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Friend,
If you told Rasheid Davis when he was 23 and serving six years in prison for marijuana possession that he would become not only a successful small businessman but would lead marches in his town calling for criminal legal reform, he would have shaken his head.
If you told Saletheo Perez when he was a teenager with a gun that a quarter of a century later he would be a published poet, a furniture store owner and a local leader with the power to lift up his community, he would have scoffed.
And if you told Gail Wright Lowery, a 64-year-old public defender, that at her age she would find herself not only taking classes again but studying alongside the sort of people she had spent a career representing, she would not have been able to imagine just how much she would learn, not just from the classes, but from her classmates.
The three are among 22 fellows who will graduate this weekend from the first-ever Advocacy Institute, a series of education seminars created by the Southern Poverty Law Center to build advocacy skills among those most affected by systemic disenfranchisement. Selected for their desire to bring change to Mississippi, the fellows each have journeys to the classroom doors of the Institute that vary broadly. But their goals are the same: to wield their new skills at leveraging individual and collective power to fuel much-needed change.
“I didn’t really know, to be honest, that there was help out there for people like me just trying to change things in our neighborhoods,” said Davis, 44. “I thought it was all groundwork. When I see people around me with the same passion for helping people in the community that I have, well, I feel like I have found a family. Now that I’ve learned there are a lot of other people advocating for their communities, it’s opened doors to me that I didn’t know were there.”
The seminars, held on the campus of Tougaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi, are designed to open just those sorts of doors. Fellows receive stipends to participate and are taught by prominent policymakers, elected officials, advocates and attorneys the skills they need to grow their efforts in their communities. The SPLC plans to grow the Institute into a lasting training ground for new organizers, first in Mississippi and then throughout the Deep South, focused on community education and transformative change.
“The goal of the Advocacy Institute is to help grow and strengthen the capacity and network of advocates here in the state of Mississippi,” said Waikinya Clanton, the SPLC’s Mississippi state office director. “Through our program we offer the education, access and training needed to empower communities to effectuate change at a local level.”
Focusing on felony disenfranchisement
The Institute is one of a number of new initiatives and partnerships the SPLC is undertaking, as the organization founded more than 50 years ago builds on its landmark legal victories against discrimination, inequality and white supremacist groups to work more closely than ever in partnership with local communities.
With more than one in 10 adults in Mississippi denied the right to vote because of Jim Crow-era criminal disenfranchisement laws, this first series of seminars was geared toward increasing activist skills among formerly incarcerated people.
The SPLC’s Voting Rights Practice Group has been working to dismantle felony disenfranchisement in Mississippi and across the Deep South, marshaling its teams of lawyers to file lawsuits and its policy arm to support legislation to dismantle the laws that prevent many formerly incarcerated people from voting. But a deep need was seen by activists on the ground for instruction in pushing for change through protest, advocacy and organizing.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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