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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2004Lead article‘We can come together to end police corruption’The Chicago News and Letters Committee recently held a forum: “What Next for the Movement Against Police Torture and Wrongful Convictions.” It brought together three activists against wrongful convictions in Chicago: Gerard Emmett writes for NEWS & LETTERS and organizes against the criminal injustice system; Mildred Henry is a member of Enough Is Enough!, a group devoted to freeing the wrongly convicted, and is the mother of Kilroy Watkins now at Danville Correctional Center; and Mary L. Johnson has spent a lifetime fighting police corruption in Chicago and is the mother of Michael Johnson currently incarcerated at Tamms Correctional Center. Remarks by all three, edited for publication, are here. More of Mildred Henry’s presentation appeared in “Black/Red View” in the June N&L. --Editor * * * Gerard Emmett This is a hugely important moment for this movement against police torture if you think about the impasse that the anti-Iraq war movement found itself in a little while ago. There had been huge demonstrations with tens of millions of people demonstrating all over the world in unison. It was unprecedented. Yet it looked like Bush was getting away with his Iraq war, right up until the moment when the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad burst upon the world. That was, not coincidently, the moment when Bush’s popularity took a nosedive, and not coincidently, the moment when a lot of the popular media turned against the war in a bigger way. It shined a light back onto corruptions in this society. It’s very easy to debate in an abstract way about what happens in another country, but when the spotlight is shined on what really happens here, the torture, the racism that goes on in this country, it’s a lot harder for the rulers to deal with. If Bush doesn’t end up being re-elected president, I’m going to say that will be the reason, the disgust over that more than any other single factor. It should also tell people who are part of the anti-war movement why they need to focus on a movement like this one here against police abuses, why they need to look at it in a different way than before, why they have to forge links with people who are struggling against police torture in the prison system here. The killing of May Molina by the Chicago Police Department on May 26 is an incredibly significant event. I don’t think you can understand how significant it is unless you see it in a historical perspective. The closest thing that I would compare it to is the deaths in 1969 of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. There are a lot of similarities. They are people who were confronting the Police Department directly, who were killed by the police. In the case of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the police put out a story saying, “Well, look at these bullet holes in the wall. We were justified in firing and pouring the fire-power on these guys because they shot at us first.” Some seriously intrepid reporter went to look at the wall and they turned out to be nail holes. The incident was exposed as a police murder. That reverberated through the politics of Chicago for decades. It’s no coincidence that when there was a big electoral movement in the 1980s with Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson they appropriated the term “Rainbow Coalition.” That term came from Fred Hampton originally in the Black Panther Party. That was the kind of thing he was killed for. When May Molina died, the papers were filled with reports of “80 bags of heroin were found” on her. All I heard from the right-wing talk shows was ”Why should we be concerned about this drug dealer?” You didn’t hear very much of the follow-up to that: They analyzed these “80 bags of heroin” and they turned out to be supplies to make candles. The parallel is very clear. People in the media are not necessarily aware of this. At the press conference put on by May’s family, some activists and all the reporters wanted to ask was, “What about the drugs?” These same reporters need to realize that they’ve been lied to. That was their “weapons of mass destruction.” We must make sure they can’t get off the hook for it. These cases are pushing the torture cases of former Police Commander Jon Burge, former detective Kenneth Boudreau, and detective Reynaldo Guevarra into the open. * * * Mildred Henry This is a power struggle for greed and power, and they’ve got us divided. A lady spoke on TV about what happened to the late Emmett Till who was lynched in 1955. She said her father, a Black man, told her about it. They asked her, “Why didn’t you say something? Do you believe there was a Black man mixed up in his murder?” She said, “I know for a fact there was.” He watched as Emmett Till was murdered. He took it for a prank at first. They didn’t know that they were going to end up shooting and drowning this young boy. Then they asked, “Why do you come forward only now?” She stated because that’s the way it was back then. The way I see it, that’s the way it was back then, but it doesn’t mean that’s the way it has to be today. We can come together. My son Kilroy ran into a little problem in the institution he was in. He said, “I was standing in the cell door and I asked a guard if I could make a phone call.” Without telling him to step back, the guard slammed it on his arm. I will be filing a grievance. He doesn’t know what was going to happen to him because he’s in the middle of a transfer, which hasn’t gone through because of the budget. I became nervous and called Ms. Johnson and all over Chicago, saying “They’re trying to hurt my son because I’m out here doing public speaking.” But I know, if I don’t do it, no one else will, nor would they understand. No one here knows that child like I do, or can speak of him like I can. We’re all humans and we make mistakes, but they have set up a prison that is holding them, stripping them from their lives for 30 to 50 years. You are arresting them as young, Black males and Latinos between 19 and 21; you give them sentences of 30 to 50 years; what can they come out here and possibly do? All I ask is that we somehow try to get together, in unity and in strength. Take away the color; do whatever we have to do; just go out here and strip these people of their power. Mayor Daley is Jon Burge’s power. People in Chicago read about it, they see about it; yet, nothing has been done. That’s the way it was back then, but that doesn’t have to be the way it is now. We can bring this man down. * * * Mary L. Johnson I’ve been out here talking about police brutality since 1970. That’s when I first complained. There was a time I thought it was wrong, the way people were treated by people in authority, but somehow I had been conditioned to feel that they must have done something wrong. That’s the trick. Who could blame Santa Claus if he put sand in your eyes; you had no business being awake. But when it happens to someone you know, someone you care about, someone in your family, it’s a whole new ballgame. You know that this person may not be perfect, but he doesn’t deserve to be treated less than human. This is what I woke up to. When it happened to my son the first time, when he was brutalized by the police, I ran as fast as I could to the police to tell them. I thought they’d care because my son had done nothing wrong. But after I went to them and complained, they targeted my whole family. I went to all the organizations that I had contributed my little spare time to, marching. I felt sorry for Black people in the South. They couldn’t ride the bus with whites, couldn’t drink out of the water fountains. I thought it was a shame; I thought they all should move to Chicago. I was secure in my community, because we had doctors, lawyers, politicians. We could identify with Black people. There was no status code then. Well, there’s not now, but some of them think there is. And that’s the sad part. They had gotten to the position where they don’t even consider themselves one of us anymore. I went to people of color in the organizations. They looked at me as if to say, “You’re complaining? He’s still living! All they did was beat him? That’s part of being Black. Where do you think you are? You’re living in America.” After I got over the pain and the anguish, I started going out and getting with people who had some understanding of what I was talking about. It was very often a small group. When I said what had happened to me and my family, they were looking and I could see that they were understanding that this does happen. It wasn’t like the people of color I had gone to. When I started to read my history, which was something that I didn’t get in school, I started to identify with the plight of all people. I learned that over the years there were people who were fighting, who had gone through all kinds of suffering and pain. Very often I heard people of color say, “I see you you’re with somebody white.” I say, “Harriet Tubman was a smart woman, but in the Underground Railroad were white people who were conscious of what was going on.” It was a white woman who told her, “Whenever you get ready to stand up, get in touch with me. I’ll do all I can to help you.” So I got the same mind she had. I don’t care what color the hand is. When it reaches for me, I’m grabbing it because if I wait around going by the color of people, I’ll do the same thing that they’re doing to us—stereotyping, assuming. . . . I was so helpless with my son’s case. Who would want to believe that they would give somebody a life sentence after he refused to take a three-year plea bargain? Who would think that they would actually do this? They do it all the time, but people don’t talk about it. They’re ashamed. They tell their children, “I did the best I could and that’s all I can do.” It’s not all we can do, but that’s the way we’re made to feel–like we’re just hopeless and helpless. So I got the idea: Let me join the coalition. That’s when I started going to Death Row. I started visiting guys who were helpless and hopeless. They were bitter. They were angry. But I started going in and they started feeling comfortable with me. They said they were used to people coming and looking at them like they were animals, like they were visiting a zoo: they were making a study of Black people; they were doing a dissertation about urban living; they study law and this is one of their assignments. They were tired of being used so people could make their Ph.Ds. In talking with these men, I learned that many of their stories were similar to mine; and they were waiting on a death day. One guy said, “The only reason why I signed a confession was they forced me.” Like him, they showed my son a statement and told him that if he didn’t sign the confession that they would go on my job and drag me out handcuffed. They couldn’t beat him enough to make him say anything, but they knew that if they said they were going to get his mother, that would do it. He was going to sign the confession, but the lawyer told me that she was going to be with him when he signed. So I told her, “You tell him that if he signs anything, he done already destroyed me ’cause he done took every reason for me to fight away.” I said, “Don’t sign nothin’!” I know that if he had signed that confession, he would have been executed because I do know people who were executed after they signed and plea bargain. I told myself to get the best attorney in Chicago. I went to Eugene Pincham, but he was too busy. He referred me to one of his partners, Ed Jensen, one of the best attorneys in Chicago. But the first day I missed court, he told my son to plea bargain in spite of the fact that he didn’t do it. “Your poor mother’s working so hard,” he said, making him feel guilty because I was working. But he didn’t give me back any of my money. He just settled the case like that. . . . Very often I talk to people to whom it hasn’t happened, people in universities, schools and churches. I tell them, when they show you someone’s picture on television, if you could see that person as garbage, less than human, you’ll think he deserves whatever we do to him. If you could take that color off his face and identify with him, he’s a human being. We got the attention from going all over to places people had never heard of someone talking about people in jail before. Maybe two or three people out of the crowd would come up after we talked and wanted to know what they can do. I would tell them, “You might not ever go into the penitentiary like I do. You might never get out on the street and protest. But you can write a thing as small as a letter and it will have an impression on those politicians.” That’s because the only thing they want to do is keep their positions. We got so many people that we thought, “They’re trying to help us.” For a lot of them, this is the way they make their living. Crime pays. It pays big, to the point where it has started to pay even the people out here who are supposed to be struggling. I have been in a group without anyone working in the beginning. When they started getting staff, they started mistreating me. I tell the guys when I go back into the jails, “You can’t expect for other people to have the same kind of mind and heart that I have.” I’m not a volunteer. I was drafted. When they got my son, they got me. We got a permanent relationship. I’m going to be there, fighting as long as I can. . . . When Death Row sentences were commuted by then-Gov. Ryan, it promoted some people’s careers. They are more famous now than ever, but the man who really should be in the history books, when they talk about abolition of the death penalty, is attorney Dan Sanders. When the coalition had a big meeting and said it’s too late to do anything for Death Row inmate Anthony Porter, I went downtown to Dan Sander’s office. The information on Anthony Porter’s case pointed to his innocence. After reading the transcripts, he said, “There’s one technical thing that was never brought up. And if we can stop that execution, it might be enough to save his life, and that’s that they never brought up that his IQ was only 51.” And that’s what we went to work on. Two days before he was to be executed I was at his cell with him, crying. He said, “Sister, I could understand if I had done this. But how can they kill me for something I didn’t do?” I said, “We’re still fighting. Don’t give up.” On the way home from that visit, a guy came out of the gas station and said, “Anthony Porter got a stay of execution.” It was because Dan Sanders didn’t know that you could just take people’s money and do nothing. He went against the norm. He made all those judges, who said it was all right to kill this man, look wrong. He made all these attorneys, who had worked on Porter’s case, appear incompetent. It brought the case to the attention of the governor and everybody else that had heard people talk about it, and people started getting involved; and all of a sudden they said, “We’re killing innocent people.” . . . Until we can stand up for the incarcerated person and until we can stand up for his rights, we’re going to jeopardize everybody’s. There are some people in jail that I used to bypass in their cells because they looked so wild. But when they saw that I really cared, they changed. You can’t make excuses for people, but sometimes, if you really understood what has happened to them, it would change the way you feel about them. We have to keep talking. You can get people to have, not sympathy for you because you have just a sad, sorry story, but empathy. How would you feel if it were your son? Get people to write letters that would influence people to look at these people’s cases, to treat the sick people in these institutions. The only way they’re going to change is that people out here get involved. I try to get people involved. Anything you can do to help us on this journey I believe in the end will benefit you. Some good will come out of it for you. |
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