We had 300,000 in jails and prisons. Now we have 2.3 million.
Percentage of women going to prison has increased 646%.
Bureau of Justice now predicts that 1 in 3 black male babies are expected to go to prison.
How do we respond? How do we create justice?
I believe to be an effective leader, we have to get proximate to the people that are suffering.
Often solutions don’t work because the people that are working to solve them are so far from the problem. It’s in proximity that we find the answers. We have to be willing to get closer to the parts of our community that have suffering.
My grandmother was the end of every argument in our family growing up. “Do you still feel me hugging you? I’m always going to be hugging you.”
Leadership requires that the people that we are serving feels like we are with them.
Went to high school because some lawyers got close to poor black kids and fought to allow them into the public schools. I went to Eastern University. I love college. I want to spend the rest of my life in college.
I ended up at Harvard Law School. I started rationalizing a career that I knew would be unfulfilling.
13 states that have no minimum age for trying children as adults.
Story of young boy who thought his mom was killed and shot and killed his mom’s boyfriend, a deputy sheriff.
Who is responsible for this? We are. We have gotten distant from the neediest. Leadership requires that we not run away from the problems. We have to get closer to the problems.
We have to change the narratives that sustain the problems we are trying to address.
The war on drugs has created criminals. We could have dealt with it through medical care. We were being led by the politics of fear and anger. If you allow yourself to be led by fear and anger, you can create dangerous narratives.
We are so burdened by our history that we cannot talk about race issues in America. The problem with slavery was the narrative we used to create racial differences. Slavery did not end in 1865. It just evolved. We lived through lynching and terrorism. We grew up with terror. The people of Cleveland and Detroit and Chicago went to those cities not as immigrants but as refugees.
If you go to Rwanda, they will force you to listen to the story of genocide. If you go to Germany, they will make you listen to the horror of the Holocaust. We aren’t comfortable talking about it in America.
It can liberate us. There has to be repentance before redemption.
We have to understand the narratives to the problems we see.
We have to stay hopeful. Hopefulness is essential for effective leadership.
Hopelessness is the enemy of justice. Hope is what gets you to stand up when others say sit down. Hope is what makes you speak up when others are saying to stay silent.
You’re either hopeful or you’re part of the problem. There are either hopeful leaders or people in leadership positions that are causing the problem.
Johnnie Carr – Montgomery bus boycott organizer – conversation between Ms Carr, Rosa Parks, Ms Durmond talking about not what they’ve done, but rather what they were going to do.
It takes courage to stay hopeful in the face of daunting situations.
We have to be willing to do uncomfortable things. We have to choose to do something uncomfortable.
Sometimes you have to position yourself in uncomfortable places and be a faithful witness.
Man who was set to be executed. He was intellectually disabled. He tried to stop execution. Trial court, state court, appeals court, Supreme Court all denied the stay of execution. “I love you for trying to save me life.”
Why do we want to kill all the broken people? I represent broken people. I work in a broken system. I do what I do because I’m broken too.
In brokenness that we understand true leadership. It’s the broken that understand mercy. In brokenness, we begin to transcend.
We are more than just the worst thing we’ve done. I don’t believe that the opposite of poverty is wealth; it’s justice.
Our communities cannot be judged by how we treat the rich and the powerful, it’s how we treat the poor and broken.
Don’t think your grades are a measure of your capacity to lead. Don’t think your income is a measure of your capacity to lead.
Keep beating the drum for justice.
You see these scars, bruises. I got them trying to register people to vote. These are my medals of honor.
If we get proximite, if we change the narrative, if we stay hopeful, if we get uncomfortable, real change can happen.