Voices Behind Walls

Sarah McConnell: From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I’m Sarah McConnell. Today, second chances and the power of a classroom behind bars.

(Music plays: "A Thousand Miles" by Jessica Carlton)

Sarah McConnell: There’s a massive shift in higher education underway, sparked by college classrooms opening up behind federal prison walls. It’s driven by the return of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, and Brightpoint Community College has just launched a two-year degree program inside the federal prison complex in Petersburg, Virginia. Here to talk about it are Beth Benson, Brightpoint’s new dean of academic prison programs, and Brightpoint literature professor Maria Durso.

Beth, you’ve called teaching behind bars the ultimate test of what community colleges are built for. Why do you say that?

Beth Benson: I have always felt good about teaching in a community college setting. When I was first asked to just investigate the possibility of offering a prison education program, my first reaction actually was, "There’s no way, we cannot do this." But as I started doing more research and looking into what this means to students who are in correctional settings, the reality is that we are really working with students who are the epitome of what we do in a community college setting. We work with students who are often underrepresented, come from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. They don’t have resources available to them as maybe other students might have. So we're coming in and we're bringing them an opportunity to learn a little more about themselves. It's also improving the quality of life for them inside a correctional setting, and when they are released, we're hoping that they're in a better position to gain employment and to perhaps reduce the recidivism rate.

Sarah McConnell: As you really got into it, you said, "This turns out to be my passion."

Beth Benson: Um, I think when I realized that the impact this program has on students inside, I realized that I couldn't back away from it at any point, and the opportunity to create an environment where somebody who is incarcerated has something else to think about other than being incarcerated, and maybe has a little bit more control over something in their lives, that for me spoke volumes of how much we are helping people. Regardless of why they're inside a prison, we're helping people develop a way to improve and better themselves. And we don’t often feel that impact as much as when we're inside a prison facility. When we're on campus, we're caught up with sort of the everyday experience of being around students, our colleagues, driving to campus, getting into the classroom, and we forget maybe what we're doing on a regular basis.

Sarah McConnell: Maria, you called the composition course you taught last spring of about 15 male inmates of all ages a pinnacle teaching experience. Why did you say that?

Maria Durso: One of the things that you want as an educator is to feel that the work you're doing is being received in the spirit in which you're giving it, and that it is having the effect that you want it to have on the student. You want that effect to be deeply personal and rewarding for them, but you also want it to be outward-looking in that they are able to take what they're learning and use it in their interactions with the rest of the world.

And in our daily experience teaching on campus, it is becoming more and more difficult to feel that that is happening. There are a lot of distractions, literal like students have their phones, or you know, something's wrong with their cars, things like that. And internal students aren't sure why they're there or necessarily want to be there. And in the carceral system, the inmates are very clear about why they are there and they have zero distractions. And so the experience is very pure. It feels like everything's been purified in that environment.

Sarah McConnell: This was at a medium-security prison for all men. Describe your class in terms of age and other characteristics.

Maria Durso: So my class was 15 students. The age range, to my best guess, was probably late 20s up through probably early 60s. There were nine African-American students and six white students.

Sarah McConnell: Did they seem to be eager to be in the class?

Maria Durso: Very. They were nervous and hesitant, but also excited to be there, very glad for the opportunity.

Sarah McConnell: Were you initially worried about them? Did you fear them in any way?

Maria Durso: I did not. I don’t have a good explanation for why I was not afraid for my own safety. The prison staff does go through training and they tell you what some of the dangers might be. So I did not have a lot of worries about my personal safety, no. I only had concerns about who my what kinds of crimes they might have committed on the outside, and whether or not I would be comfortable knowing and working with someone who had committed certain crimes like sex offenses, and chose to just simply not know what crimes they committed.

Sarah McConnell: What essays did you teach them and what did they really like? What did they connect with?

Maria Durso: Many of them were not readers and didn't have a whole lot to say about their reading and writing prior to becoming incarcerated, when reading became really important to them. So it was exciting for them to start talking about the first, you know, Stephen King book that they read when they found themselves, um, imprisoned.

We had a lot of different ones for them to read, but they really took to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I chose a chapter in which Douglass describes the experience of learning to read and write on the sly when he was enslaved in Baltimore. We read Letter from Birmingham Jail and they found themselves enthralled with how Martin Luther King was able to employ all of the appeals that we were studying, um, but the the essay that they wrote was an analysis of a Cavalier Daily article, the student newspaper for the University of Virginia. They enjoyed reading what these students had to say in their op-eds about inmates, about recidivism rates, about job training for inmates. A couple of students chose to write about an essay that was about Ramadan on grounds and how the op-ed writer felt more could be done to support students—celebrating. There were a number of Muslim students in my class that wrote about that essay.

Sarah McConnell: Did they express to you the class meant a lot to them?

Maria Durso: Yes, absolutely. Um, asking me if I would come back and teach the next class or telling me that they wanted me to go back to Brightpoint and tell my colleagues about them, they said, "Tell them about us, Professor Durso," so that other faculty members would be willing to come in and teach them.

One student wrote about the group work that they had done and expressed gratitude at what he called making friends with people that he hadn’t known before in this unique context. It wasn't just that he made new friends, but that he had developed friendships in the context of this collegial academic experience.

Sarah McConnell: One class day you walked in and they all serenaded you. What were they singing and why?

Maria Durso: Yeah, so I walked in and they were singing "A Thousand Miles," I think it's called, by Vanessa Carlton. The song actually begins with a piano riff that without it, I didn't quite recognize, and they were asking me if I knew the song and I said, "It sounds familiar, but I don't know." Anyway, they continued to serenade me with this song when I came in on subsequent classes, and of course I had looked up the song and and knew it afterwards and told them, "I looked up the song, I now I know what you're singing now," and they, yeah, it was just very sweet. They did lots of sweet things like that.

Sarah McConnell: Why do you think that song?

Maria Durso: Well, to be honest, the explanation came from my adult one of my adult sons. I when I came home and I said, "They serenaded me today," and my son said, "What was the song?" and I I said, "I don't know what the name of the song was, it was about walking," and he immediately identified the song and I said, "How did you do that? How did you know that was the song they would sing me?" and he said, "I just had to imagine that they would pick a song that a white girl would have listened to, you know, when it came out." They were sort of typecasting me, I guess.

Sarah McConnell: What about the members of the prison staff? How were they toward you and toward them?

Maria Durso: Yeah, so the staff in the education complex, they were just the most welcoming and supportive group. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that they seem to practice gratitude perpetually. So I never showed up for my class without being told, they were grateful that I was there, that they appreciated me and the work I was doing and that I was willing to do it, and then reiterated all of that on my way out.

They expressed gratitude towards each other and towards the inmates. Their relationship with the inmates within that building seemed very collegial in a lot of ways. When it wasn't collegial, it would be more of a I don't know, like mentor-mentee situation where, you know, an inmate would have just passed his GED and there would be this huge celebration. It was so supportive and loving, and I didn't expect to use that I would be using those words—loving and gratitude—in order to describe an environment in a carceral system, but that's what it felt like to me.

Sarah McConnell: Beth, are you encountering any of that? Are you dealing with some of the education staff at the prison?

Beth Benson: Yes, absolutely. On on my side, I'm dealing with the administrative side of things, and so I'm setting up the courses, I'm talking to the staff sometimes on a daily basis, and yes, that sense of gratitude, the students, the staff, they are incredibly appreciative of our coming into the facilities. Um, they have the same goal as we do, to either, if somebody is inside for the long term, to improve the quality of life for them, or if they're going to be released, we are preparing them to be released and get employed and go out into society and be productive.

Sarah McConnell: What kind of degree is this? What will result for inmates taking these community college classes eventually?

Beth Benson: Uh, for our program, we are offering the Human Services pre-social work specialization Associate of Applied Science degree, preparing students to be counselors and working with um people who might be going through some sort of traumatic moment in their lives, um, working with people who uh who are drug addicts and helping them to recover from those kinds of experiences.

Sarah McConnell: And how many courses over how long will they typically take?

Beth Benson: This is a two-year program, so that's 60 to 62 credits.

Sarah McConnell: How large is your program now in terms of numbers of faculty and students, and how big do you think it will become?

Beth Benson: So it is a small program right now, we just implemented our first cohort in spring. Um, we had 15 students in one section and the second section dwindled down to 13. There's potential for this program to grow where we could have a couple of cohorts going at the same time. We could work on the trades, you know, electricity, welding, HVAC, so that when they are released they can go immediately back out and and become employed.

Sarah McConnell: Is prison education on the upswing across the country?

Beth Benson: There is a big movement for prison education across the country. Nationally, the numbers are going up for a higher education in prisons. I am part of a consortium in Virginia where a number of people um from the two-year side, four-year side, just people who are supportive of prison education, also people who are working to reduce the recidivism rate. We meet about once a month to discuss what our options are and kind of brainstorm and share our experiences together.

Sarah McConnell: Do the prisons themselves want it? Is this fully endorsed by the federal prison system of America?

Beth Benson: I don’t know that I can speak to that directly, but I can say our experience has been incredibly enlightening. We have a really strong partnership, um, and so what we've experienced suggests that yes, the federal system endorses prison education programs, Department of Corrections as well. There's a big push to increase prison education programs in Department of Corrections.

Sarah McConnell: In Virginia or all over?

Beth Benson: Across the nation.

Sarah McConnell: Yeah, why do you think that is?

Beth Benson: There are a lot of people who see this population as worthy of having the same rights as anyone else, and providing them the educational experience helps them to achieve whatever goals they might have, so whether it's academic goals, work goals, personal goals, there are many, many people who are supporting this, and I'm sorry I don't have the numbers for you on that. I can tell you that from my experience, knowing that we can make a change in somebody's life and realize it in most cases, that again, what you mentioned earlier at the start of the interview is that is the pinnacle of what we do. We often don't see that. Some of the people that I work with in public organizations and some private organizations, when we talk about helping students on the re-entry side, they themselves are appreciative if we can work with them on the education side to help people get out into society and working and being productive. The potential to have an impact on someone's life and improve their lives, there are so many people who who want to see that goal achieved.

Sarah McConnell: Do either of you know anyone, or know someone who has a loved one who's imprisoned?

Beth Benson: Not that I know of, but what I can speak to um since starting this program is the number of people who have come to me and said, "Oh, my brother is inside. My cousin, I have a friend." So yeah, oh, me too. Yeah. As soon as you start talking about it, it's people will express it.

Maria Durso: My hairdresser, I was telling him what I was doing and his brother spent eight years, and so I feel like bringing it up has brought people it brought stories out from the people that I've been speaking to.

Sarah McConnell: Maria, why do you think we should bother with this? There are people who think, "You know what, they did whatever, they were convicted, let them do their time and then emerge and we'll deal with it then."

Maria Durso: Yeah, so one of the first times I spoke to Beth after beginning teaching in this classroom, I came to her and just said, "What are we doing? Why why are why are they locked in this awful situation, these people with so much potential, so much humanity, so much humor, so much intelligence, so much to offer?" And yeah, it brought me back to reading Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, and something he reiterates in that book that we are so much more than the worst thing we have ever done. And spending time in that classroom teaching college composition, I felt like I was able to see all these parts of these human beings that were unassociated with the worst they had the worst things they had done, and there's value there. And I said to Beth, "What are we doing? Why do we have these people locked up without hope or prior to us showing up without education?"

Maria Durso: Maria was one of the first people to put her hand up to be a part of this program, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that many faculty who I wouldn't have expected to have been interested in teaching in a prison education program, they jumped right for it. And and I think that's part of for me what gives me the motivation to continue, knowing that there is support. You know, despite all of the other pieces and the barriers that that that are in front of the students, that are in front of us as we move forward with building a prison education program, there are so many people, unexpectedly so many people, who want to support the program and keep us moving forward.

Beth Benson: And an example of that that I saw repeatedly was anytime the bureaucracy got in the way of the students getting to class or us getting in to teach the class, the education staff at the prison worked tirelessly to clear bureaucratic roadblocks whenever they arose, ensuring that students could get to class and instructors could get inside to teach.

Second half of the show:

[00:00 - 00:30] Welcome back to With Good Reason from Virginia Humanities. It's not as bad as it was 20 years ago, but America still imprisons its young people at double the global rate. Judith Dunckerley-Bean shares her experience working inside Virginia's detention system and why she believes true reform begins with what she calls "radical listening." Judith is Director of the Literacy Research and Development Center at Old Dominion University.

[00:30 - 01:10] Judith, you and a colleague worked a while back with teenagers in the detention system in your area. You engaged them through literacy. What was the need you were addressing? Why was it literacy for kids in the detention system? That's a great question. We were actually called by the director of the residential center to look at how kids in the detention center were struggling with school-based literacies. But when we asked them to write about things they cared about, they weren't illiterate. They struggled with what was expected of them in a structured school environment. They just didn't necessarily have interest or buy-in to what they were being asked to read and write in alternative settings in school.

[01:10 - 01:31] Was this your first experience with the juvenile detention system? Yeah, it was. What really struck me and my research team was that what we encountered with these kids—and to me they're kids—was so much different than the single-story narrative that we might think about when we think about kids involved in the juvenile justice system.

[01:31 - 01:52] Like what? What did you see instead? What we saw was really the human side of kids that are sometimes portrayed in monolithic ways, like they have one identity as a bad kid. And what we really saw across our four years working at this site was just a lot of stories.

[01:52 - 02:40] And the stories would often break our hearts, because it wasn't that a child set off to do something wrong for a kick. But these kids, each was a story that was really in some way silenced and overlooked by the system they were in. Now, I'm not saying that about the residential center, because the director and the staff who worked there had their whole heart and soul in helping to make these kids feel comfortable, getting them the resources they might need, even like us coming in and working with them was a resource that they offered. But what we saw was really just a lot of pain.

[02:40 - 03:22] One child that comes to mind in particular was a 15-year-old girl whose brother was shot in the chest by a rival gang member. He was taken to the hospital, he survived. Two months later he came out and was set up by an ex-girlfriend and was shot in the head and killed. This young lady that I was working with was there and witnessed this whole thing.

[03:22 - 03:59] Now, any of us might start acting out if we saw that and not know how to cope. Right? I mean, she's 15 at the time, she saw her twin brother murdered in front of her in the most horrific way possible. And, you know, I'd like to share with your listeners now something she wrote, and this one excerpt is from a song she wrote called "Over and Over Again."

[03:59 - 04:36] And it starts with, "I'm contemplating to myself, asking God for some help. I got thoughts running through my head, because damn, my brother's dead. Streets put him to sleep, but he ain't even made his bed. It's the same tear cycle all over again." And so when we sat there and we heard these powerful stories, it really decenters this idea of incarcerated kids being, you know, quote-unquote "bad kids," or being where they deserve to be.

[04:36 - 04:54] It really started to speak to a humanity denied and lives that were being shut down way too early.

[04:54 - 05:01] Was it both young men and young women? Yes, this was a co-ed facility, so it was young men and young women, ages 13 to 18 years old.

[05:01 - 05:47] How did they respond to you and your team? You know, at first, justifiably they were suspicious. And with good reason. They said they had had people come in that were quote-unquote "do-gooders" that just wanted to do something with them so they felt better, but didn't really benefit them. So the first month or so was really just spent building rapport. Once they saw that we weren't going to sit there with worksheets and books and tell them what they had to read and what they had to write, that we wanted them to share stories that they wanted heard, the trust grew quite a bit because we weren't imposing a curriculum, we were really working with what they had to say and the stories they wanted to share.

[05:47 - 06:17] Once they did trust you, what did they say about you that mattered? Now, we also would share stories about our lives. I have family that have been incarcerated. And so that built, I think, a level of trust where one of them would say something like, "You know, you get good-doers coming in here, but you all aren't like that. You actually care."

[06:17 - 06:40] We gave them each a journal, and they would come running out of their rooms with their journals when it was time to meet. And so it was that way of showing us that they trusted us.

[06:40 - 06:51] You encountered so many young people with traumatic stories. One was a 16-year-old young woman who had a baby.

[06:51 - 07:44] Yeah, sadly she wasn't the only one, but she she chose the name Dolly as her as her pseudonym. So Dolly was pregnant by a 34-year-old man that she referred to as her boyfriend. I'm sure us and your listeners would see that as being rape and not akin to a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. But she was in there because her boyfriend—I'll use her terminology—had committed an armed robbery, and quite tragically the homeowners were killed during this home invasion.

[07:44 - 08:34] Dolly was not there at the time, but he gave her things to sell that he had taken from the home. And again, she's 16 and she did go and try to, you know, the term she used was "fence" them. But her baby, instead of trying to reunite and and and deal with the trauma that Dolly herself had encountered being 16 and pregnant by somebody old enough to almost be her father, law enforcement used that baby as a cudgeon and as a wedge to try to get her to, you know, roll on her boyfriend.

[08:34 - 09:25] Now, while we certainly want to see murderers find justice and those victims find peace, berating a 16-year-old and telling her that she will never see her baby again and will die in prison is tragic in and of itself. And then when she came back, she was shaking and still crying and, you know, sobbing, and she goes, "Please don't let them take my baby. I didn't do anything. I want to see my baby. I want to be a good mom to my baby." You know, it's quite difficult, and I think it speaks to the need for an overhaul of the juvenile justice system that really thinks about being transformative instead of punitive.

[09:25 - 09:47] When you all were doing this project, Virginia had the highest juvenile incarceration rate in the country, and then your area had the highest in Virginia. They did. And that fact alone blew my mind when we started to do the background research for this.

[09:47 - 10:48] Those numbers have certainly decreased now. The juvenile incarceration rate in Virginia has decreased. However, it still remains high. And so girls like Dolly, like Tia, represent 8% of the public school population, but over 13% of the incarcerated population. And we know this nationwide, that children of color are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system, overrepresented in special education classes, overrepresented in school detentions that then lead potentially to juvenile justice system involvement. And it just seemed at the time that we were doing more warehousing of kids than necessarily any reformation, or any transformation, or giving them, you know, facilitating a path that was different than to quote Tia, "the same tear cycle all over again," right?

[10:48 - 10:52] It was a revolving door sometimes. And part of that is because the system does not work to help the kids that are involved in it.

[10:52 - 11:15] For parents, educators, others who just want to build this kind of trust, where would you suggest they begin? No, I think it begins with decentering popular narratives. So I was certainly somebody who thought, you know, maybe before I got involved, if a kid's in juvenile justice, they must have done something to deserve it.

[11:15 - 12:02] Well, yes and no. So I think part of that radical listening is starting with a radical decentering of what we think about when we think about kids in the juvenile justice system. And we know that just the incarceration system in general was modeled on those that chased and captured and enslaved people back in the in the times of slavery. So it's not a model that is necessarily meant to transform. So what I would suggest is first let's get rid of the stereotypes.

[12:02 - 12:47] None of the kids we worked with fit a stereotype, so we might as well just get rid of them and start thinking about what it means for a child in the system to be able to tell a story. What might that child be? I can't tell you how many times kids that were 13 to 17 years old thought their life was over. What these kids need is somebody to listen and to hear them, and a system that wants to support them.

[12:47 - 13:30] And I think that can start at a grassroots level. You know, it can start with community members thinking about, you know, what can they do? Can you volunteer? Can you send books? Can you send journals? Can you give the kids a chance to tell a story that decenters what we want to believe—the story that helps us sleep at night—is not the story that helps those kids sleep at night. So radical listening starts with maybe a radical self-examination of stereotypes that we cling to because it helps make the world seem like it's a safer place.

[13:30 - 13:38] Bad kids are bad kids, bad kids go to jail. The end. And unfortunately that's not that's not the truth.

[13:38 - 14:15] I wonder if there are any other countries that are doing this better, differently? I know that different countries do their justice systems writ large differently, such as, you know, building skills. And I know we do this to some extent in the United States, where, you know, we give the incarcerated population, whether it's teens or adults, the skills they need to be successful on the outside.

[14:15 - 15:10] But we know also that the system is not necessarily set up to support them. And when we look at the privatization of jails, of prisons, makes prison a very profitable enterprise. So they need people there to keep the profits rolling in. I think what we need to look at is if we're spending the money anyway—it costs a lot of money to keep somebody incarcerated, whether it's a teen or whether it's an adult—what if we took those funds and looked at instead of using them to cage people, to offer them a chance for change, to offer them a chance to learn a skill, have support?

[15:10 - 15:59] You know, we talk a lot about the school-to-prison pipeline, or the cradle-to-prison pipeline. I think what we really need to find is a way to reverse that pipeline and offer supports early on, so that kids don't find themselves in the situation that if Tia had received appropriate counseling after she saw the murder of her brother, chances are she wouldn't have acted out in the ways that she did, and her path and her trajectory could have been a lot different.

[15:59 - 16:30] Judith Dunckerley-Bean is director of the Literacy Research and Development Center at Old Dominion University.

[16:30 - 17:09] Traditional police archives are typically written from the perspective of police, but that leaves out the voice of communities most impacted by the justice system. Dr. Manika Rou took a different approach when she led a team that digitized thousands of Los Angeles Police Department records from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Dr. Manika Rhue is a professor, archivist, and trained griot. She also is a fellow at Virginia Humanities.

[17:09 - 17:34] Dr. Rhue, when you and your colleagues digitized thousands of Los Angeles police records, these were documents written by the police and the news media, is that right? Yes, it was from the 1970s, '80s, and we had a few files from the '90s.

[17:34 - 18:24] And so basically, under the leadership of Dr. Kelly Hernandez, who was a professor and also the director of the African-American Ralph Bunche Center at UCLA, there were certain communities that were policing very heavily. And so when they approached the LAPD archives, they got the runaround, they couldn't have access to the archives, they actually sued the Los Angeles Police Department to gain access of the records.

[18:24 - 18:41] They probably never thought that no one would ever request these archives or read these archives because of how they actually detailed the incident in the incident's report.

[18:41 - 18:47] Give me an example of what you're thinking of, one of these.

[18:47 - 19:42] And so one of the ones that I'll share with you was a case, Yula Love case. And so they said on January 3rd, 1979, the Los Angeles Police Department officer shot and killed Yula Love, a South Central resident who was a mother of three and a recent widow. Love became distressed when after she failed to pay a $66 gas bill, a utility worker arrived to shut off the gas to her home.

[19:42 - 20:25] She chased him off, and when the police arrived, Love was holding a boning knife which she threw at the officer. Two officers open fire, shooting 12 bullets at close range and striking Love in her legs, lower body, and chest. Yula died in her front yard. The LAPD killing of Yula Love incited mass protest in Los Angeles. So that was the write-up.

[20:25 - 20:49] You know, traditional archives often include information from the perspective of the people that are paying for the collection of the archival materials, and leave out the voices of people who don't have money or don't have political power, that kind of thing.

[20:49 - 21:38] In this case, you all did something different. Yes, it was very important and intentional to include the community in this process. We shared some of the cases with them, so that we can gain their input and a broader perspective on what really happened, because the police records, the incident records, only show the perspective of the police officers involved in that incident.

[21:38 - 22:15] It left out the voices of the people, the family, and the community. And so one of the things that we strategically did was actually curate from the lens of making sure that the residents' voices was uplifted and not necessarily the police reports themselves.

[22:15 - 22:38] You wrote a blog post in association with this that was called "Death by Another Name: Police Brutality Records." What did you mean by "death by another name"?

[22:38 - 23:25] Well, often time we know that the chokehold has killed a lot of residents. What we intentionally started doing is calling it what it is. It was actually murder, you know, whether it was provoked, whether how the incident actually occurred at the end of the day, it was actually a report that we also found in these records that they actually did an assessment on the brutality of the chokehold.

[23:25 - 24:02] When I did this piece called "Death by Another Name: Police Brutality," because so many incidents, traffic violations, but it all eventually led to either somebody shot in the head, someone killed, or the chokehold was used. And so "Death by Another Name" is really putting the human side to the impact of police brutality.

[24:02 - 24:34] You spent two or three years in LA while you were working on this project with your team, but along the way you came across one of these police records that brought tears to your eyes. You actually cried because you felt such empathy for the victim in the case. Tell us about that one.

[24:34 - 25:12] Well, the case that made me really emotional was a case found from a police incident report that took place on October, February the 7th, 2002. And this when a police officer chased a community member and attempted to apprehend him. The officer reported that when the community member did not follow their orders to drop a broom,

[25:12 - 25:16] they tased him.

[25:16 - 25:21] But the man still had the broom.

[25:21 - 25:52] And so the officer reported shooting him twice with a beanbag shotgun and still had the broom in his hand, and claiming that they feared the man with a broom might have a gun, although they never saw a gun, they shot him two more times with the beanbag shotgun.

[25:52 - 26:17] The officers then released a k-9 dog that bit and held the man on the arm. And according to the officers, the community member grabbed the neck of the K-9.

[26:17 - 26:27] And so they hit the man with three distraction strikes and kicked him.

[26:27 - 26:55] And in the end, the officer arrested the community member and placed him in a hubble hole. The hubble hole was used to control and punish the enslaved.

[26:55 - 27:31] And also the community member's pelvis was broken during the incident. And so this was very emotional for me, especially knowing that in the 21st century that they actually use a hubble hole to control this particular resident. And reading this case again, it's still very emotional that you didn't have any other tactics or practice for someone just holding a broom in their hand.

[27:31 - 00:28:16] You also did something very creative. You used your professional experience as a griot, as an African storyteller, to explain what these violent police encounters were like from the perspective of the residents who were shot or killed, or abused in some way by the police. Would you be willing to perform here a few of the stories you created where you contrast an official police record with how the incident may have unfolded from the perspective of the person who was killed or injured in the encounter?

[00:28:16 - 00:28:34] Yes, so I already shared a little bit about Yula Love. And so this is how the Yula Love component of the story from the griot's voice started.

[00:28:34 - 00:29:21] I just lost my husband. I have three beautiful children and I am raising them all by myself. I'm falling behind on my bills. In fact, my gas bill is due. Knock, knock at the door. Who is it? I'm the bill collector with the gas bill.

[00:29:21 - 00:29:56] Yula opened the door. And as she was saying, "Who are you and why are you at my door? Why are you at my home when I open my door?" The collector and two police officers were at my door trying to collect a $66 gas bill. My three children were in the other room. I became upset and I grabbed a bone and knife and in my hand, and before I knew it, I was shot twice at close range, and I died instantly.

Now my children, suddenly, unexpectedly and unnecessarily, lost their mother, lost their caretaker.

Let us pause. Breathe deeply for the story I just shared is not to provoke anger, but justice. True justice can only be given in peace, so that the Roman soul can find peace in the words of the storyteller. Rest in peace, Yula May Love. Rest in peace.

So that's one story I did. Another one was, you know, teenagers, you know, playing with a BB gun.

We all have bad days or mental breakdown, but it should not cause us to be shot or killed for that uncontrollable moment. No one should die, especially the young and the innocent, in the custody of police officers, especially without an explanation of what caused that death within 24 hours.

Yes, I had an argument with the store owner and maybe even threatened him, but I didn't have no weapon. And then they show up and I was shot and killed. No one should die because they were pulled over for a traffic violation.

Really. No one should die from a traffic violation.

Make no mistake, these narratives that I speak are indeed the truth. Written in police reports, buried in boxes and a cold dark never to be read, never to be shared, and never to be heard from the mouth of the griot, the storyteller.

Do you find this as a trend in archival work to have community voices, the voices of the people affected by these events, more involved and showcased in archival work?

Oh yes. When you talk about community archives, you're talking about the grassroot people. You're talking about the individuals who are making changes in their own community in their own way. And those are the stories that doesn't make it to the mainstream archives. So a lot of communities just started to take ownership of their own stories and their own history from their own voices as well.

And they may not have the archivist practices, um, but they're doing it. And that's very important for us as archivists and like burring who are engaging in these communities to understand, to let them be a part of curating and organizing their records that speaks about them and who they are and how they represent their communities.

Dr. Monifa Love Rhue is a professor, archivist, and trained griot. She's also a fellow at Virginia Humanities.

With Good Reason is produced by Virginia Humanities, which acknowledges the Monacan Nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Our production team is Allison Quantz, Matt Daro, and Lauren Francis. Special thanks to Jenny Taylor for booking assistance.

For the podcast or to comment, go to withgoodreasonradio.org.

I'm Sarah McConnell. Thanks for listening.