Reginald Lewis #AY2902

Our Justice Office Coodinator, Joanne Tromiczak-Neid, recently received a letter from Reginald Sinclair Lewis, a published poet and playwright on death row in Pennsylvania's SCI Green State Prison. Lewis' letter invited Joanne to share his poems with the CSJ community. This piece "On the Day the Children Marched," was written after Lewis' pen pals at a nearby elementary school marched to the gates of the prison to protest his imminent execution. The Children's Crusade, as it came to be called, was successful, and Lewis received a stay from the Pennsylvania governor. A brief description of that march and a second, larger action that the children staged afterwards can be found below the poem.

On the Day the Children Marched

Reginald Lewis

On the day you marched they said

the angels were with you,

winding through the new Meadow Run and on

Down the highways, trouncing across

Inauspicious redneck counties and

Into buildings where God reigned.

Heading towards Babylon -- braving the

Wind and the rain and Satan's fire --

You didn't come because of some

twisted notion of heroism,

You weren't drawn by romantic visions

Of matyrdom or self-aggrandizement.

The thing is, you could have been anywhere --

Wallowing in the decadent playgrounds

of indifference,

Lolling in the murky dark shadows

Of blissful ignorance, yeah,

safe and secure behind your impenetrable

Fortress of hypocrisy and indignation.

On the day you marched God smiled

down on you --

Because you see an injustice and

You want to correct it.

You see racism and you want to cure it,

And you see the brutal inequity of

capital punishment and you want to abolish it.

When the Pennsylvania governor signed a death warrant for Reggie Lewis, an inmate at the SCI Green State Prison, the children from nearby Spring Valley School knew they had to act. The kids, who had been penpals with Lewis, badgered their parents to drive them to Green County, where they marched up to the prison, waving signs and chanting, "Don't murder Reggie! He's our friend!" and "End the racist death penalty!" A few weeks later Reggie Lewis got a stay of execution. The elated children next organized the Children's Crusade Against the Death Penalty, a three-day 30 mile march of 1,000 young people that attracted media coverage worldwide.

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Update from the JRLC

A key legislative committee is considering the Governor's budget proposals to:Eliminate General Assistance - that provides $203 a month in income support to adults unable to work because of very serious illness or disability; andTake income assistance away from 7,000 families who have a parent or child with disabilities and are on the Minnesota Family Investment Program, leaving those families to live on disability support only at deep poverty levels. (Another 900 families in which the parent of a child with disabilities or the spouse of someone with disabilities would lose all or much of their child care assistance, jeopardizing their ability to continue working.)Defund the Emergency General Assistance which provides one-time emergency help to keep adults from becoming homeless or for those who are homeless to get re-established in stable housing.The MN House Health & Human Services Finance Committee will be deciding over this Passover/Easter break whether to accept or reject the Governor's proposals. The following committee members have influence over this decision. Please email them and say, "Please protect funding for General Assistance, Emergency General Assistance, and MFIP families. Don't balance the budget on those who have the least."

Rep Jim Abeler, Anoka rep.jim.abeler@house.mn

Rep Tom Anzelc, Balsam Township rep.tom.anzelc@house.mn

Rep Julie Bunn, Lake Elmo rep.julie.bunn@house.mn

Rep Patti Fritz, Faribault rep.patti.fritz@house.mn

Rep Jeff Hayden, Minneapolis rep.jeff.hayden@house.mn

Rep Larry Hosch, St. Joseph rep.larry.hosch@house.mn

Rep Thomas Huntley, Duluth rep.thomas.huntley@house.mn

Rep Tina Liebling, Rochester rep.tina.liebling@house.mn

Rep Erin Murphy, St. Paul rep.erin.murphy@house.mn

Rep Mary Ellen Otremba, Long Prairie rep.maryellen.otremba@house.mn

Rep Sandra Peterson, New Hope rep.sandra.peterson@house.mn

Rep Maria Ruud, Minnetonka rep.maria.ruud@house.mn

Rep Bev Scalze, Little Canada rep.bev.scalze@house.mn

Rep Nora Slawik, Maplewood rep.nora.slawik@house.mn

Rep Cy Thao, St. Paul rep.cy.thao@house.mn

Rep Paul Thissen, Minneapolis rep.paul.thissen@house.mn

If you are not a constituent, please find a friend, family member, old classmate, colleague, board member, or somebody who is and ask them to send an email!

Restorative Justice Peace Prayer

The Criminal Justice Working Group of the Sisters of St. Joseph took charge of the organization and execution of the 11th Day Prayer for Peace this month, taking Restorative Justice as their theme for the service.

Restorative Justice is an ancient idea that is enjoying a recent surge of popularity in criminal justice circles. It's the profoundly sensible idea that crime hurts everyone in a community, not just the victim, and that everyone is responsible for preventing recidivism, not just the offender. Ideally the victim, the offender and the community can join together to create a sense of joint accountability and culpability. The basic message is that we are all responsible for each other.

An example of restorative justice at work on a large scale can be found in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission convened by the South African government after the dissolution of apartheid. All of the trials and hearings administered by the commission were public, and both the victims and the accused perpetrators were allowed to make public statements.

The Criminal Justice team took this theme and ran with it, inviting Jodelle Ista, a member of the South St. Paul Restorative Justice Project to give the reflection and taking the Good Samaritan story of the Gospel reading. Marilaurice Hemlock did a beautiful job as the music leader for the evening, and Mary Maas, Chris Furlong, Ann Quincy and Carmen Shaunghessy-Johnson shared reading responsibilities.

Thanks to all who came!

NOLA

The bright, cold sunlight of 7am February 22nd dawned on two vanfuls of St. Joseph Workers, packed to the overhead lights with snacks and sleeping bags. We traveled in caravan for 12 hours that first day, finally ending in St. Louis, MO, where we were fed and put up for the night in a lovely old convent building. The next morning we set out again, this time for New Orleans, to begin our week of service with Operation Helping Hands, an organization sponsored by Catholic Charities.

Operation Helping Hands is dedicated to rebuilding and refurbishing houses destroyed in the flooding that destroyed the city when the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Their website describes their work this way, "Operation Helping Hands brings volunteers from across the country together to help rebuild New Orleans by rebuilding homes of elderly, disabled or uninsured homeowners."

We were joined in New Orleans by six other women, three each from worker programs in Philadelphia and New Orleans, as well as three staff members from those programs and a fledgling program in Albany. You can find photos of the group below . . .

We spent about half of our stay working with OHH painting houses in the Gentilly neighborhood. It felt good to be outside, to be making visible progress on our various projects, to be filling a truly demonstrable need. Some of us got the chance to visit with the homeowners we were helping.

On the one rainy day of the week my group was sent to scrape the rust from the chain link fence that surrounded a one-story mocha and cream bungalow. The task was repetitive and tiring in the way that boring and simple things often are: grasp scraper handle firmly, rasp at the rust only each link, trail a finger down the metal to see if you've made any difference at all. Repeat. We were all grumbling mutinously by mid-day, which was when the homeowner made her first appearance. She had been out shopping for a specific brand of direct-to-metal paint to cover the sanded off rust-coat on the fence when we finished scraping.

We chatted with her for a bit. She showed us a little baggie of paint chips that she had saved from the facade of her house and stored in her purse. She planned on showing them to the supervisor of this project, hoping that he would have something that could come close to a match. We admired the colors and tried to talk about painting metal fences like we knew anything at all about it.

The day before during our dinner table reflection, Marilaurice Hemlock, one of our program supervisors, had mentioned that she felt frustrated while she was working on the house assigned to her group. She said that many of the tools she would have used if she had been painting her own house were missing. The power washer, the paint sprayer, a truly thorough scraping and priming job - all these were not in evidence when they began their work on the house. So she picked up a wet rag and a brush and set to work wiping down the siding by hand, painting as carefully as she could, treating the house, she said, as if it were her own house, and these were the tools she had at hand. At the time I didn't appreciate that commitment fully - I thought that I was doing a pretty good job on the house we were painting. I didn't have a lot of experience, and I was muddling through, whatever. Somehow meeting this homeowner snapped that comment back into the front of my mind, though. Here I was, presented with a task a monkey could do perfectly, and I was slacking. I was scraping, all right, but I was doing it more to have my body in motion than to do a really excellent job. Unlike the house painting we had done the previous days, scraping the house didn't allow me to excuse my half-hearted application with a claim to lack of expertise. Scraping rust off of chain link is not something that you need to be trained to do well. You just either do it thoroughly or you don't.

That moment was a flashpoint in the week for me. There's a chasm of difference between doing something like it's your job and doing something like it's your passion. I was approaching the work like it was service to a distant neighbor, when I should have been thinking of it, as Marilaurice said, as service to myself.