Ryan Haygood is a civil rights lawyer and President and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. Ryan reflects on growing up in Denver, and the formative interactions he had with police growing up. Since then, Ryan has focused on bringing to light the structural racism that has disadvantaged persons of color. His advocacy work focuses on helping those who have been disenfranchised by systems of racial discrimination.
“But I also think that what we learn about democracy in this country is that it’s always been a contested exercise, where we experience periods of expansion, followed by efforts to scale back democracy.”
Annotations
Transcript
Interview conducted by Daniel Swern
Newark, New Jersey
June 3, 2019
Transcription by Chelsea Woods-Turner
Annotations by Joann Gellibert
00:00:00
This is Dan Swern from coLAB Arts, it is Monday June 3rd, uh, 1:13 p.m. I'm here at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, and I'm here with–
My name is Ryan Haygood, I am here with New Jersey Institute for Social Justice and excited to be here with Dan.
Uh, so Ryan you don't need to lean in–
Okay.
It'll pick you right up–
Okay.
Um, so if you can just start from the beginning.
Sure. Um, so I think the beginning is, uh, that I– although I'm a 44-year-old full grown man, I think of myself as a kid from Denver, Colorado. I was actually born in, uh, Los Angeles California to a single mother, uh, who was white. Uh, my father is Black, and my mother raised me as a Black child, and, um, at about 2, we moved to Denver, Colorado. Um, my mother's decision to raise me as a Black child turned out to be one of her greatest gifts, uh, to me. It helped really shape my identity, and, uh, we lived in a very diverse neighborhood in, uh, Denver, um, and I came of age, I came of age in the early 1990s. It was a time when, um, sort of at the beginning of kind of Black Conscious rap like Public Enemy, I remember, was a pioneering rap group, um, very influenced by them, but it was also a time in which there was the beginning of gangster rap and that was very influential i– uh, on the culture and it also influenced me as well, so I had this interesting influence: I was out a music head, I am to this day a lover of music.
And so I was deeply influenced by kind of this Black Conscious rap, but also by this gangster rap, which, even in Denver, I think, pretty accurately described some of the conditions under which particularly young Black boys and men, uh, were growing up. And so at about the age of 14 or so, um, the– one of the gangs that come to the state around that time moved next door to me, and I had a chance to really study them. And there were things about them I admired, you know, they were very, um, respected, they seem very close knit, they had a pretty clear sense of who they were, and they– and they had lots of things.
And, um, and I grew up without my father, I sort of missed the male influence. And so I was pretty influenced by them as well, and this really was a time I began to sort of see the way in which particularly Black men try to grab hold of their identity, and it seemed like there were, so, these two ways to go: kind of a Black Consciousness route or more like the gangster rap route. And I was both influenced– influenced by both of them, and it was really at 14 I began to really wrestle with– with those two things at the same time, and whether I could be a person who both embraced– embraced them both and was influenced by– by them both.
It was also the time in which, um, I really began to have interactions with the police. Uh, there was a time, there was a summer in particular where, after I got my driver's license, um, our first Black mayor was running for re-election against a gentleman who was the city's chief prosecutor, and his campaign focused pretty heavily on public safety. And at that time there was an increase in violence particularly, um, between the gangs, and so there was a lot of activity there, and the police had really stepped up their interactions with community members. And this summer– I think it was like the summer of 1993– was one where my friends and I, while driving, were pulled over– on a conservative side I'd say– a conservative estimate might be forty or fifty times in a summer. It was so bad that when I had a curfew at midnight, and I would say to my mom, you know, that I might be a little late ‘cause I do tend to get pulled over, like, right around the curfew, so we had to build in time to get home, imagining that we'd be pulled over and how long that would take.
And the truth is, most of those stops were unjustified. We were just kids, just teenagers driving around as kids do, excited to be outside. We didn't drink. Um, and there was one incident in particular where my friends and I were going to a party. Guess jeans were, like, very popular at the time, so I had a pair of white Guess jeans, and we got pulled over in our neighborhood, and the police ordered us out of the car, and under my seat I had a crescent wrench. Back in the day, these, uh, crescent wrenches were standard. If you had a car– my car was old– the crescent wrench was like the universal tool that could fix, uh, if you couldn't roll your window own, if your alternator was loose, if your starter stopped working, the crescent wrench was, like, was like the universal tool for almost every problem that people with older cars faced.
So it was under my seat, and the police officer mistook the crescent wrench for a gun, and so the police officers drew their weapons on us and pushed us to the ground, and I remember how humiliated I was when I got up and my brand new Guess jeans were not only soiled by the street, but they had a big hole in the knee, and my knee was scraped up, so there was some blood on the knee, and the police officers, once they realized it wasn't a gun, didn't own that they had mistakenly– that they mistook the crescent wrench for a gun, nor did they own how humiliated we were. They just said, "It looks like that's not what we thought it was, and have a good night."
00:06:27
And that– that interaction with police officers at 16 years old, really, uh, sorta spoke to how we interacted with, too often, police officers– very hostile conditions. And I begin to appreciate why in the music, particularly in the gangster rap songs, there was this disdain for police officers, because they weren't seen as part of the community; in fact they were an opposing force, and they didn't, and they did, they didn't– what I thought about public safety, I didn't so much worry about the gang members as I did about the police officers, even when the gang violence was at its height as it was that summer.
And so I think it was about this time in high school that I had a class, um, it was called "The Black Experience." It was a social studies class taught by a very serious teacher, who I think probably also taught at the college level, because he– we used to refer to him as Doctor Pedigin, his name was Sayudin Pedigin. And, uh, his class was right after the lunch hour, so our school was not outfitted with air conditioners, and so in the summer, in the warmer months– and because it was right after lunch, kids would often sleep in his class, um, but I was mesmerized by the content.
He showed us these black-and-white videos called Eyes On the Prize, and they chronicled the civil rights movement and captured these people whose names we wouldn't ever come to know, who literally put themselves in harm's way to move our country closer to its high ideals, and move the country away from it's very low practices. And I was transformed watching these courageous folks literally put themselves in harm's way, and I started to think about what I was going to contribute to the struggle that they fought.
And it was right around the time that Mr. Pedigin began to push me about what I was going to do with my future, and he said after class one day that he thought I could be an attorney. And this was, you know, this was revelation knowledge to me because I– I didn't grow up knowing any attorneys, um, my mother finished high school, um, I didn't know many– as I think about it, many college graduates– and I certainly planned to go to college, but I didn't– didn't have a sense of how one became an attorney. So he both put a vision, um, he set forth, he set a vision for what an attorney could be, and that could I be one, and then we sort of mapped out how I would get there.
00:09:23
And it was in watching these Eyes On the Prize videos that I saw, um, a video about Thurgood Marshall, who was the first Black Supreme Court Justice, and how he founded an organization called the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And I thought to myself, "I want to be Thurgood." I– I was mesmerized by how he would use his mind, his intellect, his genius to defeat straight-out racists. And I was mesmerized by his worldview, that looked at the systems that have been created to disadvantage Black people in particular, and how very often the country looked at the result that the systems create: high rates of poverty, criminal justice entanglement, separation from the vote, all of the things that foll– that follow the systemic racism that we don't often talk about, he had this searing critique of that.
And in high school I begin to see this, I begin to think about the way in which I listen to this, you know, Public Enemy and X Clan and other rap groups that talked a lot about this. And the influence both of the gangster rap, which was a description of the conditions, and the Black Conscious rap, which got at the reasons for the conditions, along with Mr. Pedigin's helping me understand the history that brings about the systemic racism that sets forth these conditions, I began to think about myself in that context. And I really wanted to be an attorney like Thurgood Marshall.
And so after, um, high school I went to a college in Colorado Springs, a small liberal arts school. And I was, um, there for four years, uh, and while in college, I applied to law school and I stayed in Colorado for law school, um, and then right after college, my girlfriend, who was my high school girlfriend and also went to the same college, applied to a program called Teach for America. And Teach for America staffed her in Newark, New Jersey, uh, which is where I've now lived since 2001. And one of the summers in law school, I had a chance to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as an intern. And during that summer I learned about a fellowship, a four-year fellowship, that was a partnership with the law firm for two years and then a partnership with the Legal Defense Fund, so it was a four-year fellowship, and I applied for it, and, um, was really, really blessed to get the fellowship.
And so I spent two years at the firm, and then I spent the next twelve years at the Legal Defense Fund litigating, um, large-impact, um, civil rights cases involving race, particularly focusing often on Black people and other people of color around voting, criminal justice, um, broad civil rights principles, and it was– it was a transformative time in my life. It was a chance for me to begin to do the thing that I learned about in high school, uh, and I could– and I– as I mentioned at the top, I think about myself as a kid from Denver, I've just been given extraordinary opportunities, you know, but I often think about my friends back in Denver.
And Denver is a beautiful city. Every year Denver is like one of the top one or two cities to live in, in the country, but just like other cities, Denver is also a place where there are deep, deep pockets of systemic racism that undermine opportunities for people like me to enjoy the prosperity of that city. And I'm a kid from that city who got this amazing opportunity to work for one of the top law firms, to get some real skills that I could use at one of the premier civil rights organizations in the country for more than a decade, and so I think about that often, and how blessed I am. But then I also think about my friends and the friends I grew up with in Denver who didn't have those same opportunities.
A good number of them have criminal convictions, which has made it difficult for them to pursue the things I have, and then some haven't even, have not survived. And so it's funny, ‘cause when you think about Denver, you don't think Denver's like a Newark, or like a Compton, and it isn't. Um, not in every respect. But there are similarities, and there are difficult conditions that folks have to weather, um, and I think, I do think about that often, and I struggle. I think I even struggle with that feeling, um, like I don't deserve the opportunities I've had, though I've tried to make the most of them, because I have a good number friends, many of them that were much, much smarter than me, who didn't have the extraordinary opportunities that I have and continue to have.
And so it's interesting, when I was interning at the Legal Defense Fund before I became a lawyer, um, it was right around the time that I met my dad. My father at this time was living in Brooklyn. The Legal Defense Fund's office is in Manhattan. And so when I was in Colorado, trying to think about where I would stay for the summer, my father said, "You know, Ryan, um, you could stay with me. I have a place in Brooklyn." And again, I hadn't grown up with my father so this is a pretty risky proposition, to be sure, but it was an exciting opportunity, because I've always loved the city of Brooklyn, though I hadn't spent much time there. Everyone loves The Cosby Show, and that's the thing where it was filmed, and, you know, I love– I loved the idea of it.
00:15:32
And so, my father, when he offered me a chance to stay with him, I– it was one I couldn't resist, and so I remember getting to New York City, and into Brooklyn on a Friday night. And it was, the weather was amazing, and we enjoyed my favorite food, which is pizza. And then Saturday night we had another night with, uh, basketball and some pizza, and then Sunday morning, I got dressed, my internship was going to start on Monday. I got dressed, did a practice run, took the train to the city. LDF'S office was in Tribeca, so I just wanted to make sure I had it mapped out so I could be there on time. And then Monday, the first day of my summer internship at the Legal Defense Fund, I woke up super early, as did my father who was a cameraman for a news– major news network in the city. I got dressed and my father said, "You know, Ryan, I didn't appreciate how crowded it would be with you here," and, um, I was struck by that, because it was really only now day three, the first day of my internship. And so I said, "Well, I guess I didn't, I didn't either."
And so my father left for work, I packed up my things in the suitcase, I got to Legal Defense Fund very early, and fortunately the cleaning person was there, and, uh, she let me in to the office. I was the first one there. I hid my suitcase in the library, and then on my lunch hour I called Charity, my wife, who was then teaching and is teaching in Newark. I called her, asked if there's anywhere I could stay in Newark. And she said, "Well, you could stay at the Newark YMCA, they have rooms there." So I called the Newark Y, and a woman– I swear she was an angel– she answered the phone. I was embarrassed to share my story, but I did about why I needed a place to be for the summer. And she said, "You could rent a room here for $8 a day." And I said, "That $8 sounds great!" So I told her I'd be to the Y after the office closed, because you– you can't be the kid on the first day of your internship with your luggage, 'cause then you look like you’re unstable, and they’ll question about whether you were a good hire.
So everyone left, I made sure of it, and about 8 o'clock, I left. I hopped on the PATH train, took the train to Newark, checked into room 531, and that really began my real learning experience with the city of Newark. And it was an unbelievable summer. I learned, that summer, a great many things at the Legal Defense Fund. I was learning about structural racism, I was running the case law, the cases that had been litigated to chip away at or end racial discrimination; I learned about the various systems that advanced the racial wealth gap, racial inequality in economics; I learned about how there was then an impact in the criminal justice system, where folks were separated from wealth, they're overly-entangled in the criminal justice system, and I learned about even when you're entagled in the criminal justice system, there are collateral consequences, including that you can't vote. So that summer painted a very vivid picture for me of the history of structural racism, and its modern-day impact. And at night, in the YMCA, I was interacting with people who were directly impacted by the structural racism.
So there, during that summer at LDF, we were working on, um, a case involving a clemency petition for Kemba Smith. I shared the office with two guys in the criminal justice division that were working on that. They gave me a very, very small place, uh, part to play in the fact pattern of Kemba's, uh, case. But the Legal Defense Fund was seeking to– uh, asking then-President Bill Clinton, uh, for a pardon for a conviction, um, that, um, Kemba had gotten because of her relationship with a drug dealer in Virginia. She was a college student, fell in love with an abusive drug dealer, who was ultimately killed, and the FBI prosecuted Kemba. Though she'd never touched the drugs, she was sentenced to– convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.
And I met a number of Kembas in the YMCA, who told similar stories about being in love with an abusive boyfriend who sold drugs, and because the government couldn't get to the boyfriend, the government came for the girlfriends, who were in a horrible situation and they weren't actually dealing the drugs. And that summer opened my eyes to a number of incredibly gifted people, who just, again, hadn't had the opportunities I had, as my friends in Denver. And that was a summer that I fell in love with the city of Newark. And so, after law school, which was the next year, um, my wife and I got married, we moved into Newark's South Ward. My wife was a middle school teacher for nine years, then she became a vice principal for five, and for the last nine years, she's been a middle school principal, all in Newark's South Ward. And, um, it's a beautiful city; like all cities, there's some incredible strengths alongside some really incredible challenges.
And it's been a blessing to be in a place where there's so much potential, so much happening, but also, it's also so sobering to realize the challenges that the city faces, and it really is, in that sense, a microcosm of the challenges that Black and brown people face in cities across the country. And so I, um, after about twelve years of Legal Defense Fund, one of my mentors, who was a mentor at the Legal Defense Fund, and who also was on the Board of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, reached out to me as the past–president, Cornell Brooks, was leaving to lead the NAACP, and she encouraged me to apply for his position, and, uh, with great support from her and– and encouragement from some others I applied for the position. I was very hesitant to do so because I had not led an organization before. Uh, I felt very inadequate to do so and still do, having now celebrated four years at the Institute.
But I've been here now for four years. Uh, I've been able to hire an amazing team, we have, uh, twenty people, half of them are lawyers. We have community organizers on staff, we've got a great communications and development team, great Chief Operating Officer. The staff is made up of, it's majority, uh, women who are women of color, um, maybe fifteen or sixteen of our twenty, uh, members of staff are women, and again, the majority of them are women of color. And it's a fantastic team of really national-level talent that could be anywhere, but they're here. At the Institute, our mission really is to identify load-bearing walls of structural racial inequality, that, if we topple them, it'll open up opportunities for people of color in the areas of economic justice, criminal justice reform, and civic engagement.
00:23:31
And I think at its heart, you know, our work really tries to– through community organizing, through research and writing, through advocacy– seeks to make victims of racial discrimination whole. Um, we approach our work with a racial justice lens, that's the world through which we see the work. Um, you know, it's interesting– New Jersey has one of the largest wealth gaps in the country; it's in this state, one of the wealthiest states in America, that the median net worth of New Jersey white families is $309,000. It's the highest in America, but the median net worth of New Jersey's Latino families is just above $7,000, and it's just $5,900 for Black families. And so we spent a lot of time looking at racial disparities, doing research and writing around them, understanding what the numbers are, what the data shows us; but it's not uncommon, when I'm talking about the numbers, the racial disparities, for someone to resist it.
And so, I was recently speaking somewhere about this racial wealth gap. I shared that number, that the median net worth for New Jersey's white families is $309,000, the highest in the country. That by stark, and really shameful, contrast it's just $5,900 for Black families. And this gentleman in the audience said, "Well, you know, one: is that accurate?" So he resisted the data, and so I pointed him to the data source that comes from footnote twelve, which cites the "Prosperity Now" study. And so then he said, "Okay, well, maybe that– okay well maybe the data's right." Then– he then focused on the second piece of it, that $5,900 is the median net worth of Black families. He said, "Well, that must be because Black folks just don't work that hard." So he pointed to a deficiency in the people as an explanation of why their median net worth is so low. And so I talked to him about, well, you don't get that kind of racial wealth gap without them, there being a systemic racism that drives it. And the third point he made was that, "Well, I don't have a median net worth of $3,900– $309,000, and I'm a white guy." And then I made a, you know, I, sort of– in tongue-in-cheek, I said, "Well then that act– that is actually, there's actually something wrong with you, because you've had every advantage to have that as your median net worth, meaning there's no systemic– there's nothing systemic seeking to create a racial wealth gap the disadvantages you." And so, you know, there was some– some laughter in the audience. I told him, of course, I was somewhat joking, although I wasn't.
But it's interesting 'cause when we talk about race, as we do, when we do so from a data-driven perspective, the first instinct is to resist the– resist the data. So, it cannot be the case in New Jersey, the median net worth for white families is $309,000, and just $5,900 for Black folks. It cannot be the case that a Black kid is incarcerated at a rate of 30 to 1 versus white kids. Clearly Black kids must commit crime at that level: 30 to 1 greater crime, even though the research shows that Black and white kids commit most offenses at about the same rate. So the first instinct is, because the racial disparities are so staggering in New Jersey, the first instinct is to resist them. So that– that can't be right.
Once folks are convinced that the data is accurate, then they say, "Okay, well, then the reason must be because there's something wrong with the people on the other end of the disparity." So if the median net worth is so low for Black and Latino folks, it's gotta be because there's something wrong with them in their DNA. They don't want to work as hard, they're averse to wealth, they're bad stewards of the money they have; there's something wrong with them, which is why it's so low. And then– then when you work through why that is like that, then you begin to really get to why, I think, in people's minds the case for why the Institute's work is so important. But for many folks it's not, it's not intuitive. I think there are folks who believe that because we had a Black president twice, we had a Black male attorney general, we had a Black woman serve that role, these historic firsts, which a generation past couldn't have imagined they'd ever see, and even folks in our generation couldn't imagine that we'd ever see– I think folks think that sort of systemic racism, racial discrimination, are largely things of the past.
And I find that fascinating in a lot of respects, including that everyday, if you turn on the television, you are bombarded with images, often recorded, of non-violent, mostly Black people, and Black males in particular, being killed by the police. And even as folks see those images, there are people who find ways to justify what they're– what they're seeing. But I also think that those kinds images and the difficult national moment has motivated a lot of folks to join us in the kind of work that we do; to fight for racial justice, to fight for social justice, to begin to build systems that don't drive racial disparities, but actually build systems that close those racial disparities and bring equity into the focus.
00:29:05
And so that's a lot of the work that we do at the Institute for Social Justice.
[pause]
I think, it’s been interesting, too, because I think here, a lot of my work for a lot of years was at the national level, um, but what I have found, particularly in this difficult national moment, is the way in which change happens from the ground-up in communities– local communities, cities, at the state level– that I think one of the greatest historical lessons I've ever learned comes from Selma, Alabama, you know, where John Lewis– a young John Lewis, before he's a congressman– and 600 folks organized a march over a bridge named after the Grand Wizard of the Alabama Klu Klux Klan, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to dramatize to the world their desire for voting rights.
And at that time, pre-1965, very few Black people were registered in that part of the state, really in Alabama more broadly and throughout the South, even though there were large numbers of Black folks who wanted access to the franchise, and it was really because of a, you know, it was because of a movement that they sparked from the community up, from the ground up, that changed the course of this country's democracy.
And I've been inspired by the fact that that march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, 600 non-violent protesters, led within half a year to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and then within just one generation after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America elects to the highest office in the land the first Black president, who then appoints the first Black attorney general, who later appoints the first Black female attorney general, and then who wins a second term, and that wouldn't have happened without the Voting Rights Act, which wouldn’t have been passed without the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which wouldn't have happened without organizers organizing themselves and local communities from the ground up.
00:31:37
But I also think that what we learn about democracy in this country is that it's always been a contested exercise, where we experience periods of expansion, followed by efforts to scale back democracy. And so I actually don't believe you can have a Black president, I don't believe you can have it Barack Obama, a Barack Hussein Obama, two times without then having a Donald Trump, because democracy has always been contested, particularly for Black people in this country from the beginning, after reconstruction which was a period of expansion, there were efforts to constrict democracy; after the passage of the Voting Rights Act there was an expansion of democracy followed by efforts to constrict democracy. And democracy has always been expanded after it's been contracted by people who organize themselves and local communities to do work from the ground up.
And so that really is our model: that we do social justice from the ground up, and one way that we’re doing this in the democracy space is by championing what I think is probably the next phase of the Civil Rights Movement, which is the struggle to secure voting rights for people with criminal convictions. There's a long history of states using laws of deprived people with criminal convictions in a racially-discriminatory way– so, you know, Mississippi has a a constitution that was written in the, just after the end of slavery, and they have a provision in that Consti– they had a provision in that Constitution which would require the loss of voting rights for someone who stole something, but not for someone who did something more egregious, like killed someone. And the– this law was guided by the, um, rationale that newly– that newly-freed Black people were more likely to steal a chicken then, for example, to kill a chicken's owner. So you would lose your voting rights if you took something, but not if you did something, like, killed someone.
And these laws really took effect shortly af– at the end of reconstruction. They found their way into a number of state constitutions, including New Jersey's. New Jersey is interesting because, although we're seen as a really progressive state, we're also in one of the most regressive states in the country. And New Jersey was actually a state to which southern states and those in the Confederacy looked to to resist reconstruction. New Jersey itself rejected the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, New Jersey was the first state to restrict voting to white men, it was the last state to abolish slavery, and it was a state that in 1844, the same year it restricted voting to white men only, it also began to disqualify people with criminal convictions from voting.
[Editor’s Note: the last state of the Northern states, not in the country; NJ only instituted gradual abolition in 1804]
00:34:46
And so today, New Jersey's law that bans people with criminal convictions from voting, denies the vote to almost a hundred thousand people. This is a number that's larger than our capital city of Trenton, and larger than several hundred cities in the state, and half of those folks who can't vote because of a criminal conviction are Black, although Black folks make up just 18– or, fifteen percent of the overall population. So our, uh, third body of work around civic engagement really looks to connect people with criminal convictions, all of them in New Jersey, to the right to vote.
So we launched a campaign, it’s called, “1844 No More, Let Us Vote,” and it harkens back to that year, 1844, when New Jersey deprived people with criminal convictions of the right to vote, and restricted voting to white men only. And we're saying, look, New Jersey's got to turn the page on this moral stain on our democracy. New Jersey has to declare that we are, “1844 No More,” and we’re aspiring to position New Jersey to be more like Maine and Vermont, and most Western democracies, which don't deny people with criminal convictions of the right to vote, even if they're in prison. Because in a state like New Jersey, which has the worst racial disparities, by connecting voting to the criminal justice system, we literally insert those racial disparities into the political process. And what we found is, if what you want to do is actually advance criminal justice aims around rehabilitation, re-entry, lowering recidivism, voting has been shown do the very thing– voting has been shown to do those things. So voting has been shown for people with criminal convictions to help facilitate re-entry, and help to reduce recidivism.
And so we actually undermine legitimate criminal justice aims by withholding voting rights for people with criminal convictions. So part of our advocacy here at the Institute for Social Justice is a fight to restore voting rights for people with criminal convictions, whether they be currently incarcerated, on parole, or on probation. And what makes, I think, our effort really powerful, is that we're centering people who lost their voting rights in this effort. So my colleague Ron Pierce, who helps to lead this work for us, is himself a gentleman who does not have the right to vote. He's on parole, and he talks powerfully about how voting for him has value to his soul, because the act of voting would connect him to a broader community.
Now he's isolated from that community, but he’s expected to be a member of it. And you can't be a member of a democratic society without having access to democracy, and the heart of democracy is the right to vote. So he talks powerfully about why people with criminal convictions should have the right to vote, and he is organizing people with criminal convictions, including people incarcerated, on parole, and probation, to weigh in on this, on this campaign of ours. So we had a hearing, um, on some really powerful legislation that was introduced that would do this very thing, would enfranchise nearly a hundred thousand people in New Jersey, which we've not seen that many people come to the ballot at one time probably since the end of slavery in New Jersey.
In fact, today there are more Black people who cannot vote, owing to population increases, than who couldn't vote, uh, before the 15th amendment was passed. And so part of our charge is, you know, if you want to legitimize a democracy like New Jersey's, you’ve got to expand access to it. And that's really what the campaign is about. So we had a powerful hearing a few months ago where we heard for fifteen or so witnesses. A good number of them are people who had themselves lost their voting rights, and were fighting to get them back. We’re pushing hard on the elected officials to support the legislation has been introduced. We’re urging the governor to sign it once it's passed. We've been building this campaign for about a year-and-a-half, and I have every confidence that we'll see movement on this bill probably later this year, if not in early– early 2020.
00:39:26
[pause]
It’s been interesting, too, to see the way in which– you know, there’s been lots– we've been advocating for this in New Jersey. Florida recently restored a million and a half people to the ballot, and yet Jersey is a state in which I think people fancy themselves progressive. It's overwhelmingly Democratic, the two chambers in the legislature, the Assembly and the Senate, are overwhelmingly Democratic, the Governor’s a Democrat; and so if what lawmakers in New Jersey want is to build an inclusive democracy that includes the voices of people with criminal convictions, they could do that. There's not a Donald Trump to blame, there's no former Governor Chris Christie to blame. All that's needed is for the people in these positions of power who are almost overwhelmingly, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, to have the political will to champion the voting rights of people who’ve been denied them for too long, and that's really what we've been urging people to do.
But we also know that in order to get elected officials to do what you want, even the most progressive electeds, you've got to make them do it. You've got to build a groundswell of support to put pressure on them to do it, because, too often, even those most progressive elected officials are keepers of the status quo. And so our “1844 No More” campaign is the opposite of that. We say, “No more status quo, we need to turn the page in 1844 no– and be 1844 No More,” and we've been very strategic about reaching out to elected officials, to push them to support this legislation with the hope that we can move it, at the end of ‘19, early 2020.
00:41:51
Might be a good minute to take a– take a restroom break, do you mind?
Yeah, totally.
[End of Recording One]
[Beginning of Recording Two]
00:00:00
[fading in]
Dad– m’kay.
And, and if you hit a point where it’s like, Dan, feed me a line, or feed me a question, that’s totally fine, too.
Okay.
We can go back to these points.
Yeah, make– if you wanna do that, make sure I cover your points.
I’m sorry?
Yeah, feed me, feed me a line.
Or a question, or a touch-down, so yeah, so what we were talking about earlier was, I think there was– I, I would love to hear an anecdote, um, or two regarding your mother’s choice to raise you as a black child–
Mmm hmm, okay.
Based on that identity.
Yeah. Yeah, my mom is really, uh, an extraordinary woman in a lot of respects. She’s, uh, she battled alcoholism, um, before I was born, and raised me in Alcoholics Anonymous, so, I was actually raised in that, um, program, and in my 44 years of life, I never saw my mom take a drink of alcohol. Um, and so I benefited tremendously from– from that. I think my mom understood that alcoholism, uh, can be hereditary, and I think she wanted to protect me from that as best she could. Um, my mom also tried her best to, I think, protect me from identity challenges, and though she's a– she's a– she's a white woman, definitely a white woman, um, she made the conscious decision to raise me as a Black child.
And that decision to raise me as a Black child, and she also gave me my father's last name, though I didn't grow up with him– My father is Black– uh, turned out to be one of most significant decisions that I think she made for me, and I think she did so recognizing that America is a country, like most countries, that is very color, color-conscious. And so I think she thought I'd have a difficult time fitting in if I didn't have a clear racial identity. And my clearest racial identity was Black, and so she made the decision to call me that and raised me that, as that. And I think a significant, um, supporting action, was that she identified me as Black, called me Black, and then raised me around mostly Black and Latino people. So I remember as a kid at football games, my mom was often the only white parent on the sideline, and in our neighborhood she was often one of few white people, and I'm sure there were moments where that had to be uncomfortable for her, but what it did for me was situated me in a community largely of color and help to support the racial identity that I, that– that she sort of identified for me.
And I'll tell you, I had a number of kids who were mixed, Black and white, uh, who tried to do the, when asked what they were, the, “I'm multiracial, Black and white,” and I even had a friend, who, whose name was Ben, whose mother was white, his father was Black, and he would often proceed by telling people that he was multiracial or biracial, and he ultimately felt rejected both by white people and Black folks. Like, he was looking for a place to land, to be embraced; he clearly looked Black, but he would say he was white and Black, and I remember what they did to him emotionally and psychologically. Ben ultimately tried to join the skinheads.
00:04:23
The skinheads were a Neo-Nazi group that where– they were really prominent in the early 1990s in Denver, and I just remembered learning at a really young age, like, at least for me, it was important to call it one or the other. And I– I saw often that kids, particularly Black kids who were raised by white parents in the absence of the Black father, when they would choose Black, they felt like they were doing a disservice to the white mother who was raising them. And my mom taught me that I could obviously still be her son and biologically half-white, but that it was okay for me to have embraced that I was a Black child. And I have– I have respected my mother's decision, um, deeply then and now, because it gave me the permission to be who I– who I actually am, and not have to wrestle with, um, trying to fit into worlds that are not available to me.
It’s funny, when I was a teenager in that era where we were getting pulled over all the time, I got pulled over by a police officer who was especially hostile for no reason in my mind, and I said, “Officer, would you treat me like I'm white?” And he was really irritated by the question, and I said, “‘’Cause my mother is white, so I'm technically half of you,” and he didn't appreciate the humor at all, nor did he believe it to be the case, in part because I didn’t look like a mix, especially now. I mean, then, I was lighter, I had curlier hair, so you can imagine I was mixed with something, but he– he didn’t find that funny at all. I thought it was funny, but that speaks to how difficult it is for kids who have Black in them to claim to be white.
In the multiracial piece, I don’t– in my mind, people should be free to identify as they do, but for me identifying, as a Black person was significant, and importantly, my mom freed me up to know that me saying, or me identifying myself as straight Black, to the extent that people can be straight Black in this country, doesn't undermine her as my mom, who's white. Um, and it’s, you know, I remember there was– my mom would often get questions about whether I was adopted. I did a speech contest one time, and after the contest, someone came up to my mom and asked, you know, “When did you get him?” And I, you know, ‘cause when we stand next to each other, um, I think people could reasonably believe that I was adopted. But I definitely wasn't, that's my mother. She's white, I'm Black, and she freed me up to– to be able to identify myself as– as Black.
00:07:20
And I think my mom had always hoped by giving my last– my father's last name, that at some point in life I would meet my dad. And it happened, uh. When I was in college, my mother was watching TV, she saw a commercial advertising a book called “The Haygoods Since the Civil War.” And my father is John Haygood. There were forty or so John Haygoods in this book, which she ordered. She wrote to all forty-plus John Haygoods, and the letter actually goes to my grandfather in Statesville, North Carolina, and he files it away, and, um, and then he dies. This all happens in pretty quick succession. My father goes through his things, and calls me in October of my 21st year, uh, so, one month after I turned 21, my dad called. And, uh, he called at the perfect time. You know, there were periods of my life, where if he called, I’d have been too angry to take the call.
But at that age, I had– at that age, I wasn't angry that he wasn't there as a kid. At that age, I was grateful for the mom I had, you know, she was amazing. She gave me all she could, which was all that I needed. And, uh, I was excited about starting a relationship with him. And I never asked my dad where he was in the first 21 years, because, um, there wasn't an answer he could give that would be sufficient, and also I was here versus there, you know. Um, I was just happy to know him and get to know some of my family from North Carolina, get to know more about him, and we've worked– it's been twenty years now– we've been working on a relationship.
I've learned a lot from my dad about sorta who I am, and, um, and I've also sorta learning how to, like, to know the Bible says to honor your mother and your father and your days will be long. And so I've tried to honor my mom, I’ve also tried to honor my dad in the way that I think I'm required, even though, you know, he wasn't there for half of my life. Um, and it's interesting ‘cause my dad has a real deep love for history, which is something we share. My father can also be very angry, which is something we also share, um, so it's been helpful for me to– to learn my daddy, even if we didn't have a more quote-unquote traditional relationship.
It’s interesting because most of my friends don't know their fathers either, and so for me, it was powerful to meet my father. My father didn't know his dad either, which is my grandfather; my grandfather didn't know his father, which is my great-grandfather; so my great-grandfather left his son, which was my grandfather; my grandfather left his son, which is my father; my father left me, his son, and so to tell you, I was determined, and I just got to, like, I just need to be around, and, um, and looking at that generational challenge of the missing Haygood fathers humbled me in ways, and challenged me in others, to not continue to do that.
Um, and it's also taught me a powerful lesson about forgiving, forgiving your– your folks, even for the most difficult actions, like being gone for half of your life. And then I’ll also share with you candidly that there are reasons– I, I have a better understanding now about why I didn't grow up with my dad. At that time my dad was not– would not have been good around us, so I think I met my father at the right time, to be sure.
I think I need one of your questions.
00:11:59
Um– and these sort of tie together, um, I’m curious about– you’ve spoken about– I don’t think we’ve talked about it here yet, but we talked about it in our pre-interview, about the differences in the journeys between you and your friends–
Mhm.
Uh, and then also, um, I’m curious about the larger, um, outside of the police, experiences of bias.
Mhm, mhm, okay, yeah, yeah. [pause] Yeah, I can talk– I do come from a pretty tight-knit community of, uh, friends in, um, friends in Denver. I think of most friends, I’ve had some of the most extraordinary opportunities, but I'm not the smartest person of my friends. I think I have several friends who are much smarter, funnier, better looking, um, who, if given the opportunities I've been given, would do what I'm doing here more, you know. And that's, so I do– I live in view of that, that sobering reality, um, and I think, you know, a good number of my friends have criminal convictions for doing frankly the same– we all did the same thing. There was, I remember, one night where one of my friends stole a car, and, uh, he came to pick me and some other friends up. I was the only one who had a curfew, I had to be home by midnight. So we drove around all night, and then went, you know, to a couple different parties, and it was a stolen car, and it was a Saab 9000, which was a popular car back then, and it was a stick shift, and that matters because– I’ll tell you why that matters.
So he picked me up, and we’re driving around, and– and then I had to be home by 12:00, so he dropped me off at 12:00, and as he turns a corner on my block, the police get behind him, and then he tries to get away, and they chase him, and ultimately catch him and my other friends who are still the car, who didn't have a curfew, and if they did, it was later than mine. And I use that example because I was in the car with them doing the same thing that they were doing, that landed, for a couple of them in that car, the first criminal conviction that I also deserve, but that I didn't get ‘cause I was dropped off earlier, you know. So, the early entanglement with law enforcement made it difficult for them to realize the opportunities that I had.
00:14:52
I had another friend whose mother saved, um, from birth, for him, a college fund, and when we were in high school, um, the big thing was to try to get bicycles, you know. So the truth is we were all trying to get these bicycles, not legally. And he gets on a bike and starts to ride away. He gets it from a garage, and the owner of the garage is actually– we did not appreciate– he was actually there. So the owner gives chase and catches him on the bicycle, and he gets arrested. And his mother has to get him a lawyer, and the mother pays for the lawyer with the money she had saved for him to go to college. And so he does, ultimately; he goes to community college, but he runs out of money pretty quickly.
And so I, you know, I think about that– that as– as well, and I don't sit in this seat talking to you in the professional position I had because I didn't do those things. I did those things, the same things my friends did, the same things my friends did, I just didn't get caught and they got caught. And it’s interesting, ‘cause when I got to college, that was a real eye-opener for me. I– I, yeah, my friends and I, we didn't do– you know, we drank at some point, but we didn't do drugs, and when I got the college was the first time I saw kids, mostly white kids, doing hard drugs: you know, cocaine, mushrooms, acid, ecstasy– and I thought about, like, when my friends and I would do silly stuff that kids do– all kids do silly things– um, the response of the police to those silly things. But in college it was known what these kids were doing at these parties, openly: lines of cocaine, no police intervention.
In fact it was understood those kids were just doing what silly kids do, but they were going to graduate and go on to become lawyers and police officers and judges and professors. They were just being kids, And it struck me, the way in which the ability to be a kid is racialized. Um, my friends and I were doing these things, and some of them are not above board; but when I got to college, kids are doing things certainly not above board, but there was a presumption of goodness still.
00:17:26
That my college colleagues were doing what college kids do, but that was a phase and they would survive the phase. And for us certainly in those high school years, which determine whether the Black kids would get to college, there was a very different approach, very different treatment, certainly by law enforcement officials. And that really shaped my own sort of thinking, you know, that nobody gets to be in the space when they are, without some extraordinary opportunities; very often folks don't get to the places where they could be, though, because of systemic challenges. And I’ve seen that lived out in my– in my friends’ lives, and I’m clear that it hasn't come to me both– both because of the grace of God, but also because I had an extraordinary opportunity that God made available, uh, available to me.
I think I need another question from you.
Um, can you speak to other experiences in Denver, outside of the police that–
Oh, yeah.
That you recognized as bias.
Yup. [pause]
And I'm, I’m–
Yeah.
I’m asking the question in the context, um, of the opportunities in the work you’ve been able to do by coming to, um, LDF–
Yup. Yup.
And ultimately the Institute.
Yep. So, it’s interesting, in high school– high school, um– our high school was in downtown Denver, which was then– I say then ‘cause the neighborhood has changed quite a bit in the last twenty years, but it was then Denver's historically Black neighborhood, and later, majority Black and Latino neighborhood, and our high school was situated there, so it was a very diverse high school racially. It was a majority Black and Latino, but it had a sizable population of white kids. They were actually bused into the neighborhood. There is a famous US Supreme Court case called Keyes versus the City of Denver that required Denver to integrate its schools through busing. So white kids were actually bused into our– our school.
[Editor’s note: The case is Keyes vs. School District No. 1, Denver; see here]
00:19:49
And what– what I didn't appreciate in my early years at– at the school– which is, which I feel– I feel more connected to my high school than college and law school in part because it was a neighborhood school, you know, and it was my neighborhood. So it was a high school that sort of represented a broader neighborhood. But what I didn't appreciate in my early years at the high school was the way in which, even though, if you look at the demographics of the school, it's very ra– it was very diverse racially, there was some pretty serious tracking going on in there, so that in the accelerated courses, in the AP courses, you had very few kids of color in those courses, and so those courses were overwhelmingly white. And for white kids what this high school experience meant– it’s called Manual, Manual High School– the high school experience for white kids at Manual was a rich one. So on their college essays, they would say, “I got a top-flight education at Manual High School, in an inner-city setting, in a diverse setting, but I had AP courses and exposure to advanced, you know, advanced, uh, thinking, but you know, it all happened in a very diverse setting.”
But Black and brown kids, very few of them could tell a similar story, because there were very few of them in those courses. And so I remember, although I had some fantastic teachers, I did have one counselor in my early years, uh, I had a conversation with her about a t-shirt that a kid was wearing. So– a white kid– so these, the white kids would very often go to some of the elite colleges in the Northeast, and I know this because they’d wear these shirts– I remember this– uh, the shirts would say, like, Brown, Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan. I actually didn’t know, I didn't know what those– I didn't know what those shirts meant until I asked, uh, one of my counselors– maybe I was a sophomore, a freshman or a sophomore– and my grades were always very good in high school, and I was in those classes with the white kids. So I remember asking one of the counselors, you know, “What is Brown? You know, what is that? I see that t-shirt everywhere, and I kind of like it, but what is it?” And she said, “You don't have to worry about– about Brown, you know. You’re probably going to go to school in Colorado, ‘cause don't you, don't you want to stay close to home?”
The truth is, I really wanted to get out of Colorado, and I'm not sure why. I– I– I knew– I knew I wanted to be out of Colorado. I didn't have a good sense of where I wanted to go.
00:22:39
I loved Colorado but I had been there most of my life, and I was interested in– in college or something outside of the state, but she was like, “You don't have to worry about– about Brown,” and by the way, she didn't tell me what Brown was. I just knew that it was not in Colorado, and that I probably was going to be in Denver or in Colorado somewhere. And that stuck– that stuck with me, and it was interesting, because, you know, it was– it was competing. And you know I had mentioned to you that I had a– a teacher in the same school, Black, who told me that I could be a lawyer; I had a counselor, white, who told me that I didn't have to worry about– about Brown.
Um, and I was, I think that was a pretty formative experience, because this was a counselor, and obviously the role of the counselor is to guide you and help you think about things you're not thinking about it. And because I didn't know any– I certainly didn’t know any college graduates– and I was kind of embarrassed to ask the kids what Brown was. I probably could have looked it up, but all this is like before Google and all that, right? Before internet. Um, I'm mostly accepted, “Ah, well maybe I'll let you know, you know, maybe I can do my thing here in Colorado.”
And so it turns out, I do. I applied to some schools out of state, um, and I got into some very good schools out of state, but it was easy to stay in Colorado. And so I did that, you know. I do think, and I ultimately believe, I went to the schools that I was supposed to go to. But I all– I also know that I– there’d have been a good chance I would have went to state out of school, if I had the early– if– if, she, if she instead said, “You know, Brown is in Rhode Island, and it's one of the best colleges out there. It's actually also a pretty diverse college, as the elites go; you should apply there or we should send you there to visit. Have you ever been to the Northeast?” “I haven't.” “Have you been to the East?” “I haven't.” “Hmm. Maybe we should find a way for you to get there, to see if you might like it.” You know? Like if that encouragement had been offered versus the, “Don't worry about that,” I think, I think I may have gone to school out-of-state.
00:24:52
But I think the broader, the bigger takeaway is that, if this is clearly a situation in which race– race was the motivating factor. Because if there was a kid at our school, if there was a Black kid in our school who could have gone to school like that, I was one of those kids. Um, but I wasn't encouraged to– to do that, you know. And, you know, I think a broader– at some point Manual High School closes, the city gets out of the consent decree that was put in place by that Supreme Court decision, and the city ends the busing of white kids into the school, which was inevitable, and I think necessary, in some respects. But the school had so poorly empowered neighborhood kids to do well in the school that overnight, it becomes a school where the test scores fall tremendously.
And so then, judged by these very low test scores, ‘cause they’ve removed the top, top achieving students– the highest achieving students are removed from the school overnight– and now judged on the scores of those who hadn't really been empowered by the school, they ultimately decide to close the school. And then they reopened it with three schools, a couple of charter schools, and, you know, and the school has struggled since. And now what the neighborhood, seeing a significant influx of white families, the thinking is, if that school, which was, which is one of Denver's most historic schools, in the heart of Denver’s oldest Black community, there's a very good chance that school will reopen, and will be majority white. This time minus the Black and brown kids. And that, too, is a story about race, in the state, in a state like Colorado, with a relatively diverse city like Denver. So.
00:27:17
I need another one of your questions.
How was, how does that city, then, compare to your experience now–
Mhm.
Living in Newark.
Mhm.
Is there a comparable– is there a way to compare the two?
Mhm, (laughs) that’s funny. Yeah, you know, growing up in Denver, I always wanted to– I knew that, as an adult, I wanted to live in a community that was as diverse as the community I grew up in. So Denver’s interesting, ‘cause there are pockets of, you know, Black and brown people pretty concentrated, but Colorado is overwhelmingly white. It's a beautiful state. I love it, it's also a state, though, where you can go and you can miss people of color almost entirely. Most of the time when I fly home to Colorado from Newark, there are very few Black people on the airplane.
It's just– that’s just the reality. And so, part of why I love living in the Northeast and in Newark in particular is because of its racial diversity. You know, Newark, as you know, is a majority Black city, I think that's special. Colorado has maybe 5% Black people, I think Denver may have 8% versus a majority in this city. I think that's a, I think it's a beautiful thing to be in a– in such a racially diverse area and I– I do– it’s interesting, now when I go home, I often feel– I think I can feel comfortable anywhere, but I feel most comfortable where there's racial diversity, where the primary language is not English, where you hear different music, you smell different food, you hear people arguing in different languages, you know.
I– I find going to Denver to be pretty monolithic often, and somewhat stifling, frankly, um, which is not to say that there aren’t pockets of great diversity and great activism, but I feel like the Northeast is, like, alive in a way that I'm drawn to it, and I'm– and I actually think that the Northeast, at least, in this area, I imagine this is what heaven would look like, just like a very racially diverse city of people, speaking different languages, and, uh, you know, and living, you know, who they are, without regard to whatever culture or race they come from. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Did you have any, um, early experiences when– ‘cause you lived next to someone who was a leader in a gang–
Mhm.
Did you happen to have any direct experiences–
I did. So yeah, so they– yeah, when I was, um, 14, a couple guys from one of the gangs in Denver, which had come from California, moved right next door. My mother told me to stay away from them, you know. It was hard to, ‘cause they were, you know, right next door, and they were often outside, and so it wasn't long before I found my way over there. And, um, you know, and I had a lotta, a lot of respect for them, and they were, for the most part, not terrible influences on me, though they were doing things my mom urged me not to do, and at that time I wasn't doing. Um, but I also know that they were, they sold a lot of drugs. I know this because I saw them and I also saw the things they bought with them. Um, and I remember one weekend when the police came and raided their place, and took them all away, and, um, and did so without even giving them a chance to– like, they didn't even lock the doors, I remember the front door was still open.
00:31:31
But what I remember most was, one of them had this, um, it was like a– a silver Chevrolet Impala. Like a 1960’s kind, the kind that's featured in the– the Dr. Dre videos with Snoop Dogg, you know? And it was in the garage, and the garage had, like, these two wooden doors that you could open, there was like a little latch on it, and you could– and I remember it was in, it was in there. And so, and I– I loved this car, I love that they had it, um, and I just remember that that was still in there. At some point later, a tow truck came and got it. But, I was, I was, um, I was influenced by them, I was influenced by the respect they commanded, I was influenced by the support they provided each other, you know, um, I was– I was influenced by even some of the stability I thought they provided, just– just, it– just, the area.
And they were kind, for the most part, they were pretty kind to me, um, but I was also encouraged to keep– as best I could with them being next door. My– my distance, ‘cause my mother was constantly ensuring that I wasn't there. But– but I definitely was drawn to them, and I was drawn to them because it was a collection of men, and younger men, and at that time, at 14, I really longed for a more meaningful male connection, and, uh, in some ways they provided that. Yeah.
And they, too, it’s interesting– they too, the things that drew me to them, drew them to each other, like, the thing I was seeking, they were seeking, and they found it in the group they created. You know. But they weren't, they probably weren't next door for more than maybe six months or so before they weren’t, and then there were, then more people moved in. Yeah. I think, one of the things I learned from those interactions, and even the kind of community I grew up in is when, you know, is the way in which people have power, even when they're marginalized people. Or when their voices are muted, they have power.
And they, when they organize themselves around a thing, they can get people to take notice. And so I began to think about, really at a young age, how whe– how, if you can get people organized around a thing, you could get, you could use your voice to get things done. And that's something that I've worked with my team here to do, you know. We, our theory of change is, we dig deeply into communities to understand what the pain points are, what the challenges are, and then we do our own research and writing to better understand, from a data-driven perspective, what those challenges are. And then we use what we've learned directly from communities, and from our own research and writing, to advocate.
Sometimes the advocacy looks like the policy proposals in our reports, moved into legislation. But sometimes it means direct action to urge an elected official, say the governor of New Jersey, to do something or not do something. And what I've learned is, you can't have the advocacy be powerful without the people. So we could do the ste– the second step and do our research and writing it, produce a powerful report. But if we don’t have people that the report's recommendations are responding to, if it’s not responding to the specific needs that they’ve identified, then we’ve just written a nice report that will largely be shelved.
00:35:33
The report has to be the basis for the issues that the people are articulating, and the advocacy flows from what they are advocating for. And so, you know, we have tried to center as best we can, I mean, we are largely made up of lawyers at the Institute, so we try to humble ourselves and center the community in the advocacy, so that we can say sincerely that our advocacy, the things we're fighting for are what community members have been asking for; to close the racial wealth gap, to connect people to jobs, to access their credit, to home ownership, to wealth, to transform policing and youth justice, to restore voting rights for people with criminal convictions. Those things came directly from communities who said, “This is what you all should be focusing on.”
And– and I think part of what our success has been is, once the reports come out or whatever the writing is, community members are now equipped with the data to advance the advocacy, and the advocacy is always directed at people in positions of power to urge them to do something. And people in positions of power, called the governor, will respond when there are enough people pushing them to do so. And so we're clear about the– the power of the people, or people power. And we’re clear that without people power, the reports, the writing, the research, is not meaningful. And so even in the “1844 No More” campaign, you know, the strength of the campaign is, these are people who have been deprived of a voice in our democracy, so they cannot vote. But they're not deprived of the voice to change the minds of those who advanced policies that denied them the right to vote. So they can't get– vote in the ballot box, but they can use their voice to the public square to influence lawmakers to pass laws that will empower them to vote in the– in the ballot– in the polls.
00:37:45
And so that's really what, you know, the campaign that’s being built to– to a size that gets elected officials to take notice and to do the right thing, on the other side of legislation that was introduced to empower them with the right to vote. Yeah. And then I think, you know, I think one of the powerful aspects of the campaign is– specifically for those people like Ron Pierce, my colleague here, who've been deprived the right to vote– giving them agency to articulate in the public space why they should have the right to vote.
“You’ve denied me my voice at the ballot box, I'm gonna use my voice outside the ballot box to tell you why, you lawmakers, why you must pass this law, to empower me to use it in that space.” So you and I, and other folks who have the right to vote, can make the argument that the most powerful argument is the one that's made by folks who don't have access to things that you and I enjoy. Yeah.
[pause]
I think I need another one of your questions.
Um, so, regarding, uh, just wanna check the time, just wanna be respectful of where you’re needed–
I’m fine.
We have about fifteen minutes–
Yeah, I’m totally fine.
Um, the moral argument is totally clear for “1844 No More”
Mhm.
I, I’m curious– uh, two things: You mentioned data regarding, um, the linkage between civic engagement and recidivism–
Mhm.
And if you can speak a little bit more to that––
Yeah.
And then I’ll– I’m curious what the counterargument is to those who–
Yeah.
Want to retain disenfranchisement.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah so then, I think, you know, we’ve– we talk a lot about how New Jersey's law that deprives people with criminal convictions the right to vote is a moral stain on our democracy, but it also is a law that undermines criminal justice aims, like facilitating re-entry, reducing recidivism. The Brennan Center wrote a report that talks about how empowering people with criminal convictions with the right to vote actually helps to facilitate re-entry and lower recidivism. It's a practice that Maine and Vermont have embraced since the beginning of their individual statehoods. They've never denied people with criminal convictions of the right to vote. Um, it’s interesting, too, because those are two of the whitest states in America. New Jersey, and most of the other states that deny people with criminal convictions of the right to vote, are more diverse than those states racially.
[Editor’s note: The Brennan Center for Justice is located at the New York University Law School in New York, New York.]
But we also know that if you want a person coming home from a period of incarceration to return meaningfully, you've got to give that person a stake in society. And our argument is that the right to vote is an important stake in society. To deprive folks of the right to vote, which is one of the key pieces of a democratic society, is really to say to that person, “You're not welcome back into the community.” But they're back in the community. And the best place to help prepare them to come back into the community is while they’re incarcerated. And so that's why we think voting is really at the heart of what will drive re-entry, what will help to reduce recidivism.
And so it's why we’ve championed restoring voting rights, not just for people who are on probation or parole, but also to extend to people who are presently behind the wall in prison. I think I forgot your second part, Dan. You said the moral argument–
Um, so the– before we get back to the second part, um, did the campaign always include individuals who were presently incarcerated?
It did. So we wrestle with– some of our national partners urged us, because they believed you'd be more palatable, to focus on probation or parole, and then later tackle incarceration. But the truth is that the arguments for restoring voting rights of people on probation and parole—that is, the arguments around discrimination in the criminal justice system—hold with equal, if not more, force for people who are in prison. In fact, if in New Jersey, if you– if you actually just restore voting rights of people on probation and parole, you actually increase the racial disparities, because the most significant racial disparities in New Jersey are in the incarcerated population.
00:42:40
So you would actually increase that racial disparity in the folks who cannot vote, but there's also just not a real rational reason to connect voting to the criminal justice system at all. So we have said, without respecting whether you're on probation or parole or in prison, folks have not made the case as to why they've connected voting to the criminal justice system at all, particularly in a state like New Jersey, where we have the highest Black-to-white adult and youth incarceration disparity rates.
So what folks will say is, “Well, you know, if you do the crime, you do the time, and so you've not– part of doing the time is that you lose your right to vote.” Other folks will say, and we've heard them say, that each person has a social contract with the community, and to the extent you’ve broken the law, you’ve broken the social contract. Others will say that withholding the right to vote is like retribution for what you have done. And what we’ve said to that is, when people commit crimes and they’re sentenced to something like probation, parole, or prison, that the punishment is that you are confined or your liberty to move around is somehow constrained.
But you don't cease to be a part of the society. If you work in prison and you earn enough, you're still going to pay taxes, you can still get married and divorced; you can still, um, worship freely, you can file lawsuits, you're still counted for purposes of the census and redistricting and apportionment and distributing resources to communities. There are some communities that have access to political representation solely on the strength of the prison peop– the people housed in the prisons there. So we’re saying to people that you can't vote, but we're going to count you on the census, we're also going to distribute federal and state resources, and by the way, we're going to create elected seats on the backs of you being in prison, or folks in prison.
And so we’ve said, you know, there’s really no rational reason at all to connect voting to the criminal justice system, if what you really care about is criminal justice reform, or a functional criminal justice system at all. And certainly, if you do that, you got to know that you’re actually undermining the very things you say you care about achieving in criminal justice. And so that's why our push has been for full re-enfranchisement, to totally disentangle voting from the criminal justice system, or to sever the link between voting and the criminal justice system.
00:45:26
Uh, and the second part of my question from earlier was, um, what– what argument can be made, what’s the counterargument to re-enfranchisement?
Mhm. I guess the count– I guess the biggest, I think the biggest– when opponents, are you asking me opponents to re-enfranchisement? When opponents to enfranchising people with criminal convictions are honest, what they'll say is– it typically breaks down along party lines. One party will say, “We don't want people with criminal convictions to vote, because we think they're gonna vote for the other party.” And the other party will often say, “We resist people with criminal convictions voting, because if we support it, we’ll be seen as being soft on crime.”
So really, it's a function more of how people with criminal convictions will vote, not so much a legitimate reason as to why they shouldn't. So there's a concern that if we let them vote, they’ll vote for the other party, if we support them voting, then we’ll be seen as soft on crime, which, neither of which– by the way, I think these are the heart of why these laws exist. A more insidious reason is, if we let them vote, we know they'll become powerful. And right now, we get to count them, we get the benefit from them being in that place, financially and politically, and they're not accountable to us.
And so I think there are a number folks appreciate having it, the system, uh, function as it does, and they do not want to bring new people into the political fold. And I think this goes back to the folks who were keepers of the status quo, that the existing structure works for a good number of elected officials, which is why we want to disrupt that by building the “1844 No More” campaign.
Is there anyone specifically in the legislature that has been vocal about opposition?
It's funny, we have had– publicly, most elected officials have been supportive, uh, of the effort. We've even had a legislator or two who originally, or initially, resisted the bill, after a hearing, changed his mind. And so we're doing a lot of the individual outreach to legislators. Now we'll have a better sense of where the opposition is, particularly as we get closer to the end of the year.
But we don't have– for example, the hearing we had in the Senate before a senate subcommittee in support of the bill that was passed that would enfranchise a hundred thousand people– no one testified in opposition. Fifteen or so people testified, all in support of the existing bill, which is full re-enfranchisement. I suspect, as we get closer to, uh, trying to line up votes in support of passage of the legislation, we’ll learn more about who the opponents are, but I don't think we have a good– there’s certainly not a vocal group of opponents at this time that I'm aware of.
Um, I think my last question with the time we have left, um, you spoke about Kemba Smith earlier–
Mhm.
And I’m curious if there are any other formative cases that you can point to from your time at LDF.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Um, you want, like, in a voting context?
Sure. I mean, I mean, personal and–
Mhm.
And campaign.
While I was at LDF, I represented a group of Black, Latino, and Native American people who were in prison, who filed a case challenging Washington State's law, which denied them the right to vote. Um, it was a case that martialed the racial disparities in Washington State's criminal justice system, and looked at how Washington imported those racial disparities into its political process by connecting the right to vote to the criminal justice system. As a result, in Washington State, one in four, um, Black men couldn't vote, and the racial disparities were pretty staggering as to other people of color, as well. So I litigated this case, um, before a three-judge panel, a federa– a three-judge, uh, panel in the federal court, and my argument was that there were racial disparities at every level of Washington’s criminal justice system, uh, stop, search, arrest, conviction, sentencing– that were transferred into the political process, because the law didn't allow people with criminal convictions to vote, in a way that deprived a quarter of the Black men in Washington State from voting. Not because of the criminal convi– criminal behavior, but because of a higher disproportionality of loss of voting rights of people, well, uh, because of a higher incidence of interacting with the criminal justice system.
And it was a case that we actually, for a hot second– it was amazing, we won the case, the three-judge court rule 2 to 1 that Washington's law violated the Voting Rights Act, um– but then the Ninth Circuit, on its own, decided to re-hear the case with all eleven members of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Uh, and the case was swiftly overturned. But that was an important case. I litigated it for a number of years, I had the honor of representing these folks in prison, um, and I learned a lot about this theory, that when you connect voting to a criminal justice system with it’s– that’s replete with racial disparities, you transfer those into the political process.
00:52:43
That impacts people's ability to access democracy. And that framework is really what's helping to drive the “1844 No More” campaign. Now, eight years later in New Jersey– that was a case I litigated in 2010, and, uh, and lost in 2010, but some of the lessons we learned, particularly around organizing people and communities most impacted by these laws, is really what’s driving the– the advocacy here in New Jersey. Um, and then, right before I left the Legal Defense Fund to come to the Institute, my last case was a case involving, uh, Texas’ photo ID law.
So the Texas legislature, looking then at the 2010 Census data, learned that the state of Texas has grown by about four million people.Ninety percent of those folks were Latino and Black. And so the Texas legislature, following this data from the 2010 Census, passed a law requiring photo ID to vote. Previously, Texas would allow one of a handful of pieces of ID to confirm your identity– a hunting or fishing license, a utility bill, a bank statement, a debit card, a student ID– but after the 2010 Census, Texas passes law saying, “We're now only going to allow for the use of one of six kinds of photo ID: birth certificate, driver's license, concealed handgun permit, and a few others.” But would no longer allow you to use things like a student ID.
So we file a case, along with a number of other groups in Texas, in a federal court challenging Texas’ law under the federal Voting Rights Act, um, we had students speak powerfully to how they had been using a student ID to register– sorry, to vote, they’d been using their student ID to vote. But under Texas’ new law could no longer do so, and also talked about how difficult it’d be to get a birth certificate, which you would need to get any one of those other kinds of ID in Texas. We had another client testify, an older Black woman from Louisiana, who was born in a county where she couldn't get a birth certificate, so for her it would be impossible to satisfy this new photo ID law. And then we got legislators to admit that they’d passed this law specifically in response to the increased number of new voters, as reflected in the 2010 Census.
And so, right before I left the Legal Defense Fund, a federal court, who heard a two-week trial, struck down Texas’ law as racially discriminatory, uh, intentionally and, um, in its effect, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. And it was a tremendous victory. This law impacted 800,000 to 1 million people, um, but consistent with our conversation earlier about how democracy has always been contested in this country, even after we won, the case was appealed a number of times, and even now it's still, you know, it's still pending appeal, which is really why I'm thankful to be doing this work and– and, at the Institute, because I think litigation– that fight is essential, but so too is the work of organizing communities around advocacy models that will give them voice outside the courts, pushing policymakers to be responsive to their needs, and advance legislation that would speak to them, as well. Yeah.
Um, Ryan, is there any last thing you want to be sure that gets communicated?
I think that's, I think that’s it. I don’t think I– I think, as my coach would say, I think I left it on the field.
[Dan and Ryan laugh]
Cool, great.
This is awesome.