Last Week's activity

I've sent this note to folks in the reading group.  What's particularly useful here are the links.  The internet is a wonderful thing!  Finding Ed Bradley's 1992 60 Minutes segment on Walter MacMillan was beautiful.

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Greetings - 

These were areas we said we might think about as we finish up our read of Just Mercy.

- The importance of building trust with the Black communities.  Are there other examples of Stevenson's work where he continues to comment on this?  Are there other examples of where Stevenson continues to emphasize the importance of trust in keeping Black communities feeling safer in an atmosphere of domestic terror?

- Other examples of "bits of hope"?

- Does he come back to the transcendent idea of hope as "an orientation of the spirit"?  Where, in what context, how?

- Can you find other examples of "coded" language?  For example, "the community" meaning in reality the Black community, and "we" meaning, well, us Whites.

- Re-reading the section on Ed Bradley's 60 Minutes visit to Monroe County and seeing if we can deconstruct more diligently the effect that event had on all the communities involved.  You can view this segment of 60 minutes, Fall 1992, below.

I've also included Fran Carlson's reply regarding current plans of the St. Paul's LOC with regard to prison reform.  Note the Action they are planning.  Some of us might consider attending their LOC meeting on October 11.

See you next Tuesday!

Charlie

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Here are some references you might find interesting.  BTW,  Chapman is chilling on the Ed Bradley interview.

https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice

Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice www.ted.com In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shzMjyuijRU

Walter McMillian on 60 Minutes - YouTube www.youtube.com

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/03/us/alabama-releases-man-held-on-death-row-for-six-years.html?pagewanted=all

Alabama Releases Man Held On Death Row for Six Years - NYTimes.com www.nytimes.com Walter McMillian walked out of a courtroom here today a free man after prosecutors conceded that he had spent six years on Alabama's Death Row because of perjured testimony and evidence withheld from his lawyers. Whether he was also put there for being a black man who violated the racial and sexual taboos of the small-town South is only one of the issues swirling around a case that has evoked not only distinctly Southern but also far broader questions of race and justice.

This guy is pretty good looking!  Another inspired speaker, just like Stevenson.

https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_foss_a_prosecutor_s_vision_for_a_better_justice_system

Adam Foss: A prosecutor's vision for a better justice system | TED Talk | TED.com www.ted.com When a kid commits a crime, the US justice system has a choice: prosecute to the full extent of the law, or take a step back and ask if saddling young people with criminal records is the right thing to do every time. In this searching talk, Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office in Boston, makes his case for a reformed justice system that replaces wrath with opportunity, changing people's lives for the better instead of ruining them.

St. Paul's LOC  activity

Is the Cathedral LOC still actively involved with prison reform work?

Yes.

If so, how active is the group now?

Active

Is the activity focused?

We are planning a business/ex-offender forum to take on the issue of ex-offenders having a hard time getting jobs after release.  We had originally planned it for Oct. but our day was an important Jewish holiday, so we are now focusing on Nov.  We had had a traditional action a year or so ago and this is a different format.  We are not trying to get a huge audience because we want a dialogue and conversation, but it would be fine for CCP people to come.  No date is set yet.  Our next LOC meeting is Oct. 11 at 5:15.  You'll welcome to come.

Prompts for Second Session

Prompts for Second Session

1.  I was struck particularly by Stevenson’s noting several times, the effect arrests and murders have on the surrounding community (112).  I mean I get it, but in my White mind, bad things happen.  People are picked up by the police, jailed, and adjudicated.  In my White world this seems to happen as it should.  

Not so with the Black lives in Stevenson’s world, both his world as a writer and his world as a Black man.  The effects of domestic terrorism by the Klan during the Jim Crow years, manifested by public lynchings and other forms of night-riding murder must be replicating itself through Black neighborhoods today.  remember Emmet Till?  What do you think about the rise in police murders and the overflowing numbers of Black Americans filling our jails as being nothing more than a third wave of determined oppression of Black America, eased and focused by Supreme Court rulings that make it all okay? 

2.  How is it possible that in America, we can have stories like those of Ian (152), Trina (148), George (157), and Antonio (154)?  Would our founding fathers have been similarly shocked as we have in reading of their occurrence?  What are your thoughts about the idea that the 3/5 clause of exclusion in our Constitution creates a loophole in our fundamental consciousness as a people that allows an “out” for the “inalienable rights” each one of us is to constitutionally enjoy as an American?  Perhaps our Constitution is the cause of these horrible things our majorities do to our minorities?

3. Ian writes a letter to Bryan after the report on the plight of children in the United States was published.  He writes the photos and the photo shoot “were a welcome addition to my sensory deprived life.”  Do you have family photographs that raise such emotions in you?  What do the photographs connect to in your psyche that engender feelings similar to those of Ian?  Do you suppose that this is one way Ian is us and we are him?

Session One: How short the generations

I can't shake the realization that Stevenson's grandmother, the person who said to him, "You can't understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan.  You have to get close. (14)" was known so well by him and that her parents were captives of the slave-based economy.   The fact that he mentions her again and again shows the impact she had on his life and the way in which stories move down through families.  I barely knew one grandparent and have no memories of  my other grandparents.  I have no family history, really, besides that which my brother - the family historian - has documented.  He being 6 years older than I has those memories.

I contrast this with the fact that family stories from the time of slavery and Jim Crow must hold great currency in African-American families in America today.  They live with this history in a way I do not.  We certainly didn't sit around talking about the ways we'd oppressed Black Folk in this country.  I do remember my Dad referring to the men who waited on him at the Union League Club in NYC as the "boys," men in the fifties and sixties I'm sure.  And he did it as a matter of course, not meaning to be derisive.  It was just the way things were.

No wonder W.E.B. DuBois referred to the double consciousness Black Americans needed to survive when he wrote Souls Of The Black Folk in 1903, the year my Dad was born.  Without it, you could die rapidly, not grasping how the Whites that surrounded you, perceived you.  For me, living freely in the dominant culture, I was safe.  It didn't make any difference.  And that's the way I was raised.

What Grandma said to Bryan was part of his education to stay alive.  I also wonder if it is part of his belief that "it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace".  I know I do.  And I believe without ongoing direct (close) dialogue with Black Americans,  I'll never get there.

Shouldn't we stop reading books and start talking across racial lines?

Introduction to Blog

Montgomery Alabama 1965

A small group at CCP is reading and discussing Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy.  I thought I would create a blog to facilitate commentary and discussion of the readings.  This is a book that seems to have struck deeply into our sense of social justice, what place mass incarceration has in America, the continuing havoc latent and overt racism continues to have upon us all, and the effect of our contemporary political landscape on our sensibilities to understand, empathize with, and get along with one another.

I hope members of the group (you) will join in and enrich our discussion by asking questions, offering comments, sharing thoughts that percolated to the surface in the hours after our meetings.  I've offered a comment for session one and hope I can entice you to offering a response or your own comment.

Thanks,
CR



Here's two links to Bryan Stevenson:  TED Talk and PBS extended interview.

And one to The Davis Sisters Singing  "Plant My Feet On Higher Ground"