but when she “addresses what befits a lady who pays / to ride first class / (to drift into anywhich seat she selects)/ she’s becoming one” and “she’ll / pull these threads / until the whole threadbare lie of lynching unravels” — which is a nice tribute to Ida B. Wells’ decades of tireless antilynching activism.
Chapter 10: Punishment, by Bryan Stevenson
Stevenson begins his chapter with an example of Matthew, whose case his organization, the Equal Justice Initative (EJI) took on, as a an example of the “particularly punitive nature of the American legal system” with its #1 rate of incarceration in the world, due to the 1980s ramp-up (see Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow). The racial disparities in the systems are well-documented but still mind-blowing. The reason the EJI started focusing on kids sentences as adults, like Matthew, is that this is an area where the inequities are especially start–case in point: in 2008, ALL 13- and 14-yo sentenced to life without parole for non-homicides were Black, Latino, or Native American. Matthew was one of these (one of 62 in Louisiana, of whom 89% were Black), imprisoned for 40 years (and eventually freed b/c of EJI work–this is mentioned at the very end). Even after the Supreme Court decided that this was cruel and unusual and granted the possibility of parole in these cases, parole boards had broad discretion and prisoners have no right to counsel, so the EJI took on many of these cases.
Stevenson then sums up how the history of this harsh system of punishment directly ties back to the beginnings of slavery in the 17th century, with enslaved people considered to be serving “for life” and being subject to extremely cruel punishment, with this concept then expanded to free Black people and to denying “the humanity of Black people while criminalizing their actions.” And that the 13th Amendment, with its exemptions for peonage / enslavement as punishment for crimes, fit right into that, making Blacks post-Emancipation seen as not fully human because they were “criminals”. Like Alexander, he tracks how the criminal justice system was used to impose “new strategies of racial control” even before Reconstruction ended — convict leasing, mob violence and lynching (Mary Turner is mentioned, p.280–the EJI has a very good website on the history of lynching that I have used in the past), as well as other cases, and then the Montgomery bus boycott, “broken windows” policing in the 1970s and 1980s, with “New language … for the non-crimes that have replaced the Black codes: driving while Black, sleeping while Black, sitting in a coffee shop while Black.” And all of it without any attempt at reckoning and reconciliation (the German example of Holocaust / Vergangenheitsarbeit is brought up again as a contrast), which led Stevenson and the EJI to found the legacy museum and Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL. We have to make “a commitment to truth and justice” and there is lots of work to be done.