Connecticut Bail Fund helps chart more equal path

Last weekend, the Connecticut Bail Fund bailed out 10 people to mark Father’s Day and Juneteenth, and there’s a lot more to come, according to Brett Davidson, founder and co-director of the group.

Protests have rolled across the country and state in places as disparate as Greenwich and Higganum after people watched a May video of George Floyd dying beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. The officer, Derek Chavin, has since been charged with second-degree murder. Three officers who stood by while Floyd died face other charges. The Minneapolis police chief has called Floyd’s death “murder .” The accused officer’s lawyer has chided bystanders for not stepping in.

The protests are one thing, but actions speak louder, and few know that better than people who have been in the trenches pushing for equality. As Davidson says, “When you talk about moving from sentimentality, protest can serve as catharsis for white people.” And this isn’t about catharsis.

The fund, which was organized in 2016, posts bail for people in pretrial detention, so that people who’ve been imprisoned can be at home, continue to work, and prepare their defense. The fund also works with immigrants, families and women affected by the prison system.

If you are a Black person in Connecticut, you are 8.56 times more likely to be held in pretrial detention as a white person, according to Semilla Collective of New Haven and the bail fund. If you are Hispanic, you are four time more likely than a white person to be held in pretrial detention. Some 500,000 people – the majority of them people of color -- await trial in jail because they cannot afford bail. That might mean days, weeks, or months of incarceration, all for the lack of a few thousand dollars.

And so the impact of Floyd’s death has been felt acutely at bail funds around the country. Some 100,000 people have donated to the fund in the last month or so, said Davidson.

The donations have come from all over, including from a group of white Connecticut women who decided they needed to do something. The women, some of whom had earlier formed a grassroots organization, Forward CT that is one part education, one part advocacy, reached out to Kamora Herrington, of Kamora’s Cultural Corner, a Hartford-based organization that provides, among other services, cultural humility workshops. Cultural humility suggests a respectful approach to other cultures, with an eye on one’s own bias. The term dates to the late ‘90s.

Forward CT has been worked with My Sister’s Place, a Hartford women’s shelter, and issues around immigrant families, said

Carrie Lenarcic Firestone, an author and one of the group’s founders. She estimates they’ve raised upward of $100,000 for various causes.

The education part has been key, she said. “One of our big things with donations is you don’t just throw a bunch of stuff a somebody,” she said. “We want to be efficient about it.”

As we are in a pandemic, Herrington held the session for 50-some women via Zoom, she said. At first, some of the women were hesitant to speak out of fear of saying something wrong, but Herrington is a skilled facilitator and that hesitancy went away, said Firestone.

“Coming from a Black queer Afrocentric perspective carries an ‘I suffer no fools’ attitude necessary today if we're going to move forward,” said Herrington. “White folks (as a whole) do not have the language or cultural context to enter into conversations of anti-Black racism in the U.S.A. Add to that cultural norms of respecting niceness and understanding that we don't discuss unpleasant topics and that it is OK to agree to disagree and you've got an entire group of folks who enter the conversation from the wrong door.”

When the session ended, the women wanted to do something, and when Herrington suggested they consider donating to the Connecticut Bail Fund, the meeting went quiet.

Consider the historic role of white women in black men’s incarceration. There is no faster way to get the attention of authorities than for a white woman to say a black man somehow crossed her path. That has been a foolproof method of removing a black man from circulation. See “Birth of a Nation,” Emmett Till, or Connecticut’s own Joseph Spell, a Black employee of a Greenwich white woman who accused him of rape in 1940. (One of Spell’s lawyers was a young Thurgood Marshall.)

But something’s shifted. See Christian Cooper.

A donation won’t ameliorate generations of abuse of police power, but after an initial moment of quiet the women were enthusiastically onboard. Firestone and others began researching the bail system in Connecticut. The women decided to post their plan on social media, but added informative graphics to what they called the Angry White Women’s Father’s Day Bail Project. They reached out to the bail fund, and then they began spreading the word.

Their education mirrored Davidson’s, who started the fund after learning about similar funds around the country. He, too, educated himself about related issues such as immigration and migrant justice. You cannot talk about defunding the police without talking about inequities in job opportunities. You cannot talk about bailing people out when they end up homeless, and their families are left to manage without their financial and emotional input. You can’t talk about any of this without talking about building strong communities. Donations are a start. Education is key and then? We must act.