“Locked in Solidarity” National Prayer Vigils
CCDA hosted “Locked in Solidarity” prayer vigils across the nation on January 21st in Atlanta, GA; Todd, NC; Durham, NC; Chicago, IL (2), Charleston, WV; Fresno, CA; Denver, CO; Berkley, CA; Washington, D.C. and El Paso, TX. The prayer events focused on lifting up stories from communities and praying for direction on how to further engage the confrontation of injustice around the issue of mass incarceration.
From CCDA's Press Release:
JACKSON, MS—As America's mass incarceration crisis continues to gain national attention, the Christian Community Development Association’s Board of Directors (CCDA) is meeting in Jackson, Mississippi at the Perkins Foundation to further educate themselves on this issue and dialogue about next steps of the Association’s engagement.
“When it comes to mass incarceration, there must be a cause and effect. We might be dealing with symptoms of a deeper issue without getting to the root of it. Perhaps we could tie mass incarceration to our failure at a community level,” said John M. Perkins, civil rights activist and founder of the John & Vera Mae Perkins Foundation. “Regardless, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and it's time for the church and society to step forward to take this issue seriously.”
“In my 35 years of doing ministry in vulnerable neighborhoods, working to help families impacted by our penal system have been some of the most excruciating,” said Noel Castellanos CEO of Christian Community Development Association. “My prayer for all of our CCD ministries is that we would be on the forefront of not only working in the trenches to be a support to families in this situation, but that we would find ways to reform the system that would serve to restore and rehabilitate lives in a just and compassionate manner."
Christian community development leaders within the CCDA have long since felt the impacts of mass incarceration directly. Their awareness and involvement, which stems from walking alongside families of inmates as well as visiting inmates in prison, to developing and implementing re-entry and housing programs, has given them a unique perspective into this layered issue. "This is a vigil of solidarity declaring not only that we stand with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples, but that our compassionate and just God stands with us and, therefore, against the evil system of mass incarceration in America." said Rev. Anthony Grimes, a CCDA member in Denver, Colorado.
What follows is the speech I gave at the CCDA prayer event in Denver, CO.
Denver Speech, “It's Freedom Time”
By Anthony Grimes
Thank you all for participating in this demonstration of solidarity this evening. I want to thank especially those of you who made this day possible: Michelle Warren and the strong leaders of Open Door Ministries and the Christian Community Development Association.
On June 24 2009, I routinely called my dad to see how he was doing, and immediately perceived from his broken voice that something was woefully wrong. Only a few times in my life have I heard a tone of voice over the phone that compelled me to immediately drop whatever I was doing and go find whomever I was speaking with—this was one of those times. As soon as I pulled up in front of my dad’s studio apartment, I wondered what kind of strange war had just been waged here; the front window was shattered; there was but a hole where a door was supposed to be.
Once I entered the frame of his 500 square foot apartment, the tragic scene only darkened. It looked as though a bomb had exploded in the middle of his living room. Sprawled fragments of glass dug deep into the carpet. Tables were smashed in two. Couches overturned. The space was sown in a devastation I would not see even in my journeys through the slums of Guatemala. If anything, it resembled the bomb-shelled houses I would eventually drive past in my distant travels through the walled encampments of Palestine. But that day I was not in a third world village; I was not in some war-torn community overseas; I was in these United States of America; I was at 3455 Jackson Street.
My father sat paralyzed in the corner of the living room in a state of shock. Pools of blood stained the white gauze wrapped around his thighs. At this moment, whatever sourness I had previously felt toward him—pain caused from years of witnessing his heroin addiction not only ruin his life but rob me of his fatherly love and attention—that sourness had dissipated. During this sacred moment, I no longer saw a criminal addict, but a human being in need of help—a wounded man gripping his last remnants of dignity.
When I asked him what had happened, he told me that he, his brother, and two of his elderly friends were playing cards inside when they suddenly heard the loud shatter of his front window breaking. They then saw multiple flash grenades shoot through the window frame, and felt the floor shake as the front door was forcefully snatched from its hinges by a hummer truck. My father obeyed the orders from outside to lay on the ground but, because of how he was angled, one of the flash grenades landed between his upper thighs and seared a severe burn into his skin. He wailed in agony as dozens of swat team agents stormed his living room, shotguns and rifles drawn, trampling the men, one officer even painfully pinning his knee into my father’s burned thigh. Whatever territory went unscathed by their police boots was trampled by the demeaning slurs they pronounced. This terrorizing nightmare lasted until the lead agent shouted into the radio three words that stung more than any of the others preceding them: “We’ve got nothing; we have the wrong house.” They were searching for a drug kingpin; what they found were a few “measly” addicts.
The next day, I called the Denver Police Department demanding that they at least fix the damages caused by their miscalculation. The officer refused. I spoke sternly into the phone and said, “Had this been four white men in Cherry Hills, you know that you would repair the damages.” I said again, “Had this been four wealthy men in Littleton, you would issue a timely statement of apology, lest they sue you. Yet you justify your actions since the four bodies you trampled belonged to poor black men.” He essentially laughed in my face, and I hung up the phone feeling a sense of unsettling resignation. My dad then had no other option but to endure a freezing Colorado winter with nothing but planks of wood serving as windows and doors. For months he could not sleep from the trauma, and became jittery at the slightest sound of loud noise.
Had what happened to my dad that day been the exception to urban policing, my plea for justice would be but a lone cry in a wilderness of personal angst. If it were the exception, I would attribute his story to an unfortunate hand of bad luck, and swallow it whole into the inner chambers of forgetfulness. But the stories before me, your very presence with us this evening, and our collective yearning for guidance from above suggests that what happened to him is not the exception but the rule. Far too many of our loved ones have been brutally shattered and tossed away as “collateral damage” in this merciless “War on Drugs.”
A nation that spends more of its creative capital on perfecting the technological advancements of its prisons than it does on cultivating the education of its youth is a criminal above criminals. A government that declares a war on drugs when it has never declared a war on the poverty that inspires drug culture has foolishly chosen to medicate cancer with cyanide. Prisons brimming over with black and brown inmates says less about their character than it does the character of a legal system that arbitrarily enforces its code of ethics.
This cannot be America—“The land of the free”—so long as we are the most incarcerated society in democratic history. We cannot be descendants of that great Liberator, Jesus of Nazareth, until we, like him, proclaim that fundamental to our lives is our desire to bring liberty to every captive; and in fighting for their liberty we soon shall realize, that because we are all one, because even criminals are those to whom we belong, we ourselves are not free until they are unshackled from the cold dungeons of injustice and allowed to roam the fields of opportunity; we are not free until our justice system recognizes that no human life, no child of God, can be reduced to an inmate number.
We soon shall realize that none of God’s children can truly be free until all of his children are free. It’s freedom time today, it’s freedom time today—for them, for us, for all of God’s children it’s freedom time!
