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Watching a Fall

AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini

Christine Spillson | Boulevard | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (5,070 words)

On the morning of August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea stepped out a door and into the crowd whose reported numbers would conflict greatly, anywhere between 10,000-20,000, but whose number, reports agree, had been growing in the dark of pre-dawn Owensboro, Kentucky.  Though neither Bethea nor anyone else in the crowd could have known it, this would be the last public execution in the United States. When Bethea arrived for his scheduled hanging, he had his short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the top so that his collar was closed.

He did not wear a necktie.

A path had been cleared for him. A tunnel, walled with human bodies, funneled him towards a stage. On the stage stood a scaffold, in the middle of which, was a trap door marked with an X. The X told Rainey Bethea where he would be standing and where the other men, some in white panama hats some not, should not stand. Not if they didn’t want to drop into history with the convicted man that they guided toward the center.

Rainey Bethea put one shoeless foot forward, pushing lightly down, as if to test the integrity of the space. As he moved onto the X it’s possible that, as Phil Hanna (“the humane hangman”) slipped on the noose he took a moment to whisper, “Remember, I am here to help you.”

The night before he was to be executed, Bethea took his last meal in a Louisville, Kentucky prison. One of the more widely printed pictures of Bethea shows him in the process of eating either lemon pie or mashed potatoes, both of which he requested. The black and white of the photo makes it difficult to tell which he is eating. In the picture, his shirt opens at the collar, revealing a cross tightly circling his neck. He stares out.

At some time between 5:23 a.m., when he arrived at the foot of the stairs, and 5:44 a.m., when he was pronounced dead, Bethea must have had a moment to stare out at the crowd that had gathered to watch him. He stood there watching them watch him watch them. A cycle that loops out into an infinite moment of observation. As he looked out he couldn’t have known that one of the men in the crowd had just told a reporter that he’d driven with six others from Florida to see the hanging. Bethea probably didn’t know that reporters were taking note of license plates from at least half a dozen other states and twenty different counties in Kentucky. The distance that they had traveled to be there didn’t matter, the audience was just a massive white monolith that pressed towards him from the front, the way dawn’s short but lengthening fingers reached toward him from his right, the way the stairs receded from his left, and the way that empty space beneath him pressed up toward his feet until it met the wood that held the X which, for that moment, still held his feet. Behind him, he must have known, there was nothing he could turn to see. Then there was the black hood to cover his face, a courtesy for the audience not Rainey Bethea; after that, he could see nothing at all.

***

My grandmother was there. My mother has tried to provide me an excuse for it. My grandmother, Dorothy Hagan before she was Dorothy Hagan Riley, was seventeen in 1936. She had left school three years earlier, after the eighth grade, to help support her family, her three brothers and two sisters. Her father, Jerome, walked every day to work in his tobacco field outside of town. While the living he made from it was enough to have moved his family from a log cabin with dirt floors and no running water and into a house in Owensboro, it was not enough to be enough. They had not made it far enough from the cabin and from rural poverty not to need more. A picture in my mother’s room shows her in that abandoned house, leaning out of a loft window that looks more like something that belongs to a barn than a home, and I stand below with my sister and my grandmother.

My grandmother, I am told, wouldn’t have gone to see a man hanged. My great-grandfather, I am told, wouldn’t have gone with his teenage daughter to see a man hanged. The definitive proof of this is that he was considered by all to be a Christian man. But they did. They were there. In that Friday’s predawn darkness, my great-grandfather chose not to walk to his fields outside of town but deeper into its center.  They walked together the few blocks from their home on Fifth Street and north towards the Ohio River and the parking lot that sat between First and Second streets (where the city convention center now stands) where the execution was to take place. They are somewhere there, possibly in the picture, definitely in the crowd of men in white hats, white shirts, and women in long skirts. After I asked, after I tried to make sense of it, of why the grandmother who I remember having jars full of those terrible puffy orange “circus peanut” candies, who made the world’s sweetest pecan pie and the South’s best biscuits and gravy, would have gone to watch a man killed, my mother calls me to offer her theory. She has come to it long after I originally posed the question and perhaps as a way to explain to herself why her mother would have been there. What lesson could she have been attempting to learn that wasn’t worth repeating to her children?  My mother tells me about the job in town. She argues that, if it was crowded like I say, then maybe it was hard to get home, hard to get out of the center of town, hard not to attend. She does not acknowledge that there is a distinction between having been there and having watched. I was told that she watched. I also know that it was done at dawn, that it was not evening, that she would not have been leaving. She had left her home early enough to attend.

***

The story of the execution of Rainey Bethea is likely not the story of an innocent man wrongly accused and put to death. It is not the story of a man being railroaded because of a city’s need for closure. Some disagree and the state of the justice system at the time certainly invites doubt but, by the time of his execution, Rainey Bethea had confessed to his crime on five separate occasions and had pleaded guilty during his trial. The first confession started in the back of a police car while being transported between jails after his arrest.

Sitting in the back of a Jefferson County police car, he leaned forward, “I might as well tell you something.” A small shape in the long back seat of the giant black Ford, he tells the two men driving him from Owensboro to Louisville that he entered Lishia Edward’s home, which he had worked in previously, by walking over the roofs of neighboring buildings and then prying at a loose window screen. In this first confession, possibly made while he was still intoxicated from the whiskey that he had been drinking earlier, he admits to choking the 70-year-old woman and then beating her and raping her. In this version, she does not move when he is finished and turns away to search the room for jewelry. By his fifth confession, she is alive when he leaves, and she tells his back as he exits out the window, “I know you.” But there, in his first confession, she doesn’t move as he left. He knew why the police focused on him and shook his head as if he can’t believe it even then, days later: “When I left, I forgot my ring.”

***

The crime that Rainey Bethea was convicted of committing, though horrific, becomes an essential but small detail in the story as it was brought to the nation. It was a story of a woman sheriff and the humane hangman. It was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented. It was the story of a county that had elected to charge a man with rape rather than with murder, though the prosecutor believed him guilty of both, because in Kentucky one could punish rape by a public hanging in the town where the crime occurred; a murderer would be executed privately by the state with an electric chair.

In a decade that had seen 103 lynchings by the end of 1936 and would see another sixteen in the four years before its end, the public, court-sanctioned execution of an African American was, even so, a spectacle worthy of note and worthy of condemnation by the media of a country whose states had largely already removed the punishing of capital crimes from the public view. Even in a decade in which 2/3 of those executed by the government were African- American, the public nature of the event made it worthy of wider attention.

Rainey Bethea’s death was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented.

The tension was obvious enough for anyone with an eye for drama to notice. The dynamics of race and gender and class were working together to create a story that was hard to look away from. Florence Shoemaker Thompson, the sheriff of Daviess County Kentucky, had been sheriff for only a few short months when Bethea was sentenced to hang. Sheriff Thompson had not run for the job. After her husband died in April of 1936 while in the office, a judge appointed his widow to fill the vacant seat. The appointment came from pity — she was a housewife with four young children that she needed to support — and from practicality — the vacancy needed to be filled swiftly so that law enforcement for the county could continue to function.

In his 1992 book, The Last Public Execution in America, Perry Ryan tells us that “hers is not the story of a feminist” rather “hers is the story of a simple but brave and forthright woman.” He characterizes Thompson as a good cook and an excellent seamstress who just wanted what was best for her children. This portrayal of the woman is reductively simple, just as the contemporary accounts of her go little beyond the picture of her as a sheriff in skirts. The press, and thus much of the nation, wondered if this woman who had only recently stepped outside of the home to work would be able to fulfill the duty required of a county sheriff if an execution was to be served out in their county. Could she, would she, pull the lever to make Rainey Bethea drop? How could they look away until they knew?

***

About a year ago, while eating dinner with my family in Florida, I very awkwardly brought up the topic of the execution of Rainey Bethea. My mother had invited her sister and brother over for dinner since I was home for a visit. I sat on the side of the dining room table that faces the smoked mirror wall that forms one side of the room. It is a relic of the house’s 1970’s origin that my mother finds charming and has refused to change in various renovation projects. I believe that she also thinks that it works to nicely reflect the light from the same era’s smoked glass bubble light chandelier that hangs over the dining room table, another relic of the house’s past that she has determined to keep.

I had watched a segment on The Rachel Maddow Show about the last public execution to take place in America. Maddow started the segment by talking about Florence Thompson inheriting her late husband’s job as the sheriff of Daviess County and the focused media attention that surrounded the execution. The point that Maddow was working to arrive at was that, though it was terrible, there was a sense of transparency to the processes, a transparency that had been notably absent during a botched lethal injection in Arizona. The story continued to stay in my mind as I thought about my grandmother’s connection to the place. I knew that while my mother and her siblings had not been born in or ever lived in that city, they had spent every summer there as children, since it was the town that their mother was from and the place where the majority of her family still lived. So when I brought it up over dinner in a sort of “did you know about this” way, I was surprised that my mother and her siblings looked at me with an “of course we knew that” look. They tell me that my grandmother attended but couldn’t explain why.

“She always just shook her head if it came up,” my aunt told me while we ate dessert. From what I can gather she never actually said a word about it to any of her children. But they never really asked about it. They didn’t ask her why she went. When I ask if she was racist or if her father was racist I get the reply, “No, of course not.”

I try to imagine going to see the execution out of a sense of justice or to get a feeling of closure. These are reasons that are offered for capital punishment, the reasons why they held public executions in the community that was affected by the crime, the reasons that might support my grandmother’s attendance. The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother. It is said that everyone in town knew Lishia Edwards. Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

In 2001, when Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, was to be executed, the government received more than 250 requests from those who had lost someone in the bombing for access to view the execution. Oneta Johnson lost her mother in the bombing, her body hadn’t been found until ten days later in the rubble. Ms. Johnson said that she hoped that seeing McVeigh dead might make her feel better. The Entertainment Network Inc. in Tampa, FL tried to sue the government so that we could all watch. They wanted to webcast the footage of McVeigh being executed to anyone willing to pay $1.95. The Entertainment Network Inc. lost its suit.

***

When Bethea was incarcerated in 1935 for the theft of two purses from the Vogue Beauty Shop located on Frederica Street in Owensboro for which he pleaded guilty to grand larceny, he was given a physical at which time his weight was noted as being 128 pounds and his height was recorded as 5’4”. Because of his small stature and slight build, he would, according to the 1947 Army Manual for military executions, need to drop a distance between 7’10” and 7’7” for an optimal outcome. An optimal outcome here would mean that he did not drop too far and too long, which could result in decapitation, or drop too short and too briefly which would result in a slow strangulation that could subsequently take up to forty-five minutes.

G. Phil Hanna would have known this. He might have known these figures and recommendations by heart when he stood waiting at the top of the scaffold that day in August. Bethea’s execution would be his seventieth. The hangman would have known how far a man needs to fall. He would have known that it is recommended that a hanging rope should be made from manila hemp fibers, and should be not more than one-and-a-quarter inches in diameter but not less than three-quarters of an inch. Hanna, by that point, would know that the experts suggest that the rope be thirty feet in length and that the rope should “be boiled and then stretched while drying to eliminate any spring, stiffness, or tendency to coil” and that the “portion of the noose which slides through the knot will be treated with wax, soap or grease to ensure a smooth sliding action through the knot.” A smooth sliding action through the knot would be vital to the execution, so when Hanna bought his hanging rope, or rather had one specially made for him in St. Louis out of a long-strand hemp fiber (which would be softer and less scratchy), he was willing to pay $65.

He knew the importance of a good rope. He kept all thirty-eight feet of it coiled and protected in a special box. He could observe you, estimate your weight and tell you how far you’d need to drop for a good hanging, something that he did to a reporter interviewing him in 1933 for The Decatur Daily Review. “I tie the knot” Hanna said. “Your neck would require about eight turns of the rope.” He knows that a man with a long neck might require thirteen turns of the rope but had learned to eyeball it with accuracy. He then demonstrated the noose’s construction, the twists and turns that he would require of the rope. If it weren’t just a demonstration, if it were a real hanging, he would treat the knot with pure castile soap and then sprinkle it with a scented talcum. If this were a real hanging, he would have gone to the jail and introduced himself to the condemned man by saying his name and then, “I am here to help you.”

The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother.  Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

Hanna was a curiosity in the same way the woman sheriff and the town square hanging was a curiosity for the press. He had already earned his reputation of “humane hangman” when he was recommended to Sheriff Thompson because he had his own equipment and the experience and expertise to carry off the sentence. He also didn’t demand any payment. Hanna saw his work of execution facilitator (perhaps a term that he’d appreciate given that he did not like being called a hangman) as vocational rather than occupational and he had never, in any of his seventy hangings, actually sprung the trapdoor.

Having hired Hanna to bring his portable scaffold, his thirty-eight-foot rope, and his experience in sixty-nine previous hangings, Sheriff Thompson was faced with making the decision of who would officially pull the lever to spring the moment that would ultimately kill a man. It was, strictly speaking, her duty. She refused to answer any questions posed by an interested public and a persistent press about whether she would be acting as the executioner. She started receiving requests for “reserve seating” tickets and questions as to when they might be going on sale from people all over the country. She spoke to her priest, she spoke to her friends, but she wouldn’t speak to the press. This was a mistake. By not telling anyone what her decision was she creates mystery. This mystery, the will-she or won’t-she aspect of the story became a mystery that had a defined expiration date and that would end with a death regardless of her decision. How could it fail to sell papers?

Dear Mrs. Thompson,

I am writing you this letter, offering you my services … for several reasons, … First you are a woman and have four children, none of which I am sure would want you to spring the trap that sends Rainey Bethea into eternity. Second, I wouldn’t want my mother to be placed in such an unpleasant position. Third, I am an ex-serviceman and served … in France in 1918 and 1919, and I know just how you would feel after the execution if you went through with it. You may think it wouldn’t bother you, after it is all over, but I know different … Please do not give this letter to anyone for publication … I am not hunting for publicity. I only want to help you.

Your friend,
A.L. Hash

The press didn’t know that Sheriff Thompson had been corresponding with Arthur L. Hash, a former Louisville policeman, and that he had offered to take up this responsibility on her behalf. He cites his wartime service in France as evidence that he knows what she would feel in the aftermath of the execution, even though the death wasn’t the result of a choice that she had made. “You may think it wouldn’t bother you after it is all over, but I know different,” Hash tells her. Perhaps aware that duty and obligation wouldn’t remove the immediate connection between her hand on the lever and the sudden rushing sense of a body moving quickly through space before the abrupt snap. And, of course, it will be witnessed, written about, photographed and talked about.

***

In his writings about incarceration and punishment, Michel Foucault made an observation similar to so many of the newspapers writing contemporary accounts of the execution of Bethea. The public aspect of punishment often turned into a carnival. If the purpose of public execution was once to terrify a population into being law-abiding citizens, to act as a type of control of the masses by the smaller coalitions of people in positions of power, modern public executions slipped further and further from the horror that they sought to inspire. Rather than reaffirming the authority of those in power, public executions started to degrade it and, through the lawlessness of the crowd, offered those attending as witnesses a glimpse of their own collective power.

France continued to behead people in public spaces until 1939 (and continue to behead people in private until capital punishment was banned in 1977). The final public use of the guillotine was photographed by people in the crowd. One person was able to film it. The video and photographic evidence of the social revelry before and after the execution was said to be disturbing enough to the wider French population and the French government that the use of public executions was reassessed.

Of course, this was the very narrative that Foucault was denying. He didn’t believe that the authorities developed some sentiment about the brutality of the practice, that they suddenly saw wrong and cringed from the horror. It was an issue of control.

Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, would likely have agreed but for different reasoning.

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever…The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.

For this context, the last public execution in the U.S., we might understand this to mean that we get a greater and greater transference of power from the action and the representation of the action. In an earlier society, the government or those with power had, for the most part, direct and limiting control of the images of a public execution. They scheduled it; they carried it out. Once people have the ability to take these images themselves and distribute them widely and in whatever context they chose, the power of the spectacle transferred from those that once controlled the execution to those who observe it and then redistribute it.

After 1936, control of these images was reestablished. With executions moved indoors, journalists may watch, if they are selected (usually through a lottery system), but they may not bring cameras or recording devices. They may be searched and stripped of all personal items and given a small spiral notebook that they can use. The families of victims watch like Oneta Johnson watched. In several states volunteer witnesses also watch. In Missouri, at least eight “reputable citizen” witnesses are required at each execution. Virginia, reportedly, has a list of twenty to thirty rotating witnesses compiled from a bank of hundreds of volunteers, because six are required to be at every execution. One of the volunteer witnesses, a paint store salesman from Emporia, told one reported that he had witnessed fifteen executions. When applying to be a witness, you must answer the question “why?” Why they would they want to sign up to watch people die. Some write in that it is a civic duty, some admit to being curious. Florida, though it requires volunteer witnesses, has stopped asking why.

In 1936, though, there was no need to apply for a spot. The execution was downtown, public lot, open humid air. The people were crowding and climbing, the press was swarming. The widely distributed narrative of the execution wouldn’t be the one that constructed by the police or the courts or even the guillotine operator or the hangman. It was the details shared in the papers, in the photographs. The execution was constructed characters: the Lady Sheriff, the Humane Hangman, the Condemned Man, and finally a newcomer to the show — Arthur Hash aka “Daredevil Dick from Montana”. These people become the show and it’s a show that we must now watch to the end.

We might watch out of a need for closure; we might watch out of a feeling of obligation to act as a witness; we might watch because we believe that this is justice; we might, too, still be watching because now it is a story and, even if we know the ending, we can’t resist turning the page.

***

On the day of the execution, 1,300 reporters were present and ready to make the news. Twenty-thousand people stood waiting in the dark vacant lot for history to happen. Vendors had set up the day before and sold the crowd hotdogs and soda. Parents brought their children. People climbed trees, climbed buildings, climbed telephone poles, climbed cars, including the one that would take away Rainey Bethea’s body after the hanging. Phil Hanna stood at the top of the gallows and tested the trapdoor three times to make sure they wouldn’t stick or swing up to hit Bethea on his way down.

Then dawn was arriving and the crowd was growing restless. Some had been up all night at house parties. Some had spent the night traveling to town or trying to sleep in the lot adjacent to the scaffold. Some had tried to sleep underneath the scaffold. The people were growing restless for the event that they had come to see. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., when the dark wasn’t as dark as it had been all night, some in the crowd began to yell “bring him out” and “let’s go!”

Rainey Bethea exited the Daviess County jail and walked the approximately 800 feet to the steps of the scaffold. From witness accounts, at this moment either the crowd cheered or grew hushed. Obviously, it couldn’t be both. At the bottom of the thirteen steps that lead up to the trapdoor, Bethea paused. Sitting down for a moment on the bottom step, he said “I don’t like to die with my shoes on.” He removed one shoe and then the other. He took another moment to remove one sock and then the other and to put on a new, clean pair before standing to take his first step up. He was finally at the top and at the literal center of the attention. He knelt before Father Lammers and said his final confession. Bethea’s ankles, thighs, and arms were then strapped together with leather bindings. The bindings made his body compressed and rippled. Hanna slipped on the noose and arranged it so the knot rested behind his left ear.

It became obvious as the moment neared and Sheriff Thompson didn’t appear, that she had chosen someone else to handle the duty of springing the trap. The picture that the press had come for, the headline that they all wanted, wouldn’t be happening that day. It would never happen. Perhaps fearing her presence would make it more of a circus, Sheriff Thompson sat in a car parked fifty yards away. She had chosen to deputize Arthur Hash who climbed the stairs in a white suit and a panama hat, dodging the reporter’s questions about who he was by saying, “I’m Daredevil Dick of Montana. Take a drink with me when this is over and I’ll tell you my name.”

***

In a moment, it will be over. In a moment, the man will drop and the dreadful physics of a hanging will go as smoothly as Hanna promised with his grim expertise. A moment after that, spectators, in a frenetic rush, will descend upon the still, but hanging, body to tear at it, to rip at the concealing hood and shred it for souvenirs. So many wanted a small piece to take home with them. It will be this frenzy, the barbarism, the reports, the headlines and photographs that show to the world a cheering crowd and the total annihilation of the order that this execution was proposed to uphold that would drive future death behind walls and screens and the transparent, illusory distance of the glass observation window behind which sit those that have retained their right to watch.

***

At the top of the scaffold, Hash appeared to be drunk and staggering. His wife, Cordie, hadn’t been able to understand why he would agree to play the role of executioner, possibly not knowing at the time that he hadn’t just accepted it but sought it out. He sought out this role, to be not only one among many in the crowd, but to be one among few at the top of the gallows’ stairs and to be the sole person with the responsibility of pulling the lever which would hang Raniey Bethea. “Can you imagine him doing a thing like that,” Cordie Hash said “when there are other people in the state who would do it?”

Can we imagine?

When the moment arrived Hash seemed unsure of what he was doing. The moment expanded and went on. He fumbled. Finally, someone helped him spring the door.

* * *

This essay first appeared in Boulevard, St. Louis’ biannual print journal, founded by fiction writer Richard Burgin in 1985. Our thanks to Spillson and the Boulevard staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

The Third Life of Richard Miles

Richard Miles at home in Duncanville, Texas, on Sep. 16, 2017. (Laura Buckman)

Shawn Shinneman | Longreads | November 2017 | 23 minutes (5,753 words)

Richard Miles has no preternatural pull toward stuff, but after he received his compensation from the state of Texas for a wrongful conviction, he did make one purchase of minor extravagance: a majestic-looking chess set, which he had installed at the entryway to his Duncanville, Texas, home. This is what greets his guests: a wooden board checkered in alternating shades of stain, fit with a hand-chiseled animal kingdom (a few bishop-giraffes now missing ears), sitting in a floodlit display case. The base of the display is solid wood, painted a soft white and about the size of an oven. Atop that, the board rests on a circular platform, about six inches tall and fitted with a small motor. In theory, it rotates. In actuality, the function remains turned off. When it’s engaged, the board spins too swiftly, and kings and their men veer off and collapse.

To Miles, the game of chess is the game of life: You have to be on the move while thinking ahead. A chess player should be simultaneously offensive and defensive, productive while defending what’s theirs. Miles developed a taste for the game in prison. “It was either checkers, chess, dominoes — or you’re talking about somebody,” he says.

More than a dozen years into Miles’ sentence, he learned the prosecution had been playing cards with a trick deck. He was freed in 2009. Three years later, when he was fully exonerated of the murder and aggravated assault for which he’d been put away, the state of Texas’ apology came in the form of a $1.2 million check. Now come monthly annuity payments totaling $71,000 a year. As of this writing, the state has paid Miles about $1.5 million.

Those numbers, however, tell a slanted tale. Like most prisoners who do substantial time, exonerees depart life behind bars for an intimidating new world. Things like completing menial tasks and finding and keeping a job — not to mention the prospects of building a  fulfilling career and life — prove difficult. But unlike most prisoners who do substantial time, exonerees often don’t have access to the various re-entry resources that await convicts. That can make the process seem a bit like receiving a good luck slap on the back and a check to take home.

People who have been wrongfully imprisoned experience a unique type of mental fallout. A few years ago, when a dozen Dallas exonerees agreed to check in with a psychiatrist, all 12, including Miles, were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Not one was found mentally healthy, and not one has since received serious treatment. Various family members have expressed differing levels of concern about Miles’ state of mind, and his mother’s assessment has been painfully blunt: “A part of him is still dead,” she says one afternoon, “still incarcerated.”

For some of Miles’ exoneree brethren in other states, financial reparations and even the detached sense of regret that accompanies them remain a pipe dream. Texas — Red Texas — has one of the most progressive compensation laws in America, and yet it’s difficult to tell whether the money is spurring mental or emotional recovery. Even a king can topple from a spinning foundation. At different moments, in different lights, the compensation granted to Miles can seem either extraordinarily beneficial or, given the enduring impact of wrongful incarceration, remarkably futile. Read more…

Harvard’s About-Face on Michelle Jones’s Acceptance

Katarzyna Baumann / Getty Images

In a collaboration between The New York Times and The Marshall Project, journalist Eli Hager recently published an investigation into Harvard University’s eleventh-hour flip-flop on its acceptance of ex-convict Michelle Jones to its doctoral program in history. Jones, who spent more than two decades in prison for the murder of her four-year-old son — conceived non-consensually when she was 14 — became a stellar academic and published scholar while incarcerated. She was set to attend Harvard this fall, but after her acceptance, two professors questioned whether she had adequately portrayed her crime in her application — something that was not required — and also whether the former prisoner was up to the challenge of an Ivy League environment.

Jones was supposed to be released in October, but received a two-month reduction of her sentence so she could start a Ph.D. program on time this fall. She applied to eight, with Harvard her first choice because of historians there whose work on incarceration she admired.

While those historians embraced her application, others at Harvard questioned not only whether Jones had disclosed enough information about her past, but whether she could handle its pressure-cooker atmosphere.

“One of our considerations,” Stauffer said in an interview, “was if this candidate is admitted to Harvard, where everyone is an elite among elites, that adjustment could be too much.”

Alison Frank Johnson, director of graduate studies for the history department, dismissed that argument as paternalistic.

“Michelle was sentenced in a courtroom to serve X years, but we decided — unilaterally — that it should be X years plus no Harvard,” she said. “Is it that she did not show the appropriate degree of horror in herself, by applying?

“We’re not her priests,” Johnson added, using an expletive.

Jones will be attending New York University instead.

Read the story

I Want to Persuade You to Care About Other People

Illustration by J.D. Reeves

Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | August 2017 | 23 minutes (5,681 words)

 

A few years ago, my middle brother and I were in Boca Raton, Fla. for Thanksgiving, visiting my mother’s parents. We’re very close with my grandparents, and one of the things I appreciate about my grandfather is that he has taken me — us — seriously for as long as I can remember. I spent every summer with him and my grandmother out on Long Island from when I was born into my teenage years, and I still can’t recall a time when I didn’t feel entitled to vigorously share my opinion with my grandfather, regardless of whether he would agree with it. When he would include me on forwarded political or (debatably) humorous e-mails with his Boca Raton pals — mostly politically conservative, Jewish guys like him — I would reply-all to any I found false or offensive in any way, lecturing men at least half a century older than me. He never yelled at me for telling off his friends and never took me off the email list for those forwards.

During the 2008 presidential election, I was in college, and I convinced him and my grandmother to vote for Barack Obama. It was the first time in our relationship, as far as I can recall, when my opinion wasn’t only given consideration, but prompted real change. I vividly remember running out to my friend’s Chicago porch after watching the vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin to call my grandpa and crow, “Who you gonna vote for now, Papa?” And I remember his good-natured laugh, his heavy sigh, his admission that yes, I was right. He was going to vote for my guy — in Florida, where it mattered.

Another thing I love about my grandfather is how he’s open-minded in a way that’s unusual among men of his generation. He’s no free-love hippie: This is a man who will drink at least one Coca-Cola a day for the rest of his life; who wears his socks pulled up so tautly, I don’t understand how they never fall; who worked hard for every dime he earned; who to this day insists Costco hot dogs are a great lunch; who plays tennis six days a week and pickle ball the seventh; and who spends a good two to three hours every day reading the paper. My grandfather lived through segregation, quietly. He is not a rabble rouser. But he has always been tickled by the rabble rouser in me, always willing to hear my liberal side out. After I worked as a journalist for Metro New York covering Mike Bloomberg as mayor of New York City, the things I learned of Bloomberg from his staff reminded me of my grandpa in that way. Make a convincing argument, and he’ll listen to it.

Read more…

The War on Drugs Is a War on Women of Color

Andrea Ritchie | Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color | Beacon Press | August 2017 | 18 minutes (4,744 words) 

Below is an excerpt from Invisible No More, by Andrea Ritchie. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

The war on drugs has become a largely unannounced war on women, particularly women of color.

Drug laws and their enforcement in the United States have always been a deeply racialized project. In 1875, San Francisco passed the country’s first drug law criminalizing “opium dens” associated with Chinese immigrants, though opium was otherwise widely available and was used by white Americans in a variety of forms. Cocaine regulation at the turn of the twentieth century was colored by racial insecurities manifesting in myths that cocaine made Black people shoot better, rendered them impervious to bullets, and increased the likelihood that Black men would attack white women. Increasing criminalization of marijuana use during the early twentieth century was similarly premised on racialized stereotypes targeting Mexican immigrants, fears of racial mixing, and suppression of political dissent.

The “war on drugs,” officially declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, has come to refer to police practices that involve stopping and searching people who fit the “profile” of drug users or couriers on the nation’s highways, buses, trains, and planes; saturation of particular neighborhoods (almost entirely low-income communities of color) with law enforcement officers charged with finding drugs in any quantity through widespread “stop and frisk” activities; no-knock warrants, surveillance, undercover operations, and highly militarized drug raids conducted by SWAT teams. It also includes harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions, which contribute to mass incarceration, and a range of punitive measures aimed at individuals with drug convictions.

Feminist criminologists assert, “The war on drugs has become a largely unannounced war on women, particularly women of color.” According to the Drug Policy Alliance, “Drug use and drug selling occur at similar rates across racial and ethnic groups, yet black and Latina women are far more likely to be criminalized for drug law violations than white women.” Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women make up a grossly disproportionate share of women incarcerated for drug offenses, even though whites are nearly five times as likely as Blacks to use marijuana and three times as likely as Blacks to have used crack. According to sociologist Luana Ross, although Native Americans make up 6 percent of the total population of Montana, they are approximately 25 percent of the female prison population. These disparities are partially explained by incarceration for drug offenses. These statistics are not just products of targeting Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; they are consequences of focusing on women of color in particular. From 2010 to 2014, women’s drug arrests increased by 9 percent while men’s decreased by 7.5 percent. These disparities were even starker at the height of the drug war. Between 1986 and 1995, arrests of adult women for drug abuse violations increased by 91.1 percent compared to 53.8 percent for men.

However, there continues to be very little information about the everyday police encounters that lead to drug arrests and produce racial disparities in women’s prisons. For instance, less well known in Sandra Bland’s case is the fact that before her fateful July 2015 traffic stop, she was twice arrested and charged for possession of small amounts of marijuana. After her first arrest a $500 fine was imposed. After the second, she served thirty days in Harris County jail, a facility criticized by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for its unconstitutional conditions of confinement. Read more…

Zadie Smith Takes on Black Pain With a Light Touch

(Brian Dowling/Getty Images)

At the start of the summer I turned down an invitation from a friend to see a play in Manhattan called 3/Fifths. Written and produced by James Scruggs, a black man, featuring a mostly black cast, 3/Fifths is a work of interactive theater that immerses its audience in a dystopian theme park called SupremacyLand. The actors mill about the stage wearing mammy costumes or blackface. They tie ropes into nooses and stand behind prison bars while encouraging the audience to join in on race-themed carnival games. The goal is, to me, straightforward satire, and 3/Fifths seems earnest enough. Theater-goers can experience what it feels like to walk around in a heightened, racially-charged world with the hope they can connect the dots between past and present horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration.

I didn’t really feel like spending an evening like that. Living as a black woman in the aftermath of the presidential election, unable to block out the news cycle of police shootings, acquittals, and assaults, my nervous system is frayed enough by new and old wounds. I’m in my thirties with a job, student debt, dreams still on the horizon, aging parents, family spread out all over the country, and a niece about to go to college. I don’t need a simulacrum of my experiences to understand what’s at stake.

The use of satire and comedy to have difficult conversations about race has a long history and isn’t problematic in and of itself. Kara Walker does it in silhouette and sculpture; playwright Branden Jacob-Jenkins did it in his play An Octoroon; Ishmael Reed has done it in his novels; Dave Chappelle became a household name doing it. It’s just that on the day of the invitation I was feeling exhausted, more in need of fun and laughter than anything else. When I declined, I said something to my friend like, “Take me to the show the playwright makes about black joy.”

Just a couple of months before, I learned of the visual artist Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, then on display at the Whitney Biennial, from the writer and artist Hannah Black’s widely-circulated open letter to the curators, which was co-signed by 47 artists, curators, and critics. I knew of Black’s work from an essay she wrote in the White Review that touched on Brandy’s 2002 album Full Moon. Brandy is probably one of the most important American pop vocalists of the past thirty years, and is underappreciated in the mainstream. Black’s piece treated Brandy’s work with the care I felt she deserved, so I felt a sense of trust in Black’s approach to black aesthetics. In her letter, Black demands the removal of Schutz’s painting, an abstraction of a 1955 photograph of 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till in his coffin at his funeral. His bludgeoned, disfigured face is rendered in impressionistic brush strokes.

Schutz — a white woman born in 1976 in a suburb of Detroit, and educated at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Columbia University — does not own the subject matter, Black argues.

Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist — those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.

Black goes on to explain the reverence that black Americans have for Till.

Emmett Till’s name has circulated widely since his death. It has come to stand not only for Till himself but also for the mournability (to each other, if not to everyone) of people marked as disposable, for the weight so often given to a white woman’s word above a Black child’s comfort or survival, and for the injustice of anti-Black legal systems. Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning.

It was, after all, Till’s grieving mother, Mamie Till Mobley, who insisted her son’s remains be returned to Chicago after his lynching in Money, Mississippi and drowning in the Tallahatchie River. It was his mother who demanded his remains be displayed in an open casket during a funeral that was widely photographed. She wanted the world to “see what she had seen,” to bear witness to the horror, to grieve for her boy. Only the black publications Jet and the Chicago Defender published the photos. The image enraged and emboldened black folks, and it is considered among a long list of catalysts for the Civil Rights activism of the mid-twentieth century.

In “Getting In and Out,” Zadie Smith writes about the consumption of black pain for Harper’s by looking at Schutz’s painting and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. Smith doesn’t mention Emmett Till much, and she doesn’t mention his mother, without whom we would have nothing to discuss. Smith never writes the words “Tallahatchie River,” nor does the word “Mississippi” appear. She says that Schutz’s painting didn’t provoke any profound feeling in her when she went to see it at the Biennial, and that doesn’t surprise me; it’s a mediocre painting, technically fine but emotionally removed. What surprises me about Smith’s essay is that she questions the “logic” and sentiment of Black’s letter, and writes it off as absurd. I found Black’s letter heartfelt. Its request that the “painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum” felt less important to me than her care for Emmett Till’s story, and the ongoing, present-day brutality against black bodies.

I think the conversation about race in America is a shared one, with multiple points of entry. In my mind pretty much anyone can talk about it, or make art about it, because everyone is somehow a part of it — impacted, implicated, or some combination therein. Race doesn’t really matter here in a straightforward sense. It’s too arbitrary a construction, as Smith painstakingly points out, and complicated by too many factors.

I was born in Memphis in the 1980s, so I am both a black American and southern. I remember the story of Till told to me as a child by adults who still used hushed voices. I went to integrated public schools, and then university on the east coast, and have a middle class life. I have always moved among blacks and whites, Latinx and Asians, and everybody else freely. My mother was also born in Memphis, but she remembers colored water fountains, trips to the zoo only on feeding days when there were no animals to see, swimming pools that were drained instead of integrated. Her sense of racial terror is at once more at the surface and deeper than mine—there are things she fears that I never will. She remembers Till’s lynching. My grandmother was born in the Mississippi Delta, picked cotton, and had a male cousin who was lynched. So the story of racial suffering is my grandmother’s even more than my mother’s or mine. We could go on like this, parsing out generational differences and class dynamics forever.

About Zadie Smith: I love her. I have considered her one of my favorite contemporary writers for at least a decade. In her third novel, On Beauty, she talks about American blackness in a way that doesn’t feel offensive or removed as if she thought us boorish. Her 2009 essay “Speaking in Tongues,” where she lets herself gush over Obama’s ability to code switch, and “Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean?” are two of my favorite pieces of writing of all time. Writing about her first encounter with Zora Neale Hurston’s book, I love how Smith is able to be her critical, writerly self, and still engage with her blackness, bringing all parts to the page to create this beautiful cohesive whole.

Fact is, I am a black woman, and a slither of this book goes straight into my soul, I suspect, for that reason. And though it is, to me, a mistake to say, “Unless you are a black woman, you will never fully comprehend this novel,” it is also disingenuous to claim that many black women do not respond to this book in a particularly powerful manner that would seem “extraliterary.” Those aspects of Their Eyes Were Watching God that plumb so profoundly the ancient buildup of culture reside that is (for convience’s sake) called “Blackness” are the parts that my own “Blackness,” as far as it foes, cannot help but respond to personally. At fourteen I couldn’t find words (or words I liked) for the marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who had my hair, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of the speech…She is my sister and I love her.

But in the Harper’s essay, except in the places where she talks about the genius of Jordan Peele and the black artists at the Biennial whose work was overshadowed by the Schutz controversy, it doesn’t really feel like Smith is engaging in the subject matter with much care or heart. It disappointed me. I do not think it is because she is British-born and I am African American. She said in the piece that she assumed a transnational black identity when questioning herself about whether she was black enough to commemorate Till in a piece of art. I agree with parts of this. Blackness has long been a transnational project, a conversation that transverses and troubles national boundaries.

It is just that the question is wrong. All human beings have rights, in my mind, to the vast array of human experiences. But why does it seem like everyone wants to mine black pain? When I think about work like Open Casket and 3/Fifths, what I wonder is whether there any rules, or any sense of decorum around our experiences. Does anyone pause before making this type of work, or have reverence for it? Do they consider who may be hurt or exhausted by it if it is rendered incompletely? What are the goals of the work? The work that the 1955 photographs of Emmet Till did in Jet is clearly different from the work Open Casket could do at the Whitney. I wonder, what is the point? I also wonder, what is sacred?

I don’t know why Smith seems so removed in her Harper’s piece. When she talks about the paranoia of blacks, an “indulgence” that Get Out exploits, or says that white people revile black bodies less in 2017 than they did a half century ago, I honestly don’t know what to think. I do not know what white folks in America think of me now — some times it feels like nothing and sometimes it feels like utter disdain. When I hear of a young black woman from my university waking up to bananas strung up on her campus with nooses, when I hear Diamond Reynolds crying “You just killed my boyfriend,” despite all of my attempts to avoid that footage, I know it isn’t as simple as love and happiness and friendship and being the “same people.” So when Hannah Black got together with a bunch of other art world folks to stage their intervention, I listened because it felt like care.

Zadie Smith is entitled to her experiences; her writerly exploration of race can be rendered how she feels it must and I will still think of her as my sister. But I wished she had engaged this subject matter with her heart. I needed her to think of the logic of Black’s letter from a place of shared pain, shared experiences, and shared anger. I needed her to really listen to it, before dismantling it.

Celebrating a Second Independence Day: A Juneteenth Reading List

Miss Juneteenth waves to the crowd during a celebration parade in Denver, 2015. (Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

June 19, also known as Juneteenth, marks the day when, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted, slaves in Texas were informed of their freedom. As the National Museum of African-American History and Culture notes in a Tumblr post, it could — and arguably should — be celebrated as a “second independence day.” But as the museum writes, “Though it has long been celebrated among the African American community it is a history that has been marginalized and still remains largely unknown to the wider public.”

This morning, the White House issued a statement on Juneteenth that didn’t land well. USA Today compared his statement to that of President Barack Obama, highlighting, as a commentator at the Independent Journal Review also noted, that Trump chose to praise a white person where Obama focused on the freed slaves. For more on Juneteenth, we’ve collected stories that explain the fraught history of the holiday, and the need for celebration.

Read more…

On Island: Journeying to Penal Colonies, from Rikers to Robben

Longreads Pick

On journeys to Rikers Island in New York City and Robben Island in South Africa, Roohi Choudhry examines issues of incarceration and racism, and envisions a day when the convicted are no longer exiled to penal colonies.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 19, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,556 words)

On Island: Journeying to Penal Colonies, from Rikers to Robben

Rikers Island (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, FILE), Robben Island (Roohi Choudhry)

Roohi Choudhry | Longreads | April 2017 | 14 minutes (3,556 words)

 

The Rikers Island jail complex, built on an island just off the borough of Queens in New York City, has been described as the world’s largest penal colony. It has seen its share of controversies, many of them involving issues of race. Rikers is no exception to the disproportionate and mass incarceration of Black and Latino people in the United States.

Over the past year, an independent commission, led by the former chief judge of New York, has studied the jail, and on April 2nd, it released its recommendation: shut down Rikers. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has also backed the recommended course of action, which aims to have the last inmate depart the jail within 10 years.

In place of Rikers, the plan proposes building smaller jails inside New York City’s boroughs to eventually house half its current number of inmates. At the heart of this proposal is the view that people who are sent to jail are from the community, not “other.” This view dictates that they should stay in the community during their jail term. That is, people who have been arrested or convicted should not be cast away on an island, out of sight, mind and empathy.

It’s an idea once espoused by the writer and activist Grace Paley in “Six Days: Some Rememberings,” the story of her time in prison, during which a fellow inmate tells her: “That was a good idea… to have a prison in your own neighborhood, so you could keep in touch, yelling out the window.” It’s also an idea in keeping with racial justice: Black and brown lives matter, and cannot be so easily discarded when they are seen.

In the following essay, originally published in March 2015 on The Butter, I explore these ideas by comparing Rikers to another racially charged penal colony that has already been closed down: Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. That island was once infamous for imprisoning Apartheid-era political prisoners (including Nelson Mandela), but is now a museum and tourist destination.

By commingling my journeys to both islands in this essay, I question what it means to banish our “unwanted,” whether because of crime, politics or disease, across the sea, far from the safety of our mainland. Is this impulse truly part of our nature? Using my experiences of these two places, I confront questions of nature, both of the land and of people, and how that nature collides with questions of race. Read more…

Moved by Kim

Seth Davis Branitz | Longreads | March, 2017 | 16 minutes (4,085 words)

 

My parents had said it aloud many times, and I had shushed them.

I was guilty of sometimes thinking it.

“Just kill yourself, or get killed quickly, and end all the mayhem.”

My older brother had been barely surviving on a destructive path for so long that sometimes I wished he would just finish it off already.

Really. It just sometimes seemed the easier way for him, and for all of us.

I had no idea how much worse his death would actually make things—how alone his death would leave me, as it hastened the additional deaths that would leave me the only remaining member of my family. Read more…