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Friend,
Ian Manuel. Haifa Jabara. Taylor Dumpson. Names you probably don’t know unless you closely follow hate crimes committed in the U.S. and torture in American prisons.
Names that represent how basic human rights are denied to many Americans.
“I remember being in prison and reading about the outrage over Abu Ghraib and thinking, ‘Where is the outrage here? This is happening in America,’” Manuel told the Southern Poverty Law Center, referencing the Iraqi prison where U.S. soldiers abused detainees.
Manuel was 14 years old when he was sentenced in 1991 to life in prison without parole for a crime that was not a homicide. For 18 of the 26 years he was incarcerated in Florida, Manuel was held in solitary confinement, where he was abused by corrections officers and saw “people kill themselves and be killed.”
Jabara nearly lost her life in 2015 when a next-door neighbor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, drove his car into her after years of harassing her family with ethnic slurs and threats because of their Lebanese heritage. When her assailant was released from jail on bond without notice to her and her family, he murdered her 37-year-old son in a vicious hate crime.
Dumpson was an American University student in Washington, D.C., when on her first day in office as the first elected Black student body president in 2017, a masked man hung nooses with bananas around campus. The bananas were inscribed with racist language and the letters of Dumpson’s predominantly Black sorority. That act of intimidation was followed by a relentless online harassment campaign led by a notorious neo-Nazi on the hate website Daily Stormer. That year, she became a hate crime statistic as one of the more than 7,175 reported victims.
“The physical hate was first, but it’s important because it made the cyber harassment that much more intimidating,” Dumpson said. Six years later, she still carefully monitors online threats against her and reports the serious ones to state and federal law enforcement.
“Hate is a live landscape that follows you,” Dumpson said. “Anytime I move to a new jurisdiction, I tell state and local law enforcement of my experience – that threats against me are not made by a ‘lone wolf’ but are part of my life.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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