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What We Know About the Nashville School Shooting

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Investigators were still searching for a motive in the killing of six people at the Covenant School. The shooter’s writings remain tangled in a fierce legal battle over whether they should be released.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. With some fiction and nonfiction books about Black history banned in some schools, it's a particularly good time to talk with my guest, Clint Smith. His nonfiction book "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America" won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It was also on The New York Times Book Reviews list of the 10 Best Books of 2021. For that book, he visited eight places central to the history of slavery in America to better understand the distortions in the way the history of slavery was taught to him and to most children, and the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history.

Smith is also an award-winning poet, and I'm happy to say he has a new collection called "Above Ground." It deals with the legacy of slavery in a more personal way, through poems addressed to his young children about what their grandparents endured and escaped. The poems are also about fatherhood and the joy and anxiety surrounding it, especially as a Black father. Some of those poems are very sobering. Some are really funny.

Clint Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR. It's really a treat to have you back on the show. Your book opens with a prose poem about something I've been thinking about a lot, and I know a lot of other people think about this, too, and that is how do you hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time - gratitude for the things that are right in your life and anger or fear about everything that's wrong in your life or in politics or in the larger world or with the Earth itself? What were you trying to reconcile when you wrote this? What was happening in your life?

CLINT SMITH: Yeah. Well, it's so good to be back with you, Terry. It's always a pleasure to be on this program. And with regard to this first poem, so much of what I've been thinking about over the last several years is what you've kind of alluded to, the simultaneity of the human experience, which is to say, how do we move through our lives holding wonder, joy, awe alongside fear, despair, a sense of catastrophe. And a lot of what I'm thinking about in this collection are - is that idea in a sort of - in the context of the larger human experience, but also through the prism of parenthood and how parenthood is both the thing that shows you parts of yourself that you have never experienced before in ways that you are incredibly proud of, and also in ways that you're ashamed of - how being with your kids is, you know, full of joy and levity and laughter, and also that parenthood is one of the most exhausting, difficult and fear-inducing experiences in the world. And so I'm thinking about the simultaneity of our lives both in a macro context, in a geopolitical context, in an ecological context, but also in the specific granular details of our own lives.

GROSS: And you have the ability to put it all in words that really perfect the thought, clarify the thought. So would you read for us "All At Once"?

SMITH: I'd be happy to.

(Reading) "All At Once." The redwoods are on fire in California. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father's arms. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. A glacier melts into the ocean and the sea climbs closer to the land.

(Reading) A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. A country below the equator ends a 20-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another.

(Reading) The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. Your mother's cancer has returned, and doctors say there is nothing else they can do. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.

GROSS: Before we get to more of your poems, I want to ask you about your nonfiction book, "How The Word Is Passed." That's about the legacy of slavery and the monuments commemorating the Confederacy and slave holders and the distortions of history. Has your book been banned? There's so many books now, fiction and nonfiction, related to Black history that have been banned or that are under consideration for removal from the classroom.

SMITH: Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I think there are a couple different ways that book-banning manifests itself as a sort of political and social phenomenon. I'm not specifically familiar with whether or not the book has been banned by particular school districts or that there are - whether or not there are librarians who are prevented from loaning it out. I've heard a few stories anecdotally, but I've not seen a lot of that. But what I'm more familiar with and what has happened is what I think of as a sort of quiet banning in the sense that it is not on a list that is made public. But there are people in decision-making positions who prevent the book from being a part of a classroom or of a school or of a school district.

An example I have is there was a school in which the students and teachers selected "How The Word Is Passed" as a - as their common read. And it was a private school, and they were going to buy 2,000 copies of the book, and I was going to come speak there. And I've done this at several different universities over the past year or so. And so I was excited to do this at a school with younger students and be in conversation with those educators and those students about so many of the themes that come up in the book and how it's in conversation with a lot of the questions that we're wrestling with as a country today.

But then my speaking agency got a note that said that a decision had been made from above, from a board level that decided that they were not going to do - have "How The Word Is Passed" be the common read anymore because they didn't want any sort of controversial critical race theory books being inserted into the lives of students and having them indoctrinated with a particular set of views. And so the visit was canceled. The purchase of the book was canceled. And I think that that's something that's in some ways much more common for so many authors than what's happening in terms of the specific public list.

GROSS: You know, part of the point of that book was to write the things that no one ever told you when you were in school. You got a very, like, distorted picture of slavery to the extent you were taught about it at all. And your book was an attempt to say, hey, this is what happened, and these are the monuments to that. These are the, like, physical reminders of what happened. Let's talk about what really happened and how we remember the past and what we need to change in how we remember the past, because the past has been misrepresented in schools, among other places.

And you grew up in the South. You grew up in Louisiana and in New Orleans, surrounded by Confederate monuments, walking down streets with the names of Confederate leaders and, like, slave owners. So it's just ironic that a book meant to be an educational corrective is perceived as so threatening.

SMITH: Yeah, I think it's really unfortunate. As you said, I wrote this book for the 15-year-old version of me. I tried to write the sort of book that I felt like I needed in my high school American history class, the sort of book that would have given me the language, the toolkit, the intellectual and historical context with which to more fully understand who I was in relation to my city, my state and my country.

And so - and when I think about, you know, 15-year-old, 16-year-old Clint, I think about how desperate I was for that sort of information because I grew up in New Orleans in the '90s, in a time where we were inundated with these messages about all the things that were wrong with Black people - the crime rate and the rate of violence and the poverty rate and all of these things - the way that our communities were saturated with violence and poverty was because of something that Black people had done wrong. And you're inundated with this message over and over and over again. And if you continue to inundate a child with information and don't give them the information with which to push back against it, they're likely going to begin to internalize it.

And so I remember this feeling of knowing that what I was hearing was wrong, but not knowing how to say it was wrong, not having, again, that language, the toolkit to push back against it. And I remember feeling this sort of social and intellectual paralysis that I didn't know how to escape. And it wasn't until later in my life that I read these books, that I read these texts, that I read these scholars, that completely recalibrated my relationship to American history that included perspectives and stories and narratives that were not traditionally included in the sort of dominant narrative around American history. And it's difficult to overstate how liberating that was.

GROSS: Well, let's take a break here, then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Clint Smith. His new collection of poems is called "Above Ground." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN COLTRANE QUARTET'S "OUT OF THIS WORLD")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Clint Smith. His new collection of poems, "Above Ground," is about fatherhood and the joy and anxiety surrounding it especially as a Black father. He's also the author of the 2021 nonfiction book "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America."

Let's talk about your poems, and I want you to read one that's in part about what your grandparents lived through growing up in what you describe as the apartheid South. Your grandfather was from Mississippi and your grandmother from Florida. And it also refers to the miracle of your son being born, your first child, because he was hard to conceive. And then, the pregnancy ended up being very risky. Would you read it for us?

SMITH: (Reading) "By Chance." If the doctors said you were impossible and you arrived anyway, does it mean they were wrong? Or does it mean you defied science? What is the difference between science and a miracle other than discovering new language for something we don't understand? The day we brought you home, I stayed up all night and watched you sleep in your bassinet because I was afraid if I closed my eyes, you'd vanish. Once, a long time ago, your grandmother escaped a war, and your great-grandfather fought in one. You come from good fortune. You come from a history that is arbitrary and cloaked in luck. You come from a land mine that was 2 feet to the left. You come from children who shared their bread when they didn't have to. You come from the parachute that didn't open, then did.

GROSS: Do you tell your children about what it took for them to get here, for you to get here, what your grandparents endured and how they survived?

SMITH: I do, absolutely. I think it's really important for them to know. And this poem is actually speaking to the experience not only of my own grandparents, but also thinking specifically of my wife's mother, who was born in Nigeria and escaped Nigeria during the Biafra War and who walked from Nigeria to Cameroon when she was a child and who ended up being able to move to the United States and make a life for herself when such a thing was so uncertain.

And so, you know, I'm thinking about the sort of - what it means for my children to be the descendants of people who were enslaved and also the descendants of people who were colonized and what it means to carry both of those lineages in their bodies. And I - it's important for us to communicate those realities to them. And obviously, you do it in a way that's developmentally appropriate. You do it in a way that allows them to understand, that's not going to traumatize them. But it is important for our kids to have an understanding both in a sort of micro, familial context where they come from, but also to understand the sort of larger social realities of colonialism, of slavery, that shaped why their family looks the way that it does today.

GROSS: Did you always know you wanted to be a father? And when you were younger and - well, when you were older, when you were a young man and you looked around and you saw the people who were parents your age and older, what did you see?

SMITH: Oh, man. Well, I thought that once you reached your 30s, you were, like, an elderly person.

GROSS: (Laughter).

SMITH: So I was like - you know, I couldn't - I was like, once you have kids, you're, like, old. You must be on - I didn't know what Social Security was, but I was like, well, whatever version of the thing that old people get is probably what you get when you turn 30.

I always thought that I was going to be a dad. I don't think there was ever a point in which that didn't feel like something I was moving toward. And I - with the exception - and I write about this at the beginning of the book, is when my wife and I got news that we were - that fertility was going to be difficult for us. And it was very uncertain. And the pregnancies themselves, when they even happened, were uncertain and incredibly emotionally and physically difficult especially for my wife.

I always imagined myself as being a father, but there were certainly moments where fatherhood felt more distant. And so I feel enormous gratitude to look at these two little humans that we brought into the world because there was a point in which that that was - it was uncertain whether or not that would happen.

GROSS: I want you to read a poem about that. And this is a poem about meeting your wife and deciding to try to conceive pretty soon because of the problems of fertility.

SMITH: (Reading) "Counting Descent II." My son was born on the 71st day of spring on the fifth floor of a hospital in a city with a history of burning. He had two grandmothers in the room and four generations in the world. My daughter was born on the 59th day of winter and two doors down from the room her brother was born in 21 months before. Both of my children were induced several weeks before they were due because waiting any longer would have been a risk to both of their lives.

(Reading) I met my wife two years, one month and seven days before our first child arrived and three relationships after I assumed no one like her existed. We sat at a table in a city 893 miles away from where we live now for four times more likely than we planned and talked about things we had spent half our lives attempting to forget. When the bar closed, we walked two miles to her apartment, where two dates later we'd kiss for the first time.

(Reading) After 17 months and three doctor's appointments, we started trying to have a child because the doctor said we had less than a 1% chance. I'm not sure how they came up with that number, but I remember all the doctors kept saying, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

GROSS: So that was a follow-up poem to the title poem of your first book of poetry, which was also about thinking about your past in terms of numbers. I'll just quote a few lines. You write, my grandfather is a quarter century older than his right to vote and two decades younger than the president who signed the paper that made it so. Why do numbers have so much power where you're counting, you know, the days, the months, the distance between?

SMITH: Yeah, I should say that this poem and the one that preceded it were inspired by a mentor of mine, Alan Michael Parker, who's a professor at Davidson College where I went, and he was my advisor. He was one of the people who introduced me to poetry. And he has a poem in this book that - in his book that uses a similar conceit that I was so drawn to. I think numbers are such an interesting way to document one's past. I like the idea of the specificity of these moments.

And for me, poems, especially these sorts of poems in this collection, are time capsules. They are attempts to capture a moment in time. They are attempts to archive a moment, a feeling, an idea, an event so that I might be able to look back on it in the way that one looks back at a picture in a photo album or now a picture in your phone from years ago, and be drawn back into a moment. And I think that using numbers in the sort of conceit of this poem and the previous "Counting Descent" is just another way of creating sort of time capsules within the larger time capsule of the poem and bringing me back to those moments that, whether they were positive or negative, whether they were imbued with joy or distress, are important for me to remember.

GROSS: How did you have to recalibrate your plans for your own writing career after you became a father?

SMITH: Oh, man, I - you know, I used to - I was like, I'm going to go to the woods for, like, three months, and I'm going to write a novel, and I'm going to - you know, I imagined these sort of long retreats away, these extended periods of time in which I would be able to focus on nothing but writing and was quickly disabused of that idea because there was a baby in our apartment and soon to be a toddler and soon to be two toddlers and then two toddlers at the beginning of a, you know, once-in-a-century pandemic. And so I was disabused of the idea that I would have these long, extended, lavish periods of time with which to write where, you know, I put my tea down and sat by the window...

GROSS: (Laughter) Yeah.

SMITH: ...And the sun hit me just so. And there was very little of that. I think I had a conversation with a mentor, Imani Perry, the incredible writer, Princeton scholar. We got together years ago after my son was born, and she has two children of her own. And she was saying, you have to let go of the idea that you have to have these long periods of time, of open time to write. You got to write every chance you get, whether you have 10 minutes, whether you have five minutes, whether you can only write a paragraph, whether - and it's simple advice. But it was really transformative for me.

And I began to think of writing less as something that I had to have the perfect conditions for and more of something that I had to be proactive in cultivating. And so, you know, over the last several years, I write everywhere. You know, both of these books were written in my iPhone, on my laptop, on pieces of napkin at the coffee shop, during nap time, during episodes of "Peppa Pig," at the barbershop. I recognized that, you know, if I want to be a present parent and present partner, then it is important for me to sort of write where I can so that when I'm with my family, I don't have to be imagining or wishing that I was doing something else.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Clint Smith. His new collection of poems is called "Above Ground." We'll be right back after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "KINDERGARTEN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Clint Smith. His new collection of poems "Above Ground" is about the joy and anxiety surrounding fatherhood, especially as a Black father. Some of the poems reflect the themes he wrote about in his nonfiction book "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America." That book is about how monuments to slave owners and Confederate soldiers, as well as how history has been taught, have distorted the truth about slavery and its ongoing legacy. He grew up in New Orleans, surrounded by Confederate monuments and walking along streets named after Confederate leaders and enslavers.

There's a poem I'd like you to read about being out at the pharmacy with your two young kids. And if you have any greatest hits, any poems you think of as greatest hits, I would imagine this would be one of them. So this poem is called "Gold Stars."

SMITH: (Reading) "Gold Stars." On the days when I am out alone with my children, I'm made to feel as if I am a saint or a god or the undisputed best father of all time. What I mean is that when we walk into CVS and my daughter is wrapped on my chest and my son toddles at my side, people stop and look and gasp and point and walk up to me asking to shake my hand. Men pat me on the back. Women touch my shoulder and touch their hearts. The manager at the front of the store comes on to the loudspeaker to say, excuse me. May I have everyone's attention? On aisle seven, you can get three boxes of detergent for the price of two, and on aisle five, there is an incredible father running errands alone with his children. Everyone in the store bursts into applause, and someone walks over to hand me a crown and a ribbon and a coupon for an all-you-can eat buffet.

(Reading) Just the other day, a woman at the park told me how wonderful it is that I took the time to babysit my own children. Just the other day, I changed a dirty diaper, and someone said, praise Jesus. Just the other day, a man on the road stopped his car in the middle of the street, rolled down his window and told me I was father of the year. It's not that I don't appreciate the sentiment. It's just that this man has no idea what kind of father I actually am. All he saw was me and two children and a diaper bag teeming with crackers. And it's not that I don't want people to tell me I'm doing a good job. It's just that I am praised for the sorts of things no one ever thanks my wife for. I am adorned in a garland of gold stars for simply being in this body.

GROSS: Your wife must love that poem and the acknowledgement of the disparity between how men are just, like, acknowledged and applauded for just being a father out in public with their kids and the way women are just expected to be that way.

SMITH: Yeah. It's one of those things where, you know - and we talk about this all the time and experience it in such profoundly different ways all the time. And I think there's an additional layer because, you know, she's a Black woman, and I'm a Black man. And so that is in conversation with the sort of already conspicuous difference that I think men and women, often of any race, experience with regard to people's perception of their role as parents. And it's one of those things where it's nice to tell parents they're doing a good job. Like, it is - I do feel oftentimes that, like, you know, parents should get a parade. Parents should get a - you know, should get - have random people come up to them and give them crowns and give them coupons and give them - and tell them they're doing a great job.

So it's not to say that that shouldn't happen, but it is to ask us to examine why we do that for fathers in a way we don't do for mothers. And I think that there's things to unpack from that that have to do with race and that have to do with people's - the sort of pathologies around Black fatherhood that have existed in our public consciousness for a long time. And so I think when people see a Black father, they want to celebrate it. Like, when they see a Black father with his young kids, it feels worthy of praise. And so I understand where it's coming from, even if I think it's important to push back against the impulse to do it only for the fathers and not for the mothers.

GROSS: So you've made it clear how fortunate you feel to have your two children and to have - you know, to have children at all because you were given only a 1% chance, you and your wife, of being able to conceive. But in the spirit of your first poem that you read of, like, holding two thoughts in your head at the same time, you love your kids; you love being with them; you're so glad when they go to sleep. And so I want you to read a poem about that called "Ode To Those First 15 Minutes After The Kids Are Finally Asleep."

SMITH: (Reading) "Ode To Those First 15 Minutes After The Kids Are Finally Asleep." Praise the couch that welcomes you back into its embrace, as it does every night around this time. Praise the loose cereal that crunches beneath your weight - the whole-grain golden dust that now shimmers on the backside of your pants. Praise the cushion, the one in the middle that sinks like a lifeboat leaking air, and the ottoman covered in crayon stains that you now have accepted as aesthetic. Praise your knees and the evening respite they receive from a day of choo-choo training along the carpet with two eager passengers in tow. Praise the silence - oh, the silence - how it washes over you like a warm bedsheet.

(Reading) Praise the walls for the way they stand there and don't ask for anything. Praise the seduction of slumber that tiptoes across your eyelids, the way it tempts you to curl up right there and drift away even though it's only 7:30 p.m. Praise the phone you scroll through without even realizing that you're scrolling. Praise the video you scroll past of the man teaching his dog how to dance merengue. Praise the way it makes you laugh the way someone laughs when they are so tired they don't even know if they will stand up again. Praise the toys scattered across the floor and the way you wonder if it might be OK to just leave them there for now, since you know tomorrow, they will end up there again.

GROSS: I think so many people will relate to that. What stage are you now with your kids?

SMITH: My son is about to turn 6. My daughter just turned 4. And so, you know, I think we all relate to that time after a workday and then picking the kids up, doing the afternoon activities and the homework and the hanging out and the soccer practice and dance class or a weekend where you're with your kids, you know, all day, and it's great. But then, you know, you put them down and those - just like the poem says, those first 15 minutes when you're, like, listening at the beginning, when you're listening to hear if anybody's going to tiptoe out of their room, or when they're younger, if somebody's going to start crying or start screaming and the sort of just overwhelming respite your body feels when you can, like, sink into that couch or into the bed or onto the floor. I think that is a universal experience because it's a lot to raise little humans and to try to make them thoughtful and kind and to make sure they don't, you know, put things in their mouth or their nose or both at the same time. So...

GROSS: Yeah.

SMITH: Yeah. The constant vigilance is - can be exhausting in ways you don't fully realize until the day is done.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Clint Smith. His new collection of poems is called "Above Ground." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHM FUTURE QUARTET'S "IBERIAN SUNRISE")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Clint Smith. His new collection of poems, "Above Ground," is about fatherhood and the joy and anxiety surrounding it especially as a Black father. He's also the author of the 2021 nonfiction book "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America."

You grew up in New Orleans, surrounded by Confederate monuments and streets named after Confederate leaders and slaveholders. So, you know, that was part of the inspiration for your previous book about the legacy of slavery. But you had a personal trauma - well, a collective trauma, really, in New Orleans. You were 17 during Hurricane Katrina. And I think your family moved after that. Did you lose your home? Like, what was your experience of that?

SMITH: We did lose our home. I was 17. I was a senior in high school. And our home was under, you know, 10 feet of water, submerged, like 80% of the city was. It was hard in ways that I think I'm still trying to process and traumatic in ways that I think I'm still trying to unravel. And I say that, but at the same time, you know, it - we lost our home, but I was able to go to a different school in Houston, Texas. And we were able to relocate back to New Orleans into a different home and different neighborhood afterwards. And so I - you know, I am much more fortunate than so many others who lost their home and weren't able to go back to New Orleans.

But it's interesting because now - you know, I'm 34 years old. Katrina was 17 years ago. And so it very cleanly bifurcates my life now. And I had a moment where I was back home - I brought my kids and my wife home for Mardi Gras a few weeks ago. And that was their first Mardi Gras that they had ever experienced. And seeing the colors and the sounds and the floats and the - and how much my kids loved it, it was this sort of, like, wonderful sensory overload for them. And it was so nice to experience that through their eyes, in that way, and I hadn't been back home for so long for Mardi Gras specifically.

But I had this moment where we were in my parents' house, and I realized that they had lived in that house for longer than we had lived in my childhood home, which was so staggering to me because the home that I go back to, where my parents live now, has only ever been, like, the other house. You know, Katrina is the thing that both feels so long ago, but also not that long ago at all.

GROSS: What was your personal experience of the storm, of the hurricane?

SMITH: Yeah, we evacuated...

GROSS: Early?

SMITH: ...And went to Houston probably two days before. I remember...

GROSS: Oh, yeah. So you weren't in the storm itself?

SMITH: No, we weren't in the storm. No, I mean - and the thing that some people who aren't from New Orleans don't always understand is that evacuating from the hurricane was, like, a regular occurrence. It was, like, an annual field trip almost. It felt - like, here comes a hurricane. You board up the house. You pack up some clothes for a few days. We go to Houston. Then, we come back a few days later, pick up some branches. Everything's OK. And that was my experience my whole life.

And obviously, Katrina was very different than the storms that had preceded it and had a fundamentally different impact. So, you know, I remember being a 17, you know, year-old kid who was sitting on my aunt and uncle's couch in Houston, Texas, watching CNN as the church I used to go to and the school I used to go to and the grocery store I used to go to were all shown submerged under water. But I think as a way to just keep going, I suppressed a lot of the anxiety and, frankly, depression that I felt.

You know, we didn't have - this was 2005. There wasn't the sort of conversation around public health or therapy or any of that that exists now in the way that, I think, it does for Gen Z and for teenagers who - you know, who are, in their own way, experiencing a profound mental health crisis coming out of COVID. But that wasn't even something that was, like, part of the conversation in this country in the same way. And so I think it is something that I kind of swept under the rug for a long time - to be stripped from my family, from my home, from my friends so suddenly, and to have never seen some of those people again. You know, it was a difficult time and a time that I'm, in so many ways, still trying to make sense of.

GROSS: There's one more poem I'd like you to read, and this is about your physical health and the physical health of your family. And it's also really basically a meditation on life itself. So the poem is called "For The Doctor's Record" (ph), and it's kind of as if you were giving a medical history at a checkup.

SMITH: (Reading) "For The Doctor's Records." My father has chronic kidney disease. He has had two transplants thanks to two people who were generous in ways I'm worried I am not. My mother has a nerve in her neck that doesn't let her sleep through the night. My mother's mother died of blood clots. My father's father died with Alzheimer's, casting a cloud over everything inside him. My wife had complications while she was pregnant with both my son and daughter. Both arrived early, and I held my breath until each of them released their first. My wife's mother escaped a war and lived to tell us how the memory is still whispering inside her.

(Reading) I enjoy fried foods. I eat too much salt. I worry about having more than one drink. I've seen people in my family become consumed by things they didn't know could kill them. My knees hurt some days. I feel my bones ache when it rains like the old folks used to say. I don't know what is in my body and what is in my head. I want to take more pain medicine, but I'm afraid of what I can't control. My chest gets tight when I lie to people I love. My mother's sister had breast cancer. My mother's brother let alcohol turn him into silence. I remain astonished by how cicadas lived for 17 years underground and then die within weeks of coming up to meet the world.

GROSS: What were you doing when you wrote that poem? What made you think of life in a way - as interpreted through medical records?

SMITH: This is inspired by a poem by the incredible poet Nicole Sealey. Our family, like many families, have a very specific and often checkered medical history. And I was thinking about this in part because, you know, when you bring - we began our conversation by thinking about, you know, what - did I ever question or did I ever wrestle with whether or not we should bring children into the world? Part of that is thinking about, you know, what your kids are going to carry. What they're going to - what are the sort of intergenerational realities, you know, the intergenerational traumas, the intergenerational genetic dispositions, the intergenerational health conditions that you will pass on to your children. And a big part of it is you don't know.

So I was thinking about and wrestling with that uncertainty. I was thinking about the sense of not knowing what parts of my lineage, what parts of my wife and I's collective lineage, our children will carry, and more specifically, how it will impact them. And that's a frightening, unsettling thing because you don't ever want to feel responsible for passing something on to your children that causes them physical, emotional or psychological distress. But you also just don't know.

GROSS: There's a kind of follow-up poem to the poem you just read. And it's called "For The Doctor's Record: Follow-Up," (ph) as if it's a follow-up appointment and you're still reporting medical things. And what I'd like you to do is just read the last part of it, starting with last night.

SMITH: (Reading) Last night, another boy who could have once been me or who might one day be my son was killed by police. But this time, no cameras showed up. I haven't cried in a long time. There have been 11,315 sunsets since I was born. And I haven't stopped to watch any of them.

GROSS: Is that right, that you've never really stopped to watch a sunset?

SMITH: At the time of writing that poem, that was true. Yeah. And I think that part of what poems do in their own strange way is make me more present and sort of hold me accountable. So the very act of writing down that I've never seen - you know, that I've been on this Earth, when I wrote that poem, you know, over 11,000 days and have never - really never just sort of sat to watch the sunset, like, for a sustained period of time - uninterrupted, focusing just on the way that the Earth is tilting so that the sun moves across the horizon - was a moment of revelation for me to ensure that that reality did not continue to be the case.

And so it wasn't long after that, I wrote that poem, that I did sit down and watch the sunset, because part of what poetry does is allows you to - and maybe the better word is forces you and pushes you to see the parts of yourself that you might not otherwise have encountered or might not have otherwise paid attention to. And I think that my having never watched a sunset felt reflective of a larger phenomenon, a larger idea of being unable to sit still. And I've been trying to do better with stillness, trying to do better with being present. And so that's what the poem was calling me to do.

GROSS: Clint Smith, it's been great having you on the show again and hearing you read your poems and talk about your life. Thank you so much.

SMITH: It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Clint Smith's new collection of poems is called "Above Ground." After we take a short break, Justin Chang will review the film that won the grand jury prize for Best American Dramatic Film at this year's Sundance Film Festival. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF KYLE EASTWOOD'S "SAMBA DE PARIS")

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In 'Above Ground,' Clint Smith uses poetry to confront the legacy of slavery

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Smith's poems, which are addressed to his young children, describe what their ancestors endured and escaped. He also examines the joy and anxiety of parenthood, especially as a Black father.

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Interpretation: The Second Amendment | Constitution Center

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Interpretations of The Second Amendment by constitutional scholars

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How ‘thoughts and prayers’ went from common condolence to cynical meme | CNN

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The phrase circulates after every mass shooting. To critics, the repetition of these shootings exists because no one is doing much else besides offer thoughts and prayers.

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Poet Mahmoud Darwish is the author of many collections of poetry and was considered Palestine’s most eminent poet.

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No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

The Third Amendment seems to have no direct constitutional relevance at present; indeed, not only is it the least litigated amendment in the Bill of Rights, but the Supreme Court has never decided a case on the basis of it.

The federal government today is not likely to ask people to house soldiers in their homes, even in time of war. Nevertheless, the amendment has some modern implications. It suggests the individual's right of domestic privacy-that people are protected from governmental intrusion into their homes; and it is the only part of the Constitution that deals directly with the relationship between the rights of individuals and the military in both peace and war-rights that emphasize the importance of civilian control over the armed forces. Some legal scholars have even begun to argue that the amendment might be applied to the government's response to terror attacks and natural disasters, and to issues involving eminent domain and the militarization of the police.

When the amendment was written in the eighteenth century, Americans and Englishmen in general believed that the issue of quartering troops in private homes was of great and palpable significance. During the course of their history the English had developed a deep dislike of standing armies; they especially objected to the government's compelling them to quarter soldiers in their homes.

Yet the English attitude was contradictory. At the same time as the English protested the quartering of troops in private homes, they were reluctant to house the soldiers in barracks separated from the civilian population. The English remained so suspicious of standing armies that they feared that concentrations of soldiers in barracks might pose military threats to the people's liberties. Thus, the English concluded that if they had to have an army, it must be scattered among the populace and housed preferably in inns, alehouses, stables, and private homes. But as Parliament made clear in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, the government could not billet troops in private homes without the consent of the owners. So the English fear of standing armies was inextricably connected to their fear of having soldiers quartered in their homes without their consent.

During the Seven Years War between Britain and France (called in the North American colonies the French and Indian War) the colonists who had inherited the traditional English fear of standing armies resented having to billet the British redcoats. Americans preferred to rely for their protection on local militia, not on professional soldiers. Although the peace treaty of 1763 ended the war and ousted France from the North American continent, the British government believed it still needed tens of thousands of soldiers in America in order to police the newly acquired territories. Since the earlier English quartering act did not extend to the colonies, Parliament in 1765 passed a Quartering Act that set down the regulations for housing soldiers in the American colonies during time of peace. The colonists were to provide barracks for the soldiers, and if they were not available, the troops were to be billeted in inns, stables, and alehouses; if these were insufficient, the governors and councils of the provinces were authorized to use uninhabited houses, barns, and other buildings to lodge the soldiers. The colonists were required to furnish provisions and necessaries for the troops, including firewood, bedding, and beer.

The colonies, particularly the province of New York, objected to this act, especially as it obliged them to raise money to support the soldiers without the consent of their provincial legislatures. Tensions over the presence of British soldiers in the colonies increased. In 1768 royal troops were redeployed to Boston, Massachusetts, to assist with law enforcement in a colony that seethed with resentment against British authority. Many Bostonians became convinced that this standing army quartered among them in time of peace in violation of English law was designed to overwhelm them with military force. With nearly four thousand redcoats billeted in a town of fifteen thousand civilians, it was only a matter of time before an incident occurred. On March 5, 1770, nervous British soldiers fired upon a hostile crowd and killed five civilians, resulting in what the colonists called the Boston Massacre.

In the eyes of the British government Boston seemed to be a hotbed of fanaticism. The Tea Party in December 1773, in which patriots threw ₤10,000 of tea into Boston harbor, confirmed this view and led Parliament in 1774 to pass the Coercive Acts, among which was a new Quartering Act. This act went beyond the earlier statute by authorizing the royal governors to order the billeting of soldiers in private homes if the colonists refused to provide other lodging.

These British actions lay behind the Continental Congress's expressions of American grievance. In its Declaration and Resolves on October 14, 1774, Congress protested the presence in a time of peace of a standing army and the quartering of troops in the colonies without their consent. Then in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, two of the many accusations Congress leveled against the king were his keeping "among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent or our Legislatures," and his "quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us."

Many of the Revolutionary state constitutions drafted in 1776-77 included provisions warning of the dangers of standing armies in peacetime and stating, as the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776 did, "That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free State." Some state constitutions also affirmed, as did the Delaware Declaration of Rights of 1776, "that no soldiers ought to be quartered in any house in time of peace without the consent of the owner, and in time of war in such manner only as the legislature shall direct." Thus when the new federal Congress came to write the Third Amendment to the Constitution in 1789, it had considerable experience and precedent to rely on. There was nothing new about the Third Amendment; it simply declared what had become conventional American wisdom.

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Interpretations of The Third Amendment by constitutional scholars

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Israel's policy of constructing and expanding illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land is one of the main driving forces behind the mass human rights violations resulting from the occupation. Over the past 50 years, Israel has demolished tens of thousands of Palestinian properties and displaced large swathes of the population to build homes and infrastructure to illegally settle its own population in the occupied territories. It has also diverted Palestinian natural resources such as water and agricultural land for settlement use.

The very existence of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories violates international humanitarian law and is a war crime. Despite multiple UN resolutions, Israel has continued to appropriate Palestinian land and support at least 600,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Until 2005, more than 9,000 Israeli settlers were illegally residing in Gaza.

In recent months, Israel has accelerated settlement expansion. The government has announced plans for thousands of new homes in existing settlements, as well as the establishment of two new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

As well as illegally building settlement homes and infrastructure on Palestinian land, Israeli and international businesses in settlements have established a thriving economy to sustain their presence and expansion. This "settlement enterprise" relies on unlawfully appropriated Palestinian resources, including land, water and minerals, to produce goods that are exported and sold for private profit. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of settlement goods are exported internationally each year.
We want governments to stop enabling the economy that keeps these illegal settlements growing and fuels the suffering of Palestinians: and you can help. Call on your government now to ban Israeli settlement goods from entering your markets, and to stop companies based in your country operating in settlements or trading in their goods - and help put an end to the cycle of violations suffered by Palestinians living under Israel's occupation.

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Israel's Occupation: 50 Years of Dispossession

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Mass human rights violations during the 50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have devastated the lives of millions of Palestinians.

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“When They Come for Us on the 7 Train” by Ananda Lima

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Past the underground tracks, the railroad rises / our eyes adjust to the sun over Jackson Heights …

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Reading Across America: A Poetry Reading on an NYC Subway Car?

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One bright Saturday, on the weekend before it was announced that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had offered up Long Island City and much of Western Queens to …

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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Imagine you're driving a car, and a police officer spots you and pulls you over for speeding. He orders you out of the car. Maybe he wants to place you under arrest. Or maybe he wants to search your car for evidence of a crime. Can the officer do that?

The Fourth Amendment is the part of the Constitution that gives the answer. According to the Fourth Amendment, the people have a right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." This right limits the power of the police to seize and search people, their property, and their homes.

The Fourth Amendment has been debated frequently during the last several years, as police and intelligence agencies in the United States have engaged in a number of controversial activities. The federal government has conducted bulk collection of Americans' telephone and Internet connections as part of the War on Terror. Many municipal police forces have engaged in aggressive use of "stop and frisk." There have been a number of highly-publicized police-citizen encounters in which the police ended up shooting a civilian. There is also concern about the use of aerial surveillance, whether by piloted aircraft or drones.

The application of the Fourth Amendment to all these activities would have surprised those who drafted it, and not only because they could not imagine the modern technologies like the Internet and drones. They also were not familiar with organized police forces like we have today. Policing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a responsibility of the citizenry, which participated in "night watches." Other than that, there was only a loose collection of sheriffs and constables, who lacked the tools to maintain order as the police do today.

The primary concerns of the generation that ratified the Fourth Amendment were "general warrants" and "writs of assistance." Famous incidents on both sides of the Atlantic gave rise to placing the Fourth Amendment in the Constitution. In Britain, the Crown employed "general warrants" to go after political enemies, leading to the famous decisions in Wilkes v. Wood (1763) and Entick v. Carrington (1765). General warrants allowed the Crown's messengers to search without any cause to believe someone had committed an offense. In those cases the judges decided that such warrants violated English common law. In the colonies the Crown used the writs of assistance-like general warrants, but often unbounded by time restraints-to search for goods on which taxes had not been paid. James Otis challenged the writs in a Boston court; though he lost, some such as John Adams attribute this legal battle as the spark that led to the Revolution. Both controversies led to the famous notion that a person's home is their castle, not easily invaded by the government.

Today the Fourth Amendment is understood as placing restraints on the government any time it detains (seizes) or searches a person or property. The Fourth Amendment also provides that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized." The idea is that to avoid the evils of general warrants, each search or seizure should be cleared in advance by a judge, and that to get a warrant the government must show "probable cause"-a certain level of suspicion of criminal activity-to justify the search or seizure.

To the extent that a warrant is required in theory before police can search, there are so many exceptions that in practice warrants rarely are obtained. Police can search automobiles without warrants, they can detain people on the street without them, and they can always search or seize in an emergency without going to a judge.

The way that the Fourth Amendment most commonly is put into practice is in criminal proceedings. The Supreme Court decided in the mid-twentieth century that if the police seize evidence as part of an illegal search, the evidence cannot be admitted into court. This is called the "exclusionary rule." It is controversial because in most cases evidence is being tossed out even though it shows the person is guilty and, as a result of the police conduct, they might avoid conviction. "The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered," declared Benjamin Cardozo (a famous judge and ultimately Supreme Court justice). But, responded another Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, "If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law."

One of the difficult questions today is what constitutes a "search"? If the police standing in Times Square in New York watched a person planting a bomb in plain daylight, we would not think they needed a warrant or any cause. But what about installing closed circuit TV cameras on poles, or flying drones over backyards, or gathering evidence that you have given to a third party such as an Internet provider or a banker?

Another hard question is when a search is acceptable when the government has no suspicion that a person has done something wrong. Lest the answer seem to be "never," think of airport security. Surely it is okay for the government to screen people getting on airplanes, yet the idea is as much to deter people from bringing weapons as it is to catch them-there is no "cause," probable or otherwise, to think anyone has done anything wrong. This is the same sort of issue with bulk data collection, and possibly with gathering biometric information.

What should be clear by now is that advancing technology and the many threats that face society add up to a brew in which the Fourth Amendment will continue to play a central role.

The biggest challenge ahead for the Fourth Amendment is how it should apply to computers and the Internet.

The Fourth Amendment was written over two hundred years ago. But today's crimes often involve computers and the Internet, requiring the police to collect digital evidence and analyze it to solve crimes.

The major question is, how much power should the police have to collect this data? What is an unreasonable search and seizure on the Internet?

Consider the example of a Facebook account. If you log in to Facebook, your use of the account sends a tremendous amount of information to Facebook. Facebook keeps records of everything. What you post, what messages you send, what pictures you "like," even what pages you view. Facebook gets it all, and it keeps records of everything you do. Now imagine that the police come to Facebook and want records of a particular user. The police think the suspect used Facebook to commit the crime or shared evidence of the crime using the site. Maybe the suspect was cyberstalking and harassing a victim on Facebook. Or maybe the suspect is a drug dealer who was exchanging messages with another drug dealer planning a future crime. Or perhaps the suspect committed a burglary, and he posted pictures of the burglary for all of his Facebook friends to see.

Here's the hard question: What limits does the Fourth Amendment impose on the government getting access to the account records? For example, is it a Fourth Amendment "search" or "seizure" for the government to get what a person posted on his Facebook wall for all of his friends to see? Is it a search or seizure to get the messages that the suspect sent? How about records of what page the suspect viewed? And if it is a search or seizure, how much can the government seize with a warrant? Can the government get access to all of the account records? Only some of the account records?

The courts have only begun to answer these questions, and it will be up to future courts to figure out what the Fourth Amendment requires. As more people spend much of their lives online, the stakes of answering these questions correctly becomes higher and higher.

In my view, courts should try to answer these questions by translating the traditional protections of the Fourth Amendment from the physical world to the networked world. In the physical world, the Fourth Amendment strikes a balance. The government is free to do many things without constitutional oversight. The police can watch people in the public street or watch a suspect in a public place. They can follow a car as it drives down the street. On the other hand, the police need cause to stop people, and they need a warrant to enter private places like private homes.

The goal for interpreting the Fourth Amendment should be to strike that same balance in the online setting. Just like in the physical world, the police should be able to collect some evidence without restriction to ensure that they can investigate crimes. And just like in the physical world, there should be limits on what the government can do to ensure that the police do not infringe upon important civil liberties.

A second important area is the future of the exclusionary rule, the rule that evidence unconstitutionally obtained cannot be used in court. The history of the exclusionary rule is a history of change. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court dramatically expanded the exclusionary rule. Since the 1980s, however, the Supreme Court has cut back on when the exclusionary rule applies.

The major disagreement is over whether and how the exclusionary rule should apply when the police violate the Fourth Amendment, but do so in "good faith," such as when the law is unclear or the violation is only technical. In the last decade, a majority of the Justices have expanded the "good faith exception" to the exclusionary rule. A central question is whether the good faith exception will continue to expand, and if so, how far.

In the Supreme Court's decisions interpreting the Fourth Amendment, there are a lot of cross-cutting arguments.

For example, sometimes the Justices say that there is a strong preference for government agents to obtain warrants, and that searches without warrants are presumptively invalid. At other times they say warrants are unnecessary, and the only requirement is that searches be "reasonable." At times the Justices say probable cause is required to support a search; at others they say probable cause is not an "irreducible minimum."

This is your Fourth Amendment. It describes "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." It is important for each American to focus on some basics and decide-separate and apart from what the Justices say-what this vital amendment means.

People say that the Fourth Amendment protects privacy, but that trivializes it. In this world you give up a lot of privacy, whether you wish to or not. Internet cookies, or data stored in web browsers, are just one example. But the Internet companies are not going to come take you away. The government might. What the Fourth Amendment protects is the right of the people to be secure. The Fourth Amendment is the means of keeping the government out of our lives and our property unless it has good justification.

In evaluating how the Fourth Amendment should be interpreted, it is essential to bear in mind the vast changes in policing since the time it was ratified. Whereas policing once was reactive, tasked with identifying and catching criminals, today it has become proactive and is based in deterrence. Before, policing was mostly based on "suspicion," it was aimed at people for whom there was cause to believe they had violated or were about to violate the law. Today, policing is aimed at all of us-from red light cameras to bulk data collection by intelligence agencies to airport security.

There are some basic principles that should govern searches and seizures.

First, no member of the Executive branch should be permitted to intervene in our lives without the say-so of at least one other branch. This is fundamental, and all the more important when that Executive actor engages in surveillance of the citizenry and can use force and coercion against them.

Second, a central purpose of the Fourth Amendment is preventing arbitrary or unjustified intrusions into the lives and property of citizens.

In light of these basic principles, certain interpretations of the Fourth Amendment follow:

No search or seizure is "reasonable" if it is not based on either legislative authorization or pursuant to rules that have some form of democratic say in their making. The police can write rules-all other agencies of executive government do-but absent a critical need for secrecy those rules should be public and responsive to public wishes.

Second, warrants are to be preferred. Policing agencies are mission-oriented. We want them to be-they have a vital role protecting public safety. But because they are mission-oriented, warrants should be obtained in advance of searching whenever possible so that a neutral judge can assess the need to intrude on people's lives.

Third, we should distinguish between searches aimed at suspects and those aimed at society in general. When there is a particular suspect, the protections of a warrant and probable cause apply. But those protections make no sense when we are all the target of policing. In the latter instance the most important protection is that policing not discriminate among us. For example, at airport security all must be screened the same unless and until there is suspicion-"cause"- to single someone out.

Finally, often today's policing singles out a particular group. Examples include profiling (based on race, religion, or something else) or subjecting only workers in some agencies to drug tests. When policing is group-based, the proper clause of the Constitution to govern is the Equal Protection Clause. When discriminatory searching or seizing occurs, the government should have to prove two things: that the group it is selecting for unfavorable treatment truly is more likely to contain people worthy of the government's attention, and that the incidence of problematic behavior is sufficiently great in that group to justify burdening everyone. Otherwise, the government should go back to either searching individuals based on suspicion, or search us all.

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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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Democrats, advocates question ICE enforcement raids | CNN Politics

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Immigrant rights activists and Democrats are raising concerns this weekend about recent immigration enforcement actions – though immigration officials maintain that only routine actions targeting criminals were underway.

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Poet Danez Smith issues a wake-up call to white America

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“Dear White America” is a sprawling testimony to the effects of racial violence in the U.S.

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One year ago, the nation watched as the city of Ferguson, Mo., erupted.

St. Louis police, dressed in riot gear, stood in a straight line, shields up and face masks down in a standoff with protestors. The media assembled on the sidelines, cameras poised to capture the latest. There was tear gas, burning buildings, chants and signs.

Protesters came armed with a message, a message that would echo through the Missouri night sky in the days and weeks after Michael Brown's death. It was a message heard across the nation in more protests for other black Americans who died by police hands. "Black lives matter," they chanted, wrote and tweeted. "Black lives matter," they chanted in throngs that blocked streets and demanded America's attention.

While demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson and cities like New York and Los Angeles, a new generation of activists gathered both on the ground and online. The Black Lives Matter movement called for change with how police deal with minorities, and demanded a look at systemic racism and equity. And from it emerged a group of young people paving the way.

Brittany Packnett is one of them.

Packnett, 30, grew up in north St. Louis County in an African-American household lead by parents with advanced degrees. She is an activist, educator and a Member of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

She said the death of Michael Brown deepened her commitment to social justice.

"I think the most significant thing that has changed is that people can see this isn't just about Mike Brown, this isn't just about Tamir Rice, and it isn't just about Sandra Bland," she said. "It is about defending the humanity and the dignity of all people in this country and of people of color in particular."

The young movers and shakers who have been leading the Black Lives Matter movement are now one year out and reflecting back on how far the movement has come. And what else they think still needs to be done.

"I think what we have seen primarily change is that people recognize that here we are 365 days later and we are still talking about it," said Packnett.

On Dec. 1, 2014, Packnett stood outside the Oval Office with seven other young activists. While she waited to meet with President Barack Obama she reflected on the fact that it was her enslaved ancestors who had built the White House.

"We were responsible in that moment to speak truths about our community to the leader of the free world, and that was a real opportunity, but it was also a real responsibility," Packnett recalled.

The president announced the formation of the task force that day, and in the weeks to follow Packnett would be named as a member. In May 2015, the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing released a comprehensive report identifying best policing practices and offering recommendations to strengthen trust among law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.

AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File

A recent survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed that one year after the death of Michael Brown, more than 3 out of 5 blacks say they or a family member have personal experience with being treated unfairly by the police -- and their race is the reason. The poll also revealed that nearly 3 out of 4 white people thought race had nothing to do with how police in their communities decide to use deadly force.

AP Photo/HO/Martin Family

Activist and 25-year-old data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, who lives in San Francisco, says the movement is making a difference anyway. He is a Stanford graduate who grew up in Orlando 15 minutes from where Trayvon Martin was killed. He helped found the website Mapping Police Violence after the death of Michael Brown.

"I had a lot of questions and I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn't get answers because the federal government was not collecting comprehensive information and data on police killings," he said. "What I wanted to know was how prevalent and how widespread are police killings. How are they potentially targeting black people and young black people in particular."

Sinyangwe collected data by using two large crowdsourcing databases on police killings. He says Mapping Police Violence has come to many conclusions, including "Ferguson is everywhere."

Sinyangwe's data has found that since 2015, at least 184 black people have been killed by police in the U.S. so far. In 2014, over 300 black people were killed. In the last year, Black Lives Matter has protested the deaths of black people including Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice, to name a few.

"Not only is it happening everywhere, it's happening in some places more than others. We are able to shine a spotlight on why some of these uprisings are happening in some places," Sinyangwe said. "This is rooted in policy and the system can be changed."

Sinyangwe uses Newark, N.J. as an example. With about the same population and crime rate as St. Louis, and around the same amount of black people, crime in Newark is going down, Sinyangwe says. On the other hand, crime in St. Louis is going up. He says no black people have been killed by police in Newark since 2013, while 12 have been killed in St. Louis.

He says he hopes that the data Mapping Police Violence provides helps the problem of police violence be better understood, and helps towards addressing it.

Many of the protests held over the last year occurred after officers were not charged with crimes, as was the case in the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. But just last week, a prosecutor was quick to charge a Univ. of Cincinnati police officer with the death of Samuel DuBose during a traffic stop in Ohio.

An Associated Press analysis released in late July revealed that 24 states have passed at least 40 new measures after Ferguson. The AP reports that the measures have included addressing such things as officer-worn cameras, training about racial bias, independent investigations when police use force and new limits on the flow of surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies.

While the effects of these policies are new and not yet known, Sinyangwe says it is still progress.

"You really haven't seen anything as impactful as we are seeing this one right now in terms of seeing immediate legislation being proposed and passed and signed at all levels of government," he said.

The Black Lives Matter movement hasn't come without its share of criticism. Some have called it anti-police, others anti-white; the majority of criticism has come from those on social media. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag sparked another controversial hashtag as well, #AllLivesMatter.

"I thought it represented a real misunderstanding, that, unfortunately, happens often when marginalized people finally begin to tell our own story," said Packnett about #AllLivesMatter.

Saying black lives matter is not the same as saying only black lives matter, Packnett said.

"What it is saying though is an acknowledgement of the fact that black lives, brown lives, that people of color in particular, are the ones suffering disproportionately from issues of police brutality, police violence and discrimination in the criminal justice system," she said.

A CBS News/New York Times poll released in July revealed that nearly 6 in 10 Americans say they think race relations in America are bad. And among those polled, blacks are more likely than whites to hold this view. Nearly 8 in 10 African-Americans believe the criminal justice system is biased against them, up from 61 percent in 2013.

Black Lives Matter was sparked by a woman who tweeted it after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin and it caught on, especially after the death of Michael Brown. It was also turned into an organization under the same name, Black Lives Matter. But the movement as a whole is also referred to as the Black Lives Matter movement.

As Packnett explained, the movement has faced criticism for not having a single leader, no one person the head of the movement.

A common misconception is that the movement is leaderless. But Packnett says it's actually "leader-full," and not being under the rule of one or two people allows many people to pursue change in the way they believe most beneficial and in a decentralized manner.

Sinyangwe said there is frustration from some people at the slowness of legislation, and he understands that. He said there is another common misconception about this movement, that nothing is happening. He says that's not true.

"Change is happening. And we will get free, but it is going to be a little while," he said. "What's happening really is unprecedented."

Sinyangwe says Social Media has been the lifeblood of the movement.

"People would not have heard about Ferguson if it wasn't for social media. And when I say social media, I mean Twitter," he said.

At least six people have already been killed by police this month. It's been 3 days.
- Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) August 3, 2015

Many of the activists have shared personal testimonies on Twitter, organized protests and spread their messages. It has also served as an educational tool for those outside of the movement.

"I think there is a misconception that the movement started with a hashtag," said Sinyangwe. "I think the movement started with everyday people."

But Sinyangwe says social media has still been powerful.

"It allows people to organize and build a community where it previously has not been," he said.
National conversation
Kayla Reed, 25, is field organizer for the Organization for Black Struggle. She is also a member of the Ferguson Action Council, a collaborative effort and coalition of organizations founded after the death of Michael Brown. She said the group comes together weekly to discuss action planning on the ground. The organization is responsible for the #UNITEDWEFIGHT weekend of events planned in Ferguson for the anniversary of Michael Brown's death.

Reed acknowledges that Black Lives Matter has now become a national conversation about race, and political candidates have had to answer questions about it. Most recently, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have fielded questions about Black Lives Matter, as well as candidates during the first GOP debate.

"You are seeing both Republicans and Democrats having to address the issue of police accountability, injustice and the racial inequalities that exist in America in a way you haven't seen before," Reed said.

In late July, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley was heckled on stage by demonstrators at the progressive Netroots Nation convention. The Democratic presidential candidate responded to the Black Lives Matter protesters by saying, "Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter."

He has since walked back those comments, and, as Sinyangwe points out, he has recently released a comprehensive plan to address some of the issues the Black Lives Matter movement has raised.

Sinyangwe would like to see the passing of a comprehensive package of federal legislation related to policing and criminal justice reform in the next year. In addition, he would like to see policies in police departments passed and enforced such as banning chokeholds, banning nickel rides, emphasizing deescalation, the carrying of non-lethal weapons and prohibiting shooting at moving cars -- to name a few.

Packnett said she too would like to see policies on paper become reality.

"What I am really looking to see is the foundation that we have laid to really turn into tangible outcomes and changes in peoples everyday lives," she said. "It didn't take just a year to get into this position. So it's going to take more than a year to get out of it."

She said she also hopes to see people continue to be creative, thoughtful and sustained in bringing forth what she calls a 21st Century human rights movement.

"I want to see us continue to live authentically as our generation does. I want to see some real wins that will help us figure out what the next win will be," Packnett said. "We will get there. We will keep going."

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How a death in Ferguson sparked a movement in America

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One year ago, the nation watched as the city of Ferguson, Mo., erupted. St. Louis police, dressed in riot gear, stood in a straight line, shields up and face masks down in a standoff with protestors. The media assembled on the sidelines, cameras poised to capture the latest.

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Targeted Killing: Death Without Due Process | ACLU

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The ACLU dares to create a more perfect union — beyond one person, party, or side. Our mission is to realize this promise of the United States Constitution for all and expand the reach of its guarantees.

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Fifth Amendment, amendment (1791) to the Constitution of the United States, part of the Bill of Rights, that articulates procedural safeguards designed to protect the rights of the criminally accused and to secure life, liberty, and property. For the text of the Fifth Amendment, see below.

Similar to the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment is divided into five clauses, representing five distinct, yet related, rights. The first clause specifies that "[n]o person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger." This " grand jury" provision requires a body to make a formal "presentment" or " indictment" of a person accused of committing a crime against the laws of the federal government. The proceeding is not a trial but rather an ex parte hearing (i.e., one in which only one party, the prosecution, presents evidence) to determine if the government has enough evidence to carry a case to trial. If the grand jury finds sufficient evidence that an offense was committed, it issues an indictment, which then permits a trial. The portion of the clause pertaining to exceptions in cases "arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia" is a corollary to Article I, Section 8, which grants Congress the power "[t]o make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces." Combined, they justify the use of military courts for the armed forces, thus denying military personnel the same procedural rights afforded civilians.

The second section is commonly referred to as the " double jeopardy" clause, and it protects citizens against a second prosecution after an acquittal or a conviction, as well as against multiple punishments for the same offense. Caveats to this provision include permissions to try persons for civil and criminal aspects of an offense, conspiring to commit as well as to commit an offense, and separate trials for acts that violate laws of both the federal and state governments, although federal laws generally suppress prosecution by the national government if a person is convicted of the same crime in a state proceeding.

The third section is commonly referred to as the "self-incrimination" clause, and it protects persons accused of committing a crime from being forced to testify against themselves. In the U.S. judicial system a person is presumed innocent, and it is the responsibility of the state (or national government) to prove guilt. Like other pieces of evidence, once presented, words can be used powerfully against a person; however, words can be manipulated in a way that many other objects cannot. Consequently, information gained from sobriety tests, police lineups, voice samples, and the like is constitutionally permissible while evidence gained from compelled testimony is not. As such, persons accused of committing crimes are protected against themselves or, more accurately, how their words may be used against them. The clause, therefore, protects a key aspect of "the system" as well as the rights of the criminally accused.

The fourth section is commonly referred to as the " due process" clause. It protects life, liberty, and property from impairment by the federal government. (The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, protects the same rights from infringement by the states.) Chiefly concerned with fairness and justice, the due process clause seeks to preserve and protect fundamental rights and ensure that any deprivation of life, liberty, or property occurs in accordance with procedural safeguards. As such, there are both substantive and procedural considerations associated with the due process clause, and this has influenced the development of two separate tracks of due process jurisprudence: procedural and substantive. Procedural due process pertains to the rules, elements, or methods of enforcement-that is, its procedural aspects. Consider the elements of a fair trial and related Sixth Amendment protections. As long as all relevant rights of the accused are adequately protected-as long as the rules of the game, so to speak, are followed-then the government may, in fact, deprive a person of his life, liberty, or property. But what if the rules are not fair? What if the law itself-regardless of how it is enforced-seemingly deprives rights? This raises the controversial spectre of substantive due process rights. It is not inconceivable that the content of the law, regardless of how it is enforced, is itself repugnant to the Constitution because it violates fundamental rights. Over time, the Supreme Court has had an on-again, off-again relationship with liberty-based due process challenges, but it has generally abided by the principle that certain rights are "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" ( Palko v. Connecticut [1937]), and as such they are afforded constitutional protection. This, in turn, has led to the expansion of the meaning of the term liberty. What arguably began as "freedom from restraint" has transformed into a virtual cornucopia of rights reasonably related to enumerated rights, without which neither liberty nor justice would exist. For example, the right to an abortion, established in Roe v. Wade (1973), grew from privacy rights, which emerged from the penumbras of the constitution.

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Fifth Amendment | Summary, Rights, & Facts

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Fifth Amendment, amendment to the Constitution of the United States, part of the Bill of Rights, that articulates procedural safeguards designed to protect the rights of the criminally accused and to secure life, liberty, and property. Learn more about the Fifth Amendment in this article.

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Interpretation: The Seventh Amendment | Constitution Center

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Interpretations of The Seventh Amendment by constitutional scholars

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The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appears, sparking a movement | July 13, 2013 | HISTORY

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The Black Lives Matter movement begins when Alicia Garza posts a message on Facebook on July 13, 2013 that contains the phrase “Black lives matter.”

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george zimmerman found not guilty of murder in trayvon martin's death - cnn

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George Zimmerman found not guilty of murder in Trayvon Martin's death - CNN

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George Zimmerman is not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin, a Florida jury has decided.

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Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out (Published 2018)

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After serving time for a crime I committed at 16, I discovered how hard it is for a felon to get a second chance.

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Cash bail leads to wealth-based detention

Jailing people because they can not afford to post money bail amounts to wealth-based detention that violates well-established norms of fairness and constitutional principles.
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One of the most basic principles underlying our criminal justice system is the presumption of innocence: that one is "innocent until proven guilty." Keeping people in jail solely because of their poverty before they have been found guilty of any offense flips this fundamental presumption on its head.
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Cash bail allows people with financial means to purchase their freedom, while those without cash remain incarcerated. Freedom from incarceration should not depend on one's wealth.

Cash bail is the leading cause of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States

The United States is one of only two nations in the world that use cash bail; the other is the Philippines. Most other common law countries criminalize the practice of requiring money in exchange for pretrial liberty.

Nationwide, 62 percent of people held in jail have not been sentenced, the majority of these people, who should be presumed innocent, are held because they cannot pay cash bail. The United States has more people -- 526,000 -- detained pretrial than most countries have in their jails and prisons combined. In the past three decades, both the use of cash bail and the amount of money assigned as bail has risen steeply.

Nationally, from 1990 to 2009, the the number of people charged with a crime who were assigned cash bail rose from 37 percent to 61 percent and the average bail amount doubled from $25,000 to $55,400.

Pennsylvania has also seen a steep rise in the number of people incarcerated pre-trial.

Cash bail has devastating impacts on individuals, families, and communities

Pretrial detention caused a major disruption for the detained individual and their families. Many people held in pretrial detention will lose their job, even if only detained for a relatively short period. People held in pretrial detention may also lose their housing. A recent survey of women in pretrial detention in Massachusetts found that almost half were at risk of losing their home through non-payment of rent or eviction as a result of their detention. Pretrial detention could prevent individuals from paying child support and can threaten custody arrangements. There is also evidence that incarceration contributes to food instability for families of incarcerated people.
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Jails are often deadly, especially for people in pretrial detention. Nationwide, three-quarters of jail deaths occur among people in pretrial detention, and more than one-third of deaths occur within seven days of incarceration. People in jail who have not been convicted of their current charges have about twice the mortality rate of those who have been convicted and suicide rate among pretrial detainees can be 9 to 14 times higher than in the general population. Nationally, 82 percent of all jail suicides occur among people in "unconvicted" status.

Cash bail disproportionately impacts people of color

A 2016 report found that in Pennsylvania across all offenses black defendants are more likely to receive a monetary bail decision especially when charged with a weapons offense; 33 percent of white defendants charged with felony weapons offense were assigned cash bail compared with 78 percent of black defendants charged with similar offenses.
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A study of large urban counties across the US, found that judges are more likely to assign unaffordable bail to black defendants than white. Moreover, the odds of being detained pretrial were twice as high for Latinx than whites and 87 percent higher for blacks than whites.
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People of color (especially Black, Latino, and Native American people) are at a higher risk of becoming involved in the justice system, including living under heightened police surveillance and being at higher risk for arrest. This imbalance cannot be accounted for by disparate involvement in illegal activity, and it grows at each stage in the justice system, beginning with initial law enforcement contact and increasing at subsequent stages such as pretrial detention.

The Risk Assessment Instruments used in determining whether an individual should be detained pretrial or given bail is steeped in racially biased data that too often conflates character with risk, while failing to deliver meaningful pretrial recommendations. In fact, a University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics study found that, in Allegheny County, judges only use the recommendations from the Risk Assessment Instruments about 60% of the time.

As with sentencing, Risk Assessment algorithms cannot replace the individual decisions that a judge makes per case.

Cash bail undermines public safety

Assigning cash bail makes our communities more dangerous. Multiple studies have documented the way in which cash bail and pretrial detention undermine public safety.
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A large study of cash bail in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh found that assigning cash bail to a defendant increases the likelihood of recidivism by 6-9%.

A 2016 study of people charged with misdemeanors in Harris County, Texas (Houston), found that pretrial detention was associated with a 30 percent increase in felonies and 20 percent increase in misdemeanors within 18 months of the initial bail hearing.
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Another study found that when low-risk defendants were held for 8-14 days, they were 51% more likely to commit another crime than equivalent defendants held less than 24 hours. When detained for even 2-3 days on bail, low risk defendants were 40% more likely to commit new crimes than equivalent defendants held no more than 24 hours.
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These studies demonstrate the profound destabilizing impact of incarceration on individuals.
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In addition to increasing recidivism, cash bail may not actually be that effective at getting people to come to court, the main purpose for its existence. One study that examined bail and court appearance rates in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia found no evidence that money bail increased the probability of appearance. Another study demonstrated that release on unsecured bonds, (bonds that allow for defendant's immediate release and threaten monetary bail only if the defendant fails to appear at a future court date) was slightly more effective in getting people to appear in court than assigning money bail.

Detaining a person pretrial negatively impacts criminal case outcomes

Pretrial detention increases the likelihood of conviction and the length of sentences. Cash bail that results in pretrial detention poses a particular threat to innocent people because it induces them to plead guilty in exchange for their liberty. Pretrial detention is directly correlated to an increase in guilty pleas, as those who are detained pretrial are far more likely to accept guilty pleas than those who who have their liberty.
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In an analysis of data from 1990 to 2004 from the 75 largest counties in the nation, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 60 percent of released defendants were eventually convicted compared to 78 percent of detained defendants. In Brooklyn in 2013, 62 percent of defendants charged with a misdemeanor who remained in jail were convicted, compared to only 12 percent who made bail. Another study that looked at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia estimated that the assignment of cash bail caused a 12 percent rise in the likelihood of conviction.
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A 2012 study that looked at 10 years of data from New York found that even controlling for other factors, pretrial detention was the single greatest predictor of conviction.

Many jurisdictions in the United States reject cash bail

Washington, D.C., Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, Colorado, Kentucky, and Maryland have moved to eradicate cash bail.

In addition to statewide reform, many counties and cities have also moved away from this practice, including: Atlanta City, Harris County, Texas, and Jackson, Mississippi. The district attorneys in Richmond Virginia, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Middlesex Connecticut, have declared their intention to stop requesting monetary bail for certain offenses.

Alternatives to cash bail

Other methods may be more effective than cash bail at getting people to come to court:

Phone call reminders increase appearance rates by 42% and mail reminders may increase appearance rates by as much as 33%.

Unsecured monetary bail more effective than monetary bail at getting defendants to come to court.

Two-way text messaging apps that notify defendants of pending court dates and allow them to communicate with their lawyers has dramatically reduced failure to appear rates. Uptrust, a relatively new not-for-profit tech company provides a messaging app for public defenders that allows defenders to notify their clients via text message of their pending court dates. Uptrust has achieved a 95% court appearance rate for those who receive this service.

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Cash bail leads to wealth-based detentionJailing people because they can not afford to post money bail amounts to wealth-based detention that violates well-established norms of fairness and

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Interpretation: The Eighth Amendment | Constitution Center

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Interpretations of The Eighth Amendment by constitutional scholars

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“So much of entering the space of a poem feels like prophecy.”

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In June of 2015, 22-year old Kalief Browder tied a cord to his neck, and pushed himself out of a hole in his wall to his death. When he was 16, Kalief had been sentenced to prison in Rikers Island for stealing a backpack-a crime he did not commit-and was charged with a "violent felony" [ ]. Despite a lack of evidence, Kalief was shipped to Rikers on a bus and endured torture, starvation, and abuse at the hands of guards and inmates. He did not receive trial until three years later.

The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial" [ ]. Forty-four states have enacted their own version of a speedy trial statute or a court rule in addition to this constitutional right; New York is one of them. In 1972, New York passed its own version of the speedy trial statute: CPL (Criminal Procedural Law) §30.30, also known as the "Ready Rule," which requires the prosecution to be "ready for trial" within an applicable time period.

The shocking case of Kalief Browder ushered in a sweeping effort to reform CPL §30.30. How many defendants like Kalief had spent months or even years waiting in maximum-security jails for trial only to be proven innocent? Yet, as politicians and legislators drafted bills and called for administrative overhaul, Kalief's legacy dims while the structural, discriminatory implications of New York's "speedy trial" statute live on.

Since CPL §30.30 was established, prosecutions have been quick to exploit the statute so that felony defendants often have to wait up to three years in jail for a day in court. As the Ready Rule merely requires the prosecution to be "ready for trial", prosecutors will state that they are "ready" within the timeframe, a condition that does not actually necessitate going to trial; prosecutions can thus delay trial without ever actually violating CPL §30.30. Moreover, the failure to clearly define what constitutes "trial readiness", as well as how the "speedy trial" time is determined from the time of the prosecution's declaration of trial readiness rather than from the emergence of the defendant's case, allow for further manipulation and delay. Thomas O'Brien of the New York Law Journal suggests, "the dismal reality is that, under the "ready rule" of CPL §30.30, delays in the prosecution of criminal cases are far worse than was the situation when it was enacted in 1972" [ ].

On top of its flawed provisions, the Ready Rule is also often employed selectively and is discriminatory against certain neighborhoods and minorities in New York City. According to a lawsuit filed by a group of Bronx defense attorneys in 2016, 2,378 misdemeanor cases had been pending for more than a year and 538 for more than two years in the Bronx. Defendants must wait an average of 642 days for a non-jury trial and 827 days for a jury trial. Each week, 800 new cases come into court and less than two, on average, get trial [ ].

Comparatively, defendants facing trial in Manhattan faced a relatively short wait. It is no coincidence that the Bronx is demographically more diverse, with 43.7% of its 1.5 million population being African-American and 56% Hispanic or Latino [ ]. With NYPD's history of racist policing, including the stringent enforcement of "Broken Windows" policing in the 80s and continued stop and frisk policies, it comes as no surprise that the constitutional guarantee of a "fair and speedy trial" is being denied to African-American and Hispanic communities. In fact, it is just another example of how systemic racism continues to be perpetrated by mass policing and incarceration: black and brown men and women cannot succeed when they are stuck in purgatory for years awaiting trial.

Despite the Ready Rule's glaring issues and due to the nature of partisan and state politics, both legislators and the New York State government are slow to make the necessary reforms to prevent another victim like Kalief from slipping into the cracks of a flawed justice system.

Former State Senator Daniel Squadron first proposed an amendment to CPL §30.30 in the form of Kalief's Law, which would reduce delays in prosecutorial readiness by requiring the prosecution to provide evidence that they are ready when declaring trial readiness, as well as requiring the court to approve exclusions when the prosecution states that they are "unready" after previously stating otherwise [ ]. Since then, the bill has been continually passed between House committees for overview and, though passed in the Democratic-majority Assembly (the equivalent of a House of Representatives for New York State), it has not passed in the Republican-majority Senate.

Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Jonathan Lippmann also announced administrative reforms intended to reduce the number of pretrial detainees after Kalief was released, but failed to gain support in the state assembly for two years [ ]. In addition, while New York has spearheaded a supervised release program in which a small number of approved defendants are released pretrial, it has simultaneously enforced strict eligibility requirements based on the nature of the crimes charged, the risk of failure, previous criminal history, failure to appear, and ties to the local community [ ].

Not only do these requirements apply to a very selective group-Kalief Browder himself would not have qualified-but they also discriminate against the very communities such programs were designed to serve. African-American and Hispanic-American communities like the Bronx have much higher instances of existing previous criminal histories amongst its population due to systemic racism, discrimination, and police brutality. How can we speak of reforming the speedy trial statute when teenagers like Kalief are being charged with felonies they did not commit? In order to tackle such issues, we must see the Kalief's tragic case as an important manifestation of the institutional racism that exists within New York's criminal justice system. Kalief was black, and because he was black, the criminal justice system failed him.

[vii] Goff, Liana M. "Pricing Justice: The Wasteful Enterprise of America's Bail System." Brooklyn Law Review 82.2 (2017): 881-916. 20 October 2017.

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Kalief Browder's Legacy: The Lie of New York's "Speedy Trial" Statute - Columbia Undergraduate Law Review

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In June of 2015, 22-year old Kalief Browder tied a cord to his neck, and pushed himself out of a hole in his wall to his death. When he was 16, Kalief had been sentenced to prison in Rikers Island for stealing a backpack-a crime he did not commit-and was charged with a "violent felony" [ ].

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National Constitution Center - The 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

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The 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

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In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

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Influenced by his activist father, photographer Frank Espada, and his own struggles with poverty, Martín Espada ’81 uses his poetry to speak for the downtrodden and the forgotten.

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The Ninth Amendment ensures that you don't lose certain rights just because they're not specifically granted to you or mentioned elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution.

It reads:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

By necessity, the amendment is a little vague. The Supreme Court hasn't explored its territory in depth. The court hasn't been asked to decide the amendment's merit or interpret it as it relates to a given case.

When it's incorporated into the 14th Amendment's broad due process and equal protection mandates, however, these unspecified rights can be interpreted as a general endorsement of civil liberties. The court is obligated to protect them, even if they're not explicitly mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution.​

Nevertheless, despite more than two centuries of judicial precedent, the Ninth Amendment has yet to be the sole basis of a Supreme Court ruling. Even when it has been used as a direct appeal in prominent cases, it ends up being paired with other amendments.

Some argue this is because the Ninth Amendment doesn't actually grant specific rights, but instead lays out how a myriad of rights that are not covered in the Constitution still exist. This makes the amendment harder to pin down in a judicial ruling by itself.

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe argues,

"It is a common error, but an error nonetheless, to talk of 'ninth amendment rights.' The ninth amendment is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution."

At least two Supreme Court cases attempted to use the Ninth Amendment in their rulings, though they were ultimately forced to pair them with other amendments.

U.S. Public Workers v. Mitchell (1947)

The Mitchell case involved a group of federal employees accused of violating the then-recently passed Hatch Act, which prohibits most employees of the executive branch of the federal government from engaging certain political activities.

The court ruled that only one of the employees had violated the act. That man, George P. Poole, argued, to no avail, that he had only acted as a poll worker on election day and as a paymaster for other poll workers for his political party. None of his actions were partisan, his lawyers argued to the court. The Hatch Act violated the Ninth and 10th amendments, he said.

At first glance, the 1947 Mitchell ruling as given by Justice Stanley Reed sounds sensible enough:

The powers granted by the Constitution to the Federal Government are subtracted from the totality of sovereignty originally in the states and the people. Therefore, when objection is made that the exercise of a federal power infringes upon rights reserved by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the inquiry must be directed toward the granted power under which the action of the Union was taken. If granted power is found, necessarily the objection of invasion of those rights, reserved by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, must fail.

But there's a problem with this: It has absolutely nothing to do with rights. This jurisdictional approach, focused as it was on the states' rights to challenge federal authority, doesn't acknowledge that people are not jurisdictions.

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Concurring Opinion

The Griswold ruling effectively legalized birth control ​ in 1965.

It relied heavily on an individual's right to privacy, a right that is implicit but not explicitly stated in the language of the Fourth Amendment's "right of the people to be secure in their persons," nor in the 14th Amendment's doctrine of equal protection.

Does its status as an implicit right that can be protected depend in part on the Ninth Amendment's protection of unspecified implicit rights? Justice Arthur Goldberg argued that it does in his concurrence:

I do agree that the concept of liberty protects those personal rights that are fundamental, and is not confined to the specific terms of the Bill of Rights. My conclusion that the concept of liberty is not so restricted, and that it embraces the right of marital privacy, though that right is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, is supported both by numerous decisions of this Court, referred to in the Court's opinion, and by the language and history of the Ninth Amendment. In reaching the conclusion that the right of marital privacy is protected as being within the protected penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights, the Court refers to the Ninth Amendment ... I add these words to emphasize the relevance of that Amendment to the Court's holding ...
This Court, in a series of decisions, has held that the Fourteenth Amendment absorbs and applies to the States those specifics of the first eight amendments which express fundamental personal rights. The language and history of the Ninth Amendment reveal that the Framers of the Constitution believed that there are additional fundamental rights, protected from governmental infringement, which exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically mentioned in the first eight constitutional amendments ... It was proffered to quiet expressed fears that a bill of specifically enumerated rights could not be sufficiently broad to cover all essential rights, and that the specific mention of certain rights would be interpreted as a denial that others were protected ...
The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution may be regarded by some as a recent discovery, and may be forgotten by others, but, since 1791, it has been a basic part of the Constitution which we are sworn to uphold. To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment, and to give it no effect whatsoever.

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Dissenting Opinion

In his dissent, Justice Potter Stewart disagreed:

...to say that the Ninth Amendment has anything to do with this case is to turn somersaults with history. The Ninth Amendment, like its companion, the Tenth ... was framed by James Madison and adopted by the States simply to make clear that the adoption of the Bill of Rights did not alter the plan that the Federal Government was to be a government of express and limited powers, and that all rights and powers not delegated to it were retained by the people and the individual States. Until today, no member of this Court has ever suggested that the Ninth Amendment meant anything else, and the idea that a federal court could ever use the Ninth Amendment to annul a law passed by the elected representatives of the people of the State of Connecticut would have caused James Madison no little wonder.

2 Centuries Later

Although the implicit right to privacy has survived for over half a century, Justice Goldberg's direct appeal to the Ninth Amendment has not survived with it. More than two centuries after its ratification, the Ninth Amendment has yet to constitute the primary basis of a single Supreme Court ruling.

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The Ninth Amendment: Its Meaning and Ambiguity

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The Ninth Amendment ensures that you don't lose certain rights just because they're not specifically granted to you or mentioned elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. It reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

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Aaron Klein, Cameron F. Kerry, Courtney C. Radsch, Mark MacCarthy, Sorelle Friedler, Nicol Turner Lee

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Promoting Democracy and Human Rights: Lessons of the 1990s

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Brookings Review article by Catharin E. Dalpino (Fall 2000)

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1I know that I shall meet my fate

2Somewhere among the clouds above;

3Those that I fight I do not hate,

4Those that I guard I do not love;

5My country is Kiltartan Cross,

6My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,

7No likely end could bring them loss

8Or leave them happier than before.

9Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

10Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

11A lonely impulse of delight

12Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

13I balanced all, brought all to mind,

14The years to come seemed waste of breath,

15A waste of breath the years behind

16In balance with this life, this death.

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The best An Irish Airman Foresees his Death study guide on the planet. The fastest way to understand the poem's meaning, themes, form, rhyme scheme, meter, and poetic devices.

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Summary

This was a significant revision of existing immigration laws, which greatly increased the number of people who could legally immigrate to the United States, and introduced provisions to facilitate the entry of specific groups for specialized work. The new law raised the ceiling on regular immigration (i.e. excluding refugees) to a flexible cap of 700,000 until 1995 and 675,000 thereafter. It also introduced the Diversity Visa lottery, which was designed for people who had been adversely affected by the preference system introduced through Hart-Celler Act of 1965. This allowed persons from any country that sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants over the past five years to enter a lottery for one of 40,000 diversity visas. Although initially intended to address a backlog of Irish, Italians and other Europeans, the lottery enabled a significant number of non-Europeans to immigrate. Applicants from African nations who lack the family relationships or skilled employment credentials to enter by the preference system have benefited significantly, receiving approximately 40% of diversity visas. The 1990 act also introduced the H-1B skilled worker visa program, allowing employers to apply to hire skilled workers using temporary visas. This increased the number of annual employment visas from 54,000 to 140,000. The Immigration Act of 1990 helped permit the entry of 20 million people over the next two decades, the largest number recorded in any 20 year period since the nation's founding.

The Act also provided Temporary Protected Status so that asylum seekers could remain in the United States until conditions in their homelands improved.

Presently, most H-1B recipients are Asians whose employment sponsors are in the computer and IT industries.

Source
Conference report filed in House (10/26/1990)
Immigration Act of 1990

Employment Based Immigration: Directs the Secretary of Labor to establish a labor market information pilot program for employment-based immigrants, effective for applications for certifications during FY 1992 through 1994. Requires the Secretary of Labor, under such pilot program, to determine labor shortages or surpluses in up to ten defined occupational classifications. Deems a labor certificate to have been issued if there is a labor shortage in an occupation. Permits such a certification even in an occupation with a labor surplus if the employer submits evidence of shortage for a specific job opportunity, based on extensive recruitment efforts.

Diversity Immigration: Sets forth diversity transition provisions for immigrant visas for certain groups, as follows. Provides specified numbers of immigrant visas, in FY 1992 through 1994, for aliens who: (1) are natives of foreign states that are not contiguous to the United States and that are identified as adversely affected by the 1986 repeal of the national origins quota system

H-1B Visa: Sets forth annual limitations on numbers in the following categories of H nonimmigrants: (1) temporary (redefined as specialty occupation) workers admitted on the basis of professional education, skills, and/or equivalent experience (H-1B category)

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Immigration Act of 1990 - Immigration History

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This was a significant revision of existing immigration laws, which greatly increased the number of people who could legally immigrate to the United States, and introduced provisions to facilitate the entry of specific groups for specialized work. The new law raised the ceiling on regular immigration (i.e.

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The Guatemalan genocide, Mayan genocide, or refers to the massacre of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan military government's counterinsurgency operations. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilian collaborators at the hands of US-backed security forces had been widespread since 1965 and was a longstanding policy of the military regime, which US officials were aware of.

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"For some poets, social class is the triangle in the orchestra, a distant tinkling," Martín Espada writes in his essay collection Zapata's Disciple (1998). "For me, the matter of social class is the beat itself, an insistent percussion." In more than a dozen poetry collections over nearly 40 years, Espada has stayed true to this urgent thrum, making music out of language that's both resolutely political and unfailingly beautiful. Some of his poems are born out of his own experiences: the son of a community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, Espada has worked in factories and as a bouncer, a reporter, a tenant lawyer, an activist, and a teacher. His words often reach far beyond his own life, giving glimpses of lives poetry too often overlooks, relating the stories and histories with humility, humor, and urgency. Espada's writing has earned him many accolades: he is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, an American Book Award winner, and a National Book Critics Circle nominee. Sandra Cisneros once called him "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors." Like Neruda, Espada is both accessible and versatile, writing poetry in which, as he so memorably puts it, "I pay homage, bear witness, act as an advocate, and tell secrets."

" Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper"
In this early poem, Espada relates his teenage experiences working in a printing plant. The "hidden cuts" on Espada's own hands serve as a powerful image for how capitalism alienates us from labor, disguising the human costs-the very real suffering-of even our most mundane and disposable objects. The detailed descriptions and emphatic line breaks here offer a kind of corrective to that alienation: they are as painstaking and "exact" as the work they evoke, and they suggest the knowing seriousness with which Espada puts pen to paper. If the poem offers a detailed reply to the title's query, it's also a powerful reminder of how often these questions go unasked or hang in the air, unanswered.

" The Meaning of the Shovel"
In this poem from Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), Espada brings his considerable powers of witness to bear upon Central America, where he traveled to aid the Sandinistas. Repetition and present-tense narration give the poem an almost physical immediacy, but its catalogic structure also allows Espada to pile up meanings and tones, tying divergent scenes to his digging, which makes this poem a kind of ars poetica. If the list here contains heartbreak and resilience, its concluding lines are ones of purposive fury, challenging inherited ideas about what work we value and why. Its final image-"the passport / in [Espada's] back pocket [saturated] with dirt"-is particularly pointed, considering US opposition to the left-wing Sandinistas: one can read it not just as an expression of solidarity but also as a rebuke of American imperialism.

"Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100"
The word alabanza means "praise" in Spanish, which is indeed what this poem offers as it celebrates an undersung, often invisible group: the immigrant service workers who keep US restaurants, hotels, and skyscrapers running. Espada's poem eulogizes their deaths in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 by documenting their lives and the specific textures of their day-to-day: "the kitchen radio" with its "dial clicked / even before the dial on the oven," the "yellow Pirates cap / worn in the name of Roberto Clemente," and the "stoves that glowed in the darkness ... like a cook's soul." Though the poem ends quietly, with its litany giving way, its last stanza enlarges the poem, envisioning a dialogue between "Manhattan and Kabul." It's a connection, forged in music and dance, that transcends borders, language, and even death.

" En la Calle San Sebastián"
Espada writes what June Jordan called New World poetry, building on the earthy, demotic foundations laid by Walt Whitman and later by Pablo Neruda. But this piece from Alabanza (2003) also has a Continental pedigree: it borrows its structure and intensity from "Son de negros en Cuba," a poem by the visionary Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Like its surrealist inspiration, Espada's poem is a praise song of place-Puerto Rico, in this case-and to its multicultural heritage. The insistent repetition and slant rhymes here (cobblestone / arrow, appear / beard) imitate both a heartbeat (that "drums in the chest") and the beat of the conga drum, whose importance in Latin music is (as the poem reminds us) inextricably bound up in the history of slavery.

" You Got a Song, Man"
Espada's collection The Republic of Poetry (2007), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, features numerous poems dedicated to other poets, including this elegy for his friend Robert Creeley. Inspired by an actual visit the two poets made to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the piece not only quotes Creeley but also channels him, imagining the wily poet alongside Thoreau, "loaning [him] a cigarette." If such a meeting feels whimsical, even comic, it's also representative of Espada's fluid sense of history, of how the past and present constantly reshape one another. In Espada's eyes, we see both Creeley and Thoreau differently, as vagabonds whose political power derived from their "all night conversation with the world."

" Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913"
Drawing on archival materials, this sequence from Espada's 2016 collection paints vivid (and often visceral) portraits of the "overcome heroes" of a major textile strike in Paterson, New Jersey. They're woven together not only by a common subject and red imagery but also by a formal conceit: each section puts the Petrarchan sonnet through narrative paces, with the volta marking a climax that the first octave sets up and the final sestet comments upon or contextualizes. The final sonnet puts the entire series in perspective, leaping forward in time to a later strike and offering the river as a figure for collectivity, for the history of struggle into which even the smallest actions feed.

" Letter to My Father"
Espada's father, a civil rights activist and documentary photographer, is a highly important figure in the poet's life and poetic work. In an earlier poem, for example, the elder Espada takes on an almost mythical dimension, dying and then coming back to life (" The Sign in My Father's Hands"). Here, in this powerful 2018 elegy, Espada has no illusions of return or salvation-as his father taught him, there is "no life after life"-but he imagines them anyway, in part to memorialize the man but also to fix attention on the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria "gutted" the mountains where Frank Espada was born, reducing its towns to a "Camp of the Forgotten," and in the poem's final lines, the poet wishes his father could confront President Trump the way he once dealt with neighborhood kids who stole cars. Though the poet's wishes cannot come true, his poem becomes its own kind of confrontation: an act of defiance that continues a family legacy of both might and mercy, of "swinging machetes" and "open hands."

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