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This morning, I took my eye off the prize. I succumbed to surface and to common narrative.
“60-years ago today Rosa Parks sat on a bus, held a mirror up to a racist United States, changed history,” I tweeted.
What I said was true … but it was reductive. And it was in fewer than 140 characters. For a moment, I settled.
We need courageous historical moments as way-markers and inspiration in the ongoing fight for equality, and we mustn’t mistake them for job done or mission accomplished. What she started, we must still continue.
“Social justice requires social action,” says Mike Lee, Executive Director of Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity (PLSE) an organisation with whom I am allied and who responded to my tweet by pointing out that since Rosa Parks was fingerprinted and booked into jail, over 70 million people have joined her in law enforcement and FBI criminal databases.
“Rosa Parks was arrested while demanding social equity,” wrote PLSE in an email this morning. “This creation of her criminal record is often cited as the tipping point for the civil rights movement of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and beyond.”
Rosa Parks changed history but she didn’t heal all social ills.
70 million is quite the acumulation of permanent information. Quite a new order of magnitude in state control. Have the advances we’ve made in employment opportunity, and even educational opportunity, been met with anything close to equality within the machine of criminal justice? I don’t think so. Permanent records have permanent effects and debilitate people in their efforts to move forward in life with secure housing, jobs and access to social services.
“It is estimated that one in five Philadelphians has a criminal record,” says PLSE which has, in recent years, expunged over 5,500 criminal records in Philadelphia County for 3,000 low-income individuals. PLSE conducted over 200 educational know-your-rights workshops about criminal records creation, dissemination and destruction. It has donated over $5,000,000 of pro bono legal representation and facilitated 900 hours of AmeriCorps community service in expungement hearing representation. PLSE settled two employment discrimination cases based on criminal history.
Let’s honour Rosa Parks in a continuation of her fight for equal rights. Let’s act, not just talk. Do, not just ‘Like’. And perhaps today, on Giving Tuesday, Give?
For the past 18 months, the Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity (PLSE) and the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC) have partnered in creating client art as part of the PLSE’s Criminal Record Expungement Project (CREP) clinics. While CREP lawyers, grads and volunteers are pulling up criminal records, assessing eligibility and triggering first steps of expungement, the PPC has been taking physical copies of those records and with clients, shredding and pulping them.
New paper is made from old records, upon which clients write what they are and what their future is without the millstone of a record and its associated barriers to entry into work, housing and education. A Polaroid or digital snap of the client accompanies the testimony. Fantastic artistic strategy.
The result is a massive “quilt” of such testimonies — a detail is shown above and the collection is shown below hanging behind a speaker addressing a PPC event.
NEW YORK, TOMORROW
The People’s Paper Co-op has been selected to be part of the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival this weekend. It’ll be displaying the quilt and talking about the project. Representatives of PPC and PLSE will be in the PPC Mobile Studio parked in front of the New Museum tomorrow, Saturday May 30th, from 12-6pm.
If you are interested in the intersection of art and legal advocacy on behalf of those with criminal records stop by!PPC and PLSE’s collaboration was one of 110 projects chosen to represent how artists are responding to changing urban spaces.
I’ve sung the praises of PLSE before. PPC was co-founded by friends of the blog Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist. Below is a small selection of images from the workshops and PPC events that Bowles and Strandquist have carried out during their SPACES residency at the Village of Arts & Humanities in Philadelphia.
PLSE and PPC’s work has been featured in Philadelphia Inquirer, Wall Street Journal, NBC and City Paper, to name a few.
Prison Photography 