Black women

Formerly incarcerated author, Donna Hylton

October 18, 2018 by Harry C. Goodall Jr.

Donna Hylton, who was abused as a child, spent 27 years in prison and wrote a book about how she turned her life around. She said her mission today is to be “a voice for the silenced” women still in prison.
At age 20, Hylton was sentenced to 25 years to life for her role as a nonviolent accessory to kidnapping and second-degree murder. She is finally freed.

Donna Hylton

Hylton’s childhood was a living hell. She was abandoned by her mother in Jamaica, N.Y., at age 8, according to the article by The Glow Up. At that time, she was subjected to physical and sexual assaults by her adoptive father and multiple offenders. These factors culminated in her role in her crime, according to the article.
In prison, Hylton was inspired to write a memoir called A Little Piece of Light: A Memoir of Hope, Prison and Life Unbound. It’s a recounting of her life’s events and changes she made.
Her spiritual awakening came twofold. One, from earning her master’s degree and, two, learning her talent for writing. She developed self-worth, which has enabled her to re-shape her life.
“There’s this culture of silencing women; it’s like saying, ‘Well, this is what happens. You get what you deserve,” Hylton told The Glow Up.
Hylton left behind her 4-year-old daughter when she was sentenced to life. That left her daughter, Adrienne, to suffer a similar fate, according to the article. Adrienne felt abandoned and became a victim of sexual assault. Adrienne was raped when she was in her early teens.
Six years after Hylton’s release from prison, she is still trying to forge a relationship with her daughter. “We love each other deeply [but it remains] a work in progress,” Hylton said.
The collateral damage effects were highlighted by New York City first lady Chirlane McCray. “[A] woman’s imprisonment has a profound effect on their families and communities. It’s not just the woman that’s impacted, but the entire family,” McCray told The Glow Up.
Hylton noted that during her 27 years in prison she discovered a commonality among the stories of the women in prison.
“This way of being, this way of characterizing women and silencing women has been going on for so long that we’ve become comfortable in believing that that’s the way it should be,” she said. “ “
In 2017 Hylton was a featured speaker in the Women’s March on Washington. She has become a prominent voice in the movement to end mass incarceration.
There are talks of making her life story a movie. According to Dealine.com, Rosario Dawson, an activist and actress, has agreed to play Hylton’s role.
Hylton seeks America to recognize the humanity of incarcerated women. She said women are often forgotten in prison-reform discussions, according to the article.
While in prison, she formed friendships with the infamous Pamela Smart, and the Long Island Lolita, Amy Fisher, according to The Glow Up.

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Becoming Ms. Burton: … by Susan Burton

August 8, 2018 by Juan Haines

Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women (2010)

Of the many memoirs that have landed on my desk, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women (2010) is one of the most inspirational. In the foreword, writer Michelle Alexander sets the stage by drawing a comparison between the memoir’s author, Susan Burton, and the legendary Harriet Tubman. Tubman helped create the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves yearning to be free; Burton helps women held captive by our prison system make a constructive break for freedom and rebuild their lives.

“African American families comprise 42 percent of welfare recipients…but are 59 percent of poor people shown on television are African American.” “Sustaining Stereotypes” by Lanien Frush Holt in QUILL Summer 2018 www.spj.org/quill

Burton’s efforts prefigure the era of Me Too and Times Up as she and co-writer Cari Lynn take readers through the struggles and setbacks women endure and the crucial policy changes necessary to promote their independence and, for the women who have children, create stable homes for both. She makes it clear that one person’s determination, aided by partnerships, can make an enormous difference.

The author vividly portrays the hardships of her own childhood and the many obstacles she had to overcome. Just one of the ways she suffered was abuse by the men in her mother’s life — abuse from which her mother did not protect her. The pivotal trauma in her life, however, was when her five-year-old son was killed by an off-duty policeman speeding through an intersection. The police refused to take responsibility for the death.

“64% of California’s jail population is awaiting trial or sentencing as of December 2016.” Most remain in pretrial custody because they cannot afford bail. Jail Profile Survey, http://www.bscc.ca.gov/

The combination of these events — the nagging effects of childhood trauma, the lack of police accountability and the gaping hole her son’s death left in her life – resulted in Burton turning to drugs. The timing of her addiction couldn’t have been worse because it coincided with the Los Angeles drug epidemic that she describes as follows:

Crack had come to town mysteriously and seemingly overnight. One day it didn’t exist, the next it did. Like the biblical plague of locusts, like Hitchcock’s The Birds, crack swarmed out of nowhere straight into South Central and ravaged the place.

“Drugs are insidious. No one does dope to get addicted,” Burton writes. “But you use it, and then it uses you.”

25 percent of millennial-age American men think asking a woman who is not a romantic partner to go for a drink is harassment, according to a recent survey by The Economist/YouGov reports The New York Times 1-17-18.

Her life spiraled out of control as she engaged in criminal activity to support her addiction. She describes substance abuse as “a social ill for some, a criminal ill for others,” adding, “The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for White women is one in 118; for Black women, it’s one in 19.”

Ultimately, Burton realized that getting off drugs was only the first step — a stable home after incarceration was another essential step toward successful reentry. To meet this need she created a halfway house: A New Way of Life.

“The total drug-overdose deaths was 64,070 in the 12 months through January 2017.” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 27, 2017

While building the program, she discovered that she had an exceptional ability to “connect with people and feel something.”

Now, she sees hope and possibilities in everyone.

“My job now was to value each and every woman, to cast aside my doubt and believe in them — and to teach them to cast aside their own doubt and to hold themselves and others to a standard of accountability, integrity, and respect,” Burton writes.

After A New Way of Life began providing women a place to live post-incarceration, she realized that eliminating barriers to housing, employment and healthcare was also necessary. And, she writes, it’s crucial that women have access to their children after leaving prison.

“Then I thought, ‘it’s gonna take more of us to make some real change,’ so I became an organizer,” Burton writes.

The most important goal, Burton says, is reuniting women with their children. She points out that 65 million Americans with a criminal record face a total of 45,000 collateral consequences that restrict everything from employment, professional licensing, child custody rights, housing, student aid, voting, and even the ability to visit an incarcerated loved one. “Many of these restrictions are permanent, forever preventing those who’ve already served their time from reaching their potential in the workforce, as parents, and as productive citizens.”

Burton’s sense of what’s needed to assist returning citizens derives from her belief that the people most directly affected by a problem will have the best solutions for it because, she writes, “they lived it.”

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FBI report reflects historical similarities

February 14, 2018 by Kevin Sawyer

Kathleen Cleaver, secretary of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-DefenseParty for Self-Defense

The FBI in 1956 created its secret Counterintelligence Program—COINTELPRO—to take action against Black organizations viewed as subversive. Sixty-one years later, on Aug. 3, 2017, the FBI published an intelligence assessment titled Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers.

The two FBI approaches had striking similarities, despite the passage of 50 years.

The “official use only” Black Identity Extremists report follows the November 2014 Grand Jury decision to exonerate the police officers involved in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August of that year.

“The FBI assesses (that) it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement,” the report says.

“According to a RAND analysis, every $1 invested in such [inmate] education generates at least $4 in economic return,” reports Fast Company.

“The state typically spends $71,000 a year to house an inmate. It costs about $5,000 total to help put one [incarcerated] student through community college”, reports Fast Company.

Many scholars say the Civil Rights Movement and the revolutionary movements spearheaded by Black liberation resistance of the 1960s, similar to today’s Black Lives Matter, became the targets for the U.S. government counter-offensive to neutralize these movements.

“The full force of the state, the murderous COINTELPRO project of the FBI, had to attack the Panthers because community control of police could never be allowed,” Rick Ayers, an assistant professor at University of San Francisco, wrote in the Huffington Post in 2015. “Protests, which have existed since the beginning of police forces, which were behind all the past urban uprisings in the U.S., and are coming back with renewed focus today, are about the fundamental way that state violence is wielded and the demands by communities for a different relationship to resources and to each other.”

The U.S. government’s alleged illegal use of programs, such as COINTELPRO, to kill, imprison and disrupt what it judged as subversive activists was followed by the war on drugs. The ensuing decades ushered in a vast expansion in building prisons and imprisoning people, a phenomenon often called the “prison industrial complex.” California went from 12 prisons in 1970 to 35 institutions under the CDCR today.

In 1954 the Civil Rights Movement was still in its infancy when the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown versus the Board of Education ruled the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. Following the court’s ruling, in 1955, Blacks organized a boycott of the city bus system in Montgomery, Ala., after the city arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the “colored” section in back of a bus, and the Civil Rights Movement was born.

Long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist[s],” according to FBI documents. Those targeted included the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The government did not confine its attacks to those organizations carrying guns. The list included activists fighting to advance racial and social equality using nonviolence.

By the 1960s, Blacks around the country were protesting against segregation, discrimination and police violence. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized “Freedom Rides” so Blacks and Whites could travel together by bus. Some staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South and were beaten by mobs of angry Whites.

Many Blacks did not take this lying down. Black veterans formed the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana. Elsewhere, Robert Williams, an ex-Marine, took the view that Blacks should defend themselves with guns, if needed. Williams was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) North Carolina president. The Black Panther Party was born in Oakland in 1966.

In 1970, the FBI provided a secret report to President Richard Nixon that said, “A recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the Black population has a great respect for the Black Panther Party, including 43 percent of Blacks under 21 years of age.”

According to author Howard Zinn, from 1956 to 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO acted 295 times against what it deemed Black militant groups. The government attempted to dismantle these groups through harassment, wiretaps, sabotage and other means, including terror and murder, Zinn wrote.

In 1974, reporters learned of the existence of the “Subversive Organizations List” after Attorney General William Saxbe declared the list was ending with the exception of 52 organizations under surveillance by the FBI. The Justice Department, however, refused to reveal what groups were on the list, because it was a secret.

The list was created in 1947. At its peak, there were 300 designated “subversives” on the list, including the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, members of which fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and the fascists.

FBI director Hoover used the bureau to investigate Americans. Today, United States law enforcement and intelligence agencies have greater access to the personal information of the whole population than was imaginable decades ago.

Martin Luther King Jr., Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X, Black Panther leader Huey Newton, and former Communist Party member Angela Davis and many others fell under FBI scrutiny, particularly those who embraced Marxism, Leninism, Maoism or supported leaders such as Ho Chi Minh.

“The last thing those in power wanted was an organized underclass, ready to fight for revolution,” Davis said.

The FBI’s BIE report says Black “extremists have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans, but had not targeted law enforcement with premeditated violence for the nearly two decades leading up to the lethal incidents observed beginning in 2014 (the Michael Brown killing).”

Today the FBI applies the term Black Identity Extremist retroactively to violence that peaked in the 1960s, when Blacks rebelled against segregation. Organizations like the 1970s Black Liberation Army (BLA), formed to “take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of Black people in the United States,” are considered a BIE group.

The FBI warns that unrest among Blacks “may also lead to an increase in BIE group memberships, collaboration among BIE groups or the appearance of additional violent lone offenders motivated by BIE rhetoric.

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