George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery. And here in Charlotte, Jonathan Ferrell and Keith Lamont Scott. It seems to happen over and over in this nation, Black men killed by police or vigilantes without justification.
A new book, "We Refuse to Be Silent: Women's Voices on Justice for Black Men" highlights both the systemic dangers facing Black men in America and the intimate details of loving the Black men who face them. Local authors featured in the book will be discussing it on Wednesday at Park Road Books.
Joining Morning Edition host Marshall Terry is Angela Dodson, author and the book's editor.
Marshall Terry: We've all seen the headlines and heard many of the stories featured in this book. Why did you decide to approach the topic through this particular lens? Women's voices?
Angela Dodson: Well, it started back in 2014, when Michael Brown was killed. A lot of women I know were discussing that on social media, and some women were writing articles about it. So it was, you know, heavy on the hearts of a lot of women I know personally and one of the people listening to some of the conversations was a top New York agent named Marie Brown. And she encouraged me to propose an anthology about this subject that women could contribute to, and she encouraged me to write a book proposal for it. Women are important in particular because we are mothers and girlfriends, and aunties and teachers and our relationship to these Black men helps us to paint them as humans so that the world can see them as somebody's son and somebody's husband. That's why I think it's important that women speak up.
Terry: One section of this book deals specifically with the dangers Black men who are neurodivergent face. That's an aspect of this issue that just seems like compounded risk. Tell me why you included that focus.
Dodson: I included that focus partly because I'm the mother of four adopted sons and two of them have special needs. One of them is autistic, the other one has more learning disabilities and psychological problems. This is a very important community and I learned, learned by writing my essay, that up to half of the people killed by the police in the United States are disabled and they are more likely to be involved in some sort of police matter, and the outcome is more likely not to be good.
Terry: One of the authors in this book, Patrice Gaines, interviewed the mother of Jonathan Ferrell. He was the Black man and college football star who was shot and killed by police in Charlotte in 2014 while he was unarmed after a car wreck under circumstances that I don't think were ever fully explained. The police officer who killed him, Randall Kerrick, was charged with voluntary manslaughter, but the case ended in a mistrial. Tell me about what Patrice learned from Jonathan Ferrell's mother.
Dodson: Jonathan had not only wrecked his car, but he couldn't find his phone, apparently. And he had to climb out of the car through the back window. He was bloody. He went to a nearby house and knocked on the door. The woman had first opened it thinking it was her husband coming home from a night shift. And when she saw a Black man she slammed the door and called the police and said somebody was trying to break down her door. So he apparently had been walking away, and then when he saw the police, I guess he figured they were there to help him. And he walked toward them and was shot immediately.
What we learned from his mother was that he kind of had a premonition of his death at least 10 years earlier as a child. He once asked her to shoot him, but with his toy gun and he said that that's how the police were going to kill him. And in the days leading up to his death, he kept talking to his mother, as if something was going to happen to him. His mother said that she heard the voice of God say 'I need one of your children' a few weeks before his death and she believes that his death served a purpose in bringing attention to these kinds of deaths. So his life was not in vain.
Terry: We talked about this a bit a moment ago, but I think one thing that sets this book's approach apart is how it addresses both the systemic deep-rooted issues and the intimate personal issues in each family affected by violence against Black men. Why did you aim to create that blend?
Dodson: I think in some ways the blend just happened, but a lot of the women in this book wrote specifically for the book. I assigned them a topic or they proposed a topic so they would tell me their story, what they wanted to write about. 'I want to write about my son being stopped by the police.' 'I want to write about my son who has autism.' Others write about their sons' experience in school. They're very, very personal stories. You know, I think you have to do that to humanize this topic. The media paints our men as dangerous, and that's one of the reasons why some of these disasters happen. To picture them as living human beings that somebody loves and then there are pieces that I had to buy permissions to use. I read them in a magazine or some other publication. One of them is even the young lady who photographed George Floyd, Darnella Frazier. I bought a piece that she'd written on Facebook. It's the beginning essay in the book.
I think that voice of loving Black men and seeing them as people who are lovable is something that is generally left out of media in general. Several of the women write about the media's role specifically. So basically just to make them somebody's son, somebody's husband, somebody's nephew and tell their story — who they were and what they were about. And they are very human beings, that somebody misses and we've got to make the whole of society know who they are and make them miss them and make them humanized.
Angela Dodson is the editor of "We Refuse to Be Silent: Women's Voices on Justice for Black Men." Dodson along with local authors featured in the book will speak at Park Road Books on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.
Those featured authors include:
- Mary C. Curtis
- Patrice Gaines
- Dartinia Hull
