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ANGELS ON EAGLES WINGS
BY REGINALD SINCLAIR LEWIS
Wednesday, August 20,1997,should have dawned with bright gold beams illumining the earth with a radiant warmth but instead,a battalion of gray-blanched clouds tossed a black sheet across the sky.
By mid-afternoon,a cold
steady rain pelted this rural corner of southwestern Pennsylvania.
An unmistakable air of
festivity and excitement hung over the landscape like wings of a giant
eagle.
On " Progress Drive",the main road leading to the sprawling super maximum prison in Greene county,which houses nearly two-thirds of Pennsylvania's death row inmates, ( Including Mumia Abu Jamal,and this writer ), a flock of hawkeyed reporters from the local ,national,and international press pushed and clawed for positions as over a thousand parents and and supporters of the 500 or more Bruderhof children slogged towards them on the final leg of the three-day, 30-mile march that would culminate in songs and prayers and speeches protesting the use of Capital Punishment in Amerikkka.
The air crackled with
the relentless hypnotic sound of flash bulbs exploding and video recorders
humming and pens noisily across paper.This was truly a memorable event:
The Children's Crusade
To Death Row.
Sometimes all it takes is a single newsworthy story to seize the publics imagination and stir the collective conscienceness of the people. Never in my wildest dreams had I envisioned being " The Inspiration" for the children's crusade, which galvanized a universal movement.
When the Spring Valley school students publicly protested the June 16, 1997 signing of my death warrant - which eventually led to my brokered stay of execution - almost overnight transformed them from ordinary schoolchildren to pint-sized activists who could not have known the glaring spotlight of media attention would cast them smack dab in the middle of the debate on Capital Punishment in the United States, and the world. It was a challenge they gladly accepted.
These were bright kids. The idea came to them to organize one huge march against the death penalty, an adequete (and big enough) platform to fully express their views on the subject. They hadn't the slightest idea of the gargantuan task that lay ahead of them. In the smoldering white heat of summer 1997, a time when most kids rode bikes, skipped rope, attended picnics, sold lemonade and splashed about in cool chlorinated pools - the Bruderhof kids had better things to do.
They sent out calls for
support over the internet, printed posters and fliers and distributed them
throughout the country.They made telephone calls to anyone who'd listen,
and knocked on every door they could find. The childrens
crusade was endorsed by enthusiastic supporters across the nation and around
the world - folks such as Sister Helen Prejean, author of
Dead Man Walking:
Jean Bertrand Aristide, former President of Haiti; Author Jonathan Kozol;
folk singers Pete Seeger and Tom Paxton; Tony Benn, Member of Parliament,
England; Michael S. Dukakis, former Presidential Candidate and 3 term Governor
of Massachussets; Amnesty International, Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney
General; Leonard Peltier, Native American political prisoner; a group of
catholic children in Ireland; the Maoist Internationalist movement,
just to name a few.
If the novelty of the idea of small children organizing a major civil march against the death penalty earned them the adoration and respect of the world community-also attracted some of their most vociferous detractors at home.The angry chorus of dissent reached a crescendo a day after three of the bruderhof kids appeared as guest on a popular local radio show.The children were encouraged to talk about their objectives of the upcoming march.
And talk they did.
They articulated their opposition to Capital Punishment with fervor and conviction-using their research and statistical findings to illustrate their point. They talked about the 23 or more people who were executed only later to be proven innocent,the 59 people,who,since 1970, were released from death row after they were also proven to be totally innocent. They discussed the draconian drug laws that targets specifically young blacks and latinos - and of course the racial inequity that fuels the machinary of death.
The host was amazed and astounded by the kids range of knowledge on the subject. They even seemed to understand the pain of families of a murdered loved one - and they saidthey wanted to stand with them, and extended an invitation for them to attend the march. A healing needed to be brought across this Country, the children said, and they hoped their march would be the beginning of that process.
The talk show asked the kids to share with the audience how they'd become involved with all this - and they told them it all happened after I'd written a Christmas play for their school - a gesture that touched them deeply and made us lifelong friends. The public should know about the unfairness of my conviction, they said,which was brutally racist. The station was bombarded with hate mail and threats-mostly from the surrounding counties with more racist groups than the entire south.
Of the 40,000 residents of Greene county -98 percent are white.
Everything but a child of God,they called those children.
They were accused of being used by the Bruderhof adults, who were nothing but a tax-evading, flag burning, draft-dodging, dope-smoking cult.
What do those kids know
about racism and politics and the court system or the death penalty? the
critics asked. And just what were those people doing up in
that hermetically sealed
"Compound", stockpiling
weapons? They had to be stopped.Put down. This group.
White resistance to the
children's march tragically mirrored the turbulence of the civil rights
era in the old south-the conjured palpable fear of " outside agitators"
sweeping into this sleepy small town,of fastidious reporters relentlessly
skulking about,asking questions.
The unheralded
intrusion peeled back the carapace of ugly racial hatred festering amid
the white male patriarchy of the Pennsylvania department of Corrections-and
threatened the livelihood of the " Good ole boys". The local Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan issued death threats to the children if they went ahead
with the march.
Then Warden Ben Varner threw up another hurdle: The children's request to march up Progress drive-the designated site of their concert-denied. So the youngsters sued.
It is very important to
us to march within sight of the prison," said Timothy Hochstetler,
an 8th grader who was
one of the young organizers of the march." To march thirty
miles and then stop in the middle of nowhere would be meaningless."
U.S. District Judge Donald J. Lee scheduled an emergency hearing. Both sides faced off. The expensive mouthpiece for SCI-Greene and the D.O.C. made a feeble argument about any demonstration on or near this prison posed a significant threat to its security.It would also create a potential risk of danger to the officers and staff.
The presence of an obstreperous crowd outside the prison could cause a riot among the prisoners. Complete mayhem. Not to mention the enormous cost to the taxpayers for crowd control.
"The postition taken by the State cannot satify any test of reasonableness," the Bruderhof lawyer argued. There is no factual basis for concluding that a march by a group of pacifists and their children on a road outside the drive leading to the State's most secure prison would pose any threat to prison security."
He could have easily made a case for religious persecution. There was sufficient evidence to support it. If he wanted to, he could have recounted the oral history of the Bruderhof movement founded in Germany in 1920, traced it to the 24 hours they were given to get out of the country by the nazi storm troopers, barely escaping, uprooted, and forced into exile because they opposed WWII and Hitler's brutal regime.
Fleeing from Liechtenstein, a tiny mountainous country, to England and finally to Paraguay, the only country that would take them. In the hegira, 256 men, women and children perished in their struggle. Decades later, they could have easily made the case for the rise of vicious fascism in this rural stretch of southwestern Pennsylvania, that the ignorant lilly-white populace were simply enraged by the Bruderhof's support for a host of unpopular charges - justice for the move 9, a new trial for Brother Mumia Abu Jamal, liberation of the Chiapa indians, the end to sanctions in Iraq and Cuba, the abolition of Capital Punishment in America - among others.
But the judge had heard enough. He said he needed time to consider the arguments and the briefs filed before he'd issue his decision - giving no hint in which way he'd rule.
But silence can be deafening, and tragically, often misinterpreted.
The prison took precautionary measures as if preparing for a counter offensive against some huge, well armed invaders. Steel barricades were put up to block access to the prisons grounds. A crack swat team deployed around the perimeter. Bomb squads put on tactical alert. Mounted police. Shields. Attack dogs. Pepper spray powerful enough to bring down a 2000 pound gorilla.
The Department of Corrections had followed closely the developments of the march on the internet - and some of the radical figures who might attend it worried them, they claimed.
But the children were determined to go ahead with the march, in spite of the imminent danger. No court ruling or executive decree that was unfavourable to them would prevent them from marching on this prison, this neo nazi gulag. In their little hearts and minds, they felt they were doing what God would want them to do; Stop the killings. Choose life. Even if it cost them their own.
They were too young to have experienced it - but they'd seen the horrid images of children being bitten by attack dogs, sprayed with water hoses and hauled off to jail in all those grainy black and white reels of Eyes On The Prize. And they'd read about the "Four Little Black Girls" in Birmingham Alabama, who were murdered when a bomb exploded in the 16th street Baptist church, on September 15, 1963. Their young innocent lives lost were sacrificed for the movement - and the Bruderhof children wanted to embody the spirit of those little black girls.
But three days before
the march, U.S District Judge Donald Lee announced his decision :
A march organized
by small schoolchildren can in no way compromise the safety of employees
of the securest prison in Pennsylvania. Such a ban violated the childrens
rights to free speech and peaceful assembly as mandated by the American
constitution. The right to freely express their views - no matter
no controversial - must be protected.
LET THE CHILDREN MARCH
!
It was the first day of the march ,August l8th.The huge procession of Bruderhof children and adults and the family and supporters of men on death row set off from the Farmington, Pennsylvania mountain enclave on their arduous trek through inauspicious redneck counties and on down rain-slicked highways.
"When I woke up that morning,
first I got up. Then I heard it : Rain !" exclaimed eight year
old Rosemarie Mommsen.
" On any other day I wouldn't really care but today was the childrens
crusade. We had been planning it for weeks and now it had to rain
! 'A little rain can't stop us' said my mom, and it didn't
!"
The bruderhof members adorned dazzling bright yellow tshirts with Childrens Crusade To Death Row etched in bold green letters across the front. They also wore sporty ball caps advertising their crusade logo. Meticulously woven flower wreaths decorated the hair of some of the bruderhof women and young girls. Tall signs of every shape,size and color lit up the dreary dark sky like glittering sequins.
From the outset of the march a vanguard of little soldiers unfurled a huge matching children crusade banner in olympic fashion as they trekked through the streets.
News helicopters hovered overhead, vying for airspace with the conspicuous police copters monitoring the marchers on the ground. There were reporters from the major American news stations: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and FOX Television. And they came from all over the world to see the little ones: Sky-TV, The BBC,( Which dispatched a film crew that captured the entire event) ,France, Swedish TV, Africa, Denmark,among other foreign news agencies.
The children were deluged with interviews. The reporters had to lean down to speak with them. When asked why they were marching, one kid said, "We are marching for life, justice and to abolish the death penalty and to free political prisoners"
With a State police escort and the Department of Transportation directing traffic, brightly painted 60's styled love and peace vans and buses winged out along route 40, to the funky uptempo beat of " We Are Marchin" and scads of beautiful songs the bruderhof children wrote and recorded for the event .The highway rocked and vibrated under the powerful acoustic speaker mounted on the lead bus.
They rolled into Uniontown. " Main street was ours," said one little angel.They held a rally outside the Fayette county courthouse,where three young black males were on trial for the Capital murder of a white woman-despite evidence that her murderer was a white man. As the songs and prayer-vigil ended,the jury told the Judge that they were hopelessly deadlocked-so the Judge declared a Mistrial. The marchers covered over ten miles the first day.
The second leg of their harrowing journey began on Tuesday, August 19th. The marchers made prayer and eat breakfast quietly before abandoning their campsite. Security was tightened. Uniontown proved to be a cold, inhospitable place. During the night a shot rang out-but noone was hurt. The procession next took the narrow stretch of Route 21. A rickety pickup truck displaying a confederate flag whisked past playing Dixie. Someone else hung a hangman's noose out the window of another vehicle and a knife glinted in the distance. Cars filled with rednecks crept past slowly. Cold dead eyes tossed daggers of white hatred. The signs posted along the ramps clearly advertised their consensus: Fry 'em all!" and " He that killeth any man shall surely be put to death".
They converged onto the yard area of Allegheny power's Hatfield station in Monongahela township. More songs ,prayers, and speeches.
Two more grueling miles.
By the third day, tension
rose to a fever pitch. The prison girded loins for a showdown.
The swelling crowd made
them nervous. The beautiful images of small children marching for
a cause was disseminated around the world-and hundreds of supporters drove
or flew to join them. A squadron of little bruderhof soldiers from
England to fly into the Country--but the officials were so afraid of these
little children they closed the Greene county airport.
Rain pounded the sprawling tundra. The prison was put on lockdown. Nothing moved on death row. The inmates refused food trays and went on strikes in support of the children. Outside, police on horseback galloped about. Swat teams poised. A gauntlet of stone-faced guards stood behind steel barricades stiffened as a hazy blur of small,sneaker-clad feet trudged towards them.
The kids handed out bouquets
of flowers to the gaurds. Some refused. Others accepted.
The kids said, "I love
you," They sang, prayed,and delivered speeches. A mixture of cold
rain and hot joyous tears streamed down their beautiful little faces.
They passed around the names of their death row pen of colorful balloons
with " Abolish the death penalty" and each of our names on them.
The balloons floated skyward,
soaring under the dark clouds like magnificent eagles spreading their wings.
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