Born Suspect

ON A COOL NIGHT in spring 2006, I knelt with a half-dozen friends on the driveway of North Carolina’s maximum-security prison. When officers came to inform us we were trespassing, we asked if they would join us in prayer against the scheduled execution of Willie Brown. Though one officer thanked us for doing what he could not, we were arrested and carried off to the county jail. Willie Brown died early the next morning.

But this isn’t an article about the death penalty.

At the county jail that evening nearly a decade ago, I was fingerprinted, strip-searched, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, and processed into the general population of an overcrowded cell block. When I walked onto the block, I was greeted almost immediately by a 20-something African-American man who asked me, “What the hell are you doing here?” As I summarized the events of the previous evening that had led to my arrest, he decided I was teachable. “You wanna know how I knew you weren’t supposed to be here?” he asked. “’Cause everybody else in here I knew before they got here. We’re all from the same hood.”

“They only kill people like us,” my teacher at the county jail told me that day. “The train that ends at death row starts here.”

A new underground railroad
Since the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray at the hands of law enforcement officers, the U.S. has begun to engage a public conversation about the ways racial profiling creates an environment where young men like my volunteer teacher are born suspect. While the NAACP has focused its organizing efforts around anti-profiling legislation, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, points out how the systemic problems exposed by police brutality against young black men grow out of the complex history of a Southern reaction against the civil rights movement, where tough-on-crime politicians called for “law and order,” a “war on drugs,” and mandatory-minimum sentences for low-level crimes. Poor black children are born suspect, Alexander argues, because they are born into a criminal caste system that has replaced the old Jim Crow laws of the segregated South.

Alexander’s analysis sounds a lot like the education I received in that county jail cell- block a decade ago. When asked where she sees hope today, Alexander points to people like my teacher: directly affected individuals who are not only fighting to survive but also organizing others to confront a broken system and build up beloved community.

She points to efforts such as the Children’s Defense Fund’s Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Campaign, a network of state-based coalitions from California to Tennessee that empowers people of color to provide preventative support—mentoring, after-school programs, and summer jobs, for example—to children growing up under the new Jim Crow. While working to build a movement that can abolish mass incarceration, the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Campaign is an underground railroad that aims to save every individual it can.

I caught up with Eric Brown, lead organizer for CDF’s campaign, at the Re-Visioning Justice in America conference this spring in Nashville, Tenn., where faith-rooted organizers from around the country came together to hear Alexander and Bryan Stevenson, author of The New York Times best seller Just Mercy. While the mostly white audience was eager to analyze the policy issues involved in changing our broken criminal justice system, Brown was more interested in telling us about the kids he knows and works with in North Nashville. We talked about Brian, a 15-year-old who Brown got to know inside the local detention center. Brian is locked up on a drug charge, but Brown wanted me to understand that there’s a story behind that charge—a story in which Brian was born suspect and brought up to expect that he would end up dead or in prison.

Brian’s story
The oldest of five children, Brian grew up in North Nashville without a father. His father was not dead but locked up on a drug charge, unable to either provide for his family or pass on to his children what he has learned about how to survive a harsh environment. Left to raise five children on her own, Brian’s mother turned to drugs as a coping mechanism when he was still young. Looking for an occasional escape, she became addicted to crack and couldn’t care for her children. Brian knew that social services would split up his family if he didn’t do something. So he got a job doing the only thing he knew. He started selling drugs in his neighborhood.

As Brown tells the story, he becomes animated, emphasizing how no one hates drugs more than Brian. “Drugs took his dad away; drugs wrecked his momma’s life. No one needs to tell Brian drugs are bad. But drugs were all this 15-year-old knew,” Brown says. “He was trying to be a provider at 15.” Brian’s family values were neither affirmed by his community nor acknowledged by the criminal justice system. Viewing his decision to sell drugs as a bad choice, our retributive justice system sought to punish and degrade him by locking him up and branding him a criminal.

To Brian, it feels like a death sentence. But this isn’t an article about the death penalty.

Brown says CDF’s Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Campaign is rooted in the Southern Freedom Movement that interrupted Jim Crow segregation in Nashville half a century ago through nonviolent direct action. This history is not hidden. I stopped by Nashville’s Public Library and climbed the stairs to its second floor civil rights room, where the rules for sit-ins are engraved on a symbolic lunch counter. In a small theater, a video tells the story of Rev. Jim Lawson, who trained Diane Nash, John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, and dozens of other civil rights leaders in the history and practice of nonviolence.

That core group of nonviolent soldiers would go on to lead the sit-in movement in Nashville and later the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which took up the Freedom Rides in 1961 and laid the groundwork for Freedom Summer in 1964. Lawson, their trainer, was an adviser and friend all along the way. Half a century later, he’s working with Brown and his colleagues, introducing them to a force more powerful than any drug or weapon.

Damien Durr, another member of CDF’s Nashville team, works in North Nashville’s public schools, mentoring young men like Brian and inviting them to join the campaign to dismantle the cradle-to-prison pipeline. As both a teacher and a local church minister, Durr sees how the institutions he represents have participated in the condemnation of these young men, conflating the labels of “sinner” and “criminal” and constructing a practical theology that pretends young people have a choice between an escapist salvation and the secular hell of prison. As a follower of the Jesus who took on human flesh and moved into the hood, Durr wants to invite young men like Brian into a new kind of community where they are embraced as beloved children of God and empowered to lead their neighbors toward a better future.

I want to know what “best practices” Brown, Durr, and their colleagues are employing in their work with youth and what kind of results they’re getting. The nonprofit I work with runs a youth mentoring program in a neighborhood like North Nashville; I think I know what I’m looking for. But Brown challenges me. “You know, we always say, ‘It takes a village,’ but I don’t think we’ve really asked ourselves what that means in places like North Nashville,” he says. “We’re not just building a program to help kids ‘succeed’ and get out of North Nashville. We want to help them imagine a good life here. Because if people can live well here, they can live well anywhere.”

Ndume’s story
Ndume Olatushani didn’t grow up in North Nashville, but the notorious Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis that he called home in the 1960s gave him plenty of experience to understand what young people born suspect face today. Though he knew the love of a mother who raised 11 children against great odds, Olatushani felt the economic injustice his mother faced and decided to try to even the score. He admits he got involved in breaking and entering. But after being labeled a criminal by St. Louis police, Olatushani was targeted as a murder suspect in a hard-to-solve Memphis case tied to St. Louis only by a stolen car. Though Olatushani had never been to Tennessee before his arrest, he was convicted in a Memphis court and sentenced to Tennessee’s death row.

But, again, this isn’t a story about the death penalty.

While Olatushani was in prison, his mother died, and he nearly lost all hope. But after a vision in which his mother came to him and said, “Get up,” this man born suspect and condemned to die discovered a new imagination through art. “There’s a lot of things we should be angry about,” Olatushani says. “But you have to learn what to do with your anger. Painting helped me to learn that.” Painting also helped Olatushani build community.

While still on death row, he met Anne-Marie Moyes, a volunteer who was coordinating an art show for prisoners. Captivated by Olatushani, Moyes became interested in his case, eventually going to law school in order to fight for his release. Though the fight took more than two decades and help from an even wider community, Olatushani walked out of prison in 2012, married Moyes, and joined CDF’s Nashville team.

After sharing his story at a conference session, Olatushani is excited to show me the art project he’s been working on with some of Durr’s students in North Nashville. It is a row of wooden school desks, painted with facts and statistics about mass incarceration in the U.S. On one end of the row, there is a cradle. Chairs that were made so that students could sit in them and study were filled instead with orange jumpsuits. One of them is stuffed with cash, flowing out of the hole were a head should be. A Bible is open on the desk, but it has handcuffs holding its pages down. On the far end, where this representation of the cradle-to-prison pipeline ends, a desk sits as a memorial to George Stinney Jr., who was executed in South Carolina’s electric chair in 1944 at the age of 14. Olatushani tells me that the jumpsuit in that chair is the one Olatushani wore the day he came home from death row.

He has a lot of things to be angry about, but Olatushani speaks with moral authority about the power of art to interrupt us. This isn’t just any art teacher working with inner city kids. Born suspect like them, he has faced the worst of what they must face and has seen the power of a loving community to overcome the power of death. Who better to help the young people of North Nashville imagine a better future for us all?

‘Where do you see hope in all this?’
Before heading home, I left the CDF team to talk to a group of Episcopalians about prayer and the pursuit of justice. It’s an all-white crowd, and we’re a world away from North Nashville, but these are my people, and we need a better future too. I tell them about that day a decade ago when a guy at the county jail introduced me to the cradle-to-prison pipeline, and we talk for an hour about the complexities of what it will take to dismantle a system in which some people profit from condemning, caging, and even killing others.

When an older gentleman asks where I see hope in all of this, I tell him about Brown and Durr and Olatushani; I tell him about the young people who made the art installation. I tell him that white folks like him and me aren’t going to fix this problem, but that we can learn to support work such as the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Campaign, just as white folks supported the black-led civil rights movement with their money, their time, and their lives. I tell him that I think this is what the scriptures mean when they say “the stone that the builder rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”

Jesus was condemned to die and ultimately executed, but his isn’t a story about the death penalty. It’s a story about how God interrupts us, making a new world possible. It’s a story about how those who’ve been condemned can show us all what it means to live for change.