“A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke’s memorable anthem to the urgency of civil rights, was still doing well on the record charts in my senior year in high school a half-century ago. (Pull it up on YouTube for a bit of great nostalgia!)
I remember it as mesmerizing, uplifting, even inspirational, for a teenage farm boy like me who would have had to drive almost 50 miles to find someone whose skin was not the same color as my own. My experience with race, for the most part, was limited to what I watched on CBS News, the only network we could get on our TV, for most of my youth.
Amazing change had come even in the two years since Cooke first crooned that song in 1963 in his delicious gospel tenor, and even more change was to come, as a generation of activists from the president to Congress down to the grass roots worked hard to eliminate the structural barriers that inculcated institutional racism into the fabric of this great country, most often in the form of segregation and disparate treatment.
And yet, when I arrived in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., 50 years ago this fall, I quickly signed on to the idea of change. I became active in the Campus Democrats, where I was elected vice president of the group by the time I was a sophomore.
Those thoughts came rushing back in mid-October, as I listened to Attorney General Matt Denn call out for change in the criminal justice system in the name of social justice. And the thoughts returned as I read The News Journal’s expose on the disproportionate number of blacks incarcerated in Delaware, approximately 60 percent of the prison population while they make up just 23 percent of the Delaware population.
Indeed, it is long overdue for Delaware – and for most states – to revisit the “mandatory minimum” sentencing requirements with which legislatures around America responded to the rise in all sorts of ills, from drug use to the crimes that stemmed from antecedents like single-parent homes, high school dropouts, poverty, hopelessness and despair.
Frankly, a curious blend of Democrats and Republicans – the latter more often drawn from the formerly labeled more moderate “Rockefeller Republicans” – who have led the fight for “man-min reform.” They’ve included one of my mentors, former Gov. Dale Wolf, his longtime friend and colleague the late former Gov. Russ Peterson, Democrat consigliore Carl Schnee, former State Sen. Liane Sorenson, and many others.
Even a number of judges who could not otherwise speak on the record often would confide to me their frustration with “Man-Min” justice, that otherwise seemed to tie the hands of a State Judiciary regarded throughout most of the country as among America’s best.
Albeit unlikely by design, one result was a prison system where the minority is the majority, that is, filled disproportionately with African Americans. That is an issue, and it will remain an issue.
To his credit, Charles Madden is leading an effort on one of the most important aspects of that, “re-entry,” or returning to the community of those who have been released. Delaware’s recidivism rate, – the number who will find themselves back in prison after re-offending – is among the highest in the country. Madden heads an inner-city program focused on felons who have left prison.
Still, based on a variety of comments in public discourse, whites and blacks still seem far apart on the nexus of the issue. Many of the former see it simply as a crime-and-punishment issue. Many of the latter see it as one more expression of institutional racism that is decades, even centuries, old.
Both sides – including business, which helps pay the price via its taxes for such dysfunction – will need to set aside a lot of assumptions for Delaware to pursue the opportunity created here by the attorney general for some effective problem-solving.
I’m one of the many who feel it’s not about pointing fingers, but about self-direction and self-empowerment, looking inside – inside ourselves, and inside our communities – for the solutions and the will to escaping the miasma of social conditions that create that sense of despair. Cynics need someone outside to blame, but the greatest potential is what people unlock from the inside.
“Knowledge of self is very important, you can’t be living in a world pretending to be someone you’re not. No one will ever believe in you, when you don’t have the courage to believe in yourself,” writes Amaka Imani Nkosazana in “Sweet Destiny.” A 40-year-old Alabama-born African American writer and poet, Nkosazana credits Maya Angelou as her role model and inspiration.
The truth about changing society, communities, families and self can be found in her message of self-empowerment through self-awareness and self-knowledge.
