Earning Freedom In Every Generation, Keynote Address, Black History Month, Calhoun College/Yale University
Members of faculty, trustees, students, and honored guests. It is an honor and a privilege to be here today. Thank you also to Professor Jonathan Holloway and Ms. Joanna Gorman for making this Howard girl feel at home here at Yale. Thank you so much for inviting me to join your celebration of Black History Month here at
Tonight, I would like to begin by remembering three giants of history who we lost this past year: Ms. Rosa Parks, Judge Constance Baker Motley, and Coretta Scott King. We owe them all an enormous debt of gratitude, and I know their memory will humble and inspire us to continue their work.
Coretta Scott King once said, “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”
That is so true. Torchbearers like Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks accomplished so much with their work, but they also realized that we will always face forces that the importance of civil rights. And we will continually need to renew the struggle for freedom and justice. So, tonight let’s consider: What is the facing us as the defining struggle of the 21st century?
From my standpoint as a law enforcement official, I suggest that the defining struggle in the 21st century will be the reform of our criminal justice system.
This struggle is important because of the widespread inequality in the criminal justice system, especially as it affects AA’s. It is also important because I believe reforming the system to create proactive, progressive law enforcement effort can be a legitimate and powerful tool to protect our civil rights.
I would like to offer some thoughts about the choices and challenges we face in reforming the system, and the opportunities that I believe are emerging to create a new model of law enforcement. A progressive model that will protect our civil rights. I believe we should draw inspiration from a prior generation of AA civil rights leaders who struggled to reform the justice system and, at the same time, used the law to protect civil rights. And, ultimately, there is a role for all of us in this struggle—all the exciting young people I’ve met here over the last couple of days.
Let me begin by discussing the false choices we are often presented in our dialogue about safety and civil rights. By false choices, I mean incorrectly telling us we have to sacrifice one right or to protect another.
For instance, on a national level, we are being told that we have to compromise the central principles of our justice system in order to be kept safe. We’re being told to compromise the right to counsel and the right to confront the charges against someone who is being held. We are told to compromise due process and judicial supervision over the use of wiretaps. If we question these practices, we risk being labeled unpatriotic. I believe that the proudest and noblest traditions of our country, and the history of the AA experience, require us to reject these false choices. That is real patriotism.
At a local level, similar false choices are being presented. Low income communities and people of color are being presented told to choose between their safety and their civil rights.
I became a prosecutor because I believe we should not have to choose between enjoying civil rights or having safe communities. Since the time I marched in demonstrations through the streets of
Today, it is important to reject false choices and to reform the criminal justice system, thereby making a big impact on the struggle for civil rights.
As many of you know, many of our biggest challenges to social justice are tied to the CJ system.
At every phase of the system, there is profound inequality, and the impact on the AA community has been enormous.
In this country, we currently have over 2 million people in jail.
That means, if you emptied all the jails and prisons tomorrow, we’d fill a nation larger than
Of these 2 million people, at least 40% are AA’s.
And, on top of that, because of a felony conviction, over 15% of AA men are barred from voting.
And, predictably, racial disparities exist at every phase of the system, for juveniles and adults.
In fact, AA’s are more likely to get arrested, more likely to be convicted, more likely to serve longer sentences, more likely to have their probation or parole revoked, and more likely to be sentenced to die.
And if you walk down any city street, or into any emergency room, and you can see inequality in who the victims of crime are.
Nationwide, homicide is the second-leading cause of death for young black men.
In my city,
Across the nation, a generation of young AA men is wiping itself out.
And, as AA communities suffer under the weight of this violence, they also feel abandoned by law enforcement and government.
AA can often recall a long history of bad experiences with law enforcement, which results in a lack of trust with law enforcement.
And the lack of trust is crippling the ability to enforce the most basic laws, like the laws against violent crime. In fact, there is a growing trend that witnesses to even violent crime will not come forward.
Take, for example, the “Stop Snitching” phenomenon.
Many of you know about the “Stop Snitching” DVD. It was an underground hit across the country. A rapper waved a gun and threatened anyone who would testify against his crew in crime-plagued
In
So, we face some enormous challenges that deeply affect our civil rights and the quality of life in our community. Certainly, in light of the passing of torchbearers in the struggle for civil rights, some might find this outlook bleak.
But I am encouraged and hopeful because they left us a model for reform from the generation that has recently passed. They left a model both in the goals they fought for and how we get there.
They taught us to be proactive and progressive and to use the law to achieve civil rights and equality.
So, in reflecting on that history and our inheritance, I would like to talk how we can use this model to address some of the enormous challenges presented by the CJ system.
And we should be inspired to use it now because it’s been proven to work in reforming an unjust system.
Let’s remember that, as early as the 1700’s, there was a system of laws that was used to oppress AA’s in this country.
It was “slave codes” that were the law of the land.
Part of the early history of the AA experience, when an AA man spoke out of turn or even looked at a white woman, it was the duty of white men to punish him.
Can you imagine: if an elderly or disabled AA man used a cane, he would be lynched for the offense of trying to walk like a Southern gentleman.
After Reconstruction, Jim Crow Laws grew out of the “slave codes,” at which point the offenses were considered crimes, which caused thousands of AA’s to be lynched, up until 1968.
As early as 1892, a group of progressives organized to challenge the segregation laws. Homer Plessy sat in the white section of a train and refused to move. He was jailed and convicted. Homer Plessy and his supported challenged the legality of his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. It resulted in the despicable Plessy versus
The strategy of using the law evolved into the establishment of new rights and a call for proactive law enforcement to enforce those rights.
In 1957, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and in 1964, the Voting Rights Act was passed. The U.S. DOJ established its Civil Rights Division to enforce these new rights.
What did that Division do? Its 10 lawyers went door-to-door in segregated towns to investigate and prosecute violations of these great civil rights laws.
And, the civil rights struggle, thus, came to embrace the proactive use of law enforcement to protect our rights.
And, today, just like the original Civil Rights Division, we must be supportive of systems dedicated to protecting our civil rights and our most vulnerable communities.
And it means that we should hold accountable those who victimize our community through predatory business practices, fraudulent schemes, and environmental pollution in our poorest neighborhoods.
It means we should require strict enforcement of hate crime statutes.
And equally, as prosecutors, we must also be vigorous in our protection of due process and civil liberties.
And to do this will require confronting and correcting racially imbalanced outcomes in the criminal justice system.
It’s not going to be as simple as believing the problem is that the system is being run by a bunch of racists—like Bull Connor and Governor Wallace.
We should be prepared to study systematically study and correct disproportionate outcomes in CJ systems as a whole.
And this has to be done while continuing to protect public safety.
Unlike other areas of discrimination, like education, housing or employment, access ain’t the problem.
Many individuals in the criminal justice system have in fact committed crimes, some of them very serious crimes. So, we aren’t going to address disproportionality by opening up the jail house doors. And the goal of equality cannot be at the expense of requiring individual accountability.
If our challenge is to create a just justice system, a system that Americans of all races can have confidence in, we have to take on this issue.
You might be wondering: What can I do about this? Remember, it wasn’t just a group of lawyers that changed the world. It was patriots from all walks of life who marched and sang and preached and sat down and stood up. (By the way, if it had been just lawyers, we’d be in pretty bad shape.)
What can you—the new generation—do?
You can help keep kids out of the system.
You can work with former offenders who are reentering the community.
If we want to break the cycle of incarceration that causes so much despair in our community, we must make a serious investment in restoring former offenders and their families to be full participants in our community.
Think for a moment about the reality of what happens when someone returns from prison.
They’re given a Greyhound ticket and a little cash. They are usually homeless when they get back to their community.
Any job they used to have is long gone, and their felony conviction bars getting a new job.
Predictably, the vast majority of them will go right back into the system. When they do, there is a real, personal cost in the AA community. First and foremost, the victims of violent crime suffer. AA neighborhoods and families suffer. The offender also harms his own family—when parents are locked up, and children end up in the foster care system.
So, we need to invest serious attention and energy in what is being called Reentry—helping exiting offenders reengage with their families and be restored as full members of the community.
Teach them to read. It was the most radical act centuries ago for AA’s to learn to read. GED’s and literacy open the door to the mainstream economy and bring former offenders out of the shadows.
Support daycare and preschool. Women who are reentering need help with their kids, so they can hold down jobs and go to school.
We must re-engage politically. This year was a genuine turning point for AA’s. The torchbearers of the movement—Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King and Constance Baker Motley, the first black women to be a federal judge—we no longer have them with us.
But we have their wisdom, and we stand in their shadows, confident that they overcame much greater odds with much less than what we have at our disposal. We must keep doing their work because the struggle never ends, as Coretta Scott King said, we must continue the struggle and earn justice and freedom for this generation.