I was riding shotgun in a 1996 Chevy Caprice Wagon. Yusef Shakur was driving, his phone ringing every few minutes. This was our first time riding together. We were picking up one of the brothers on the first stop, an elder from an East Coast branch of the Black Panther Party. Yusef flew him in for an event later that night, the Restoring the Neighbor Back to the Hood banquet, an awards ceremony that spotlights the work of black revolutionaries’ organizing in Detroit. He was walking me through his influences.
“As a young person growing up who had a nigga mentality,” he said, “I looked at other niggas to imitate. You know, gangbangers. Dope dealers.” Those were his heroes then. “So, following that same suit, now I become a brother. And recognizing what that means, I look for other brothers,” he said. “George Jackson, Bunchy Carter, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass.” These were the men he looked to, men who had changed their lives and changed the world. “I didn’t have the knowledge of the black struggle or what it meant to be black in America,” he said. “I just had the knowledge of suffering and things of that nature.”
We pulled up to the hotel. I hopped in the back seat while Yusef got out of the car to hold the door open.
“Boy, you looking super-cool!” he said to a young brother wearing a newly pressed dashiki who couldn’t help but smile. This young man’s job was to escort an elder, make sure he got around the city safely. Yusef ran a tight ship.
“What you got a taste for?” Yusef asked as he greeted the elder.
“Nothing with pork,” the elder said, smiling. He got in the car, and we pulled off.
We had been driving just a few minutes when Yusef turned to explain the evening’s event. “The work that we do was called Restoring the Neighbor Back to the Hood,” he said. “We organize around black liberation weekend. So we’ll be introducing the whole concept of black liberation, what it is, but from a historical standpoint. It’s not this thing in space without no substance. It’s not like it just fell out of the sky,” he said.
Black liberation had a history, and that history was connected by the people who lived and died for it—old organizers and new ones. This was why the elder was there. He was a member of the Black Panther Party, and he was one of the founders of his city’s branch. He’d earned his stripes years before. Yusef would introduce the elder at the banquet. His presence and Yusef’s connected the older and younger generations of the black power movement, which did grassroots organizing in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Oakland, and Chicago.
“We’ll be honoring people in the community that is taking initiative,” Yusef said. The elder would give the keynote address, and Yusef would speak after he was done, discussing what black liberation could mean to the people he grew up with on the west side of Detroit. He would give an award to an organizer from the younger generation of black power activists.
Yusef spent years mentoring kids and twenty- and thirty-somethings from his neighborhood. It had always been this way. He was a cofounder of Zone 8, a gang named after its Detroit zip code, and he did nine years of a fifteen-year bid for a robbery he says he didn’t commit. Nine years is a long time. It wasn’t inevitable. No one deserves it, according to Yusef, but to him, the bid wasn’t surprising.
His mother was fifteen when she had him. The men in her life were abusive. He watched them beat her, and they would sometimes beat him. He learned to fight early. He told me once he looked up to his father. “He was cool,” he said. “All boys want to be like their dads. And he was real good at martial arts.” But Yusef didn’t know the man, not really. He only knew his father lived a few blocks away.
Yusef was nineteen when he was convicted for a robbery, but he had been in and out of juvenile detention, like almost everyone else I met during the course of my work. By that time, his father had been in prison for years on a murder charge. When Yusef was transferred to an adult facility, after a fight and a few close calls, he wrote his father a letter.
“Dear Dad,” the letter opened. “By seeing the adress on the envelop, you can see Im down the road from you. I have been in prison for about three months now. I came to prison for assault with a attempt to rob un-arm.” He explained that he was convicted of a crime he did not commit. “The fucking black judge talking about he was going to send a mesage back to my hood,” he said. He had not written his father before because “I didn’t want to hear one of those I-told-you-so speeches,” he wrote. And he got into a fight with his bunkie. “The coward nigga call himself trying to act hard.” But Yusef, who was then Jo-Jo, “was not having none of that.” He was sent to the hole, and he told his father that “these fake religious guys trying to kick knowlege to me,” ones who “be messing with fags or in to all type shit,” were trying to convince him to join their group. Yusef declined, saying he could get into trouble alone. “My attitude is I’ma be a nigga 4 life,” he wrote and signed off, “Love U. Jo-Jo.”
His father wrote back: “Peace be upon you my beloved Son.” He told him he’d received his letter. That he was sorry to see his son in the “belly of the beast.” That the prison was a concentration camp and that he was sorry that Yusef had been convicted of a crime he did not commit. He said Yusef must file his appeal within fifty-six days and that he must study the law. He told his son to make his own decision about religion, though he himself had become a Muslim. He said Yusef was more than a nigga and ended the letter by saying he loved him. He left a curious postscript. “Joseph,” he wrote, “you misspelled knowledge, religion, envelope, address, message and religious.” He urged him to get a dictionary, which he said Malcolm X studied from beginning to end when he was in prison. “Words are powerful,” his father wrote, “because they convey who we are. Use your mind to free yourself or somebody will use your mind to keep you a slave.”
This began decades of correspondence and mentorship between father and son. An event, perhaps less bizarre than it seemed to me at the time, brought the men together in a way that even their affectionate letters never could have. Yusef was transferred to his father’s prison. They even did time on the same wing. This was their opportunity to grow close, and they took it. They studied and prayed and exercised and walked the yard together in the mornings. Yusef grew as a man. He changed his name. He was no longer Jo-Jo from Zone 8. He changed his religion and became Muslim like his father. Yusef has since walked away from organized religion. He steeped himself in the works and words of black revolutionaries, the same people he calls heroes today. He said, “It was like going away to college.”
After six short months with his father, he was transferred again, but even this was, in his words, a blessing. “It gave me the opportunity to try out what I learned,” he said. Yusef started study groups and a chess club. He organized men inside the prison. He once organized against the guards because they’d used racial slurs. This was itself striking. Yusef used to say he was a “nigga for life.” He writes about this time in each of the four books he’s published since walking off the yard at the Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Michigan. We met a decade and a half later.
Yusef had long since returned to Detroit. He broke up fights and counseled men and did what he could to help them meet their needs. This was all on the same blocks where he cofounded Zone 8. “When the resources left our community, we turned on each other,” he once said in an interview. “Crime is a part of a larger system. It forces people into doing illegal things as a result of survival.”
Yusef did political education and opened a bookstore and a café. He started rehabbing a vacant building in 2011 that would eventually become a community center, and he started the Restoring the Neighbor Back to the Hood initiative, which included an annual book-bag drive, a block party, and the banquet where the elder would speak and the young revolutionaries would be recognized, completing what Yusef might call a circle of black liberation.
The elder said he didn’t want to be recorded when I asked him. “I’ll just stop talking,” he said, laughing, when I told him that I was a researcher trying to get my head around Yusef’s life and work. “I will say this, though,” the elder said, looking over his shoulder to make eye contact with me. “So many of us have been caught and criminalized in the prison system,” he said. “Yusef is a role model…in terms of self-transformation. Becoming a people’s servant. He represents the new leadership in the twenty-first century. On the ground. Grassroots. You can record me on that,” he said before turning back around in his seat.
Ronald was one of the first people to tell me about Yusef. He’d done time with Yusef’s father. They respected each other, and they were leading voices in a large and growing coalition of organizers directly affected by mass incarceration. While they took different bites of the apple, they had the same goals. The prison system was unsustainable. Yusef wanted his people to be free and independent. Ronald wanted the same. He had been traveling the country, giving lectures to local and national policy makers about the problem of overreliance on prisons and the possibility for reform. He was pushing to change laws, but more than that, he was advocating for a change in perspective.
Ronald walked out of prison in 2012 to a part-time job at a prisoners’ rights–advocacy group. He was selected for a fellowship with a national coalition of formerly incarcerated organizers. They hired him within the year. He worked his way up from program associate to director of alumni relations and civic engagement, facilitating the communication with a national network of formerly incarcerated activists. He went from organizing lifers inside the “belly of the beast” to persuading public officials to change law and policy in the halls of power. He’s met with judges and state and federal legislators and he’s given public lectures at universities, churches, and community-based organizations.
I remember the first time I saw him give a public address. It was 2015. We had been working together for a year and a half. He was invited to Washington University in St. Louis to give the keynote speech at a conference on criminal justice reform. The moment was surreal. His boss, Glenn Martin, was leading the first in a series of fireside chats. He sat on stage with Ronald. Joining them was John Chisholm, a “progressive prosecutor” and the district attorney of Milwaukee County. All you could see of them in that packed auditorium was the men sitting on a stage with a coffee table, three mugs, and their microphones; on a large screen behind them were the words REIMAGINING JUSTICE in red letters on a mostly black background with faded images of city life.
The prosecutor was between Glenn, who sat cross-legged in a sleek gray suit with his MacBook Pro open in front of him, and Ronald, who wore a crisp black jacket, tie, and freshly pressed white shirt. Ronald was comfortable, sitting most of the time with his hands folded in front of him, while Glenn walked the men through the discussion. The audience learned of Ronald’s wrongful conviction and the prosecutorial misconduct that had put him in a cage for twenty-seven years. We learned about the importance of reform and the steps the prosecutor took to demonstrate he was open to change. Ronald talked about the tragedy he carried—his son’s murder on Father’s Day after Ronald had spent a decade locked away for a crime he did not commit.
This was the first time I heard him tell that story to anyone else. There were a couple of hundred people in that auditorium, all hanging on his every word. This man who had been wrongfully convicted sat on the stage with a prosecutor, both of them trying to bring about change.
Ronald explained that he advocated on behalf of his child’s killer. “I did not want that child in an adult prison,” he said. “It would not bring back my son.”
Ronald, in what I’ve learned is standard after he gives a public lecture, received a standing ovation. These days I find it hard not to think about the contrast between Yusef’s life and Ronald’s. Yusef found his father in prison. Ronald lost his only son. The prison shaped their families, pushing each man into political action in ways that I find profound.
I’ve now heard Ronald’s story dozens of times. Each time there’s a similar reaction. Gasps. Then silence, as people try to make sense of the boy’s death. Sometimes someone cries. The audience is always receptive. It is what comes next that used to bother me.
Ronald would talk about the need for reform, the fact that everyone deserves a second chance. But then he’d say something like, “If we really want change that’s lasting, we have to change people’s hearts and minds.” He would offer a measurement of people who could be swayed: “I may not be able to reach the ones and twos or the nines and tens,” he’d say, “but the fours or fives or sixes—those are the people I’m concerned about.” I’ve always found this jarring. Nine hundred thousand black people would still be in cages even if Ronald convinced all the fours, fives, and sixes that they deserved a second chance. Yes, racism and disdain for the poor led us to mass incarceration, but I believed, and still believe, that the law is its engine.
The problem, I thought, wasn’t hearts or minds. It was the rules that keep a woman with children from being able to rent an apartment because she has a criminal record. It’s the policies that push a landlord to evict a grandmother because her formerly incarcerated grandson slept on her couch. Imprisonment and being viewed as a criminal by the larger society create material conditions that must be dismantled if we’re serious about making change. The problem is policy, not people’s hearts. It is action, not intention—at least, that’s what I believe. But Ronald would follow that statement with a sentiment that challenged my presumptions.
“If you don’t change hearts and minds,” he’d say, “with the stroke of a pen, when someone new comes into power, they can wipe away all your progress.” This is true. History isn’t linear. Time passes from year to year, but we don’t move from one victory to another until we get closer to some version of the truth or some great new world where our problems have all disappeared. We don’t perfect the union, not in the ways we typically talk about. To borrow words from Angela Davis, freedom is a constant struggle.1 In this case, the struggle is about making a world in which everyone belongs, even the people you’re afraid of. The problem of mass incarceration is really a problem of citizenship. This is because citizenship isn’t just about whether or not someone has a set of legal rights. Citizenship is something each of us practices in everyday life. It is made through everyday exchanges and between people at every level, because citizenship is about belonging.
The phone rang. I recognized the number. It was the digital woman from the Michigan Department of Corrections telling me that Jeremiah was on the line. It had been nearly a year and he was up for parole. This meant it was time to think of an exit plan. Where would he live? Where would he work? How much would all of this cost? I pressed 0 to accept the call.
Jeremiah and I talked for the next fifteen minutes about plans we’d discussed a dozen times. He would live in my friend Bradley’s building, a three-flat with a basement apartment. The basement was in rough shape. The rug was mildewed. It was cold in the winter. The radiator pipes dripped. But the apartment was cheap and there were heaters. It was pretty easy to fix leaking radiator pipes; there’s a putty you can buy at Ace Hardware. We could remove the rugs together and clean the basement. I could buy throw rugs for the living spaces, and with insulation and a little drywall, the unit wouldn’t get so cold. Add fresh paint and new appliances, and the basement would feel like someone’s home.
I would pay Bradley four hundred dollars each month. He would allow my brother to live there for as long as he needed. Jeremiah caught his case in my house, so he couldn’t live with me. Besides, we didn’t have the room. And if you live with someone on parole, you are subject to the things that person is subject to—random checks at ungodly hours, phone calls, the threat of a raid. This was not only a point of discomfort. There were videos floating around the internet of police shooting the wrong person or raiding the wrong house or killing black people every day going about their normal routines. We are a black family. I have a young black son who answered the door the last time Jeremiah got our house raided. On top of that, my landlord wouldn’t permit it. We lived in university housing. They did background checks. If I allowed Jeremiah to live with me, my family could be evicted. Renting the unit from my homeowner friend was the only real option.
I wrapped up the conversation with Jeremiah and left a voice mail for the woman who handles parolee placement at the Michigan Department of Corrections headquarters. She called back a few days later. We went over an application for a parole transfer. He would have to be transported to Chicago. She cleared the plan for Jeremiah’s release. A parole officer would contact me within a few days, she said, to inspect the unit where he would live.
A month went by before I heard from the officer. He left a cryptic voice mail, but I was used to this by now. I remembered the awful communication I had with the police when Jeremiah was arrested the year before. They didn’t believe that I was a faculty member at the University of Michigan even though they called me at work.
The parole officer said, via text message for some reason, that he would come by in two days to inspect the unit. Should it be approved, he would put in the paperwork to have Jeremiah transported to Chicago on the day of his release. I was nervous about the inspection, but we had a plan. Sometime before he was released, I would grab remodeling supplies and start preparing the drafty basement apartment.
Unfortunately, Bradley had rented the apartment without telling me. He met another man who had been to prison—a white handyman who did electrical and drywall work for Bradley from time to time. The handyman needed a place to stay. He asked Bradley if he could live in the basement in exchange for work on the building. He’d lived in the basement for months. Bradley never said a word.
I learned that Bradley had already rented the apartment when I called to set up the parole inspection. I was stunned and sad and frustrated and angry but I couldn’t afford to grieve. There was so much to do. Where would Jeremiah parole? How would I find a place in just two days? How would I get it approved? Did this mean he would have to stay in prison longer?
Bradley asked me if Jeremiah could sleep in one of the rooms in the basement apartment. Of course he couldn’t. I knew what his release papers would say, if he ever got out of prison. Perhaps it would be item six or seven, right after “You may not leave the state,” but before “You may not own a firearm” and “You may not drink alcohol”: “You may not associate with known offenders; that is, you may not spend time with anyone who has a criminal record.” He certainly could not live with a man who was on parole. Besides, the handyman also had a parole officer and conditions of release that he had to follow. He could not afford to have Jeremiah live there any more than Jeremiah could afford to live with him. Associating with a known offender could get both of them sent back to prison. And they would each be responsible for what happened in the unit. If one of them got caught with a gun or with drugs or if he kept alcohol in the apartment, they could both be arrested. And two parole officers would likely be assigned to that one basement apartment, doubling the chance that the unit would be randomly checked or subject to a raid.
This normally would have been the end of things. It almost ended our friendship, though Bradley never knew it. I had no time to argue. Now there was nowhere for Jeremiah to parole. How would I explain this to my brother? What would I say to the parole board? This was the plan the woman at the MDOC headquarters approved, and this was the plan I’d laid out in my letter of support. I’d leveraged my career in that letter.
TO: Michigan Parole Board
Lansing, MI
FROM: Dr. Reuben Miller
Chicago, IL
RE: The Parole of Jeremiah, Inmate Number 1234567
To whom it may concern,
My name is Reuben Miller, the younger brother of the prisoner and an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Chicago. I write this letter in full support of Jeremiah’s parole.
As members of Jeremiah’s primary support network, our family will do everything we can to help him make a successful transition home from prison. I would like to tell you a bit about my family and background, and then discuss how we will help support Jeremiah upon his release.
I talked about my experiences working with men in the Cook County Jail and my research with people on parole in the state of Michigan. I told them that I understood the nature and severity of his crime and that I would do all that I could to help “hold him accountable,” knowing how much parole boards got off on the language of responsibility. I told them that I’d served my country as a hospital corpsman in the U.S. Navy and that my family had a history of service; my maternal grandfather was an infantryman in the army during World War II. I told them that I’d become a religious volunteer after getting out of the service, and I told them about the support system we’d built to help Jeremiah transition to life back home. I wrote my brother Joseph’s letter too. He would provide moral support. And I wrote my friend Bradley’s letter, discussing, in great detail, Jeremiah’s living arrangement. I would cover his rent until he found a job, but not a month longer. He had to be accountable—though I knew I would likely be paying his rent for the long term. Jeremiah had had a drug problem before he went to prison. He would have the same drug problem now, and he’d have a felony on his record. Who would hire him? Who would rent him an apartment? There was no time to think of these things. We had to get him home.
How would I explain to the woman who handled parole placements that Jeremiah’s living arrangement had changed? What would I say to my brother? I avoided his phone calls and all calls from a Michigan area code for the next three days. I needed to clear my head. I couldn’t think of anywhere else for him to parole. This meant he would have to wait in prison until a place opened. I had just started to make peace with this idea when I got a call from Bradley.
I understood why he’d rented the apartment. Bradley was facing foreclosure. He needed work done in the building. He didn’t apologize. I’m not even sure he thought he’d done anything wrong. I’m not sure that he knows this even now. But before he got off the phone, my friend offered to let Jeremiah sleep in an extra bedroom in his apartment. I hated the idea. My brother was older than me and needed his own space, and my friend was no-nonsense. I could imagine more than one circumstance that would lead Bradley to put Jeremiah outdoors. But he insisted. Bradley had known Jeremiah for as long as he had known me. We were like family. He would let Jeremiah sleep in his spare bedroom, which was generous, and when the handyman moved out, Jeremiah could rent the basement unit. We had a new plan. I called the woman in Lansing.
I was glad to have a new arrangement for Jeremiah and grateful that Bradley would allow him to sleep in his extra room. But even though he would just be upstairs, it was technically a different address, and that address had to be approved.
Two weeks went by. A parole officer eventually called to set up an inspection, a process he said should take thirty to forty-five minutes. The officer walked in the door, his hair cropped close in a military flattop, his hand gripping his belt just close enough to his gun holster for me to feel uncomfortable. He seemed overly serious when he wasn’t cracking some childish joke, but his face was friendly enough for me to overlook it—at least at first. It took just a few minutes to figure out how the visit would go.
The pudgy man enjoyed the power of his position. First, there were the seemingly random comments. “This is who will be leading our country,” he said as he glanced at the muted TV. The news was on in the background. The Parkland shooting had happened a few weeks before, and student activists were leading the first of many large rallies. He made some passing reference to Black Lives Matter, doing his best to draw me into a long conversation about why police kill black civilians. He knew I was a professor. He seemed to like something about starting and, perhaps in his mind, winning an argument.
“Did they fight?” he asked me when confronted with the fact of police murder. Young unarmed black men were killed at twenty-one times the rate of young unarmed white men. Native Americans were killed at an even higher rate, but no one paid attention.2
Bradley’s two large German shepherds were curious, peering out of the bedroom. The agent told my friend to call them in. They trotted out, happy to get their heads rubbed. I was worried that this would be a problem, but the officer said he loved dogs. He cracked some bad joke about shooting a rottweiler during a raid.
“I’m just kidding,” he said, noticing the mood drop in the room. “I would never shoot one of these beautiful creatures.” But he would kill a black man if he fought back, I thought.
“You’ll put in my phone line,” the officer said to Bradley and me while he nodded his head up and down signaling that we should say yes, like we were children. He needed to reach Jeremiah and, by extension, Bradley at any time of the day or night. And he promised to call at two or three o’clock in the morning. He also joked that he’d conduct a few raids at around the same time. It was the strangest conversation. In one moment, he would tell some off-color joke like he wanted to be friends. In another, he would make a threat. “You know, when we search a house, we search your things too,” he said. “You don’t have a gun in here, do you?” He was shaking his head from side to side to indicate that Bradley should say no.
About three hours into the visit I told him I had to leave and he cracked another bad joke. “Your wife has your balls,” he said. A three-hour parole inspection, almost none of it about Jeremiah—I should have told him to leave after the half an hour the visit should have taken, but how could I. I needed him to approve the unit.
I didn’t know it then, because I didn’t have the words, but I was drawn into the economy of favors. I had to overlook my friend renting the basement to that handyman; there was nowhere else I could turn for help. I had to leverage my reputation to get the parole board to believe in the plan or Jeremiah would spend more time in prison. I had to indulge the parole officer, sitting through ridicule, so that he would approve the placement. All of these arrangements could dissolve on a whim. Any of the people I turned to for help could have said no without so much as an explanation.
I didn’t hear from the parole officer or the woman from headquarters for nearly three weeks. Jeremiah called and told me the news: after a three-hour visit, and after I’d endured bad jokes and threats for more time than I spend with most people, the officer denied the placement. I called the officer to find out why. I got his voice mail. He replied with a text message a few days later. I suppose this was his way.
Yeah, the unit had dogs, he texted. That’s what the boss said. This was section 12 of Illinois Criminal Statute 720 at work: “Possession of unsterilized or vicious dogs by felons prohibited.”
I was giving a lecture at a university in Georgia about citizenship in the carceral age. I talked about the economy of favors, doing my best to lay out what it’s like to live with a criminal record. And I talked about what it meant for everyday activities that were legal for everyone else, like drinking or crossing state lines or spending time with whomever you wanted, to be illegal for you. I discussed how demands that can’t be legally required of others, like peeing in a cup or attending an anger-management class, can be required of you. I discussed how the laws and policies that made you dependent on others also made you among the least desirable candidates for help, that the people you turned to in your time of need could be punished if they helped you. And I talked about the lengths that a formerly incarcerated person had to go to in order to convince others to do him the “favor” of offering him a job or renting him an apartment or providing the social services that he needed. I called this “carceral citizenship” and said the emergence of an economy of favors changed how people relate to one another in this new supervised society. It introduced a new power dynamic. Relationships, for formerly incarcerated people, now began from a position of need. You need the apartment or the job with the boss who mistreats you or the relationship with the lover you no longer care for because you have nowhere else to go.
I met Sabrina at that event. She was a well-known organizer from Georgia who worked on the campaign in Florida to restore voting rights for people with felony records. She had been featured in a documentary, had won an international fellowship, and had just returned from a tour of prisons in Norway. She happened to be in town when I gave my lecture. We became fast friends.
“Reuben,” she said on a phone call a few months later, “I couldn’t even get a fucking apartment. This was just last year!” She was gainfully employed. She had strong credit and was well respected in her community. But none of that mattered. She had a criminal record. Her applications were denied. “I got a state representative to write me a letter of recommendation,” she said. “You know they still wouldn’t rent me an apartment?”
Sabrina eventually found a landlord willing to rent her a place, a woman she described as a fan. “She would come to all my talks and say, ‘Let me know if I can ever help you out.’ But the more people know your struggles, the weaker your position,” she said.
The woman offered Sabrina a lease, and Sabrina moved out of the two-bedroom apartment she shared with her mother, her younger brother, and her two children. She was happy to be out on her own and grateful that the landlord was willing to do the “favor” of leasing her the unit.
“The place had fleas,” Sabrina said. “I’m there on the floor with my kids, and the apartment had fucking fleas,” she said. Sabrina told the landlord about the fleas and the other problems in the apartment, including mice. “Do you know that she said I was lucky someone was willing to rent to me?”
Sabrina moved out and tried to rent an apartment elsewhere, but when other landlords in their small city called the woman for a reference, she told them that Sabrina was a “difficult tenant.” No one in Sabrina’s hometown was willing to lease her a decent apartment, one that was clean and in a safe neighborhood.
“People see all these accolades,” Sabrina told me, “but I’m still a formerly incarcerated woman.”
I’ve thought a lot about the people I’ve met over the years, especially in light of caring for Jeremiah, and I’ve thought a lot about what it would take to improve the lives of people with criminal records. Ronald’s words have haunted me. What does it mean to “change hearts and minds”? It seems Pollyannaish, but it requires a radical kind of politics if we take the idea to its limits. It didn’t matter if white people or judges or elected officials were afraid of Sabrina or not. It didn’t matter that she’d gone above and beyond paying her so-called debt to society. It certainly didn’t matter that she’d changed her life. She was still a formerly incarcerated woman. Jeremiah might never land the kind of job that could lift him out of poverty. He still has an X on his back. It didn’t matter that I was a professor who had worked in the nation’s most prestigious universities. There was nothing I could do to ensure my brother had a place to live. It didn’t even matter that Ronald didn’t commit the crime for which he was convicted. He still spent twenty-seven years in a cage. They were drawn into a mesh through a history of incarceration, whether they committed crimes or not and whether they changed their lives or not.
The change that Ronald calls for goes far beyond a feeling. You can change all the laws and policies you want, he would say, but if hearts and minds don’t change, the victory just won’t last. We see this all the time if we care to pay attention. Sabrina helped restore voting rights in Florida for some people with felony records. People convicted of murder would not get their rights restored, nor would people convicted of sex offenses, because these people are feared and loathed. But what does a felony record have to do with the right to vote? How and why are they connected? The legislation restored the franchise to 1.4 million people, a historic victory by any measure despite its limitations. But in less than six months, a newly elected governor signed a bill into law stating that people with criminal records could not vote until they’d paid all of their fines and legal fees. With the stroke of a pen, in Ronald’s words, a symbolic debt to society was transformed into an actual bill.
Changing hearts and minds is about recognizing the full humanity of people, even when they’ve caused you harm and whether you’re afraid of them or not. Ronald advocated for his son’s killer, because no matter how he felt about that boy, he knew that he needed all the same things that every other boy in this country needed. He needed a community to belong to and a place in that community where he was made to feel as if he belonged. And he was entitled to this community whether he changed his ways or not, just because he was fully human.
Changing hearts and minds, in the way Ronald means it, isn’t about how people feel at all. It doesn’t even require forgiveness. “Forgiveness is a platitude. But forgiveness without works is dead,” he often said. It takes work to make a place for someone who has harmed you. Ronald did not love his son’s murderer. “I advocated for him because it was the right thing to do,” Ronald said, “and I thought it could be an example to help others move on with their lives.” Ronald did the work required of his ethical commitment. Changing hearts and minds has little to do with changing the way people feel. It is a commitment to a radical politics of community and hospitality that would take us far beyond the limits of a moral calculus based on public safety or fear or retribution.
It was 2015. I was back in the passenger seat of the 1996 Caprice, riding with Yusef as he prepared to throw his annual celebration. Restoring the Neighbor Back to the Hood was in its eleventh year. We were on our way to meet with an organization that had pledged backpacks for the event, and we were stopping along the way to pick up donations.
“Thank you, Auntie,” he said to a woman who handed him a twenty-dollar bill.
“Thanks, good brother,” he said to a man who donated fifty dollars.
We stopped at least six times on what would have been a twenty-minute drive. “Good brothers” and “good sisters” and “aunties” and “mas” all handed Yusef what they could. When we got to the organization, we saw a few of his comrades in line. One brother, a food-justice activist whose name I knew from his reputation in the city, turned to me after giving Yusef dap.
“This brother was wild,” he said. “It’s a blessing what he’s been able to do.”
We got to the front of the line. The woman behind the counter greeted Yusef, smiling. She had good news. The organization promised to deliver one thousand book bags. Yusef walked out the door proudly. It felt like a reunion. His comrades spoke on his behalf, but so did the donation. This was twice as many book bags as the organization had donated the year before. We jumped back in the car and made our way to Yusef’s place in Zone 8.
We spent the ride catching up on recent events. I had been following Yusef now for six months. He told me about the progress on the community center and the artists who would perform the next day. We were making small talk when Yusef hit the brakes. He pulled over and said, “Come on, good brother,” as he hopped out of the car. There was a white man with a clipboard and two white women having a conversation in front of a building. They were real estate developers.
“What’s going on?” Yusef said. The man looked surprised. Yusef introduced himself to the group and reached out to shake their hands. “You know who I am?” he asked, smiling just a bit. “Yeah, I know who you are,” the man said. He seemed nervous. “Your name kept coming up in our planning meetings,” he said.
“Who’s on the committee?” Yusef asked.
The man said something about there being community representation. Yusef told the man that his company, a development group, kept inviting the “same old people. You can’t do no development unless the community approves, you know that,” he said. The man gave Yusef a card and said he would be delighted if he came to a meeting. He said something about the economic benefit to the neighborhood.
We talked for a few more minutes, waiting for the man and his two partners to pull off. “Ain’t gonna be no development unless community is meaningfully involved,” he said, “and not just some token on an advisory group.” We walked back to the car, drove to Yusef’s block, and parted ways for the evening.
A thousand children descended on the block the next day, drawn by a bouncy house, food, and free haircuts. The whole operation felt like a family affair. Yusef’s mother cooked most of the food. Old friends barbecued hot dogs and set out trays filled with macaroni, corn on the cob, green beans, baked chicken, and cornbread. Men served the guests, which one of the attendees found strange. He asked Yusef, “Where are the women?”
Later Yusef told me, “The comment was sexist and misogynistic. It was important to have men serve as a way of fighting patriarchy.”
Yusef’s aunts and uncles beamed from the porch of their family home, taking time to talk with strangers. In between performances by local musicians, Yusef’s comrade Javon went to the back of a cargo van, returning every few minutes to unveil a surprise for the dozens of screaming kids who gathered by two wooden picnic tables. The first time, the surprise was a full-grown turkey. The next time it was a fifteen-foot python that slithered from his shoulder bag onto the asphalt. My son, Jonathan, was with me. He was ten and happy to be among the kids rubbing the snake’s yellow scales. A brave toddler squatted in front of the next surprise, a ninety-pound tortoise, giggling and patting its shell.
I left Jonathan at the booth where Javon, who ran the Detroit Exotic Zoo, quizzed the kids on animal trivia, and I walked over to the community center. About half the work had been completed. There were still exposed walls, but Yusef had put in new windows and a ceiling and done most of the electrical and plumbing work. The architectural plans were on display at the door, and throughout the first floor, there were exhibits portraying black Detroit activists and organizers from the past fifty or so years. One of the walls was papered with Crayola-colored superheroes, each named after a child who completed a worksheet on the project. Their characters were in a fight against gentrification, thwarting the plans of evil “John Corrupto,” who plotted to steal their parents’ homes at a tax auction.
Right outside the center, local authors read books about time-traveling brown girls who were among the world’s leading scientists to children sitting in a circle. Volunteers painted faces and passed out clothes and condoms. Musicians took turns performing on the stage set up down the block. With soul music blaring, Javon brought out the next surprise. He had the crowd make a wide circle. The kids screamed as a kangaroo on a leash hopped out of the van and down the street, shadowboxing from time to time with one of Javon’s colleagues.
I walked over to the booth where Yusef was giving an interview to a local reporter. He stood there beaming with one of his good brothers, both of them wearing sunglasses and dashikis.
“What’s up with the zoo?” I asked when the chance came up.
He shot me a glance, smirking. “When was the last time you saw a kangaroo in the hood?”