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Friend,
When it feels like justice is an ocean away, sometimes you have to cross the water.
A soft-spoken 19-year-old named CJ Jones and his dad will do just that next week. They will fly from their home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Geneva, Switzerland, to tell the United Nations what officials in CJ’s native state didn’t want to hear: that the teenager’s high school years were cut short, and his future nearly derailed, by a school disciplinary system with a history of disproportionately and arbitrarily punishing Black students.
Accompanied by a delegation from the Southern Poverty Law Center from April 16-19, the pair will address the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. They will share a story all too common: of a Black student punished and forced out of school for a minor, unproven offense. In CJ’s case, school officials claimed he was in possession of a small amount of marijuana found in a car parked at the school. But the then-high school senior was a passenger in the car, no evidence ever tied him to the drug, and the police eventually charged someone else.
What should have been a triumphant senior year as a star of his high school baseball team devolved instead into a time of loneliness and mistrust. CJ, whose full name is being withheld because he was a minor at the time of the incident, was warehoused at in-school suspension for months without due process. Then, he was told after a school hearing – at which he was not allowed to tell his story, be represented by a lawyer or present evidence – that he was being sent to an “alternative” school. He withdrew instead and finished his degree requirements through a home-schooling program.
“Nobody, nobody was listening to me,” CJ said. “I told them the truth, and nobody listened.”
The U.N. may seem an odd forum for the SPLC to speak on injustices levied by school districts in the U.S. But the SPLC’s upcoming participation in the forum is part of an evolving strategy to use the power of international condemnation to shine a light on the enduring injustices at home.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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