(Here at the Willow Creek GLS trying to learn about leadership for our Operation Christmas Child team.)
It is a great honor to be here. I am a lawyer and I’ve spent my career trying to increase
the justice quotient in our country.
In 1972 we had 300,000 people in prison and now have 3.2 million –
highest percentage of incarceration in the world. Percentage of women going to prison has increased _____ in
the last 20 years.
1 in 3 black babies now born are expected to be in prison in
their lifetime. How do we create
justice in this setting?
1)
I
believe to be an effective leader we have to get proximate to the people who
are suffering. We can’t be
effective leaders from a distance.
Many politicians are too far removed from the suffering. I am persuaded most of us are taught to
stay away from “bad parts” of town.
We have to be willing to get closer so we can begin to understand what
it means to lead. I grew up in a
family with a classic family matriarch grandmother. She was the daughter of a slave. When I was 9 or 10 she’d hug me so tight I thought she was
trying to hurt me and she’d ask me later if I could still feel her hugging
me. As she was dying I was holding
her hand and she squeezed my hand and asked, “Do you still feel me hugging
you? I’m always going to be hugging
you.” Leadership requires the
people we are serving to believe we are with them. I grew up in a community where only white kids could go to
public schools. I went to ‘colored
school’. I graduated from high
school and then got to go to college at Eastern University. I was captivated by the
experience. I began to think I
would spend my whole life in college.
That’s how I ended up in law school at Harvard. Soon I was deeply disillusioned because
no one was talking about social justice.
Then I took a course that required me to provide legal services to
people on death row. In proximity with them I began to work with people who
were victims of injustice. I
learned some things. I worked with
a 14 year old boy whose mother’s boyfriend was violent. One day the boyfriend called the boy’s
mother in the kitchen and hit her in the face and she fell and hit her head and
became unconscious. After 10
minutes the boy thought she was dead.
The boyfriend fell asleep and the boy got a gun and pointed at the man
in his sleep then ended up accidentally pulling the trigger and killing the
boyfriend. That boyfriend was a
deputy sheriff so the boy had to stand trial as an adult. When I went to interview him and
finally got his trust he told me what happened to him in the jail and how he
was hurt and raped. That little
boy didn’t want me to leave him.
We’ve gotten distanced from the people in our communities and leadership
requires we not run away from the problems. There is power in proximity.
2)
We
have to change the narrative in the problems we address. We have treated addicts as criminals because we are driven by fear
and anger that are the basic elements of injustice. We are burdened by our history of inequality. We use the narrative of racial
difference to justify inequality.
We got the court to say African-Americans were 3/5 human. Slavery didn’t end in 1865 it just
evolved. Black people fled the
south and a terrorism they experienced. The geography of America was shaped by
terrorism and blacks had to flee to the north. If you go to South Africa you are confronted by the legacy
of Apartheid. In America we don’t
talk about slavery and we have to change that—not to punish our country but to
liberate it.
3)
We
have to stay hopeful.
Hopefulness is essential for effective leadership. We will be confronted
by things that challenge our hope.
You’re either hopeful or you’re part of the problem. I live in Montgomery, AL and get
provoked when people romanticize our history. Johnny Carr was the architect of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. She told me, "When I call you up and
ask you to speak you will say, 'Yes, Ma'am.'” One day she said Rosa Parks was coming to town and she asked
me to come over and listen. They
were talking not about what they had done but about what they were going to
do. Rosa Parks asked me about the
Equal Justice Initiative and when I finished she said, “That’s gonna make you
tired, tired, tired and that’s why you’ve gotta be brave, brave, brave.”
4)
We
have to be willing to do uncomfortable things. Because we’re human we’re programmed to
be comfortable and have to choose to do the uncomfortable. Effective leadership only happens when
great leaders do uncomfortable things.
I’ve had the privilege of winning freedom for clients but I’ve also had
difficult moments. I got involved
in the case of a man who was facing execution in 30 days but was intellectually
disabled. On the day he was
scheduled to be executed I was pacing and an hour before the execution I found
my motion for a stay of execution was denied. I had to tell the client and he began to cry and then to
sob. He said he wanted to tell me
something important but he stuttered and couldn’t get out the words. Tears were
running down my face. Finally he thanked me for representing him and told me he
loved me. I started to think I
couldn’t do this anymore. It was
too hard. But then I realized I do
what I do because I am broken too.
The broken understand the
quality of mercy and redemption.
In brokenness we begin to transcend and to lead. If someone kills someone they’re not
just a killer; we have to understand what they are.
The opposite of poverty is justice. Sometimes as leaders we’re distracted
by the shiny things but it’s about how we treat the poor and neglected. Effective leadership has a different
metric system. Your income isn’t a
measure of your capacity to lead.
An old man looked at me and said, “Do you know what you’re
doing? You’re beating the drum for
justice.” He pulled me into his
wheelchair and showed me the scars he got from trying to register people to
vote. “Got my bruise in Birmingham
trying to register people to vote. These aren’t my scars, cuts, or bruises. These are my medals of honor."
If we get proximate and change these narratives we will
honor what it means to be a good leader.
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