Building Stronger Communities

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So, let my words be a colorful brushstroke that paints canvasses across a clear calm night.

I can see her gripping her legs tightly as she sways back and forth in the corner.   Her hair violently blows as the wind slowly creeps through the tattered broken windows and envelops her.

All she can do is bob back and forth and back and forth to try to keep her body warm. She’s trying, but failing….She’s all alone in this old wooden home, and just like no one can hear its creaks, its rustles, its shuffles as the old curtains clash against one another, and its drips as water drops from the hole in the ceiling and overflows from the bucket below, no one can hear her sniffles, no one can hear her cries reverberating around the old home, and no one can see that she’s black like you and I. 

The only difference is, like Toni Morrison, she had the bluest of eyes.  Her blue tears flow like a raging tsunami after an earthquake, like an avalanche on steep mountainous cliff, soon she’ll drown and the only thing left of her will be her young fingers extending. Reaching for something it doesn’t know. Reaching for something it isn’t certain of. Reaching for us to set her free.

Cause that poor little girl on the floor by the door, who needed more, was a metaphor.   A metaphor for underfunded school s with bars over their cracked windows reading from history books made before 9-11….but it don’t matter to 911 cause they love crack, life is a like a baseball game, 3 strikes and you’re out,  and more black men are out in prison today than were slaves in 1850.

But, here we are as black lawyers and leaders today.  The cream of the crop, on a mountain top so high that not even Pegasus can reach us.  Sitting above the clouds, we watch the rain as it falls on the potholed streets in Compton, slides down the graffitied walls in Inglewood, and washes away on the Watts blocks.

They say life is like a box of chocolate. Well, I want chocolate to get out of the box.

But we’re in a box somewhere far in the docks bolted with 3 locks under a bunch of rocks; stagnant through all these talks. 

Luckily, I have the key to set us free, we need to build a stronger community.

So, when I hear someone say they’re bored(board) with law, I say they forgot two words: Brown and Education.

When I hear someone says transformative law fails in civil society, I say be uncivil and follow martial (Marshall) law…Thurgood.

Cause there can be good when we put our minds to it, there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour but it does not even take a second to decide to make a change.

And even though this is the Black Law Student Association Solidarity Dinner, change does not have to be black or white, cause the man who wrote “Black or white” also wrote "We are the world, we are the children, we are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving" and we give when we don't bury our talents, but instead use our talents to build a better world.  

So, let’s not go through the motions when we write motions, write motions with emotion, so that our motions can be poetry in motion, with the motion to move this community and this world forward.

Going backwards is a con, the pro is bono. Pro bono work that can change lives of mothers, fathers, children, of all colors and creeds, from calorific California to rocky Colorado, from  cold complex Connecticut to calm coniferous Kentucky, from every star-crossed state capital to every  encapsulated corner of the once 13 colonies now known as the United States of America.

And please, let’s continue to be a source of force, a recourse of resource, in other words, a workhorse, for future lawyers so that 1L, 2L, 3L, and maybe for some of y’all 4L does not have to rhyme or be synonymous at all with hell.

And  lets strive to be positive because even though Newton’s 3^rd law of physic says what goes up must come down, if we don’t get down on ourselves, but instead remain positive individually and collectively, our positivity will  never come down, and we can take our legal profession and legal field to heights that it can only dream of.

We are at the mountain top! And the dream of a preacher still lives on. It’s beautiful dream.  It’s a special dream. It’s an American dream.  It’s a dream that requires all of you and me, to set our people free by please please please building a stronger community.

Confessions of a Prisoner

I’m so lonely.

My loneliness is lonely

My loneliness left me

It found someone.

Now, not even my loneliness can keep me.

Empty. 

Please Rose, Bloom

Please rose, bloom.

But the rose lies there withering in the orchard.

The sun beams bright on it

And the gentle rains nourish it

But its stem hunches in decadence

As though a windy darkness

Covers all of the light.

I water the rose and tender its soil

But it just continues to wither.

I watch its luster leaves shrivel.

I watch its smooth lavender petals

fade into brittle spotty auburn

Tears of petals lie scattered on the ground

My rose is dying.

Please rose, bloom.

I beg u, don’t leave me.

Stop crying away your beautiful petals.

The petals blow in the directions of my window sill.

I keep an empty vase inside my window.

The vase is for a blossom not yet seen.

I hope to one day find such flower and delicately place it inside.

The rose sits in the orchard.

Although it blows toward the window sill, I do not let it in.

It is not the flower for my vase.

Please rose, bloom. 

I buy it special fertilizer

And whisper gentle music to help it grow.

I spend all day watching over it

And all night thinking of ways to make it better.

But, nothing I do works.

It still withers and cries petals towards my window sill.

I cannot let it in my vase.

I love the rose dearly

I want to keep it in the orchard.

But it continues to die.

No matter what I do,

All it wants is to be in the vase of my window sill.
And that's what's killing it. 

The rose is now almost dead.

I love the rose too much to let it die.

There is nothing more that I can do.

My presence coupled with my empty vase

has led to its brittle lusterless withering.

I must leave the rose alone.

Good-bye my sweet rose.

I will never forget you.

Publish Post

Soliloquy of the Eternal Negro

Take a look into my eyes,

Take a deep deep look,

A look so deep that the gaze causes you to drown away into my thoughts

I am much older than Katrina, and I am much older than riots in 1992 and 1965,

I am much older than eyes that closed that allowed a preacher to dream,

And I am much older than Malcolm Little when he knelt before Elijah Mohammad,

I’m so old that I can remember the Great Migration to the North, and, honestly, I was old then too

Because even though I was free to leave the South and go north, I vividly remember 1865 when I became free, period.

That was the day when I looked at my calloused hands blistered with the hulls of the cotton which I picked for centuries,

And, I clenched my fist and let the blood drip from my palms to unpicked cotton below and cried to God that I would Never Ever be a slave again!

To this day, I’ll never know if he heard me;

I’ll never even know if he was my God, or just the oppressors who I once called “Massah”

Honestly, I don’t remember who my God was, I don’t even remember my name, or where I came from

I lost that all when they chained me to that damned ship and brought me here

For 3 months I lay in whirling darkness, envying the humanity given to rats and roaches

Fearing them too, as they gnawed at the dead and ate our handcuffed emaciated flesh

I lost my sons and daughters, my nieces and nephews, my mother and father and friends in that hell

Those who didn’t die were thrown overboard to lessen the load of the ship

Thrown overboard like dirty rags, thrown overboard like helpless dirty rags

Their screams still haunt me so much that my eyes forever became cold

You see, beneath this nappy hair, big lips, and dark skin, I am over 400 years old

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  Black don’t crack.

We do, you don’t believe me? Take a look at the whip marks on my back.

Then take a look at the bone protruding from my ankle where they chained me,

Take a look at my limping knee where over 30 times they clubbed me

Or pass me a tissue, and I’ll cough up the blood from generations of beatings

I crack.  I bruise. I cry. I feel pain.  And, at times I’ve wished I was dead

I’m human.  It still brings me to tears to say that.

Nothing about my life has been humane.

I remember 1776 like it was just yesterday. 

I fought in that war; I fought for the freedom of the United States.

I fought because the truth was “self evident” that all men are created equal.

Little did I know, I was only 3/5ths of that man.

I gave my life to fight for the freedom for what?

At the end, I was more of a slave then I was before.

When that revolutionary war ended, I basked in the glorious sun and extended my arm in hope of being called equal

But, in my extended hand they placed a shovel and told me to dig

The once glorious sun then beat on me causing beads of sweat to drop from my body like daggers,

Its beating only matched when they mercilessly whipped me for digging the coarse tundra too slowly

And they called me a word that to this very day sends shudders from my spine down to the earth below so much so that I lose my balance and can hardly stand when I hear it.

Nigger.

Weeping as the dripping sweat caused my fresh foot long wounds to burn

And blood-curdingly screaming, I gripped the ragged shovel as they poured salt on my wounds

I cried, “Why must I dig massah! MASSAH! Why!”

“To bury your hopes and dreams, nigger.” He replied with a menacing cackle,

“To bury your hopes and dreams.”

I hadn’t dreamed since the slave ship, and I lost hope after that day too.

Whatever hope I had left boomed from my bowels like a benediction,

 The hope that that Sweet Chariot would swing low and carry me home.

Or the hope to “Keep my hand on the plow”

Amidst my hollow hymns, I fathered thousands of children.

Some were my own blood, and they hated me for being cursed with my hands

Others were the seeds of my daughter’s rape; they hated me because they had the hands of my Massah

Cursing me, spitting at me, throwing rocks at me because they hated the fact

That one drop of “me” made them ME!

And that no matter how much perm, presses, peroxide or bleach they pampered on themselves

That even after the Civil War; they would never be able to escape ME!

I’ve been free for over 150 years now. 

Ha, some freedom if you ask me.

They promised me 40 acres and a mule,

But instead they gave me black codes, Plessy, and Jim Crow.

Before they cut off my tongue in slavery when I tried to read like them,

Now they cut off the funding for my school so I’ll never read like them.

I finally got my sons and daughters to rally with me like panthers

We united to lift ourselves from the pits of despair

Rallying behind Huey Newton and Bobby Seale

We wore black to symbolize our new-found pride in black.

And, it ended blackly, as they sent discord to rip through our chords

Once proud black, now stained with crippled blue and bloody red

And crack rock contraband sprinkled in the middle

So that my sons face life imprisonment

So, their sons and daughters don’t know them

And, once again, they don’t know me.

I fought in wars and was put in the front line to die

Considered “expendable”, my operation was suicide

I’ve fought in every war and every major battle for this nation

I fought as a slave, I fought as a segregated man, and I still fight

Instead of segregation, now I fight because socioeconomics leaves me at the bottom

I tried to climb up the totem pole.

I climbed day and night for over 20 years.

As I climbed, my slave clothes were replaced with business suits.

And when I slept, the wind whispered into my ears to be like them.

When I got to the top of the pole, so high above the clouds that I could hardly stand

I looked down through binoculars to my daughters and sons hungry jaws

They were eager to climb up like I had

I threw down a rope, to try to pull up my daughters and sons

The rope was torn to shreds; they called my action too affirmative

The pole was then covered in slime pasted in crack rock.

My daughters and sons try to climb, but they didn’t get high up the pole

They only got high, so the earth shook beneath them and they fell further into a pit.

Now, I struggle to even get them back to where they were before.

I’ve lived for over 400 years and I’ve seen it all.

I’ve drowned in my own thoughts, and brought myself back to life.

My dreams have been shattered like porcelain dropped from a tower

And my hope has been chopped up like thousands of fiery spores blowing ashes away in the wind

Yet, I continue to breathe in the air through my lungs and move forward.

From slavery, to black codes, from segregation, to Jim Crow,

From black panthers to crips, from being shipped in chains to being slashed by whips

Through it all, I rise.  Like the sun after dusk, I rise.

Like a single blossom, bathed in the waters of spring, I rise.

And like the clenched fist I throw up in the air, bearing the hope of my generation,

I WILL RISE.

I WILL RISE!