THIRTEEN

THE GREATEST INDICATOR OF CITIZENSHIP

THE MOCK TRIAL at the end of law school connected to me and my experiences, and it helped create in me a resolve that I was going to need. When all the experts and all the consultants said that restoring the rights of felons in Florida was impossible, that experience in the courtroom played a role in my having the type of faith that believes it doesn’t matter what people say. A judge says to me you’re going to be incarcerated for fifteen years—I believed it myself at the time, but God didn’t. There was something bigger at play here. I was walking in my purpose. Others might not see it, because it was a personal mission. My whole family might not understand it. But there was a burden that I alone, and no one else, had to carry and real hope that I could clearly see and believe in.

DURING THE NEXT SIX YEARS, THE FLORIDA RIGHTS RESTORATION COALITION GOT HELP from so many sources that it was humbling. The PICO (People Improving Communities Through Organizing) National Network and their Florida branch, Live Free (Lifelines to Healing), the ACLU, the Advancement Project, the Florida Justice League, the Brennan Center for Justice, the NAACP, the Sentencing Project, the League of Women Voters, DEMOS—every one of these organizations contributed some thinking to what a ballot initiative to re-enfranchise returning citizens could look like.

All I knew before receiving input from these groups was that I was directly impacted by disenfranchisement, that felon disenfranchisement was not good for our state, and that we needed to do something to change the policies maintaining it. I had the content for making the case for re-enfranchisement, but I was sorely lacking in the mechanisms for how to get it done. A constitutional amendment on a statewide ballot would not stand a chance without substantive input from anyone who had something of value to add. Whether someone contributed funds for research, access to a phone bank, help with canvassing, or just a thought-provoking conversation, it was all welcome to me.

I guess one of my contributions was to be humble enough to let it all in. But how could I not be? For much of that time, while I was in school, in addition to managing the three-quarter-way house, I was working as a short-order cook. I didn’t know what these other folks knew. Come to think of it, my hospitality experience is a good example of not only my own arc but also of movement building.

Before I was first released from the drug treatment program, I got help retrieving documents like my birth certificate and my Social Security card. You need that identification to get a job, even though there are so many places, too many places, that turn away from hiring returning citizens. According to those employers, there is only one right answer to the question, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” You need someone to take a chance on you, which is what a chef at the Hyatt in downtown Miami did.

I applied for a job to be a cook there. I was not a cook. I remember the chef said, “You can cook, huh?” I said, “Yes.” He took me in the kitchen, and he put a pan on the stove and said, “Make me some over easy.” I tried to do it. I messed the egg up. He gave me four more chances. At that time, he could tell that no, I was not a cook. But there was something about me that he was attracted to.

He said, “You know what? I’m going to give you a chance. I’m going to hire you, but I’m going to train you.” He would make me stand in the kitchen in slow periods, and I would have to put a piece of bread in the frying pan and I would have to flip the bread without the bread leaving the frying pan. The bread had to maintain contact with the surface of the frying pan. He kept having me do that.

Once I mastered that, my confidence level started to grow, and I was able to get a job at Denny’s as a short-order cook. Denny’s may not impress you, but that place is hard work. You have to have it together, and you have to keep it together. Denny’s has a fast pace; you had to learn how to be orderly in the kitchen and how to clean as you go. Not doing these things contributes to the kitchen being backed up and you being lost in the weeds. I became a really good cook working there, but when I look at the beginning, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like those penguins in the movie Madagascar who were building the plane as they flew it.

It was the same thing with running the ballot initiative. I’d never done anything like this, or even close to this, in my life, but I knew I could figure it out, especially with the kind of help I was getting.

IN 2012, OUR FRRC CONVENING WAS HELD IN ORLANDO. IT WAS THERE THAT I FIRST CAME into contact with People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO). They were very interested in the restoration of civil rights because some of their leaders in the Orlando area were directly impacted. They had done a listening session with their folks, and they kept hearing about felon disenfranchisement. They were thoroughly impressed with the convening, and that led to me being able to leave Denny’s to work for PICO. PICO was the largest organizer of faith-based institutions in the country, whether Christian or Jewish or Islamic or other denominations. I was brought on in Florida to help organize churches, and from that experience I developed a deep bank of connections that would later greatly assist with the ballot initiative.

My work with PICO helped in other ways too. The PICO National Network was running a campaign at the time called Let My People Vote. The phrase “Let my people vote” was actually first used by Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, a formerly incarcerated person and an advocate for criminal justice and voting reform. He labored for years to enfranchise returning citizens throughout the Southern states. PICO’s project was specifically designed to get more churches engaged in the voting process, by getting their congregations registered to vote and encouraging them to actively go and vote at the polls. They were using in their flyers and banners an image of a man whose hands were bound by a flag with that wording, “Let My People Vote.” That combination of image and text really struck me, and the thought that the phrase originated from a fellow returning citizen and advocate was fitting.

I decided I was going to use that image on the pledge cards that FRRC was designing. The idea behind the pledge cards was to get returning citizens to get five to ten family members and friends to pledge to vote on their behalf. The cards read “I pledge my support to _____,” and then the person filled in the name of the returning citizen who couldn’t vote, along with the person’s name, telephone number, and address. The returning citizen would collect those cards and send them back to me, and we would start building a database of people who were pledging to vote on behalf of their loved ones. I was able to get the pledge cards printed and was soon passing them out as I traveled the state, meeting with returning citizens and anyone who would stop long enough to listen to my pitch.

I also had assistance in printing and distributing these pledge cards from my sister-in-law, Salandra Benton, the state convener for the Florida Coalition on Black Civic Participation. This speaks to something I have seen time and again in my activist life: women are more likely to be engaged than men. This is just my personal observation, but it seems that whatever meeting I might be attending, the majority of the people there were women. Throughout my process most of the folks that were with me, especially when no one else believed that what I was doing was going to go anywhere, were women. Women have really stepped up in a major way in my eyes.

There was no more special example of this than my mother-in-law. As I mentioned earlier, I met Ms. Jackson, or, as everyone affectionately calls her, “Big Ma,” months before I met my wife, Sheena. She happened to attend a breakout session where I spoke about felon disenfranchisement. This was not a hot topic at the time, so I was given the last speaking slot of the session. By the time I had my chance to speak, most of attendees had already left the room. Big Ma was one of the few people who remained to listen, and when I was done, she patiently waited as other people lined up to speak with me to share their stories or ask additional questions. By the time we got a chance to speak, I had run out of my makeshift business cards, and she had to write my contact information on a piece of paper.

Among Big Ma’s many roles to come was to prepare large mailing envelopes for any packets of blank petitions (once we had graduated from pledge cards) that had to be mailed out to a volunteer, or signed petitions that needed to be mailed to a Supervisor of Elections’ office. But her primary role, and the one she loved the best, was sorting out the signed petitions and grouping them by county. She would have large folding tables throughout her living room with mounds of petitions on each one. The living room became her command center, where she could comfortably sort out petitions while watching her Lifetime shows. Big Ma was so committed to her role that when the campaign got to the stage where we had to quickly collect a million petitions and finally had funding to hire staff, it was extremely hard to get her to accept the fact that our now established operations had to take over handling the petitions. She did not go quietly.

Just as there was a time when I was educated and buoyed by so many organizations, there came a time when the running of the campaign seemed to be more of a family operation than anything. When it became apparent that funding was not going to come, the support of organizations waned, and I was left to fend for myself; my wife, five kids, and my mother-in-law were pressed into filling the void left by organizations. It was not too difficult for people from these other organizations to walk away from the campaign when they already had the right to vote, or when they or a loved one was not feeling the weight of collateral consequences because of a felony conviction, but I couldn’t just walk away. While everyone could just go back to what they were doing before and still be able to vote the next day, I had nothing to lose by sticking with it, but I had everything to gain. So I stayed, and I sacrificed.

Freshly married, I remember being in the living room with my wife, at times upset and overwhelmed. People ask Sheena now, “How did you guys make it?” And she says, “Well, we just couldn’t give up at the same time.”

The days I was having a bad day, thinking, Why am I doing this?, she would remind me, “Baby, God called you to do this.” And then there would be days when she would ask, “Desmond, why are you doing this, with no money and no support?” And I would have to answer, “Honey, I’ve been called to this, and it’s about more than just me.”

Sheena says, in the language of our faith, that God had to strip me all the way down, to make sure we knew that no one did this but God. God gave me the strength and ability and endurance to push his campaign along.

AS WE STARTED TO MAKE SOME HEADWAY WITH THE PLEDGE CARDS, THE QUESTION became, What are we asking these supporters to vote for? They are pledging their support, but we don’t have any legislation up. There is no focus to our initiative. Politicians are certainly not addressing issues that directly impact returning citizens. Felon re-enfranchisement was a huge topic to be covered with one particular vote. We needed some specificity.

I started to get glimmers of this when I was traveling the state. Almost every community I visited faced the same challenges, exemplified best perhaps by the Parramore community of Orlando. Residents there have suffered tremendously from institutionalized racism. Unemployment there was at nearly 25 percent (and this was long before COVID-19), and median household income hovered just below the poverty line. I got to meet some of the neighborhood’s leaders and realize the gravity of their situation. At the same time, so many of them couldn’t vote to change any policies that might be affecting their economic well-being. There were even pastors there who couldn’t vote.

I remember reading and hearing stories about how, during the civil rights era, when it was time to vote, parents would dress up the family in their finest clothes to go to the polling location. Voting was a festive occasion, and civic participation was a part of many discussions held at the dinner table. But like the saying goes, “If you cut off the head of a snake, the rest of the body will die,” so when fathers, mothers, and preachers are stripped of the right to vote, it killed those conversations at the dinner table and at community gatherings, and the enthusiasm to participate in democracy on a larger scale died right along with it. That was an inspiration for FRRC, to land on the best way to begin the process of the re-enfranchisement of all rights for returning citizens. We would start with the right to vote.

All rights are important to returning citizens: to be able to surpass occupational license restrictions or housing restrictions or education restrictions; to serve on a jury; to run for office; and to own a firearm. All of these make up an individual’s civil rights. But when I looked at all of those rights, the one that stuck out more than any other was the right to vote. I had learned over the course of the years since returning from prison that nothing speaks more to citizenship than being able to have your voice heard. If we were limited to just dealing with one issue at a time, that seemed like the single most important civil right. Nothing restores dignity more effectively than the right to vote, which in turn can lead to all kinds of other positive momentum for an individual.

Once we decided on the heart of our ballot initiative, we were able to undertake another round of polling with the assistance of the Brennan Center. We were still reeling a little bit from the polls in the previous decade that showed an overwhelming number of voters against the restoration of returning citizens’ rights. Now we wanted to dig a little deeper and figure out why. What’s going on in the minds of voters?

We did focus groups throughout the state of Florida: one in the Orlando area, two in the Jacksonville area, and two in the Miami area. Each group was made up of a different set of demographics. We found out a few things of distinct interest. The first was that people were strongly opposed to restoring voting rights to people who were convicted of crimes like murder, child molestation, and rape. The second thing we found out was that people were more inclined to be supportive of the restoration of voting rights when someone had completed all portions of their sentence, not just when they were released from prison. Folks wanted to make sure that those who were on probation or parole had completed their sentence before having their voting rights restored.

I was fortunate enough to attend four out of the five focus groups, and one of the things I felt strongly was that people there did believe in redemption. They did believe in restoration as a matter of moral principle. How that happened just had to be crafted the right way. So we took the findings from the focus groups and went back to the drawing board. We carved out those convicted of homicide, sexual crimes, or crimes against children, and we introduced the stipulation that a returning citizen must have completed all of their post-release obligations. When we did that, the support for restoration skyrocketed. I had heard that no one was going to support a ballot initiative unless you could show polls that were at least 60 percent in favor of it, which was the threshold needed for such an effort to pass. The reasoning went that there are things that will happen that make your numbers go down, and all of your work can help them rise again, but your initial number has to be there. Well, our initial number was 77 percent in support of our initiative.

When we got that number back, my heart just jumped. I didn’t want to get too excited too fast, but I couldn’t help it. I just felt like, Oh my God, we have a pathway. I maintained my composure, but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew this would excite folks working for our cause and provide an infusion of optimism. With this research backing us up, funders were going to turn out. There might be periods of doubt ahead for others, but there were not going to be any more dark days for me, because deep down inside I already knew what the research eventually told us: most people care about, and believe in, forgiveness and giving people second chances.