White Sheets Under Black Robes

Posted on February 19, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Black Robes, White Justice, by Judge Bruce Wright, is one of my favorite titles touching on the criminal legal system!  The title itself speaks volumes.  Bruce Wright was a distinguished New York City Judge and, in light of the current debates about crime and bail reform, specifically in NYC, the late Judge Wright should be uplifted.

Long before the current bail reform movement, Judge Wright was dealing with the issue of imposing fair bail on people charged with crimes.  During the 1970s until the present, many judges in NYC would by default impose excessive bail on poor defendants, bail so high the people presumed to be innocent until proven guilty were held in places like Rikers Island for up to three years before their day in court.  In far too many cases, their trials did not last three days.  A couple were one day trials!  Thus, why the delay in bringing them to trial?  (That’s rhetorical.)  Their cases were not complicated, not if they could be disposed of in less than three days.

Judge Wright, in imposing fair bail, looked to the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, to wit: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”  For following the Constitution, and in imposing fair bails, not the king’s ransoms many NYC judges imposed on poor people charged with crimes, in the NYC tabloids, Judge Wright was dubbed, “Cut ‘em Loose Bruce!”

Judge Wright calls out a judge or two in his book, even Black judges.  Ironically, many Black judges administer “white justice.”  This has been a fundamental problem of the criminal legal system and law enforcement.  Oftentimes, Blacks in the legal field, from judges to prosecutors to the beat cop, try to prove to their white colleagues that they can administer “justice” in the same way.  If the scales of justice are tilted against Black and Brown people, and the poor, then something is fundamentally wrong with Black jurists imposing “white justice.”  My argument to Black jurists, for quite some time, has been: Black and Brown folk are not asking for any special preferences in the criminal legal system from Black jurists.  They are only asking them to balance the scales of justice.

Judge Wright famously calls out William Thompson, an Administrative Judge in Kings County Supreme Court.  Then, before the Individual Assignment System, the Administrative Judge assigned cases.  “Willie,” as Judge Wright calls Judge Thompson, dubbed himself the “king maker.”  I would add “queen maker.”  Thompson romantically allied himself with a white woman judge in Kings County Supreme Court, Sybil Hart Kooper, who dubbed herself the “Dragon Lady.”  Thompson made sure he assigned “high profile” cases to Judge Kooper, making her the Queen of the Court to his Kingship.  Court watchers have reported that Willie would often visit Sybil in her courtroom when Black and Brown “defendants” were on trial for their lives, and even the teenagers standing trial before the Dragon Lady knew that something was going on, even if they could not articulate it.  So much “white justice” happened under Kooper’s Court I could write a book.

This book, Black Robes, White Justice, is a must read for advocates and any person of color looking to serve on the bench or have anything to do with the administration of “justice.”  If “justice” was truly colorblind, then Judge Wright would not be calling out “white justice!”

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Derrick Albert Bell Jr. — The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

Posted on February 18, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Derrick Albert Bell Jr. should be as well-known as Thurgood Marshall.  He was a lawyer, civil rights activist, and professor.  In 1971, he became the first tenured Black professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  From his reputation alone, Professor Bell would be an instructor I would have stood in line to sign up for any class he taught.

As it was, I was introduced to Bell’s work by one of my professors, Bill Webber, during graduate school.  Webber, President Emeritus of New York Theological Seminary would, once he thought he had taken the measure of you, recommend two books, one for the fall and the other for the spring semester.  Both of my book recommendations were written by Bell, and Webber is the only white male who truly saw some of my “measure.”

Bell was the only Black graduate of his 1957 law class at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.  Shortly after law school, Bell was working for the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department.  He was asked to resign his membership in the NAACP under the rationale that his objectivity, and the objectivity of the division, might be compromised.  Bell left the Justice Department rather than give up his NAACP membership.  Compare this with Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who was a member of the Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 in Birmingham, AL.  Black “resigned” from the Klan in 1925. In 1937, after Black was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was reported that he had been given a “grand passport” in 1926, granting him life membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

So, today, I recommend the two books by Bell I read in 1993 and 1994, respectively: And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, and, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.  Note that Bell, considered the Godfather of Critical Race Theory, is quoted as having said: “Racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it.”  Think President Barack Obama’s successor, No 45, and his white nationalist platform.

Now, I am interested in what Bell might have said or wrote about Clarence Thomas when he was appointed to the High Court. Thomas probably doesn’t realize it, but his face is truly at the bottom of the well.

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If Only Death Blossomed

Posted on February 17, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

We are more than halfway through the shortest month of the year, dedicated to Black History Month.  I am feeling a sense of urgency, in that there are thousands of books I would like to recommend.  I stay awake at night, by overly active mind and imagination keeping me up.  Instead of counting sheep, books have been playing across the screen in my mind, my mind scanning the memory banks of books I’ve read in order to make book recommendations.  This sense of urgency made me think of the last letter someone wrote from death row, giving it to his lawyer before his state-sanctioned execution.

For a number of years I volunteered with PEN America, the writers’ organization, the affiliate of PEN International, with the Prison Writing Program (PWP).  PWP held an annual writing contest for people in prisons and jails across the United States.  I served on the poetry committee, which was the most-submitted to category.  Poetry is hard, as Steinbeck attests, yet many aspiring writers begin with poetry, perhaps thinking poetry is easy.  PWP received a lot of awful poetry, but there were, inevitably, gems among the piles of manuscripts.  Many of these poets had no formal education – some wrote themselves out of the darkness of illiteracy, like Jimmy Santiago Baca – and no specialized training in writing; many didn’t know how to present their work.  Others wrote from solitary confinement, handwriting their poems on the back of the disciplinary reports that landed them in solitary.  Oftentimes, the back story, which they felt compelled to tell, was more interesting than the work submitted.  The Chair of PWP during my volunteer time corresponded with people on death row.  At one meeting she read the last words written by someone who was executed.  He only wished that he had more time, to write, to read, but especially to write. His handwritten letter, his handwriting, seemed rush, as if he was racing against time, and he was.  When I stare at a blank sheet of paper, I imagine that letter, that last piece of paper that carried his words from death row to a meeting room in Manhattan where many of us could not begin to imagine that sense of urgency, that all was lost, and that we had to get these words out before walking that last mile at the appointed time of death.

I was going to make a different book recommendation, but the above story compels me to this one, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, by Mumia Abu-Jamal.  For decades, Mumia wrote with urgency under the threat of death.  Read Death Blossoms and just begin to imagine. . .

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“Dying But Fighting Back”

Posted on February 16, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

In my last blog I wrote about Langston Hughes, our Harlem Renaissance poet, and his collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, which was published in 1926, the same year my father was born.

I want to uplift the works of another Harlem Renaissance writer, Claude McKay.  McKay was, first and foremost, a poet, and one of his best known works, “If We Must Die,” uses the sonnet as his poetic form of expression, written in 1919, responds to white-on-Black race riots and lynchings across the United States in 1919.  Fifty-two years later, during the Attica Prison Rebellion, in one of the prison yards, one of the people in the prison yard wrote one of the poem’s stanzas across a white sheet.  Tom Wicker, a New York Times reporter covering the Rebellion, wrote a book about it, A Time to Die, perhaps inspired by the words on the sheet.  From his comment on the stanza, it was obvious that Wicker did not know this famous sonnet.  (Perhaps reporters don’t know poetry!)

Although McKay was, as stated above, first and foremost a poet, he wrote five novels and a novella, Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, as well as short stories and other works.  After reading “If We Must Die,” one of the most powerful poems I had ever read, even before I knew what a sonnet was, I set out to read this Bard.  The first novel I read by McKay was Banana Bottom, published in 1933, the same year my mother was born.

McKay, born in Jamaica, first traveled to the United States to attend college.  In the States he read W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and one can see how DuBois’ writing on the “duality,” the dual consciousness of Black folk in America, influenced Banana Bottom, whose main character is a Jamaican girl who was adopted and sent to be educated in England by white missionary benefactors.  When the girl, Bita Plant, returns to her native village of Banana Bottom, she “finds her black heritage at war with her newly acquired culture.”  (Talk about “cancel culture!”)

Claude McKay was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and anyone interested in that period should read him.  Additionally, McKay was interested in politics, and as many Black intellectuals of the day, flirted with the politics of the Left.  Almost any political philosophy, they probably intellectualized, had to be better than America’s since her Democracy spiraled out of control and turned violent against Black people simply affirming their humanity, or simply being (in the way James Baldwin’s character, Sonny, the title character of that great short story, “Sonny’s Blues” wants to be), and “dying” (read murdered by white folk), for this alone.

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The Weary Blues Redux

Posted on February 15, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

In 1926 Langston Hughes published his collection of poetry, The Weary Blues.  That same year my father was born in the segregated South.  Carl Van Vechten’s book, Nigger Heaven, was also published that year.

My father was born on this day in 1926, nearly seven years after World War I ended in 1919, a war that his uncle served in.  That very same year, 1919, saw race riots across the United States.  Black World War I veterans were targeted, for the obvious reasons, in what some historians call Red Summer.  Four years later the Black Wall Street was destroyed, burned down by angry hordes of white Americans whose response to Black prosperity, that American Dream that perhaps was elusive to them, was violence.  In fact, whenever Black Americans asserted their rights, they were met by violence by white folk.  Almost all of white violence against Black people went unpunished.  Often, law enforcement turned a blind eye, in a different iteration of blindfolded Lady Justice.

It was this historical backdrop by father was brought into the world.  At the same time, far from the South, in seemingly another country, another world, the Harlem Renaissance was in full bloom.  Langston Hughes, one of the prominent Black writers of this era, published his collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, our book recommendation for today.  The title speaks volumes.  Blues, as experienced by Black Americans, is a uniquely American “thing” – it encompasses so much, so much more than music; these “gifts” W.E.B. DuBois wrote about are all wrapped up in the blues.  A short story by the great James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” captures what the blues is.  In the final analysis, the blues just wants to be.  It wants to be left alone to be.  “Why can’t a man just be?” Sonny, the title character, asks.

White Americans have made being for Black Americans difficult in the extreme.  This is the blues, and in 1926 Black folk were weary of how they had to be in America, often simply to survive.

I will write a part II to this because my father’s story only begins in 1926.  (Note: my father absolutely loved the music of Ray Charles.)

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Maya Angelou, A Muse for All Ages

Posted on February 14, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

On this Day of Love, also known as Valentine’s Day, I want to uplift an author and one of her books, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  I love Maya and this book!

Maya Angelou was challenged by none other than James Baldwin, her friend, to write this autobiography, so poetic, so lyrical, that reviewers categorized it as “autobiographical fiction.”

Maya first published this book in 1969, the last year of the Decisive Decade.  It would be the first in a seven-volume series.  Black male authors have penned many coming-of-age stories.  This book features a coming-of-age story by a Black female author.  It begins when Maya is three years of age.

This book is a book for the ages!

Many know Maya through her poetry, single poems as famous as the author.  My favorite, “Still I Rise.”  Maya could do almost anything with poetry, and she tapped into so many forms, even “the toast!”  My second favorite poem by Maya is, “Where We Belong, A Duet.”  I would argue that in this poem she uses some of the features of the toast.

If you don’t know why the caged bird sings, then you must read this book.  If you have, then there are six more in the series, the titles as evocative as the content, and the main character, Maya, a Muse for all ages.

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The Work of Reconstruction Continues. . .

Posted on February 13, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, by W.E.B. DuBois, is a must read.  One Amazon reviewer wrote, “This book is a great clue to the puzzle of how we got where we are today.”  Indeed, this period would inform the next 100 years in American history, and even today its’s part of the subtext in political machinations.

As I have written elsewhere, the Hayes-Tilden Compromise (1876-77), effectively ended the Reconstruction years in America.  This period of Reconstruction was America’s first attempt to live up to her lofty ideals, especially for the descendants of Africans forcibly brought to this land even before the Constitution was ratified.  This Compromise is one of many in American history adversely affecting Black people in America, most notably beginning with the founding of the nation and the Three-Fifths Compromise, written right into the U.S. Constitution.

Today, we see politicians on both sides of the aisle looking for advantages in the electorate; we see Democrats attempting to preserve the voting rights of Black people, and Republicans attempting to restrict these rights.  (Here it is worth noting that the party of Abraham Lincoln, called “Radical Republicans” at this point and time in American history, pushed and enacted and to a certain extent promoted the rights of the newly freed “Americans” of African ancestry.)  Ever since Black men were given the franchise with the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in 1870, there have been efforts to restrict or deny altogether the rights of Black voters.  Southern politicians and their constituents found a way around the 13th Amendment (one of the three post-Civil War Amendments) by creating, passing, and enforcing laws in order to perpetuate slavery under another name, the penal system.  With the 15th Amendment, these very same individuals resorted to intimidation and terror to keep Black men and years later Black women (with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 giving all women the right to vote), from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

One could argue that DuBois, in Black Reconstruction, is putting a “Black spin” on this period, but in actuality he’s correcting the false narrative of white historians, mostly Southerners, who would argue that Reconstruction was a failed experiment.  But what do you expect from treasonous Rebels and their supporters who call the American Civil War “The War of Northern Aggression?”  Just look at all the Confederal iconography standing more than 100 years after the South’s defeat we are only recently removing from public spaces.  These Confederate monuments and memorials exist in large part because the South did not lose the Civil War.

Today, the white lies in the historical narrative, when corrected, is called “cancel culture.”  The genocide of the indigenous people, slavery, and Jim Crow, are true examples of “cancel culture,” not asking white men to behave and to be held accountable in this brave new world.

DuBois eventually left these here United States and emigrated to Africa, to Ghana, because the way he understood the historical record, White America would not change, at least not in his lifetime.

And so, the work of Reconstruction continues. . .

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Octavia E. Butler — Amen I Say to You! Amen!

Posted on February 12, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Octavia E. Butler went where no Black women writers had gone before – her writing is out of but of this world!  Butler was the first science fiction writer to ever receive the MacArthur Fellowship.  And though Butler can be considered a science fiction writer, she was much more.  Indeed, Butler did not want to be shackled to a genre, for very good reasons.  Her “science fiction” is unlike the science fiction written by white males, who dominate the genre.

I was not a big science fiction fan.  I am not a Trekkie, even though I sporadically watched the Star Trek series as a kid and I’ve watched a number of the various movies.  I didn’t come to science fiction as a fan until my early 20’s, when my “book buddy” recommended Dune.  I read the first book and then devoured the next four in the series.  Shortly thereafter I discovered Octavia E. Butler, who is considered the godmother of Afrofuturism.  Butler’s sci-fi is different than the typical fare because Black writers look at the world through a different lens than white writers, although some of the same themes are addressed.  My favorite book by Butler is Wild Seed, which has two Black Immortals, Doro and Anyanwu.  My next favorite books by her are The Parable of the Sower (1993), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Parable of the Talents.  Biblically literate people will know these parables, but they should read Butler’s take on them.  Can I get an Amen?

This book recommendation, Kindred, is probably Butler’s most well know novel, and if you haven’t read her, then begin with this book.

I would recommend any book by Butler, for anyone who likes a good story.  Don’t think of Butler as a genre writer.  She defies being categorized!

I hope, with my book recommendations this Black History Month, that I have become your “book buddy.”

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A Love Letter to George Jackson

Posted on February 11, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

“When was the last time you hand wrote a personal letter?”

Twice a year, in the fall and spring semesters, for a number of years, Lawrence Mamiya, Professor Emeritus of Religion and Africana Studies at Vassar College, who passed away on September 15, 2019, invited me to his class to lecture on “prison literature.”  I began my lectures with that question to a classroom of approximately 40 students. One, maybe two hands, went up.

“Writing letters are important in the history of writing – Belles Lettres – and, for the most part, letter-writing is becoming a lost art.  Who writes letters?”

“Prisoners!” a couple of eager students would shout out as their hands went up.  They know this because Professor Mamiya had been bringing Vassar students into Green Haven prison for more than 25 years – the maximum sentence in New York for people convicted of class A-1 felonies – and all of these students have been to Green Haven!  At Green Haven, these students got an education that couldn’t be bought or taught at Vassar!  In fact, Professor Mamiya’s classes often changed students’ career trajectories, becoming lawyers, and even professors teaching for colleges that have/had higher education college courses at prisons.

“Right!  People in prison.”  I correct the language.  “I believe that the art of letter-writing is becoming a lost art, a lost art that people in prison, and people in the military, are keeping alive.”

Soledad Brother, this book of letters, is a classic, and it demonstrates the power of this “genre.”  Soledad Brother captures a moment in American history – the Decisive Decade – from behind prison walls.

George Jackson, a young Black man, was imprisoned nearly at the beginning of the Decisive Decade, 1961, for a $70 armed robbery, to which he was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence of one year to life.  (This is off topic for now, but note this sentence, a sentence that could keep an individual involved in the criminal legal system for life!)  Ten years later, on August 21, 1971, Comrade George was assassinated, allegedly during an escape attempt.  He never made it out of this system!

Yesterday I posted about Angela Davis’ book, If They Come in the Morning, in which George Jackson has a piece.  In fact, in his book of letters, there are some to Angela.

This book, and The Count of Monte Cristo, were two books very important to my thinking – I also read this book as a teenager.

Since Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, I’m going to suggest that, in addition to whatever you are going to do for your love, write a love letter.  When I was courting my wife, I hand wrote her love letters.  Some I mailed to her.  No one had ever done this for her!  Well, I am a poet, and some of us are hopeful romantics.

I write these words and I’m going to send them home to you
I’m going to write a letter, send it home
First class, first class baby
Let them know where I’m going to be
I’m going to write a letter, send it home
Just as fast, as fast as you can mister postman
If you please.

                                  — Write a Letter, JJ Grey & Mofro

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They Came in the Morning, and Returned that Night

Posted on February 10, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

This book was originally published in 1971, three years after Richard Nixon declared his War on Crime when he was campaigning for the U.S. presidency.  As I have written elsewhere, Nixon’s declaration of war in 1968 marked the beginning of what would be called “mass incarceration.”  Loic Waquant, a sociologist and social anthropologist, takes on using “mass incarceration” to describe the disproportionate imprisonment of Black and Brown men and women.  “Hyperincarceration,” Waquant argues, is a more accurate term, since these here United States do not incarcerate “the masses.”  But that’s another story.

The ”introduction” to this book is a letter James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis.  Baldwin knows that if we allow the carceral state to come and take people in the morning, then surely “they will be coming for us that night.”  We know that agents of the state come in the early morning hours with “no knock” warrants, that specialized tactical law enforcement teams (TNT: Tactical Narcotics Teams) explode on the scene and into people’s homes when they are asleep and leave death in their wake, think, most recently, Breonna Taylor, but also think Fred Hampton, assassinated by law enforcement on December 4, 1969.

Angela Davis is a living icon, and I have had the pleasure of crossing her path three times in the last 20 years, all at events dealing with some aspect of the carceral system.  Most notably, about 15 years ago, at an American Studies Association conference in Connecticut.  Three of my colleagues, including Bell Chevigny, editor of “Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing,” proposed a panel discussion on “prison literature” to the American Studies Association, and it was accepted.  Our argument was that the American Academy needed to value writings from prisons and jails, and that they should be taught in the ivory towers.  I think of Dostoevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, how the American Academy uplifts and values the writings of these “Russian prisoners,” but not their own.  In fact, I’ve been in literary circles, and when I stated, “Right now, as we speak, there’s someone in an American prison laboring over what could be the next ‘Great American Novel,’” my counterparts, whom I could accuse of literary snobbism, would give me that look, as if I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, for the most part, but the American Studies Association scheduled Angela Davis’ panel discussion and ours on prison literature at the same time!  Of course, more attendees went to Angela’s panel discussion.,  (I would have gone, too if I weren’t a presenter!)  The Association should have known that these two panels would draw the same crowd, and thus not schedule them at the same time.  After the panels, we ran into Angela in the hall of the hotel hosting the conference.  We told her we wanted to come to her panel discussion but that we were presenting at the same time, our panel on “prison literature.”  Angela said she wanted to attend our panel discussion, but obviously could not!  Perhaps Angela’s panel should have been in the morning, and ours that night.

I highly recommend this book to all concerned about justice, which is far more elusive than “finding Waldo.”

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