Tag: religion

Who makes time in prison? And how do they make it?

In this article, I speak with Hakim ‘Ali about Islam and black prison organizing in 1970s Baltimore in anticipation of the NYU event, “Making Time: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons” on April 10, 2015. More information about this roundtable conversation can be found here.

Making Time: Religion & Black Prison Organizing, an Interview with Hakim ‘Ali

by Laura McTighe
The Revealer | March 27, 2015

Hakim 'Ali
Hakim ‘Ali

It is shortly after the Fajr morning prayers and snow is falling as big as fists. Hakim’s deep laughter punctuates the steady chug of the steam radiator in the corner, as he launches into another tale of a Philadelphia long since passed. I smile in knowing recognition. Hakim has an unparalleled gift for storytelling. We have been talking for almost an hour.

Colloquially, folks often speak about incarceration as “doing time.” What Hakim and I have been discussing is the idea of “making time.” Can we better understand the everyday work of building geographies of confinement, as well as the complex strategies for transforming our darkest of institutions, if we think about time as “made” rather than “done”? Who makes time in prison? And how do they make it? Hakim knows the world of prisons far better than most: he spent forty years of his life behind bars. “And it is only, ONLY by the grace of Allah that I am sitting here having this conversation with you,” Hakim reminds me, with a sudden somberness. “I am a Black Muslim man, 71 almost 72 years of age, and I understand fully what that means in this day and time, in this country, and in the world.”

Hakim and I met in Philadelphia more than a decade ago. Our connection was one of intention as much as coincidence: in 1978 – the year I was born – he had been transferred to the federal prison in Lewisburg, PA – the town I lived in as a teenager. Over the years, we have built a relationship of closeness and reciprocity, as beloved friends and comrades. Through our work together, I have come to know Hakim as a poet, an educator, a revolutionary, a father, and a confidant. He rarely talks about how he survived the hell of the local, state and federal prisons that held him captive, and I know better than to ask. Those silences in his life story have been built up because of too many small abuses to count, because of great and incomprehensible ones.

But this morning, under the guise of “making time,” with the snow showing no sign of relenting, Hakim began to speak about his conversion to Sunni Islam, his work with the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Baltimore bank robbery that catapulted him into the caverns of justice in America. The year was 1972. The date was February 23rd.

* * *

When we got popped, the Baltimore cops told us the folks in Philly were calling a citywide holiday. The “Philly 5” they called us in Baltimore. Of the five, three of us were Sunni Muslim and one of us was Nation of Islam. And the other one, because of his association with us, was sympathetic to Islam, even though he wasn’t Muslim. So Islam was our point of unity as we were doing what we were doing, existing before the trial, and even during the course of the trial in the way that we were referred to, you know.

A National Guardsman watches detainees in the Baltimore city jail on April 10, 1968, six days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. (Weyman Swagger/Baltimore Sun)
A National Guardsman watches detainees in the Baltimore city jail on April 10, 1968, six days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. (Weyman Swagger/Baltimore Sun)

So one day while we were in the city jail, we were in the yard – something had just happened, a dude had tried to escape earlier – and they had everybody out of the buildings and we were in the yard, with the police around us. I saw this brother walking down the yard, and he had this paper rolled up in his back pocket. And I saw different parts of words – something about Islam, and the some parts of the Arabic… So I approached him, and asked him, “You mind if I look at that?” and he said, “Man, you can have it.” And he gave me the paper. So I opened up the paper, I was reading it, and it was in fact a newsletter coming from this masjid in West Baltimore. It had an address and contact information, so I got together with the other brothers and showed them the paper and we decided to see if we could get some materials sent in for us to read.

Just to be clear: Sunni Islam was not in Maryland. Anything related to Islam was the Nation of Islam, or this little small group of dudes who were Five Percenters. At the start, we didn’t have intentions of establishing anything in the jail. We were just seeing if we could get some materials, something to read, or a contact. But eventually this effort on our part led to us establishing traditional, orthodox Sunni Islam in the Maryland system.

First, we started with the city jail, where we were awaiting trial. Eventually we got somebody to come out. The first visit was a personal visit – the Imam, Ali Akbar, came out and met with one of the people in our group. Then Ali came back again, and we created an opportunity for him to meet not only with ourselves but also with a couple of other brothers that we found out were there and were Sunni Muslim. They had been existing under the radar, you know what I mean? Because the Baltimore jail is transitional, and folks were focusing on their case.

So we got to the point – and I’m really, really, really summarizing this – that we were able to get this brother Ali from the masjid to come in and meet with the Superintendent of Baltimore city jail and we literally got jummah started there. It was the first time that the dude had heard about jummah, it was the first time that Muslims from the community had even entertained the thought of coming into the city jail. And from that, later on down the line, a position was created where Ali got appointed as the community Imam – the representative of Islam for the Baltimore jail.

That was sort of our first political/religious statement, with all the other stuff we were doing prior to coming to Baltimore and getting locked up. We believed that we were in the course of revolutionary action, taking from the government, supporting the people… It was the same sort of concept as what the Black Panther Party was doing, but we had not been building institutions. We mostly just focused on meeting the community’s immediate needs – helping folks with rent, paying their bills, getting food… So this was the first real thing that we literally did in an institution, and to this day what we started still exists.

So that was a real spiritual change for me….

Continue reading at The Revealer….

On August 9th, I took in the news of Michael Brown’s murder with my Women with a Vision, Inc. family in New Orleans. Not once did we question whether the uprising in Ferguson would be “a moment or a movement.” It’s a question that doesn’t make sense when you are enmeshed in a long struggle for liberation that is still alive and kicking.

In this article, I reflect on the movement in Ferguson, the forces that obscure it from view and the long history of black women’s organizing we can’t afford to forget…

To Take Place and Have a Place: On Religion, White Supremacy & the People’s Movement in Ferguson

The Revealer | September 18, 2014

FranceFrancois“I CANNOT BELIEVE I STILL HAVE TO PROTEST THIS SHIT!!” the block pink letters of France Francois’ sign fired with exasperation. The date was August 14, 2014. Michael Brown had been shot and killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer, Darren Wilson, just five days prior. Francois was one of thousands who took to the streets in cities across the country as part of the National Moment of Silence/Day of Rage. People in Ferguson had not left the streets since Michael Brown’s murder. “I think, throughout the nation, we’re all asking ourselves this question: ‘How did we come here again? How did we find ourselves in this very same space?’” Francois told AlterNet in an interview shortly after the protest. Indeed, how did we?

Undeniably, the death of Michael Brown has erupted onto the national scene in a way that few murders of black and brown people by police have. That itself is remarkable. In the wake of Ferguson, there are many questions that have been bubbling through the country… Why Ferguson? (Where is Ferguson?) Why not New York? Who will be next? The question I have found most troubling is the repeated inquiry by activists, pundits and scholars alike: Will Ferguson be a moment or will it become a movement?

At face value, this might not seem like an inappropriate question to ask. The uprising in Ferguson has shone a vital and painful spotlight on the everyday terror of anti-black violence in our country. Many worry that this attention will be fleeting; they wonder if the organizing in Ferguson will be able spur a more radical transformation of the people, policies and institutions that perpetuate the devaluing of black life.

What I want to call our attention to is a pair of claims that are embedded in the moment vs. movement juxtaposition: first is a claim about how change happens; second is a claim about what counts in American history.

Of the many articles that have been penned in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder, two in particular put a point on the vision of social change swirling around the moment/movement question: educator Josie Pickens’ August 18th article in Ebony magazine, “Ferguson: What’s Respectability Got to Do with It” and historian Jeanne Theoharis’ August 26th piece for MSNBC, “The arc of justice runs through Ferguson.” Both criticize reporting that has portrayed the protesters in Ferguson as disorganized, reckless, even dangerous. Moreover, both call us to examine how a sanitized version of the civil rights movement – stripped of its poor, young and female leadership – undergirds such critiques. In Theoharis’ words, “Such framings memorialize a civil rights movement without young people in the vanguard, without anger, without its longstanding and ongoing critique of the criminal justice system.” Through these fables, we are made to believe that Ferguson must be a moment, because “real movements” do not look like this.

These fables also resign us to a jack-in-the-box approach to social movement history. “Real movements” are past and temporally bounded. A “real movement” pops UP when people make a large (but not too large) demand; it goes DOWN (or is put down) when that demand is met (or is too threatening). It is a thing for the history books. By this account, “real movements” are not only sanitized; they are exceptionalized. And so, too, are the social conditions they seek to address. In this way, we can only ask if Ferguson will become a movement, because we are telling a story of the United States in which there is no continuity of black struggle, much less a need for it.

What power dynamics are at work when the protests in Ferguson are treated like the colorful explosion of the jack-in-the-box? What is at stake in viewing black resistance in such an episodic way? What cannot be seen when it is viewed this way? These questions are at the heart of the #BlackLivesMatter systematic call to action – a call issued in response to the ways in which black lives have been devalued and black suffering has been rendered illegible. In this tradition, I want to call us to a deeper appreciation for the movement being carried forward at Ferguson. To do so, we must commit ourselves to resurrecting events that have systematically been made to vanish from our consciousness. We need to appreciate the often-untold history of black poor people’s movements, as well as the long tradition of black critiques of the everyday rituals of white supremacy. We also need to account for the ways in which our notions of justice and liberation are inflected by religious language and sensibility. This takes us back not simply to the Civil Rights era, nor even to Jim Crow, but rather to the founding of the American republic. It is an uncomfortable history, but it is vital for us to tell it if we are to appreciate what it means to be living into the possibility of justice with the movement still-alive in Ferguson.

Click here to continue reading at The Revealer…

In the Fall of 2014, I will be teaching Religion on the Move: People, Passages and Possibilities in America. This interactive seminar uses – and teaches – historical, social scientific, and narrative methods to analyze religion on the move in America. Such theoretical complexity is foundational to the study of religion at Columbia University. While our department offers courses in many different geographic regions and religious traditions, we share a cross-cutting commitment to pushing beyond the things of religion (beliefs, relics and institutions) that have traditionally animated scholarly inquiries, and to examining instead the lived processes of religion through attention to time, transmission, place, body and media. Religion on the Move contributes a fresh perspective to current department course offerings, both for North American concentrators and for students University-wide.

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Course Overview:

Our work together is divided into three core areas of inquiry: Narratives of Passage; People in Contact; and Possibilities of Movement. A theoretical and methodological introduction frames our semester’s work. We begin by asking how we should study the making of mass migrations (beyond push-pull framings) and the complexities of religion on the move (beyond framings of religion as a salve for coping with the shock of the new). We then turn to two narratives of traveling with Americans and practicing religion to consider how following the people changes our perspective on religion and mobility, as well as the types of questions we can ask.

In Narratives of Passage, we explore the classic types of free/forced migration through the peopling North America by European empires in the colonial period; the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans from 1619 to 1808; and the forced expulsion of Native peoples through the Trail of Tears mandated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. With each example, we consider how people’s religious formations and spiritual yearnings are re/made through different experiences of mobility.

In People in Contact, we bring these single community narratives into conversation through an exploration of the making of the American Empire at home and abroad in 19th and 20th centuries. We begin with the mass influx of people from Irish, Jewish and Chinese diasporas in the antebellum and post-bellum periods, considering the complex reasons migrants left their home countries, the lives they built in contact, and the rise of anti-immigrant nativism. Next, we turn to “The West” as an imagined space of religious pluralism and possibility, and as a rapidly industrializing site of missionary control and social engineering. Finally, the two World Wars frame our discussion of the simultaneous protection of freedom abroad and curtailment of freedom at home, first through the 1924 immigration reforms and then through Japanese internment. These landmark policies are juxtaposed against coterminous flights from terror and trauma, first through the Black exodus from the Jim Crow South, and second through the post-Holocaust resettlement of Jewish communities.

In Possibilities of Movement, we temper the celebratory mood of Civil Rights era immigration reform with a careful consideration of three major examples of forced, restricted and controlled movement: first, the fight for citizenship rights among undocumented workers; second, the struggles of belonging and recognition among the nation’s poor and mass-incarcerated; and third, the global exportation of American ideals of freedom and democracy through which the War on Terror became a War to Save Women. In each, we examine how religion is moved by, with and for people.

We conclude the semester with a discussion of migration, diaspora and religion that flips many of our major course themes on their heads: the story of hundreds of African American men, women, and children from all walks of life who sold everything they owned, bought Sears and Roebuck tents, and left the United States for Liberia in 1967. They called themselves “Hebrew Israelites,” claiming that they were genealogical descendants of the ancient Israelites. With careful attention to their out-migration, settlement in the modern state of Israel and growth to a 5-continent diasporic community, we revisit our opening questions and theories about the making of subjects in motion, the possibilities of finding place, and the religious aesthetics of imagining new futures.

Required Texts:

  • Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1986.
  • Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • Galvez, Alyshia. Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Migrants. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
  • Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
  • Jackson, John. Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • Vargas, João H. Costa. Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and the Meaning of Blackness in Central Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
  • Wallace, Anthony. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

 

In the summer of 2013, with the generous support of a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life, I was able to travel to New Orleans to begin work on an oral history project with Women With A Vision, Inc (WWAV).  For those not familiar with the organization, WWAV is a twenty-two year running black women’s health collective, which gained international notoriety in March of 2012 for overturning a 207-year-old crime against nature statute being used to criminalize sex work in Louisiana.  Two months later, their offices were destroyed in an aggravated arson attack.  That night, all tangible memorabilia of their groundbreaking work went up in flames.

With the working title, “Born in Flames,” we envisioned the WWAV oral history project to be a living embodiment of Executive Director, Deon Haywood’s words after the arson attack, “Fire has long been used as a tool of terror in the South, but we also know that it can be a force for rebirth.”  The title is also a nod to Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film with the same name.

laura's researcher/storyteller kitAs the lead interviewer for the project, I am the member of the WWAV team responsible for gathering, transcribing and editing hundreds of hours of life history interviews with the visionaries who have guided WWAV over the last two decades.  We decided on a life history format because it decenters events (like the arson), thereby providing staff, participants and allies the space to reflect on the paths that brought them to WWAV and the lives they lead going forward.  In the first phase of the project this summer, some began with stories of their first social work practicums; others with childhood memories of being on segregated trolleys.  Some found WWAV to be their only lifeline in a time when communities were being torn to shreds by the war on drugs and AIDS; others had to battle their own families simply for working at WWAV.  Some could trace their family lineages back through generations of New Orleanians; others were transplants who would never be able to return after Hurricane Katrina.  This texture only begins to illuminate the contours of the small grassroots organization that catapulted onto the international stage in 2012, and has quite literally kept tens of thousands of people alive since the early 1990s.

Ultimately, these interviews will be foundational for my dissertation. I will all be working the WWAV team to build a readily accessible online archive of the “Born in Flames” project with an anticipated release date of May 24, 2019, the seven-year anniversary of the arson attack.

Below you will find an excerpt from Women With A Vision’s official announcement about the project.  Please click here to read the full post.

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from Women With A Vision, November 22, 2013

Rebuilding Our Archive: The “Born In Flames” Oral History Project with WWAV Board Member, Laura McTighe

After the 2012 aggravated arson attack on our offices, we lost more than our home and sense of safety in the city we love; we also lost all the tangible memorabilia of our more than twenty years of work.

In the wake of this attack, WWAV sustained our rebuilding process by making new memories – uniting our members to craft policy campaigns for combatting the policies impacting their lives; microfinance projects for expanding their employment possibilities; and trauma healing circles for sustaining their community with one another. On the one-year anniversary of the arson attack, WWAV was able to take our healing work retrospective, with the help of board member, Laura McTighe… [continue reading at WWAV]