- Good evening everyone.
It is a very great pleasure to welcome you
to the Memorial Church
for the beginning of a
year-long conversation
with the Reverend Dr. Raphael G. Warnock,
one of the most significant voices
on religion and public
life in the United States.
The William Belden Nobel
Lectures were established in 1898
by Nanny Yuli Noble in
memory of her husband.
Inspired by Jesus' words
in the gospel of John that
"I came that they may have
life and have it abundantly."
Mrs. Noble hoped that these lectures
would deepen our
understanding of these words
and enable us to live more deeply,
more compassionately, more abundantly.
Our speaker this evening has
dedicated his life and work
to helping that abundant life take root
in this struggling world
and to resist the ideologies
and cruelties that would diminish it.
This is the first of four lectures
that Reverend Warnock
will be giving on our campus this year.
We hope to welcome you
back to the Memorial Church
for the next one on
Wednesday, November 20th.
Reverend Warnock is the lead pastor
of Ebeneezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
The fifth pastor in a
line of great ministers,
including the Reverend
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
He is a graduate of Morehouse College
and of Union Theological
Seminary in New York
where he received his indiv and his PhD
studying with the great James Cone.
He is also an alumnus of the
Summer Leadership Program
directed by our own,
Professor Preston Williams
at Harvard Divinity School
and national voice on
social justice issues
such as voting rights
and criminal justice.
Reverend Warnock's work
has been featured on CNN,
the CBS evening news, the Huffington Post,
the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
A career working at the
intersection of scholarship,
ministry and activism has
given shape to a ministry
marked by spiritual
depth and social witness.
His first book, "The Divided
Mind of the Black Church:
"Theology, Piety and Public Witness"
published by New York
university press in 2014
is centered around these commitments.
In it, he argues for a prophetic church
in which piety and liberation
are deeply intertwined.
A church that is, as he puts it,
rigorously and lovingly challenged
by both its theologians and its pastors.
He is a model of the learned ministry
that Harvard was founded to educate.
A minister who knows how
to learn in many contexts
and who was able to bring what he learns
in one to bear on another.
Tonight, he is here to bring his learning,
his scholarship, his piety,
his pastoral imagination
to bear on one of the most
urgent issues facing our country.
The scandal of mass incarceration
and the devastation it has brought
especially in Black and Brown
communities in this country.
Following the lecture,
Reverend Warnock will continue
in conversation with us
and with Dr. Kaia Stern,
Director of the Prison
Studies project at Harvard
and a visiting faculty member
in the School of Education
where she leads the
Transformative Justice Program.
We are delighted to have
her and her students
in her course from plantations to prison,
justice, punishment and
learning with us this evening.
Following the lecture and the Q&A,
there will be a reception
in the Memorial Room,
which is just off a little
bit off the middle aisle
to the left, and we look
forward to greeting you there.
For now, please join me in welcoming
the Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock.
(audience applauding)
- Well, good evening.
- Good evening.
- Okay, you invited a Baptist
preacher from the South.
You have to talk back to me.
Good evening, Harvard.
- Good evening.
- I am grateful to be here,
deeply honored by this invitation.
I want to thank Professor
Stephanie Paulsell,
Interim Dean here at the Harvard Church
for a very kind and generous introduction,
for her hospitality and the hospitality
of all the staff here,
including the Reverend Allana Sullivan
and Professor Kaia Stern who
will lead our conversation
following the lecture tonight.
I'm grateful to see
Professor Preston Williams
who led us a few summers ago
when I was in the Summer
Leadership Institute
here at Harvard and to my
good friend and brother,
the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Walton,
who invited me to deliver
the Noble Lectures.
And shortly after I committed
to doing it, he left.
Left the school and got out of town.
I don't quite know how to take that.
But he is a friend.
Harvard is a school with some history
and some tradition.
(audience laughing)
But there are those of us who hail
from a place called Morehouse College.
Morehouse men are very proud.
They say, you can always
tell a Morehouse man,
but you can't tell him much.
(audience laughing)
Jonathan Walton is a
part of that tradition
and so is Ron Sullivan
at the Harvard Law School
with whom I had breakfast this morning
as he leads a breakfast conversation.
I understand that the
Reverend Brandon Crawley
was to be here tonight.
I don't see him.
But maybe he and his congregation
at the Myrtle Street Baptist
Church are on their way.
But thanks to President Bacow
and the Dean of Harvard
Divinity School, David Hampton.
I wanna talk tonight from the subject,
"Let My People Go."
The scandal of mass incarceration
in the land of the free.
The book of "Exodus," sole
central to African-American faith
chapter eight, verse one says,
"Then the Lord said to Moses,
"go to Pharaoh and say to him,
"thus says the Lord, let my people go
"so that they may worship me."
In the spring of 1968,
Martin Luther King Jr.
took his last stand for freedom.
In a very real sense, he
was summoned to Memphis
by the sacrifice of
two sanitation workers,
Echol Cole and Robert Walker,
who were literally crushed to death
in the back of a trash truck
where they sought shelter from a storm.
They were there because
sanitation workers,
Black sanitation workers were prohibited
from riding in the truck with
their White counterparts.
Viewed as disposable refuse,
they could only ride on
the back of the truck
or in the compactor area.
So the black bodies of
Echol Cole and Robert Walker
were crushed and killed
by the vicious machinery
of Jim Crow segregation.
We should observe that this was four years
after the passage of the
1964 civil rights law
and three years after the
voting rights law of 1965,
the key legislative
victories of the movement.
Yet tragically, it was
these crushed Black bodies,
the latest blow in a long
pattern of neglect and abuse
that finally gave fuel to the
fledgling Memphis movement,
triggering the radical spirit
and action of the local Black churches
and producing those
historic and iconic signs,
"I am a man."
It is a distinctive sign of the oppressed
that they must organize
movements and carry out campaigns
to affirm about themselves,
what ought to be obvious
and secure for themselves,
what ought to be automatic,
said these sanitation workers
whose hard yet noble labor
secured human dignity for everyone.
I am a man.
Negotiating the intersectionality
of racial and gender
oppression in the 19th century.
Sojourner truth asked, "Ain't I a woman?"
Similarly, activists
resisting police brutality
and the deadly encounters
between law enforcement officers
on unarmed citizens as
consequences of mass incarceration,
declare Black lives matter.
Those who retort, "No, all lives matter,"
manifestly missed the point.
It is oppression itself that
makes necessary movements
to affirm the truth of
what ought to be obvious.
And likewise, it is privilege
that renders one blind
to the obvious
contradictions to that truth.
One of the biggest obstacles
to genuine human community
is a glib unreflective and
uncritical universalism.
Justice demands the
recognition that all lives
are not imperiled in the same ways.
That is why weary but committed
Martin Luther King Jr.
made his way to Memphis.
He was there to stand with
those who needed a movement.
Carrying signs, bearing an inscription
that was at once simple,
sublime, and scandalous.
I am a man.
A little over two months later,
he would be slain by an assassin's bullet
on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
His last book published a year earlier,
was entitled, "Where Do We Go From Here:
"Chaos or Community?"
I ask tonight where indeed.
Specifically more than half
a century after Memphis
and the poor people's campaign,
where are the places that
poor bodies and Black bodies
are being crushed by the
machinery of the state
or the society at large,
demanding the attention of the church
and the larger faith community.
While recognizing the
structural complexity of racism
and it's inextricable link to
and participation with
other constituent parts
of hegemonic power, including sexism,
classism, and militarism,
I would argue that today,
mass incarceration is Jim
Crow's most obvious descendant
and like its ancestor is dismantling,
would represent both massive social
and infrastructural transformation
and immeasurable transvaluative power
in a society still steeped
in the ideology of White supremacy.
The ideology of White supremacy
has created the massive infrastructure
of the American carceral state.
I argue that this massive
and increasingly privatized infrastructure
has in turn constructed
its own distinct ideology.
And it is this ideology,
the distorted fear based
logic of the carceral state
and its construal of blackness
as dangerousness and guilt
that imperils Black bodies
during routine traffic stops.
Sandra Bland, Philando Castile.
While running in the rain
through one's gated community,
17-year-old Trayvon Martin,
while playing in a public
park, 12-year-old Tamir Rice,
while eating ice cream
or playing video games
with one's own family
members in the sanctuary
of one's own home, Bothan Gene,
Tatiana Jefferson this week.
Yet the deadly encounters between police
or lawless vigilantes
pretending to be police
and Black citizens so
often in the headlines
are as predictable as they are tragic.
After all they are but one manifestation
of the massive infrastructure
and insatiable appetite
of a racialized carceral state.
I submit that at root, this
is a spiritual problem,
symptomatic of a sickness
in the body politic.
Dr. King understood this.
That is why when he Joseph Lowry,
who is still alive and with us and others
formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference in 1957
the organizational arm
of his prophetic witness,
their motto was not merely
"to end segregation in America
or to secure voting rights."
Their motto was "to redeem
the soul of America."
That was their motto, their
focus and their theme.
Yet again, it is the soul of
America that is in trouble.
The United States of America,
the land of the free is by far
the mass incarceration
capital of the world.
Think about that.
The land of the free, the
shining city on the hill
shackles more people than
any land in the world.
Nobody even comes close in
the rates of incarceration
or even in the sheer numbers
of people incarcerated.
It is a scandal and a scar
on the soul of America
that we are a nation that comprises
5% of the world's
population and warehouses
nearly 25% of the world's
prison population is a scandal
and a scar on the soul of America
that we lock up people awaiting trial
and keep them there for
weeks and months and years.
Remember, Kalief Browder
not because they pose a threat to society,
but because they cannot
afford to pay a bail bond
is a scandal and a scar
on the soul of America.
That we criminalize poverty
and penalize people for being poor
is a scandal and a scar
on the soul of America.
That we have a greater percentage
of our Black population
in jails and prisons and in South Africa
at the height of apartheid
is a scandal and a scar
on the soul of America.
That in all of our large American cities,
as many as half of the young Black men
are caught up somewhere in
the matrix and social control
of the criminal justice system
and that Black men have been
banished from our families.
Devastating generations of our families
is a scandal and a scar
on the soul of America.
These men and increasingly women
then come out carrying
the mark and stigma,
of convicted felon, ex-felon
and are therefore defined and confronted
with all of the legalize barriers
against which Martin Luther King Jr.
and those who battled the old Jim Crow
fought including
discrimination in housing,
employment, voting, some
professional licenses
in my own state of Georgia,
you can't even get a barber's license,
public benefits and student loans.
It is the new and improved Jim Crow.
It is a scandal and a scar
on the soul of America.
Most of the Black men in
America's jails and prisons today
are charged with non violent
drug related offenses.
They are casualties in
America's war on drugs.
At least it was a war
when the drug was crack
and the bodies were Black and
Brown in places like Detroit,
Baltimore, the south side of Chicago,
South Central LA, certain
communities and LA and Atlanta.
We had a war on drugs, the
80s and the 90s and beyond.
But now that we're talking
about opioids and meth
and the faces of the human
tragedy are White and suburban,
suddenly we have a public health emergency
and the opioid crisis.
Two very different responses
to essentially the same problem.
Public health emergencies are
addressed through doctors,
public health officials, social workers,
therapists and clinics.
Wars are prosecuted
against enemy combatants
who are either killed or
become prisoners of war.
In places as large as New York,
entire communities may
well experience daily,
the trauma of being
subjected to stop and frisk.
The tools of a de facto occupation
in a democratic republic
that makes claims to certain
constitutional guarantees
like presumed innocence, due process.
In places as small as Ferguson,
citizen protests are met by military tanks
and weapons of war on civilian streets.
The truth is that there
are a whole lot of people,
a lot of people across
racial, religious class,
cultural and generational
lines who are self-medicating
in the midst of an American crisis.
The deep aching, spiritual
void of a culture of wash
and the broken promises
of an individualistic
consumerist impulse of acquisition
that even reduces
relationships to transactions
and short circuits the difficult
but fulfilling work of real intimacy
and the joy of genuine community.
We're all entitled to our own opinion,
but not our own facts.
The data clearly show that people,
Black people and White
people use and sell drugs
at remarkably similar rates.
Yet Black people are 12%
of the general population
and over 50% of the prison population.
That's why my sister, Michelle Alexander
has persuasively argued
that the mass incarceration
of tens of thousands of Black men
for nonviolent drug related offenses
and the lifelong consequences that result
are constituent parts of the new Jim Crow.
Legally barred from the doors
of entry to citizenship,
symbolizing the right to vote
and denied access to
ladders of opportunity
and social upward mobility.
She observed that those
who have served their time
in America's prisons or who plead guilty
in exchange for little
or no actual prison time
are not part of a class, Alexandra argues,
but a permanent cast system.
I agree.
In theological terms, they are condemned
to what I call eternal social damnation.
Even in the face of heroic efforts
to car for oneself a path of redemption,
ours is an exceedingly punitive system
that routinely produces political pariahs
and economic lepers condemned
in a very real sense
to check a box on
applications of employment
and other applications,
reminiscent of the ancient
biblical stigma, unclean.
There is no clear example of
America's unfinished business
with the project of racial justice
than the 21st century caste system
engendered by its prison
industrial complex.
Moreover, I submit that there
is no more significant scandal
belying the moral credibility
and witness of the American churches
than their conspicuous silence
as this human catastrophe
has unfolded now for
more than three decades.
To be sure scores of American churches
have prison ministries
and some even have reclamation ministries
for formerly incarcerated
individuals important work.
But there is a vast difference
between offering pastoral care
and spiritual guidance to the incarcerated
and formerly incarcerated
and challenging in an organized way
the public policies laws
and policing practices
that lead to the
disproportionate incarceration
of people of color in the first place.
I submit that that is
one of the most pressing
moral issues of this moment.
We need a national multi-faith,
multiracial movement
to end the scourge of mass incarceration,
the insatiable beast
whose massive tentacles
place Black children in choke holds
and Brown babies in cages
on both sides of the border.
But how do you build an
effective social movement,
particularly among church persons
when the primary subjects of its advocacy
are those stigmatized by the
pejorative label, illegals
in the case of our Latin
sisters and brothers
subjected to draconian tactics
of immigration enforcement,
whether they are citizens or not.
And how do you win public
sympathy and support
for "convicted felons?"
It is one thing to stand up for Rosa Parks
who Martin Luther King Jr. called
"one of the most respected
people in the Negro community."
It is quite another to fight
for the basic human dignity
of persons whose entire humanity
has been supplanted by a
legal and moral stigma.
In many instances,
some may well be a real
culpability for their condition.
Indeed, this is part of the conundrum
posed by racial bias in the
criminal justice system.
In a world where ordinary black people
must still navigate every day
the racial politics of respectability,
bearing the burden of being in
the words of that old saying
in the Black community,
a credit to the race,
particular burden of an oppressed people.
Those who find themselves caught up
in the criminal justice
system by that logic
have not kept their side of the deal.
If many outside of the
African-American community
view these young Black men and women
who track through the courtrooms
of every major American
city every single day
with fear and contempt, many
within their own families
and churches, harbor
feelings of disappointment,
anger and ambivalence.
They are the ultimate outsiders,
stigmatized for life as
both Black and criminal.
Two words that have long
been interchangeable
in the Western moral imagination.
400 years after the arrival
of more than 20 enslaved
Africans in Jamestown, Virginia,
the Black body remains the central text
in the narrative of a
complicated story called America.
For all who would understand
who we Americans are
and how we arrived, the Black
body is essential reading
There is no American wealth
without reference to Black people.
Yet the black body is viewed
essentially as a problem.
Sitting at the center of what Guna Myrtle
characterized in 1944
as the American dilemma.
400 years later, formerly
enslaved Black bodies
and branded Back bodies
and lynched Black bodies
and raped Black bodies and
segregated Black bodies
are now stopped, frisked,
groped, searched, handcuffed,
incarcerated, paroled, probated released,
but never emancipated Black bodies.
Like many, I have witnessed
the human cost of this story and stigma
and I have felt this pain personally,
experiencing it in my own family.
I am the youngest of
seven boys in my family.
That's a lot of boys.
My brother Keith, who is
the brother just above me,
five years older than me,
is serving time right
now in a federal prison.
He's been in several, but he
spent most of the last 22 years
in a prison in South Carolina
that literally was a plantation.
He was sentenced to life,
that is his natural life in 1997
as a first time offender
in a drug-related offense
in which no one was killed and
no one was physically hurt.
In fact, because the entire
crime scenario was created,
concocted and controlled
by the federal authorities,
no one even got high.
In this operation, no actual
drugs ever hit the streets
and none were removed from the streets.
My brother was sentenced to life.
He is a veteran of the First Gulf War
and has appointed himself
as a model prisoner.
No easy feat admits the
challenges of prison life
since his incarceration 22 years ago,
Yet it is the stigma of
color and criminality
that makes his story not as
uncommon as one might think.
But no group is more stigmatized
than those persons on death row.
After years of steady decline
and presumptive death
by many criminologists,
the death penalty re-emerged
as part of a conservative backlash
in the years immediately following
the Civil Rights Movement.
In a real sense, it is the final fail safe
of White supremacy where
the data clearly show
that its use ensures that in the final,
the lives of White people
are to be regarded as more valuable
than the lives of Black people.
That is why the race of the
victim more than anything else
determines the likelihood
that the punishment
will be death by execution.
And if the victim is White
and the presumed perpetrator
is African-American,
the symbolic power of condemning
that cardinal trespass
is every bit as important as ensuring
that the actual African-American
who committed the offense is executed.
That is the logic of Jim Crow
and that that is still true
decades after the era of lynching
became exceedingly clear
to me a few years ago
during my public advocacy for
death row inmate, Troy Davis.
By the time I met Troy Davis
and became involved with his case
both as pastor to him and his family
and a public advocate for
the spearing of his life,
he had been on death
row for nearly 20 years.
Convicted in 1991 for the 1989
slaying of Savannah, Georgia
police officer Mark Allen McFally.
28-year-old man who certainly
did not deserve to die.
It was 2008 and we held the
first of several rallies
for Troy Davis at Atlanta's Historic
Ebeneezer Baptist Church where
I am privileged to serve.
By that time Davis'
case had already gained
national and international attention
and brought together unlikely allies
in the struggle to save his life.
The case embodied
clearly all that is wrong
with America's deployment
of the death penalty
that even death penalty
proponents like William Sessions,
former head of the FBI and Bob Barr,
a conservative Georgia Congressman
with whom I disagree 99% of the time,
stood in agreement with the
likes of President Jimmy Carter
and Congressman John Lewis
against the execution of Troy Davis.
Why?
Because the trial provided
no physical evidence
in support of Davis' conviction.
No murder weapon, DNA evidence,
or surveillance tapes were ever produced,
and then a trial based largely
on eye witness testimony,
seven of the nine witnesses
supporting the prosecution's case
recanted or materially
changed their testimony.
There was so much doubt
surrounding this case
that on three separate occasions,
Davis' execution well stayed
within minutes of his death.
I remember on one occasion going on CNN,
as he was scheduled to die
to say that it was a sad day in America
and before I could
return back to my office,
I got another call and
had to return to CNN,
grateful that his life had been spared.
And then one fall afternoon,
I sat in a pastoral visit
across from his cell.
As he reflected on his life,
its meaning and his hope
that somehow his story might be a bridge
to a better future and a larger good.
We talked,
we prayed,
we even laughed a little
We sat silently.
We said goodbye.
Two days later, I stood in a
prison yard with his family
and hundreds of others on fall
night, September 21st, 2011
as Troy Davis was stretched
out and strapped to a gurney,
bearing an eerie resemblance to a crucifix
and executed in my name as a
citizen of the State of Georgia
by lethal injection.
In the years that I have
continued to fight for Davis
and others like him
and for the soul of a nation
scarred by the scandal
of mass incarceration
and for the lives of young
Black men like Trayvon Martin
and young black women like Sandra Bland,
tragically endangered and murdered
by the stigma of blackness as criminality.
I've often reminded myself
that I preach each week
in memory of a death row inmate
convicted on trumped up charges
at the behest of religious authorities
and executed by the state
without the benefit of due process.
The cross, the Roman
Empire's method of execution
reserved for subversives is
a symbol of stigma and shame.
Yet the early followers of Jesus
embraced the scandal of the cross
calling it the power of God.
To tell that story
is to tell the story of
stigmatized human beings.
To embrace the cross is to bear witness
to the truth and power of God,
subverting human assumptions
about truth and power,
pointing beyond the tragic
limits of a given moment
toward the promise of the resurrection.
It is to see what an imprisoned exile
of a persecuted community saw
as he captured in scripture
the vision and hope
of a new heaven and a new earth.
That is why I fight.
That is why Ebeneezer Baptist Church,
spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr.
has been trying to find
a way to faithfully
and effectively bear witness
to God's justice in the world.
And so this past summer,
we organized the national
multi-racial multifaith conference
focused on the collective work
of dismantling mass incarceration
by catalyzing the resources
of people of faith
and moral courage and a movement
that operates at the local,
state and national levels.
Our co-conveners were All Burn
Theological Seminary in New York
and The Temple, that's its name.
It is the oldest Jewish
congregation in Atlanta.
Together, we are at work
now for the long haul
and we have four objectives.
Number one, to train and equip pastors,
rabbis, imams, and other
faith leaders and their teams
with practical tools for
addressing their ministries
to mass incarceration as
a social justice issue
in their local setting.
Two, to identify and
coalesce around a strategic
legislative agenda at the local,
state and national levels.
Third, to organize an
interfaith network of partners
focused on abolishing mass incarceration.
And fourth, to lay the groundwork
for the development of
a new media strategy
for reframing the public understanding
of the prison industrial complex
and its implications for public
safety and quality of life.
But this national effort taken
on in partnership with others
builds upon years of
advocacy and activism,
seeking to leverage our
legacy for good work
in the present rather than
rest on the historic laurels
of a glorious past, we at Ebeneezer Church
have been busy addressing our ministry,
particularly over the last several years,
to a criminal justice
system that crushes the poor
and the incinerator of a bias system
whose outcomes are too often
more criminal than just.
From time to time,
we have gotten engaged as public
advocates in certain cases.
We've raised offerings and
have partnered with celebrities
like my good friend, rapper TI
and actor Mark Ruffalo
the incredible Hulk.
To bail poor people
awaiting trial out of jail.
And we raised our voices
as part of a coalition of conscience
that last spring, successfully
convinced the mayor
and the council to end cash
bail in the city of Atlanta.
Moreover, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms
has committed to closing
the Atlanta City jail
and turning it into a youth center
that invests in the future.
But much of our work has been focused
on expungement or record restrictions.
In 2016, we came together with
other Fulton County officials
to organize and host our very
first expungement clinic.
It is a one stop shop in
the church's banquet hall
that cleared the arrest
records of hundreds of citizens
who had been arrested but never convicted.
Yet like millions of Americans
who have arrest records,
they were either barred
or limited in their employment options,
rejected in the applications
for housing, apartments,
and other features of a
prosperous and dignified life.
These expungement events
reduced what used to take
120 days to one day.
They'd been emancipation moments
for people looking for second chance.
I remember the very first
one and the joy I felt
as I walked into our
sanctuary one Saturday morning
and realized that almost everyone gathered
in church that day had a record.
But then it occurred to me
that that's true every Sunday.
None of us wants to be forever
judged by our worst moment,
and each of us has some record
that cries out for grace and redemption.
Sometime after the first event,
I was sitting in the
chair at the barbershop.
You all must be asleep.
(audience laughing)
I said, I was sitting in the chair
at the barber shop.
My barber was finishing my haircut.
Don't worry about it.
(audience laughing)
And I was rushing to get out of the chair
to my next appointment
when another patron whom I
did not know, walked up to me
and he said, "Rev, that was
a great event y'all had."
That's how we talk in the South.
I said, "What event?"
He said, "The expungement event."
I politely said, thank you,
thinking he had seen it on the news
and I was trying after all,
to get to my next appointment.
He said, "Rev, wait.
"You don't understand."
"You cleared my record."
He had a bad check charge.
Some story about a bad check
and an ex wife from 20 years ago.
I didn't wanna know the
details, but I froze.
He appeared to be in his
late 50s, well dressed
and he looked so respectable.
He continued, "As a result of
my record being restricted,
"I got a better job.
"My income has gone up
and my life is better."
I congratulated him, shook his hand
and was headed for the door when he said,
"Rev wait.
"A young couple in my family had a baby
"that they did not have
the means to raise.
"The baby was headed to foster care."
Thank God for foster care parents,
but quite often the outcomes
of our foster care system
are very poor.
They are a part of the prison pipeline.
But he said to me,
"Because I came to church
"and somebody cleared my record,
"I was able to adopt my great niece."
The trajectory of two
generations changed in one day.
I am glad, but I am also sad and mad
that they didn't tell me the
truth in ninth grade civics.
There I was taught that you are innocent
until proven guilty
and if you were cleared and acquitted,
you went on and enjoyed
the rest of your life.
But this brother had an arrest record.
He was free, yet for 20 years,
he had been bound by the massive tentacles
of our prison industrial complex.
While helping people like him,
it is that fundamental problem
that we seek to address
in our new movement
in a nation where nearly 30% of adults,
American adults has a record.
And now armed with a faith kit
that you can find
www.endingmassincarceration.com
and a wonderful documentary film
put together by Judy
Doctoroff, who's here tonight
and our partners at Public Square Media,
we're teaching other
congregations to do the same.
People of faith and moral
courage should lead the charge
and embrace the challenge of
saying to a failed system,
"Let my people go."
That is what God told
Moses to tell Pharaoh.
"Let my people go that
they may worship me,
"liberate them from human bondage
"so that they may blossom
"and live lives of human flourishing.
"Lives that give glory to God
rather than to human systems."
Moses had a speech impediment,
yet God picked him.
Moses had a record, yet God picked him
in spite of his record.
Or maybe God picked him
because he had a record.
The record shows that God
has a record of using people
with a record.
Moses had a record.
He slew in Egyptian.
He killed a man, but God
had more in store for him.
Joseph had a record long
before a central park case
and a roofless prosecutor.
There was Potiphar's wife.
Joseph was thrown in prison,
but he held on to his dreams.
You know the rest of the story.
The three Hebrew boys had a record
and they were sentenced to death
for an act of civil disobedience.
Daniel was charged, convicted,
and thrown in the lion's den.
He had a record.
John was in prison on
an Island called Patmos,
the Rikers Island of that day.
There he saw a new heaven and a new earth.
Jesus had a record.
Not surprising given his background.
Coming from where he came from.
Born in a barrio called Bethlehem,
smuggled as an undocumented
immigrant into Egypt,
raised in a ghetto called Nazareth.
Yet he came preaching that the
spirit of the Lord is upon me
to preach good news to the poor,
to open the eyes of the blind,
to set at liberty the incarcerated.
To preach to hear the Lord's freedom.
They brought him up on trumped up charges,
convicted him without the
benefit of due process,
marched him up Golgotha's hill,
executed him on a Roman cross,
buried him in a borrowed tomb.
But he was so powerful that he turned
the scandal of the cross into
an enduring symbol of victory
over evil and injustice.
And his movement was so contagious
that he got off the
crossing out in our hearts.
He is my redeemer and liberator
and in his name and then
the name of all that is good
and justice and righteous and true,
we must all stand together
across faith traditions,
across racial lines.
Stand together, fight together,
walk together, organize
together, vote together,
pray together, stay
together and say together,
let my people go.
(audience applauding)
(lively music)
- I was young at the time
and I made a lot of mistakes.
- Some people told me, it's
30 years ago, who cares?
But I cared because that was my name.
That was my integrity.
- Regardless of what
my certifications say,
regardless of what my degree say,
everything is fine
until they start doing
the background check.
If it's something that
they see they don't like,
they're not gonna hire you.
- Record restriction is
the mirror of our times,
reflecting the unresolved
racism and economic inequity
that still exists in our society.
- They will leave today with
the water to seal their records
and they will leave
today with the clean GCSC
to show that their record
has been restricted.
- I believe that this
records restrictions project
is geared to give people
an opportunity to get jobs,
to be employed and take
care of their families.
- What we're hoping to do ultimately
through these expungement of
the records of individuals
is to raise the conversation
about the terrible public policy decision
that we as a country have
made in the last 50 years
when we should have invested in people,
we invested in prisons.
- The Bible says in Hebrew
(speaks Hebrew)
Justice, justice shall you pursue.
And it's a reminder to us that
there is nothing as important
as the pursuit of justice.
- For the first time in 30
years, someone said to me,
"Yes, we can help you."
- And I can just tell you from
the reaction that I've seen
from the people today.
I mean, we had people that were in tears
because this was so important to them.
And if for any elected
official in any community,
if that's not important to you,
then you're in the wrong business.
- Professor Stern and Reverend
Warnock up to the front.
Let's thank Reverend Warnock one more time
for that wonderful lecture.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
Good evening.
Can you all hear me?
It's such an honor to be
in conversation with you.
You make me wanna talk about Jubilee,
which I think is my favorite
thing to talk about.
But I have four really
thoughtful questions
from some students that I'm
hoping I can translate to you.
- Let's talk.
- Okay.
So as a Black educator
growing up in an inner city
and being affected by mass incarceration,
I can admit that I have been
unfortunately desensitized
to America's normalizing
the control of Black bodies.
How do we empower
students from inner cities
like south side of Chicago
and Detroit to have hope
when I too am hopeless at times?
How do I help students
understand and acknowledge
the systems of mass incarceration
and the crisis to dismantle the system
while still empowering said hope?
- First of all, where's Judy Doctoroff?
Are you here?
Where is she?
Stand up Judy.
This is Judy Doctoroff
of Public Square Media.
They put together the
documentary that you saw tonight.
(audience applauding)
I do wanna send folks to
endingmassincarceration.com
so you can learn more about our work.
I think the fact that this
student is asking the question
even while saying I'm worried
that I become desensitized
to this normalizing of
that which is not normal.
The fact that you are asking the question,
gives me a lot of hope.
And says to me, no, you
haven't become desensitized.
The fact that you're worried about it.
Now, if you weren't worried
about it, then I'd be worried.
But the fact that you're
raising the question
suggests that there is
something in your moral antenna
that says we can't tolerate this.
We cannot accept this as normal.
I do think that that is,
I think that's something
that oppressed people
always have to struggle with.
I'm a post civil rights generation baby.
I was born a year after
Dr. King's death, 1969.
So I'm not the youngster anymore.
50 this year's a big deal.
But because I serve as senior pastor
of Ebenezer Baptist Church
and I see one of our members,
John Brown, sitting back
there a graduate of HDS.
Because I sit in the pulpit where I serve,
I have the benefit of knowing
that every Black person in America,
every single one over the age of 60
marched with Dr. King,
right?
Everybody.
In fact, there are not
enough streets in America
just for the Black people.
You all need to loosen up.
I know it's hard.
(laughing)
This is a tough crowd.
(laughing)
Who told you all had to be so.
I mean, there are not
enough streets in America
for the Black people who
marched with Dr. King.
Why is that?
It's because if you lived
through that period,
Black or White, whoever you are,
you cannot help but ask yourself,
because now you have the
benefit of hindsight.
What was I doing?
and what was I saying
about the folk who are out in the street?
And I think I got a feeling
that people kind of edit
that record for themselves
because as he used to say,
they woke up and they realized
that they either walked or
slept through a revolution.
And so I'm clear that 50 years from now,
20 years from now, 30 years from now,
our children, our grandchildren
are going to ask us,
what were you doing?
While this human rights
nightmare unfolded on your watch.
It's hard for us to
imagine but it must be true
because it lasted so long.
People had all kinds of justifications
for why segregation made sense,
for why shadow slavery made sense.
It's just the normal rhythm of things.
And people have all kinds
of moral and ethical
and legal justifications
for why it makes sense
for us to have this massive prison system
and I kind of worked it
and as something that I'm
still thinking through.
I do believe that the infrastructure
has created its own ideology.
It's one more morphing and
mutation in this tragic story
that began in 1619 that
the system of incarceration
is itself is so massive
that that that's why
that danger is in place, that
people kind of feel like,
you can't imagine something different.
And I'm daring all of us,
especially young people
who always saved the movement.
Birmingham wouldn't have
turned out the way it did
if it weren't for high school students,
middle school students and in some cases,
elementary school students.
I'm counting on all of us,
but particularly our
young sisters and brothers
to imagine a different future.
- Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
The next one is in light
of the recent passing
of Amendment IV in the state of Florida,
the public referendum that
restored voting rights
for approximately 1.4 million
people with criminal records.
What role should the
church play in motivating
and organizing these
returning citizens to vote?
- We should be working hard
to get returning citizens
and that's the right
term, returning citizens.
I wanna begin to challenge us
to think about the words that we use.
You call somebody an ex felon.
I mean, you think about that.
So they're defined always by that.
We all encourage people to vote.
In fact if you really
wanna start some stuff,
we ought to be creating some precincts
inside of some of the county jails.
There are people there
who haven't been convicted of anything.
And if you really wanna
stir up some stuff,
let's start a movement and get the folks
who are in the county
jails registered to vote.
I was with Reverend Jackson last week,
Reverend Jesse Jackson,
and I think they've done this already
in the Cook County jail.
They've created a precinct
and they've helped the folks who are there
to see that they have a reason
to vote and to be engaged.
I'm chairman of the New Georgia Project
which was started by my
friend Stacy Abrams in 2014.
I was a spokesperson when we started it.
We've registered over 300,000 new voters
and really changed was
possible in Georgia.
So stay tuned as we keep
fighting the good fight.
Part of the reason I'm
engaged on this issue
of criminal justice system
is that it touches on so many issues.
I'm glad that question was asked.
So why are you so focused
on mass incarceration?
There are a lot of issues.
Name your issue.
I'm almost willing to guarantee you
that this issue of mass
incarceration touches it.
Whether it's voting.
Say, well, the answer is education.
Well think about the
school to prison pipeline
which begins in high school,
no younger than that middle school,
no younger than that elementary school,
no younger than that.
Pull up a study by Walter Gilliam,
professor at Yale University
in which he shows that young Black boys
find themselves in the gaze of guilt.
A problem.
As young as preschool.
There's a deep kind of visceral bias.
And they literally had preschool teachers,
they put four kids, two White, two Black
male and female at a table
and asked the teacher
to tell them when, if there's a problem,
kinda just look in that direction.
They had these goggles on.
And they asked the teachers
when there was a problem
and first they asked them,
"When do you think you've
noticed a problem?"
And the teachers confess
to what they thought
was a gender bias.
Kind of boys will be boys.
But they were very focused
on the Black boy sitting at the table.
In fact, none of the kids
were causing any problems
and the reason we know is
because all the kids were actors.
And I want to invite you to go
and check out the study
at Yale University.
They were focused that this kind of gaze
in this issue starts
as early as preschool.
That's the ways in which
I think the infrastructure
creates his own ideology and mindset
and we've got a lot of work to
do to free ourselves of that.
(mumbles)
- Even though people have been granted
the right to vote in Florida,
they have to pay off all their debts
and worked in the prison system for years.
None of my inmates could afford the fines
that had grown over time and multiplied.
And I wonder if as part
of some of the religious institutions,
if there could be some work
done to take up collections,
these 1.4 million people
can't automatically have
their voter rights restored
because the Republicans
have now stipulated that
although the general public
wants to give them their rights
back, their voting rights,
if they don't pay off their
fines and many of them can't,
they will not be allowed to vote.
And I think Florida is
also an important state
for the next election.
- Yeah.
Well, I don't know about you,
but it makes my blood boil.
'Cause in America, we have noisy,
rambunctious arguments
in the democratic space
about guns and butter,
about what to fund, about public policy.
And those arguments should be noisy
and they should be rambunctious
so that we can have a non
violent democratic process.
But at the end of the argument,
we've got a powerful thing and it says,
the people have spoken.
But what we witnessed
over the last few years
is an attack on democracy itself
and the carceral system is part of that.
It's a tool in that arsenal.
So I don't know.
I'd be happy to talk to
my colleagues in Florida.
I don't know what it would
cost to pay all of those fines,
but churches and mosques
and temples that might be,
if we did it for me,
it would be a way then
of getting the microphone
to raise the question.
Us simply paying the beast
for what shouldn't be the
case in the first place
is not the answer.
We ought to push back
and we did some payment.
It would be to draw attention to the issue
and sort of like we're
bailing people out of jail,
but our ultimate goal is
to get rid of cash bail.
So it's a poll tax.
It's voter suppression.
Our democracy is being hijacked
and we have to take it back.
So we've got to keep
fighting the good fight.
Not just in Florida, but
in Alabama and Georgia
and in a whole lot of other places.
- Thank you.
You've touched a little bit on this
and leads well into the next question.
There are so many urgent
and important problems
in this world.
What are your thoughts about how to work
for an end to incarceration
and also for us solution
to climate change?
For example, certainly there's overlap
among these urgent problems,
but they are dealt with
primarily as separate issues.
Your thoughts on that?
- Well, that's something
I'm working through.
You should come to my third
lecture, whoever asked that.
No, it's my fourth lecture.
So I've made a commitment
to talk about four issues
that I think speak to the
state of the soul of America.
And so tonight I talked
about mass incarceration.
Next month I'll be focused
on voting and democracy
and voter suppression.
In the spring I'm doing
a lecture on poverty.
And last but not least,
I'll be talking about
the existential threat
of climate change and the ways in which
people who are traditionally
in the civil rights movement
need to pay more attention
to climate change.
And the folk who have been
engaged in the climate movement
that has for too long
been suburban and White
and middle class need to pay attention
to civil rights issues
and the intersectionality
of those issues.
Poor people and people of color,
people who benefit the
least from the revenues
and the technology that
create climate disasters
are impacted the most.
High incidences of asthma,
race is the clearest indicator
of where a toxic dump will be located.
So all of these things are connected.
Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
You remember that case?
Freddie Gray who died in
the custody of the police
and became one of those flashpoints
for this issue about encounters
between the police and ordinary citizens.
His story then began there.
Freddie Gray grew up in Baltimore
where I was a pastor
for almost five years.
He was a victim of environmental hazards
in the built environment.
Lead poisoning and substandard housing
in a country where we have known decades
what lead poisoning does
and how it leads to behavioral
issues in the classroom
and learning difficulties.
So then he becomes part
of the prison pipeline.
So these civil rights
issues, human rights issues,
climate change, both in the natural world
and in the built environment,
are all part of this larger issue
that speaks to the soul of America.
Flint Michigan, all of these years later,
the problem is still not corrected.
There was another Fred Gray.
Fred Gray was Dr. King's
lawyer in Montgomery.
Dr. King got in trouble.
Fred Gray, who's still
alive, brilliant lawyer,
pushed through Jim Crow's
segregation, got his law degree.
He would defend Dr. King
when he was arrested.
Fred Gray fought against the signs,
in front of water fountains
that said White and Colored.
Freddie Gray, Baltimore decades later,
never saw or experienced such signs.
But he died,
and poor children in Flint,
Michigan are being crushed
in a world where there are no
signs in front of water founts
that say White and Colored.
But the water is literally
poisoning our children.
And so these things are connected
and that's the work that
all of us are called to do.
It's not one or the other.
It's both.
- Thank you.
Finally, do you believe
in prison abolition
and what is your dream for the future?
Two good ones.
(laughing)
- That's a conversation I'm having
with people that I know who
are engaged in this work.
I don't identify myself
as a prison abolitionist.
I've got friends and colleagues who do.
I just think, I'm for the
dismantling of the carceral state.
This massive infrastructure
where prison literally becomes the answer
to a whole range of issues,
including mental health.
I think if we addressed ourselves
to the sickness of America
there would be a lot fewer
people, a whole lot fewer people
whom we might feel the need
to protect the society from
in that particular way and
through that mechanism.
So I don't necessarily get too caught up
in the nomenclature.
I think it's a healthy
conversation, an important debate.
but I imagine, and I dream about a world
in which one's zip code doesn't
determine your lot in life
and your family's income
doesn't determine your outcome.
That's the kind of
world that I dream about
and all of us are called to do that work.
I live in Atlanta.
A city that is very proud.
We call ourselves the
city too busy to hate.
We're proud of the fact
that we're the home of
Martin Luther King Jr.
And some call Atlanta, the Black Mecca
because of incredible examples
of achievement and leadership
Large Black, middle
class, professional class,
leadership class.
But there's another
side of Atlanta's story.
It too bears the burden
and the contradiction of two Americas.
Over the last decade,
on too many occasions,
we've been number one or number two
in terms of the largest wealth gap
of any metropolitan area in the country.
And they've got a lot more billionaires
and multimillionaires say in San Francisco
and the Bay area in New
York and other places.
But Atlanta has been number one,
number two largest wealth
gap in the country.
Black kid growing up in
certain communities of Atlanta
where there are these
amazing on the one hand,
amazing stories and
historically Black colleges
and universities, Black people
doing what people like me do,
doing really well.
But a Black child born in
certain zip codes in Atlanta,
their chances in terms of the
data of getting out of poverty
and into another place are near zero.
So these are larger structural issues.
Race is certainly part of it.
But if we're serious about correcting it,
all of us have got to put
our shoulders to the wheel
in different ways and ask
ourselves some tough questions.
And so I dream of a world where again,
where regardless of your
zip code, race, gender,
sexual identity or sexual
orientation, your class,
that you can embrace possibilities
for human flourishing.
I think that's what God meant
or that's what the text meant
when it records that God said to Moses,
"Let my people go so
that they may worship me,
"that they will not have to bow down
"to systems of oppression,
"but they might embrace a
world that resists injustice."
It's important for us to resist injustice
because injustice inflates
the self understanding
of the oppressor.
It injures the soul of the oppressed
and it insults the sovereignty of God.
And so for me, this is
moral and spiritual work
that declares that our God is God
in heaven above and the earth below.
And that God invites all of
us to a wonderful banquet
of human flourishing.
- Thank you.
I think we have time
for one more question.
If someone in the audience
would like to pose one.
- Are you kidding?
That was my benediction.
I'm just kidding.
- There you go.
- [Man] Thank you.
I'm a Baptist preacher too, so I can--
- Good to see you.
- Good to see you as well.
I've been reading Ibram X. Kendi's book,
"How To Be an Antiracist"
just recently came out
and so I was sort of
struck by the question
of what your hope might be for the future.
Also thinking about the
question of whether or not
you are prison abolitionists.
I'm not trying to re
emphasize that question,
but thinking about the carceral state,
moving it from a system that is non-racist
to a system that is more antiracist,
what would you imagine that
type of system to look like
in terms of the future?
- That's an excellent question.
I mean, the first thing we've gotta do
is we've gotta be honest
about the ways in which race
and racism plays itself out
in every level, at every
level of the system.
And I think many Americans
are still not ready
to be honest about that,
to have that conversation.
That the disparity that we're witnessing
is not an accident.
It's not, in some senses
not a failed system
because the system is doing
what it was organized to do.
It is one more iteration
of this aged old problem.
When we mark this year with in some ways,
even though it's long, it's
more complicated than that
by this 400th year.
So this anti-racism calls all of us,
I think to interrogate the system,
to interrogate basic assumptions
about guilt and innocence.
I mean, if we were
really focused on drugs,
we're serious about drugs
and the scourge of drugs
and the war on drugs.
I will be convinced that
we serious about that
when I see one pharmaceutical
executive get arrested.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
I mean we now have the goods.
We know that they knew
what they were doing.
Why is that disparity?
Why does Eric Gunner have
his life choked out of him
in broad daylight on
the New York City street
for selling loose cigarettes
and Wall Street bankers
literally almost took the
whole economy over the cliff
and not one banker went to jail?
So you cannot talk about that
without respect to wealth
and power and race.
And I think that's an
important distinction.
I think if we just focus on non races
in a country with a history that we have.
If we just focus on being non-racial,
I think that bleeds
into a kind of a
uncritical neutral position
and you can be neutral when
you fight White supremacy.
You've got to fight against it.
And so thank you for that
important distinction.
That's the work that we're called to do.
- I'm sorry to cut our conversation off.
I hope you all will
join us for a reception
in the Memorial Room right
off the sanctuary here.
One of the themes of our work
in our worship at the
Memorial Church this year
is the practice of pilgrimage.
We've been thinking about
how do we move our bodies
ethically through the world together?
And what claim do the journeys
of others make on our own
and where are we going?
Chaos or community?
We're so grateful to you
for pointing us in the
right direction tonight
and for being a light to our path.
We look forward so much
to the next three lectures
and hope very much
we'll be welcoming you
all back on November 20th
for Reverend Warnock's discussion
of voting rights and voter suppression.
To close us out tonight
with just tremendous thanks to you both
to Professor Stern as well
and for the great questions
from your students.
I'd like to leave us with a blessing,
an 11th century pilgrim blessing
for people who are about to
set out on their journey.
May God be for us and we for one another,
a defense in emergency,
a harbor in shipwreck,
shade in the heat, light in the storm,
a staff on the slippery
slope, joy amid suffering,
consolation in sadness,
safety in adversity,
caution in prosperity so
that we may safely arrive
where we are boldly going.
Amen.
- Thank you so much.
- Thank you.
(audience applauding)
