Dr. Britney Cooper speaks about the race and feminism in a panel for the Parren Symposium in the Colony Ballroom in Stamp on Tuesday, April 28, 2015.
Jasmine Mickens stood before a judge in August 2009 and begged for leniency for her brother.
But the policy assistant for civil, criminal and racial justice reform at the Open Society Foundations said her pleas went unanswered. Instead, the judge sentenced her brother to 15 years in the country’s highest security prison for a low-level drug offense.
She said the experience made her realize the role she needed to play in the movement for social justice and racial equality.
Mickens and four other panelists discussed police brutality, criminalization and mass incarceration Tuesday at the Critical Race Initiative’s second annual Congressman Parren Mitchell Symposium held in Stamp Student Union’s Colony Ballroom.
In 1952, Mitchell became the first black student to obtain a master’s degree from this university and was the first black congressman elected in this state.
The Critical Race Initiative, a group within the sociology department that examines race and racism, created the symposium to honor Mitchell’s social work and legacy, initiative chairwoman Wendy Laybourn said.
“We thought this was a great way to honor him since he was such an activist,” Laybourn said. “We wanted something that was living and moving and that was really engaged with people and what’s currently happening.”
The theme of this year’s symposium was “Intellectual Activism, Social Justice, and Criminalization.” Though originally intended as a response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, much of the discussion centered on recent protests in Baltimore after the April 19 death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, a black man who suffered severe spinal injuries while in police custody.
Kanisha Bond, a government and politics professor and panelist, said she thought she knew Monday what she would discuss on this panel, but the events in Baltimore “rapidly changed” things.
“This current moment is characterized by a number of events that aggregate up into the longest sustained civil resistance campaign that the United States has seen since the 1950s,” Bond said.
Panelist Opal Tometi, a co-founder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, said black people “will not find justice in our court systems, or through the DOJ [Department of Justice], or any of our other traditional mechanisms.”
While efforts should be made to improve the criminal justice system, community activism and listening to those “on the ground” is needed to enact change, Tometi said.
“We’re living in a time period where people are not shying away from calling for the justice that we need,” Tometi said. “And they’re not shying away from addressing root causes.”
Panelist DeRay McKesson, activist and senior director of human capital with Minneapolis Public Schools, said people must re-frame the way they discuss the civil unrest that occurs to protest issues like police brutality. McKesson visited Baltimore on Monday and said he did not call the events “riots.”
“What I saw was an uprising,” he said. “And if you want to talk about violence, me, too. The police have been killing people since August.”
Joseph Richardson, an African-American studies professor, called the protests in Baltimore “a response to oppression and structural violence that people have been experiencing for decades.”
To combat this structural violence, Richardson said officials must address “draconian drug laws” that lead to mass incarceration and disproportionately affect the black community. He said “the pre-K to prison pipeline is very real.”
Del. Alonzo Washington (D-Prince George’s), the moderator of the panel, said black people comprise 30 percent of the state’s population, but about 70 percent of the state’s prison population. In comparison, white people comprise about 55 percent of the state’s population but about 27 percent of the prison population.
Senior sociology major Colin Byrd said he found the discussion interesting and appreciated the mix of academics and activists on the panel.
But, he said, more than discussions are needed to solve the problems facing this country.
“Panels like this are not going to in and of themselves address effectively systemic issues of race relations,” Byrd said.
