The War on Drugs at 50 Demands Reparations for Black People by Marbre Caryn Stahly-Butts and Kassandra Frederique

As we enter the 50th year of the War on Drugs, we need to not only end the policy, but also give reparations to survivors for the enormous — and politically motivated and strategically orchestrated— harm they have endured, especially Black people. 

To understand the urgent need for reparations, we must understand the magnitude of the harm.

The incestuous relationship between the drug war, policing, and systemic racism has infiltrated every part of Black life. Police officers with drug-sniffing dogs in predominantly Black schools, but no supportive services. That’s the drug war. Black women being extorted for sex in exchange for not being charged with an offense that could destroy their lives. That’s the drug war.

Immigrants ripped from the only home they have ever known all because of a simple drug possession charge. That’s the drug war. Black people like Breonna Taylor, Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnson, and George Floyd murdered on their blocks and in their homes. That’s the drug war.

When Richard Nixon declared the “war on drugs” on June 17, 1971, it was another way to hold Black people down. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, admitted, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate […] Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

Nixon’s legacy has been successful. Black people are four times as likely as white people to be arrested on marijuana charges, despite nearly identical usage rates across races, and account for 30% of all drug arrests, despite only making up 12.5% of substance users. As a result, Black people are disproportionately saddled with the lifelong consequences of a criminal record, including barriers in obtaining employment and housing, lost educational opportunities, denial of public benefits, and losing custody of their children.

This systemic racism has been supported across party lines; presidents including Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all signed laws and orders that expanded the drug war. As an example, under Reagan, drug testing and background checks became commonplace; the Anti-Drug Abuse Act — passed in 1988 — was the first of many federal directives to evict entire households from public housing if there was just a suspicion that one member used drugs.

By 2008, the private sector adopted these exclusionary practices, with as many as 80% of large apartment companies screening prospective tenants for criminal records.

The damage that has been done to Black communities over the last 50 years is irreversible, deeply traumatic, and immeasurable. That is why we must adopt a reparations approach to begin reckoning with the harms of the drug war.

Although Black people in the U.S. have been fighting for reparations since before the end of slavery, and have seen some localized victories, we have not yet received large-scale reparations for any of the many harms perpetrated against us. However, reparations are an internationally recognized mechanism to make amends and repair harms.

The generally accepted idea is that without addressing past harms we are destined to compound and repeat them. Under the United Nations definition, reparations includes five components: guarantees of non-repetition, restitution, compensation to “the extent appropriate and proportional,” satisfaction and rehabilitation. 

While reparations for the drug war would look different in different states and should be dictated by the communities who have survived it, there are some basic tenants. Reparations for the drug war must start with cessation and guarantees of non-repetition. This is why decriminalizing all drugs is necessary, taking a sledgehammer to the cornerstone of the drug war and removing the biggest excuse law enforcement has to surveil, harass, cage, and even kill Black people. 

Secondly, reparations for the drug war would have to include restitution, meaning reestablishing the situation that existed before the wrongful act occurred. This means that the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs, housing, right to vote, children and property must get those things back to the extent possible. It also means that people who have been convicted and have had to bear the brunt of a conviction will get their records vacated. For all the things that the drug war took from people that can not be replaced, they must be compensated or given money and resources to make amends for the harm. 

Satisfaction, the fourth prong of the UN definition for reparations, addresses emotional injury, mental suffering, and harm to reputation. Under this requirement there would have to be an assessment of the range of emotional harms caused by the drug war and an attempt to address them through public acknowledgment, honoring those lost, public education and memorialization.

Lastly, reparations for the War on Drugs would include rehabilitation, including legal, medical, psychological, and other care services for the communities impacted by the drug war. At the least, this would require free healthcare, drug treatment and therapy. 

The drug war has taken so much from us. It’s time to decriminalize all drugs and give reparations. It’s time to give Black people what is rightly ours — equitable access to employment, housing, education and healing. 

Ours to Tell by Kimberly Gonzalez

Arturo Schomburg was a Afro-Puerto Rican historian, author, collector and activist. He immigrated to New York in 1891 at the age of 17 and soon joined different political groups that supported the end of Spanish colonization and rule in Cuba and Puerto Rico. 

From 1901 - 1906, Schomburg worked as a law clerk in New York. His main duties were to index, organize papers, and research. The skills he acquired during that time would prove to be useful in documenting the history and culture of Black people in the United States during a time where it was deemed inconsequential and unimportant. He had what he called “the book hunting bug.” He purchased books and other forms of media created by Black artists at a cheap rate, because white collectors and sellers saw them as junk. Eventually his collection became so thorough that the New York Public Library bought it all for the price of $10,000, and thus the beginning of the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. 

We all know Arturo Schomburg as “the man who built a library,” but he was so much more than that. He understood the importance of documenting history, of creating your own narrative about your people and your culture. He knew that one day, children and others would try to learn more about who they were, about their history, about their lineage, and created a place where it could be accessible to everyone. His love and honoring of storytelling and documentation preserved Black history in the United States and the diaspora. 

Schomburg was also a narrative disruptor. When told at the age of 5 by a teacher that Black people had no history or people worth noting, a fire was lit. He set out to prove that she was wrong, and studied prominent Black people who contributed inventions, art and the like. He is a consistent source of inspiration for me, because he was always pushing the boundaries of the limitations placed on him by society. This legacy reminds me constantly to push the narratives of oppression beyond its limitations, and to live outside the confines of the stories that others decide to write about me or my people. Most importantly, I am motivated to protect and preserve history in the ways that it should be remembered, with accuracy, tenacity and the stories of joy, community and culture at the heart of it all.

Florynce Kennedy: Black Joy Personified by Kat Walden

“I know we’re termites. But if all the termites got together, the house would fall down.” - Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy.

 A presence you couldn’t miss and a force to be reckoned with. Flo was known to appear in her signature cowboy hat and fill a room with her fiery and unrelenting spirit. I’ve recently become acquainted with Flo and I can’t help but wish we met; or at least I could have checked out her hat shop that she opened with her sister before her deep dive into liberation work. Florynce was born in Kansas City Missouri on February 11, 1916 and grew up in a family that never made her or her siblings question who they were. She was unapologetic in her work, in her approach and in her beliefs. “I'm just a loud-mouthed middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing and a lot of people think I'm crazy … I never stop to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me.” 

During her days as shopkeeper she learned of a local Coca-Cola bottling facility that refused to hire Black truck drivers.  She organized a boycott and from there her fight only grew stronger. Her legal journey began in 1948, at Columbia Law School where she ultimately graduated and earned her degree, but not without threatening to sue the institution for racial discrimination when they denied her application. The university explained it was not a racial matter, but rather because she identified as a woman. Flo refused to accept that and eventually became the second African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School. 

After experiencing racial bias and discrimination in post-graduate work as a laywer, she questioned her relationship with practicing law and it’s role in bringing about effective change. She left the practice and began to fight for change in a way that felt more at the core of her heart -- as an organizer. Flo was a diehard champion for women’s rights. She helped to find and organize many groups that put Black women and femmes’ voices at the forefront including; Women’s Political Caucus, the National Black Feminist Organization, National Organization for Women (NOW), Radical Woman, the National Feminist Party, which nominated the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm, and more! She made sure each battle didn’t go down with a fight, or a witty comment. Once she protested the shortage of female bathrooms at Harvard University by leading a mass urination on the campus grounds -- I mean, c’mon, yes Flo! Claim what is rightfully ours! 

Reading about her work, her life and her purpose inspires me (and I hope y'all reading this) to be unrelenting and to organize for what we know and believe is right. What I also take with me after reading about her journey, is the importance of bringing and cultivating joy in this work. Not only does it make it more fun but it roots us in why we are here. It explains why it takes more muscles to smile than to frown. Because our joy, our happiness is the most sacred and prized possession we can own and create for ourselves. As lawyers/legal workers, organizers, and most importantly as a community -- we must follow in the words of ‘Flo’ and “don’t agonize, organize”, and let’s do it with some beautiful Black joy!

The Revolutionary Work of Pauli Murray by Marbre Stahly-Butts

Pauli Murray was a Black, gender queer lawyer, poet, legal theorist and Episcopal priest. S/He was a radical and a visionary who often operated behind the scenes but left their mark on the labor, civil rights and women’s movement. 

Murray was always ahead of their time. S/he was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus in Richmond before the Montgomery Bus Boycott took hold. S/he successfully organized sit-ins to desegregate restaurants in Washington, D.C. Murray was part of Thurgood Marshall’s legal team to desegregate schools. S/he embodied intersectionality in both life and scholarship decades before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term. 

Murray started as a labor organizer but fought in the realms of civil rights and gender equality. Throughout their career Murray was always striving to do more. S/he not only helped Betty Friedan found the National Organization for Women, they were also the legal genius behind the strategy to apply the same reasoning used to attack race discrimination to undermine gender discrimination. This idea was taken up by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who successfully convinced the Supreme Court that the Equal Protection Clause applies to women. 

Murray was a visionary who insisted on being their whole self- gender queer, poet, and priest. S/He was the manifestation of low ego/high impact and was ahead of her time. 

A Love for Our People by Lorenzo Bradford

I called to interview Jaribu Hill  at 6pm on a Friday. The initial plan was to talk for a few minutes, I would ask a couple basic questions and we would tie up any loose ends after the 3-day weekend. I figured the whole thing would take less than an hour. This was further reinforced after Jaribu told me that her day had been filled with back-to-back meetings, and waiting on line for the second dose of the COVID vaccine. Despite her warnings that she may be less energetic than usual, we wound up talking for nearly two hours. Jaribu expertly laid out story after story, building energy and exuding passion as she went. She provided vivid details and expertly connected art, legal and movement history together while firmly critiquing those who do not have our best interest at heart. Our call demonstrated why Jaribu has been such a successful movement lawyer and cultural organizer for so many years. As she puts it, it comes down to: “A love for our people and a profound hatred for the systems of oppression.”   

Jaribu attributes her gift as an orator and lawyer, in part, to her father, a Baptist preacher from Mississippi and her mother, a multi-talented artist, singer and teacher. Although she came to the legal field later in life, Jaribu has always been a passionate advocate for the liberation of Black people. In her first line of work, as a singer, she performed alongside striking workers and was a fixture in movement based cultural work. She toured internationally, doing festivals to raise political consciousness and push people into movement. Eventually, her passion for organizing against oppressive systems took her to CUNY law school. 

While at CUNY, she found a community of lawyers and legal workers who hoped to become ‘lawyers for the people’. While she shared her classmates' interest in impacting change abroad in Haiti, Cuba and elsewhere, she challenged her peers on their reluctance to address violence perpetrated by their own government at home. Specifically, she questioned why there was so little conversation about confronting the subsistence of Black folks in the US South. This effort led her to start the Mississippi Project, a program which has brought groups of CUNY students to Mississippi to expand access to legal services for nearly three decades. Jaribu still coordinates the program and uses the students' time in the South to push their thinking on systems of oppression within the United States and globally.    

Today, Jaribu is a full time advocate and community activist, with the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights (the Center), an organization she founded in 1996.  The Center  provides legal representation and organizing support for  low-wage, non-union workers in the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the state. In cases against large corporations and other unscrupulous employers and landlords, Jaribu strives to decenter the law and foreground the needs of the people. She sees the role of the revolutionary lawyer as a partner: A comrade in struggle and one who is looking to the people, not the law, to tell us what the outcome should be. She challenges those who have become pacified by individual success or piecemeal change to find the courage to be a loving, revolutionary advocate.  

Throughout her career, Jaribu has demonstrated a deep and boundless love for Black people. When asked what keeps her going, Jaribu mentioned two things: Family, especially her three incredible grandchildren and all those whom she has been privileged to stand with in their fight for dignity, safety and human rights. According to Jaribu, it is this work that has sustained and inspired her. Jaribu’s story is a shining example of what is possible when our work is grounded in a deep and revolutionary love.

Nashville Takes on Movement Lawyering

Last Saturday, February 23rd, Law for Black Lives had an amazing evening with organizers, law students, and lawyers from the Nashville region. We convened movement organizations and the lawyers they collaborate with to discuss their wins, challenges, lessons and along with the role lawyers can play in ongoing organizing efforts.

Organizers from Community Oversight Now  spoke about last November’s victory and the role lawyers played in writing the amendment to create Nashville's Community Oversight Board. The amendment that voter's in Nashville overwhelmingly voted for in last November's election. They went on to discuss ways that lawyers and other organizers could get involved in their fight to prevent the Tennessee State Legislature from stripping away the Community Oversight Board's subpoena powers. We also heard from organizers from Free Hearts who discussed their participatory defense program and how criminal defense attorneys can support their efforts to work with people who are facing charges and the people who support them to build power and impact the outcome of their case. Finally, BLM Nashville organizers discussed their relationship with the law and lawyers and how it impacts their work. The ended their discussion by sharing the challenges they faced and lessons they learned in their successful fight for clemency for Cyntoia Brown.

Lawyers who worked with Community Oversight Now, Free Hearts, and Southerners on New Ground discussed what it means for them to be movement lawyers who collaborate with these organizations. For them, it takes innovation, trust, a willingness to take risks, and real relationships to collaborate with lawyers and obtain meaningful victories. Law students from Vanderbilt Law School and Belmont University College of Law shared talked about their law school experience and how it has shaped their ideas about their role in movement and went on to ask for opportunities to use their skills to serve local movement.

We concluded our evening with an invitation from organizers to join them in their work to both fight against these destructive systems and collaborate with them to create institutions and alternatives that align with their vision.

Community Oversight for Nashville: Lessons from the Field by DJ Hudson

On November 6, 2018, the city of Nashville voted to implement its first Community Oversight Board (COB). The fight to win those votes started almost two years ago. The COB itself was constructed from the efforts of a broad coalition that was Black led and committed to a grassroots strategy; we intentionally relied on the power of everyday Black and working class folk to win, eschewing political gatekeepers and trusting our folks to see us through. And our faith was duly rewarded.

In the Fall of 2016, local organization Gideon's Army released a report on the racial profiling of Black communities by Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) called the Driving While Black Report. Even though Nashville's city leadership prides itself on its progressive politics, action on the report's damning findings was slow, and MNPD was unrepentant, with Police Chief Steve Anderson calling the creators of the report "morally disingenuous" and accusing them of driving a wedge between police and Black communities.Then, on February 10, 2017, Jocques Clemmons, a devoted Black father and beloved son, was chased down and shot during a "routine" traffic stop. Within days, activists and organizations rallied around Jocques' mother Sheila Clemmons Lee, who had vowed that her son's life would not be taken in vain. One of our first actions was taking over the city council meeting days after Jocques' death, and issuing six demands. A COB was one of those demands.

We made sure to insist from the start that it be organized by the people, recognized by Metropolitan government, and granted subpoena power, lest we be given a toothless COB that was unable (or unwilling) to change the status quo. We would have to build the COB we wanted from scratch, from legislative proposal to implementation strategy. And even with the crisis that Jocques' death created in  our community, we faced one obstacle after another. Our initial attempt via city council vote failed when would-be allies balked dropped their support, and resistance to the idea mounted amongst liberal leadership.

In October 2017, we carefully considered our next best option: installing a COB through referendum vote. It would require us to collect thousands of signatures to just to make it onto the ballot, and then to run a successful political campaign in order to win. We did so, joining the wave of movements that year who wielded electoral politics in innovate ways, experimenting out of necessity instead of relying on the politics that have failed our communities for so long. We prevailed and won our city's support, but we're clear that that is only because we first had faith in our people, and built our campaign around that trust.

Opening a Community Bail Fund: Reflections from Chanelle Helm

When I began this work, of liberating folks, I did so from the mindset of only believing that I had the skills to support those that were close to freedom. The folks that aren’t restrained or living in limited legal capacity. It was hard then, as it is now, to help those locked up to find paths to freedom. However, if I am to commit myself to the struggle of liberation, I can do that with my people- wherever they are.

Everyday I meet folks from various parts of the liberation spectrum. From those that have it all figured out and are ready to complete a role in our fight for liberation to those that don’t understand what we would need to be any more free than what we are. My biggest struggle is for those community members that are asking for my help that are legally tied up. How do we make sure that the carceral state doesn’t condition us to accept our community’s faults as only punishable by incarceration?

That is the hardest. When we decided to open a community bail fund, we knew we wanted it to be the space to hold our work and help folks once they left jail/prison, but we also knew it would be a space that we want to free people and prevent people from going to jail/prison. To make sure our community members are supported, make sure volunteers from various backgrounds support our bail out fam by driving, checking on the family, support organizers, fundraise and admin. All these things are super supportive for a bail out member. We’ve supported roughly 10 to 13 folks- give or take their opinion on what support is lol. We’ve paid peoples fines, found them lawyers, bailed 3 people out, and put our bodies in the way of folks being arrested. Our Louisville Community Bail Fund supports our bail out community with food, jobs, and counseling.

This is why we knew it was the right thing to fight for wanting to raise bail for Da’Arria Hayden. Da’Airra is a 16 yo who is charged with first-degree murder for murdering her 53-year-old male aggressor at 14 years old.

Da’Arria attended Western Middle School, a visual and performing arts magnet, and was a successful student. Even during her incarceration, Da’Arria has managed to continue to excel in her schoolwork and studies. In addition to her good academic standing, she comes from a supportive household where both parents and siblings act as a continued source of encouragement and stability.

Although Da’Arria and her family find themselves in a uniquely challenging situation, this is not their first time having to support the teen youth through difficulties. Da’Arria is a type one diabetic and has a history of depression, increasing her needs in an already tumultuous period, as a teenager. It is during this time that she has endured 2 years of jail time at the Louisville Metro Youth Detention Services. And her endurance can mostly be accredited to the support network of her family, who continues to uplift her through these immensely challenging times, particularly in the beginning of her incarceration when healthcare services were absent and she was held in solitary confinement]. Unfortunately, the circumstances of Da’Arria’s mistreatment is very common in Louisville, KY, even for the young and vulnerable.

If you would like to donate to the LCBF, please read over our manifesto and click here!