FOURTEEN

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

WHILE THERE WERE plenty of times I felt alone in my journey, the reality is that there was no way Amendment 4 would have been successful if it were not for the countless volunteers who poured their hearts into the campaign—even before it officially became a campaign. There were literally hundreds of people from Pensacola to Key West and all points in between who, in spite of the odds being against us, continued to support me and the effort. It would be impossible for me to remember all of the names. It would take another book just to talk about the ones I do remember, but I have tried to mention here the major forces of support. In that context, I have to mention Pastor McBride of the Live Free Campaign as the first person who invested in me and the one who invested in me the most.

Not too long after I started working for PICO, I met Michael McBride. He was a pastor and the director of a campaign called Live Free, which at the time was called Lifelines to Healing. Whenever I introduced myself as president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, people naturally thought that I was employed. They thought I was getting a paycheck when I wasn’t. I was surviving off of my student loans for college and then for law school.

When Pastor McBride heard I was working for PICO, he said, “Wait a minute, I didn’t even know you were looking for a job. I want you with Live Free.”

I said, “I want to rock with anybody who wants to rock with me.”

Pastor McBride’s reputation preceded him. He was a powerful man who was part of a powerful organization; if you had them behind you, you definitely had a leg up. At the same time, he had style. My first glimpse of him revealed that: a man of the cloth who wore a suit, yet he paired that with white Air Force 1 tennis shoes à la Reverend Run from Run DMC. He was able to connect with a wide range of age groups while articulating the issues that were really important. Every moment that I spent with him, I became even more inspired. He did his work as a young African American clergy member with such passion. You could easily sense there was a deep commitment to really improving the lives of Black and Brown people, and he had a spirit that made it pleasant to be around him.

What I didn’t know was that he had already heard about me from someone in his organization. They asked me to come in and share my story while they took some photographs. I didn’t realize that my outlook would have an impact on the policymakers who were higher up. He was impressed with how I carried myself and wanted to know more about me.

I was able to share with him my dreams about the work I wanted to do in Florida around returning-citizen disenfranchisement. He affirmed his belief in where I was trying to go and wanted to take the necessary steps to support that work. He created a space for me to be able to do my FRRC work while also working for him as the state director for the Live Free Campaign in Florida. I’m eternally grateful to him for that. That space allowed me to focus attention on taking the next strategic steps that previously had just been rolling around in my head.

I told him, “Listen, I’m going to do all that I can, so whoever may have doubted your decision to bring me on is going to know that you made the right choice, that you have vision. I’m going to make you look as smart as I possibly can.”

The work of Live Free dealt with gun violence, reducing mass incarceration, and other issues that have directly impacted African American communities. Even though I was focused on rights restoration, I couldn’t escape the reality of the way everything worked together. I got to see firsthand the connection between gun violence and felon disenfranchisement.

Say that a guy gets out of prison. Originally, he was arrested for selling drugs; he goes to prison, he gets out of prison. Once he gets out of prison, he can’t get a good job, can’t get an education, can’t live where he wants to live; he’s ostracized by his own community. What is he going to do? He’s going to go back to selling drugs. If he’s selling drugs, eventually, at some point he is going to get a gun to protect himself against people who are either trying to rob him or from rival dope sellers. And now the thing about this guy is, he’s not ex-military. He doesn’t have any formal gun training, but at some point he’s going to end up using that gun. He’s going to shoot and, because he doesn’t know how to shoot straight, everybody’s going to get hit but the person who he was really shooting at, and you have innocent people dying. He’s causing trauma to so many other people, and we can trace that all back to the fact that when he was released from prison, he didn’t want to go back to being a drug dealer. He wanted to live a decent life, but because all of these avenues were cut off, he was forced back into this environment. This is the life that he was forced to live.

Live Free provided that connection to the point where I often didn’t feel like I was working on two separate issues. They both have a direct connection to the community, and I could work on them simultaneously. Even though I was focused on the restoration of rights, because gun violence surrounded me, there was a part of me that had to fight for the bigger picture. There were people dying every day. Every day I would go through my social media feed or wake up to hear a story on the news about somebody who was killed. A lot of times it was young Black or Brown men who were victims of a drive-by shooting here.

There were so many times when I was driving throughout the state of Florida, from one city to the next, that I would hear something on the news: A shooting in Miami. A shooting in Orlando. And I would just start crying. I used to cry a lot when I traveled. There’s just so much time to think. Every time I was hit with a new account of something bad that was happening to African Americans, I thought, Wow, I don’t know of any race of people in the United States that have to deal with getting gunned down, or getting into altercations with police that don’t end well, or getting arrested and convicted and getting disenfranchised on a daily basis. All of the things that are happening to Black folks in this country, aren’t happening with nearly the same prevalence to other races. If this were to happen to a race of people in another country, we would be accusing that country of genocide.

The most frustrating part about it was that people would react with grief and anger—there might even be a rally about it—but then it always went back to business as usual. Another young Black man was shot down in the street? Wow, that’s bad. But it would never quite capture the interest and commitment of policymakers to stop the violence.

As part of my work with Live Free, I was able to travel to Ohio to meet Michelle Alexander, who had written The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I was so excited to get to meet her and have my picture taken with her because reading her book was like reading about my life. It was full of people who had been locked behind bars and then denied the very rights we thought we had won back in the 1960s. We know that there’s over-policing in African American communities. We know that African Americans are disproportionately arrested because of that over-policing and disproportionately convicted. So then you have a greater percentage of the African American community losing their civil rights as compared to a similarly situated white community. Before the emergence of Black Lives Matter, before the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Sandra Bland, race relations in this country had never been adequately addressed. Implicit racial bias and explicit racial tensions have always been there, even as they were covered over or conveniently overlooked by other distractions or our unwillingness as a country to address it. When Barack Obama was first elected president, we expected that to be a moment when race relations made a turn for the better. Some folks say racism died the night President Obama delivered his “Yes, We Can” acceptance speech onstage in Chicago. But there was no appreciable turn for the better. Racism did not die, and movements like Black Lives Matter dragged this ugly truth to the surface for the world to see.

Some days I felt like I could work on both issues at the same time, and other days I was torn. Looking at the activists who have tried to beat the drum about the issues impacting African Americans just like me, there was a strong compulsion to want to dive into that. But I knew that to do it right I would have to give it 100 percent of my attention. That would naturally take away from the work I was doing with felon disenfranchisement, which was the real work I was called to do. It hurt, because my people were hurting. No campaign exists in the abstract. There are always the stresses of everything else that’s happening in our community or our country, every single day. Nonetheless, I felt like all of the signs kept calling me back to felon disenfranchisement, reminding me not to let go of my particular role to play in the grander vision.

Live Free gave me opportunities to go all around the country to see the type of work that they were doing to end gun violence. Before, my experience had always been in the state of Florida, where I never passed up an opportunity to talk to returning citizens and hear their personal stories. Now I was able to see all kinds of different programs from coast to coast, and that exposure helped me mature. I met returning citizens who were doing amazing work in their respective states, fighting for the rights and dignity of people with felony convictions, particularly people who had been incarcerated. To this day, I look at many of these people as mentors. They are the ones I bounce ideas off of, or from whom I take direction, using the programs and initiatives they’ve implemented within their state or organization to build the FRRC of today.

In retrospect, Live Free played a significant role in developing the DNA of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. My time with both Live Free and PICO helped give me a better sense of what we could do with FRRC. We were in the middle of direct actions, marches, and protests, as well as election work and public education work. When I was in Miami, my advocacy was in the form of going to board meetings, giving input into policy discussions, holding homeless memorials, things of that nature. I didn’t understand the power dynamics, I didn’t understand about issue cutting, and I didn’t understand about how to leverage money and people. I learned all of that working with Live Free and PICO.

It all came down to the fact that people have the power to come together and convince elected officials to do the things we need them to do. Being an elected official means being a public servant; they serve their constituents, the voters. What successful business do you know where the boss has to beg an employee to do something and when the employee doesn’t do it, they still get a promotion or even a raise? What hampers basic organizing practices today is the fact that we have turned public servants into demigods, and their constituents are walking around as if they’re servants. You have a group of individuals who voted to elect a certain person into office, but when they need to speak to that person, they get the runaround. They rarely get to see that person in their office. If they do get an appointment, nine times out of ten, it turns out they are speaking with the pol’s chief of staff or a low-level aide and not the elected official. But you can guarantee that if that elected official’s biggest donor were to say he wanted to speak to him or her, that elected official would probably even go to that donor.

At the end of the day, that one donor should not trump the thousands of constituents who also voted for this person. A lot of folks accept this as commonplace, but that was not the original intention when this country was formed, and it’s not a conducive mindset to have when you’re organizing. That realization allowed me to be comfortable with saying that there’s no way we were going to ask, or even allow, an elected official to endorse our campaign. If you’re the boss, you need to act like the boss. With our cause, that’s the mindset we had. We acted like we were the boss. We didn’t rely on a politician for anything. We were going to show what people power truly looks like.

A great example of that was the work that Mila Al-Ayoubi and I did together. As a result of the positive polling on felon disenfranchisement, Pastor McBride was able to convince PICO to allow Mila, who eventually became our program administrator, to work with me. Remember in law school when it was discovered I had a learning disability? That learning disability basically indicated that while I had a high IQ, I had trouble taking things that were in my head and actually putting them on paper. Mila’s job was basically to take the vision that I had about the ballot initiative and operationalize it.

Mila was a driving force behind a 2012 campaign to defeat a constitutional amendment that was on the ballot around taxes. She put together and executed the plan to defeat what was called Amendment 3 in that election year. She was hard-core, and I knew if we were going to succeed we would need someone who knew what they were doing and was no nonsense.

We didn’t have a fundraising plan at the time. Mila put together our first real proposal and began shopping it around. We were constantly tweaking it, going back and forth, going through scenarios. Many times we were up late at night on the phone fussing with each other; we’d call it quits, and the next day, we were right back to trying to move this thing forward.

We got advice to go to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center conference. That’s sort of the clearinghouse of ballot initiatives, where you can connect with people and find out all of the current best practices. We weren’t part of the in-crowd there, however. When you talk about these campaigns, you see the same people running them year after year. Even if they have a history of losing, it’s still the same leaders. These leaders would bring on consultants who they have relationships with, so you find the same consultants on every campaign as well. It was like a social club that didn’t allow other people in.

Well, I didn’t want our campaign to be the same old regular campaign. I didn’t think our campaign was regular. In order for us to get money to further our work, however, funders were insistent that we hire a seasoned person to put together a campaign plan for us. We eventually agreed and hired a professional campaign person. But what was the final product from that campaign person who we paid a lot of money? The exact same plan that Mila had already written. Mila and I had a different way of doing things, one that people resisted because they were so used to doing things a certain way. We broke that mold. And over time, we got the funders to accept us and to acknowledge that the work we were doing was quality work.

THIS WAS AROUND THE TIME THAT OUR PREVIOUS PARTNERS STARTED COMING BACK TO FRRC. One of the things these organizations had taught me was that people need validators, and I had to be strategic about providing motivation for them to get excited again about our mission. Needing third-party validation is either human nature or a necessary evil; I’m not sure which. You might have the greatest idea in the world, but sometimes the folks you are trying to convince to support that idea need to know that somebody else supports it. They could think it’s a great idea, too, but they are going to ask, “Well, what about (this other organization)? How do they feel about it?”

One of the first validators that I pursued was the Alliance for Safety and Justice, because they had just won a ballot initiative, Proposition 47, in California, which reclassified certain low-level felonies into misdemeanors. I thought if I could get somebody with that kind of credibility, someone who had been to the mountaintop, as it were, to say that our ballot initiative had potential, that would draw others in. The alliance was very interested. They came on board immediately, which felt like we had just taken a giant step forward.

Prop 47 was an amazing ballot initiative that impacted people’s lives, but it was confined within the borders of one state. When you looked at our ballot initiative, I would tell people, its impact would transcend the borders of Florida, because Florida has always played a key role in the outcome of national elections. To be able to re-enfranchise over a million and a half returning citizens and add them to the voting roster would have a significant impact on moving forward.

We now tried to leverage our newfound momentum to pursue funding on a higher level. At the time, I didn’t understand the intricate and sometimes delicate interplay between funders and the grassroots. That is something I came to realize during the later stages of the process, when it turned out that canvassing, grassroots campaigning, and word-of-mouth were just as valuable to our efforts as relationships with funders. I quickly learned that, as with a typical ballot initiative, our efforts were going to be very expensive, and fundraising was most definitely going to be a key element of our success.

I didn’t have a relationship with any funders. I was relying on others to have those conversations. I was moving forward on faith that those conversations were happening, that people were going to see the potential of the work that we were doing, and that people were going to invest. When the time finally came for me to get on some of these calls, I learned something else quickly . . . and, I suppose we would say, the hard way.

I remember it vividly. We were talking to a potential major funder about putting this amendment on the ballot for 2016, which was still at this time a few years away.

The funder asked, “If Hillary Clinton’s people do not want the amendment to be on the ballot in 2016, would you be willing to stop?”

I was still a little rusty on protocol, I guess. I blurted out, “No! Why would we stop because somebody doesn’t want it? This is for the people!”

What I didn’t know at the time, when I said, “No, that we would not be willing to stop,” was that I had signed the death warrant for the ballot initiative in that year, because there were folks in the Hillary Clinton camp who believed that having something like this on the ballot would be hurtful to her campaign for president. We can see in hindsight that the machine built around Hillary stifled anything they viewed as a threat to her candidacy. Our ballot initiative fell into that category, because they calculated that it was an issue that would be decided along partisan lines. They believed that Republicans would be dead set against it, and that would rally turnout of people who would also vote for their candidate for president. That would hurt the Clinton campaign. So when I said that we would not stop, that set in motion a series of conversations that restricted, or actually completely shut off, any funding that was headed our way.