Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, African American & Black, history, None, Discrimination
ISBN: 9781538737828
Google: guswzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2021-11-15T23:45:42.558915+00:00

The Road to Prison is Paved with Hopelessness

Brenda Jacobs was walking across the street of her North Philadelphia neighborhood, munching on fried fish, cradling her six-month-old son, Qadree, in her arms.

Her cousin waited on her front porch. Suddenly, Brenda fell. Her cousin ran to catch the baby.

Brenda Jacobs was dead at twenty-eight. She choked on a fish bone.

Years later, Qadree Jacobs would blame himself for her death after drunk relatives told him repeatedly that his mother was headed across the street to show him off. Then when he was nineteen, Jacobs finally asked his mom’s cousin what happened that day, and she told him his mother was coming over to finish a conversation she didn’t want anyone to hear: She was going to take her kids and move away from Jacobs’s father, a heroin addict, fleeing from him and a house crowded with alcoholic relatives. If Brenda Jacobs had lived, perhaps her son’s life would have been completely different, devoid of poverty, neglect, sexual abuse—and prison.

For a while, the family remained in the house Brenda had owned, a total of thirteen people in a one-bathroom house. When Jacobs was five, his father stopped using drugs and came home and told his sons, “Pack up your things. We got a house.”

They put their belongings in a grocery cart and walked to another house nearby. For the first week or so the new house didn’t have electricity or water, but the boys were happy because the crowd was gone, and their father wasn’t using drugs.

“We painted the walls. We had candles,” said Jacobs. “We made it our home.”

His father worked for a city councilman and took his sons to political rallies.

“We met Jesse Jackson and Bishop Desmond Tutu—and had a car,” said Jacobs.

Then things began to change again. Jacobs remembers watching four people at a time go into the tiny bathroom and stay for what seemed like hours. Eventually, after seeing his father sit in a chair and nod all day, he came to know that the people he saw were shooting up heroin in their bathroom and that his father had started shooting drugs again. The house fell apart, and his sons were neglected. Jacobs grew angry with his father.

“I thought he chose drugs over us. But now I think: He put a roof over our heads and taught us to not let anything come between us. I don’t know what his demons were.”

Jacobs’s father was born to a teenage mother and a father who was married to someone else and didn’t acknowledge him. The elder Jacobs was a teenager when he met his father. He grew up with three siblings in a Philadelphia high-rise housing project, hustling—first legally—from the time he was in first grade, stocking store shelves and shining shoes, then later turning to illegal hustles, selling fake gold rings, picking pockets, and burglarizing.

But Wayne Jacobs had one experience in seventh grade that would hint at the potential he possessed and the joy it could bring him. He joined

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