TRANSFORMING GRIEF INTO HOPE
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Mar. 25-31, 2007
I have received some very positive responses to my recent column calling for Amnesty for Black Panthers. Readers are, of course, outraged by the arrest in San Francisco of eight 50-70 year old men for the alleged killing of a police officer nearly three decades ago. The original charges were dismissed after a judge concluded that the confessions the prosecutors relied on were extracted through torture,
The proposal has also provided an opportunity to revisit the movements of the 60s.
Most people only remember the Black Panthers as very macho, gun-carrying militants, dressed in black leather jackets and black berets, inviting confrontations with the “pigs.” But the comment of a woman reader in Detroit reminds us that there was a “Serve the People” side to the Panthers which could be the key to transforming our schools and rebuilding our communities today. As a teenager she took the bus every Saturday to work with their Breakfast for Children program. “I thought they would save us.”
A California reader wants to know “whether this same plea would be made for the old crackers occasionally being found, apprehended, and tried for murders of blacks in the '60s? “
In the 1960s not many people would have replied “Yes” to this query. But since then, the whole world has watched Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu pursue a policy of reconciliation rather than retribution in order to create a new multiracial democratic South Africa. In this spirit the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) invited not only the victims of state violence but the perpetrators of violence for the apartheid state to testify and request amnesty from prosecution.
The TRC replaced a system of Retributive or Punitive Justice with programs of Restorative Justice.
Just imagine how much more intact our families and communities would be today if over the last forty years since the urban rebellions, we had done something similar.
Just imagine how many lives would have been saved and how much less violent our neighborhoods and cities would be if we had created programs providing ways for offfenders to regain their place in the community through individual and community self-criticism and transformation.
Just imagine how city, state and federal finances would have benefited from restoring individuals committing illegal acts to the community instead of incarcerating them at a cost of $30,000 each.
Instead, our Punitive Justice system has
*transformed countless young offenders whose original offenses were relatively minor into hardened criminals.
*produced prisons filled with disproportionately black “urban felons” and white guards which make huge profits for private corporations and are a critical source of “economic development” in disproportionately white and impoverished rural America.
Meanwhile violent crime is showing a sharp rise in many cities.
For example, in Detroit during the last week in February, Orlando Herron, 13, and Darren Johnson, 11, were shot execution-style at a west side home. Yale Miller, 35, a community leader and father of four., was killed when unknown persons fired shots at the 1999 Jeep he was driving. A 72 year old gay man, Andrew Anthos, 72, died from an attack outside his downtown Detroit apartment building,
Yet most talk show callers only complain that the governor is "letting prisoners out of jail to “save money.”
How would we go about rethinking and replacing our present system of Punitive Justice?
This is the conversation we now need in what MLK called “our dying cities.”
To get this conversation going, a broad coalition of community organizations is sponsoring a “Tranforming Grief into Hope” gathering on Saturday, April 21 from 3:30-6 p.m, at the Williams Community Center on Rosa Parks Blvd. in the heart of the neighborhood that was at the epicenter of the 1967 rebellion. The event will include food, fellowship, speak-out, singing, poetry, art, a memorial service.
See www.detroit-city-of-hope.org/
Email Grace Boggs Center,