Spring Break in the Belly of the Beast

By Bryan McCann, AlterNet. Posted March 19, 2008.

It's easy to pity the Texas death penalty abolitionist. The Lone Star State is widely recognized as the "belly of the beast" when it comes to capital punishment. Since 1982, Texas has executed 405 individuals, more than the rest of the nation combined. Harris County, which includes Houston, would rank second in the nation for executions if it were its own state. Quite simply, no state in the union is more willing to administer lethal injections to the convicted. This would not be possible without broad statewide support for capital punishment, and an accompanying sense of "frontier justice" infused with the specter of Jim Crow.

Organizing against this state killing machine can be grueling -- even devastating. Yet there are reasons to press forward. Take the recent victory in the case of Kenneth Foster, Jr., a man sentenced to death for driving the car occupied by a man named Mauriceo Brown when he shot and killed Michael LaHood, Jr., in 1996. (Yes, sentenced to death for driving a car. Welcome to Texas). We saved Kenneth's life by building a vibrant and well-organized movement that left Gov. Rick Perry with no other choice than to, for the first time in Texas history, grant a commutation on the basis of grass-roots pressure.

Another reason for hope in Texas comes every March in the form of the Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break. Since 2005, high school and college students skip drinking on the beach with their friends to travel to Austin to participate in workshops, lectures and direct actions, all designed to train them to be better advocates for abolishing the death penalty. The annual event was founded by the Texas Moratorium Network and is currently run by Texas Students Against the Death Penalty, with the sponsorship of Campus Progress. Over the years, it has also enlisted the tactical support of legislative aids, lawyers, lobbyists and grassroots activists to help build and run events.

Scott Cobb of the Texas Moratorium Network has compared Spring Break to the Freedom Summers of the Civil Rights era. Like the northern activists who traveled south to fight segregation, Alternative Spring Break participants travel from across the country to ground zero in the death penalty fight, to both learn and contribute to the struggle. The death penalty has been shown time and again to disproportionately impact the poor and ethnic minorities, punish the innocent, and fail to deter crime. As I have told students in the debating workshops I have run in the past couple years, the death penalty is a microcosm of far deeper social problems and should be targeted as such.

Life and death lessons

I first hopped onboard the Alternative Spring Break in 2006. My group, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) accompanied the students to Huntsville, Texas, where a man named Tommie Hughes was scheduled for execution. On the bus down to Huntsville, where all Texas executions are carried out, members of the CEDP engaged the students in a debate about the value of vocal and political protest versus the traditional silent vigils that often take place outside the execution chamber. We all eventually agreed to lead the small crowd outside the Huntsville unit in protest chants up until the moment Hughes was to be killed. When the execution started, we would fall silent out of respect.

Across from the "Walls Unit," where executions are carried out, is the "hospitality" building. This is where the families of the condemned and their witnesses spend the day awaiting the 6 p.m. execution. We watched as Tommie Hughes' family left the small building for the much larger facility where they would watch their loved one die. Less than half an hour later, we watched them walk back. Tommie Hughes was dead. Texas had killed another. The students of the 2006 Alternative Spring Break had seen the reality of state killing up close.

The next year, the 2007 Alternative Spring Break coincided with Senate committee hearings on Texas' "Jessica Law," which would extend the death penalty to convicted child sex offenders. A number of high-profile death penalty opponents, including exonerated prisoners Kerry Max Cook and Shujaa Graham, helped out with the Spring Break and testified before the committee. Students also testified. Though Jessica's Law was eventually passed, the opportunity to speak truth to power in such a way, plus a rally downtown that concluded the spring break, were not in vain. The students who participated gained a real lesson in grassroots struggle through losses and victories.

See more stories tagged with: death penalty, capital punishment, alternative spring break, rodney reed, kenneth foster jr

Bryan McCann lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and a doctoral student at the University of Texas.

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