As a historian, it is brings me joy to see through the window of the past and report to our world what I observe.
Yet, if looking back at history brings me joy, then seeing people make history in the present leaves me spell-bound. I not only take pride in developing my intellectual and methodological ability to view and reveal the past, and use the lessons of the past to examine the present and shape the future. I take pride in developing my intellectual and methodological ability to see through the atmosphere of the present to identify when someone is making history, when something is historic, or even could become historic.
As a historian of Black student activism, I am seeing history, witnessing something historic taking place at Howard University. In February 2011, a group of students organized Students Against Mass Incarceration, which they call SAMI for short with the “I” pronounced “E” and “SAM” pronounced like the prominent name.
I had first learned of this organization during the international campaigns to secure a new trial for Troy Davis, who was executed last fall for allegedly killing a white off-duty Georgia police officer. Recently, I gained a thorough education about this group at the National Council for Black Studies conference in March.
The more I learned about this organization, the more I contextualized them in the current moment of mass incarceration as the principle injustice decimating Black America, the more I realized that this organization was/is/will be historic.
We have student organizations challenging racism in higher education. We have student organizations opposing war and budget cuts. We have student organizations protesting against Wall Street and poverty. And all of these organizations are indispensable, dynamic, creative, and necessary for change. But racism in higher education has long been a problem in this country, and Black students have been organizing against it for more than a century. Students have opposed every war, and have been crusading against budget cuts, poverty and the excesses of capitalism for more than a century.
Yet, mass incarceration is a relatively new phenomenon. It is The New Jim Crow, as Michelle Alexander titled her popular book on the subject. When one out of three Black men are in jail, on parole, or in prison (compared to 1:27 white men), and many of them are legally disallowed from voting, financial aid, and public housing; when they are legally discriminated against in employment; when racial profiling, as in the case of Trayvon Martin, is widespread and legal; when the budding privatized prison industry and American corporations using prisoners as sweatshop workers are lobbying for tougher laws and more prisoners to increase their wealth; when local communities are lobbying for prisons to be built in their backyards to increase their job base, public resources and voting power through a higher local population with the disenfranchised prisoners — well, this mass incarceration, has become the problem of this century.
