NINE

DAVID AND GOLIATH

THEY SAY WHEN LIFE throws lemons at you, you catch them and make lemonade. When the level of enthusiasm and support for felon re-enfranchisement died down after Governor Scott’s crushing blow, I looked at it as an opportunity to fulfill the original intent of FRRC, which had been verbalized back in 2006. At that time, we said we wanted more directly impacted people involved. As the primary focus of the big-name organizations moved elsewhere, it allowed me the space to reshape the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. I had to find a way to rally the troops and get them engaged.

I decided to take the same approach with felon re-enfranchisement that I would with any other issues that might impact me. I’m not going to wait for somebody else to try to figure out and tell me what the solution is. I’m not going to wait for anybody else to take up the fight. If it means that much to me, then I have to be the initiator, because if I rely on somebody else, they’re not going to have that same level of energy or commitment.

When I first joined FRRC it was housed within the Florida ACLU’s headquarters, in Miami. Most people thought of our project as coming out of the ACLU’s office. That was problematic in a couple of ways. It made it difficult for us to get into certain doors, when people heard FRRC and thought ACLU. There is sometimes a tense relationship between the ACLU and law enforcement, and we needed to get law enforcement more engaged in our conversations if we were going to move our agenda forward. There is sometimes a tense relationship between the ACLU and minority communities, as there often is between well-funded national organizations and grassroots organizations with a different perspective of what’s happening on the ground.

While we appreciated the support and the work of the ACLU, it was time to become a stand-alone organization led by directly affected people. We needed to shift from being basically part of other organizations to an organization that mainly comprised impacted individuals. We began thinking this around the time that the ACLU’s funding for the project dried up, so we were basically on our own anyway. For a while, the ACLU let us use their offices and their phones, but eventually the money for that ran out as well. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t have any donors. We didn’t have anybody on payroll. We lost our website.

There was no support out there for FRRC. For a time, the FRRC office was my car. I worked out of there or out of the recovery house. It was just me and some dedicated folks throughout the state who still wanted to do the work. We were like a boat without an engine. We had the rudder, the direction of where we wanted to head, but we didn’t have the power to get where we wanted to go.

When we entered that valley, when folks dropped off, strangely I was not afraid. Plenty of people said that if these big-name organizations fall off, if so-and-so leaves, this thing is over with. But I never believed that. From my upbringing in the Christian faith, I was easily reminded how God used the least among a group of people to bring about the greatest change. The story of David and Goliath illustrated that perfectly.

I remember thinking about that story while I was in prison. It made sense to me that God would have things unfold that way to show his power. If he used a strong guy to beat up somebody weaker, that wouldn’t show how good he is. The miracle comes, or the belief comes, when he chooses someone who seemingly should not even have a chance against another person, but, through God’s power, this seemingly weaker person overcomes the obstacles. I saw that on the inside: Nobody got any credit for beating up somebody who was weaker than them. As a matter of fact, we would probably look down on the big guy, right? Because he needed to pick on somebody his own size. God was not the Goliath God. He was the God of David. That spiritual concept reinforced to me that this fight to restore civil rights to returning citizens was a spiritual effort. When a major organization withdrew its support, I thought to myself, This falls right in line with how God operates. Little did I know that this experience would not be the last time organizations walked away from FRRC or the effort.

In Matthew 25, Jesus says it this way: “I tell you that whenever you refused to do it for the least important of these people, you refused to do it for me.” We were the least among us. God always uses the least among a group of people to bring about the biggest change. And even for those in the fight who didn’t have a religious orientation or even any belief in God at all, these truths held, and they have a powerful message.

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT I WANTED TO DO WITH THE RECREATED FRRC WAS A statewide day of action. It would be called the “Right Now” rally to signify that we wanted our rights right now, not seven years later or five years later. We would hold rallies on Human Rights Day in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, and throughout Broward County simultaneously, publicly demanding that we have our rights restored.

In the process of planning these rallies, we came to find out something very interesting. In Tampa, for example, our point person found a great location. We were in the process of securing the space, and the owners of the facilities asked us for our nonprofit paperwork in order for them to give us the space free of charge. “What paperwork is that?” I asked. “You know, your 501(c)(3) documents that show you have been approved by the IRS as a tax-exempt, charitable organization.” I went looking for them, but I couldn’t find them. I asked around, and that’s when I discovered that FRRC was not an official entity in the state of Florida. It’s like we didn’t even exist. That was a perfect metaphor for the way someone with a felony conviction is made to feel.

At that moment I decided, Let’s make this organization official. In 2011, we became Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Inc. In order to file the necessary paperwork, I had to have a board. Who better to have on this board than returning citizens? I connected with Jessica Chiappone (now Younts), a returning citizen who had gone on to law school and eventually passed the New York Bar Exam and who had presented her testimony about returning-citizen disenfranchisement practices in Florida to the UN in Switzerland. She became our vice president. Our secretary was Dr. Rosalind Osgood, who was also a returning citizen. She is now a school-board member in Broward County, with an amazing story of redemption, including getting both her master’s and doctoral degrees, despite innumerable obstacles thrown in her way.

Dr. Osgood was the only one who’d had her rights restored at the time we created our board, but we all had some powerful stories, and when we got together some magic would happen. One of the challenges we were trying to address was how we should refer to ourselves and the people we were working for. There was a study that had come out of Florida State University, which had one of the leading doctoral programs in criminology, a few years earlier, published in an article as “The Labeling of Convicted Felons and Its Consequences for Recidivism.” It basically said that the receipt of a felony label could increase the likelihood of recidivism; calling someone an ex-offender, an ex-con, or an ex-felon makes them more likely to return to a life of crime.

The study reminded me of how we used to always hear that if you keep calling children stupid, they’re going to grow up thinking that they’re stupid. Let’s not lead with the fact that someone was formerly convicted of a crime. Let’s lead with their humanity. We wanted people to see us as human beings first, not as an ex-anything. The word we landed on was “citizen.” Then we added “returning,” because we were citizens who had made mistakes, had been incarcerated, and had done our time, and now we were returning to our community.

We were returning citizens. That was a powerful descriptor, and we intended to take advantage of that power.

AFTER THE RIGHT NOW RALLIES, ROSALIND, JESSICA, AND I HEADED OFF ACROSS THE state talking to people about the plight of returning citizens. We just wanted to keep Floridians aware of the destructive policies that were affecting people like us, and to believe that this was a relevant issue in addition to the other issues these people might be focusing on at the time. Don’t forget about us, was the core of the message. We appreciate you as old partners and allies, and we’re not trying to grab your exclusive focus. But felon disenfranchisement is a legitimate issue that deserves to be on folks’ radars.

When opportunities came up to speak on the issue, I would call Jessica or Rosalind, and one of us would go. There weren’t many speaking engagements initially available to us, but we found them where we could. It could be at a rally or a march, and we would claim a few minutes for our issue. We might be speaking to a group of professionals, sharing our stories and trying to connect with individuals one-on-one. We might go to an NAACP meeting or a community neighborhood association meeting. If we couldn’t get ourselves invited, we would show up there anyway; even if it was just to have a conversation with an organization leader, we took that opportunity. We started getting a grant here and a donation there. Slowly but surely, one person at a time, we were bringing people back in.

THE OTHER PART OF GOING AROUND THE STATE OF FLORIDA WAS TO MEET WITH RETURNING citizens. We knew they were going to be the new lifeblood of our movement. Whenever we found out what other returning citizens were doing locally, we would go to support it. I would take money from my student loans and travel tens of thousands of miles around the state. I put over fifty thousand miles on my car in one year alone working on this campaign and never leaving the state of Florida, just talking to people in order to establish relationships with them. If you had asked me where we were located, I couldn’t give you an address. If you asked me for an office phone number, I couldn’t give you one. But I could talk about the organization and the vision that we had to one day be a force in the state of Florida to accurately reflect the voices of directly impacted people.

I didn’t have great expectations that everybody who heard about us was going to embrace what we were trying to do. We were just trying to keep it moving. My philosophy was that if you told a hundred people, maybe five or ten would rock with you, so I just kept talking to as many people as possible. Eventually, in almost every major city, there would be people who just stood out. They believed in what we were talking about, even though they hadn’t seen the advanced plans yet. People like Michael Orlando or Devin Coleman in Jacksonville, who both eventually became board members for FRRC, as did the Reverend Greg James in Tallahassee. These little pinpoints of light came from people of all economic statuses; they were Black, Brown, and white; they were men and women, and I maintained close relationships with those folks.

MY JOB AS I UNDERSTOOD IT WAS TO MAKE SURE THAT THE PLIGHT OF RETURNING CITIZENS was still at least in people’s peripheral vision. No matter what some other group was working on—from an immigration advocacy organization to the Sierra Club’s concern for the environment—I would talk to them about how FRRC impacted their cause. I would tailor my argument. I didn’t want to be obnoxious about it, but every opportunity I had, I would insert a discussion of felon disenfranchisement.

Someone could be talking about educational disparities, and I would be able to say, “Well, do you know that more money is spent on incarceration than is spent on education?” If an organization was trying to reduce gun violence, I’d say, “Well, restoring a person’s civil rights and finding other means for that person to be successful is a means of reducing the number of people in our community that have guns and that might use them for bad reasons.” I pointed out that labor organizations and economic justice champions alike would benefit if we reduced the recidivism rate. And the way to do that was to help a person reintegrate into their community, and one of the ways you help them reintegrate and have a stake in the community is by restoring their civil rights.

To everyone I met, I said some version of this: “If we’re able to solve this, it’ll make your work easier.” When you have over a million people who are barred from participating in elections, that’s a million people you lose who could have helped influence or elect policymakers, who care about your cause. I was very assertive, and I think that all of that assertiveness helped create somewhat of a buzz.

Of course, there were some people who listened, and some people who didn’t. We were making a bit of progress, but there were some stiff headwinds. That was the year that a lot of cities in the state of Florida did not have enough money in their budget and were forcing the police and firefighters’ unions back to the table to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements. There were threats of laying off firefighters and police officers, and that was consuming a lot of civic attention. The legislature was trying to pass one bill to privatize prisons in Florida and another that would allow juvenile offenders to be housed in adult facilities. Both of those initiatives would only increase inequities in the basic functioning of the criminal justice system, and resources and energy needed to be put into fighting them.

I UNDERSTOOD ALL OF THAT. I COULD BE PATIENT. MY FAITH WAS STRONG THAT EVERY time there was a challenge ahead, a way would be made. If anything, these years caused my concept of faith to mature. I had heard that faith was “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Now my faith had grown to the point where I expected God to show up when he was supposed to. I didn’t worry about how or when things were going to get done. From what direction was he going to come? I didn’t need to know on a rational level. I only had to have confidence in my expectations.