KEYNOTE SPEECH TRANSCRIPTS The 1999 Bureau of Justice Assistance National Partnership Meeting Keynote Address—Henry Gardner Managing Partner, Gardner, Underwood, and Bacon About 17 years ago, shortly after I was appointed City Manager of Oakland I was asked if I would provide welcoming remarks for a very large convention. I readily consented. The person presiding was introducing me and during the introduction I became concerned because the introduction was longer than the comments that I had planned to make. And just as that thought occurred to me, the person said I’m very pleased to introduce to you this morning our keynote speaker. I went to the podium and whispered to him that I was not the keynote speaker, that my role was simply to bring greetings. He said, did you not receive our call, he said, our keynote speaker had to cancel and we asked if you would be the keynote speaker. Whereupon I took a deep breath and spoke for 30 minutes. Now I was given more notice than that for this morning but not much. I understand that the designated keynote speaker is a very prominent person here in Washington and one who I’m sure you would have been very pleased to hear from. And so it is your misfortune that I have been designated to speak instead. I thought long about what I would talk about and I had conversations and voice-mail message exchanges with Patrick Coleman. And I looked at the program and I thought what I can I talk about that others are not going to talk about. And what could I talk about that the designated speaker probably would not have talked about. And I decided that the title of my speech and the nature of the speech is the Color of Justice. Now you can relax, this is not going to be one of those in-your-face speeches. But I do want to talk about something that I think is extremely important to us as a nation and very important to me as a person of color. Almost 100 years ago a very fiery individual who had a sharp pen wrote: Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of lightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer, seldom a word. And yet being a problem is a strange experience. I remember well when the shadows swept across me. I was a little thing away up in the hills of New England. 187 Bureau of Justice Assistance . In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. [I decided that I would beat them at everything] by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house?—W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903. Could have been written today, if we changed two words, perhaps for “mayhap” and Black for “colored.” Otherwise it could have been written today. Race matters. And it’s uncomfortable to say that, but it matters in our justice system. Race matters. There are several things that are uncomfortable for us to talk about, but talk about them I believe we must. Americans have had a historic problem talking about race, about religion, about sex, and about politics among strangers. And those are some of the most important things to us that affect us more profoundly than most others except perhaps one, and that’s family. And many of us don’t want to talk about that either. But it’s important that we do so. We spend, at the last count that I saw, over $200 billion on crime control. That is a lot of money—$200 billion. I made several trips to Hong Kong and their currency is tied to the U.S. dollar and it takes several of those to make one U.S. dollar. And whenever I talk about big numbers I tell people that, the number I just gave you, those are U.S. dollars, those are not Hong Kong dollars, $200 billion annually. I was talking to the past superintendent of Oakland public schools several years ago. And he told me that he had visited several of the schools and during the question and answer period one young boy raised his hand and he said, “Dr. Mesa (phonetic) nobody cares about us, nobody cares.” He said the community does not care and the school does not care. And Dr. Mesa said, “But that is not true.” And went on to explain what he and the school board and the community were doing about public education. The young boy would not back down. He said, “I visited my brother in San Jurerto (phonetic) the county jail.” And he said the jail looked better than our school. Dr. Mesa said he looked around him and saw the peeling paint and he did remember being concerned about the exterior of the building as he approached it and the surrounding community. And he said he went back with the resolve, if nothing else, at least they were going to paint the school. 188 The 1999 Bureau of Justice Assistance National Partnership Meeting But it speaks volumes to us when a child can say truthfully that the jails look better than the schools. And who is in the jails? Now before I even go through this recitation, I want to tell you that coming from a minority community and having been raised in a minority community, a poor Black community, safety is as important to minorities, in some ways more important to minorities than to the majority. And the reason for it is that people of color in American communities, for the most part, witness crimes every single day. It is not a television story. It is real and I can think of nothing more urgent to them than to rid their communities of violence. Nonetheless, in 1991 one-third of all Black men between 20 and 29 living in Los Angeles had been jailed at least once in that same year—one-third between the ages of 20 and 29. [There are] similar patterns in other large cities. Nonwhite males are three and one-half times more likely to be arrested for a felony than a white—three and one-half times more likely. Ninety percent of nonwhite males can expect to be arrested sometime in their lifetime for a misdemeanor or some more serious offense. Two-thirds are likely to be arrested by the time they’re 30. In inner cities the rates are much higher. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of a society is this? Now is it that all of these young men are born criminals? I think not. In 1990, and it has not changed, it was estimated that one in every four African-American men between the ages of 20 and 29 was in prison, in jail, on parole, or on probation on any given day—one in every four. That is alarming. It does not paint a bright future for us as a society. In the great state of California, Black men make up 3 percent of the adult population; they make up over 40 percent of the prison population. Race matters. They’re not all there for homicides and rape and violent assaults—not all. A young African-American man suffering from asthma and pneumonia was in jail for 22 days on a $1,500 bond. He had been jailed on violation of probation for not paying $35 in court costs on a 4-month-old shoplifting charge. While in jail, he lost his job as a truck driver. A 38-year-old African-American electronic engineer, middle class, was jailed for allowing an unauthorized operator to drive. The woman did not have a driver’s license, and he was arrested. A mentally disordered 59-year-old African-American man was arrested for breach of peace at the gate of a nearby naval base. He tried to enter the base and refused to leave.