Let My People Go
An Interview with Herbert Thompson
by Marianne Arbogast

On April 7, 2001, Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African-American youth, was fatally shot by a police officer in Cincinnati, becoming the sixth African-American to be killed by Cincinnati police in little more than a year. The shooting sparked three days of rebellion. On April 23, Bishop Herbert Thompson, Jr. of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio, released a statement in response to the shooting. Titled "Let My People Go," the statement places the incident in a broad historical and social context, and challenges a criminal justice system that profits from incarcerating increasing numbers of people, largely from black and hispanic populations.

Marianne Arborgast: What have the churches in Cincinnati done to respond to the struggles that the city has faced in the past year?

Herbert Thompson: The church — both the Episcopal church and the larger community of churches — have been very much engaged in this matter – the shooting of Timothy Thomas and the unrest and turmoil in the city that resulted. Clergy were the ones on the streets when the place was exploding — our own cathedral clergy were among those who were out there helping to bring some calm and order and to put themselves physically as a buffer between the angry young people and the blue line of police. They went from being in the streets directly to being in the churches talking with one another, calling the community into conversation around this. The film, "The Color of Fear," that addresses the whole issue of race and racism in America has made the rounds all across the city. So there have been living room dialogues and those kind of things going on, to help people to look at ourselves and to try to understand one another better.

This could have happened anywhere, because I think that every urban area has the same ingredients in its mix that made for the shooting of Timothy Thomas. I think every community needs to address those issues. But Cincinnati has an extraordinary history because it sits right on the border of Kentucky. Cincinnati is in one of those border states where slaves passed through on the underground railroad going up into Canada and on to freedom. And it’s also a place where the fugitive slave laws were enacted to take slaves back into the south. So Cincinnati has this ambivalent history and from the 1820s and 30s onward has had these eruptions in its life around racial issues – most recently around the death of Martin Luther King in 1968. It’s not sure whether it’s a southern city looking north or a northern city looking south, and that makes for a certain kind of a dynamic in regard to race.

Marianne Arborgast: In your statement, you said that the first thing that needed to be addressed was racial profiling. Has there been any attempt by the churches to facilitate a way to address that?

Herbert Thompson: There is a racial profiling suit that is being addressed through the Department of Justice and the city is highly invested in that. There has been a mediation group that’s been meeting at the cathedral that has grown out of that. And what it’s done is to try to call many people in the community together — a couple hundred people or more — from various sectors of the city to look at this whole matter and then to make some recommendations.

Someone asked whether the September 11th event and now the profiling of Middle Eastern people will kind of take the heat off the racial profiling around black young people. I’m not sure. Either one is a problem for our society and I think we have to be vigilant to say in every way we can that the profiling of people of any kind is something that we cannot tolerate as a free society.

Marianne Arborgast: The statement that you issued a few weeks after the shooting is a very strong indictment of the whole criminal justice system in this country. Why did you feel it was important for people to reflect on the events in Cincinnati in that larger context?

Herbert Thompson: Because I think that we are not aware of the fact that the racial profiling phenomenon as it manifests across the country really is driven by a larger phenomenon, namely the prison industrial complex, and the fact of having two million people in prison, and prison being such a growth industry that cities and communities are vying to have them built in and around their own communities for the sake of the economy. And if you’re going to build it, then you have to put somebody in it. And how do you do that? Well, the way it works in American society — it may not be an actual thought-out methodological thing – but the way it works is the racial profiling phenomenon. And so they shot Timothy Thomas because he had 14 outstanding warrants. Well, not one warrant did he have that was more serious than a traffic violation — driving without a seatbelt. What happens is that these young black men are stopped by the police and if they can’t find anything else for which to charge them, they charge them for a violation like that. And you accumulate enough of those and you become someone who is wanted by the police and a candidate for prison. So it begins to create a population out there who are part of the feeder system for the prisons. And that’s why I wrote it, to make people aware of this insidious thing that we have developed, built and honed almost to a fine art here in this country.

Marianne Arborgast: I was struck that you talk about the prison system as a modern form of slavery – you say that America’s prisons are the "leading edge of the continuing fault-lines of the racial divide that runs all across our nation." It would seem to follow that trying to change this system is key to any progress toward racial reconciliation in this country.

Herbert Thompson: Exactly. As long as we have a system in place that has two million people who are being warehoused and not rehabilitated, then at some point turned back out into society, then returned back to prison again, what happens is you get a group of people who are profiled either as prospective prisoners, or ex-prisoners, or somehow identified with the prison population – because more than 80 percent of that population are African-American and Latino young men and women.

Marianne Arborgast: You say we have to begin the movement toward decarceration and dismantling of the prison industrial complex. How do you think we can begin to do that? Are there efforts to create alternatives that seem hopeful to you?

Herbert Thompson: Well, yes. I was at a prison just yesterday, we were called in to work with a particular young man and to have this young man placed not in prison, but under house arrest. The situation is such that he does not need to be in a prison, with all that that means in terms of the possibility of harm to him and also his carrying that particular stigma. I think that we have a huge number of people in prison who are no risk to our society. It does us no harm to have those people in some other kind of context.

We also are working on trying to head off the business of incarcerating our young people in the first instance, so that juveniles who are charged with a misdemeanor don’t even get a record, and there is more likelihood of their growing up without being incarcerated, or being an ex-convict with all that that means.

Marianne Arborgast: Many people are saying that with the war on terrorism, Congress will be asked to cut social spending even more to increase military spending. In your statement, you attach so much importance to addressing issues like education and housing and unemployment. Do you think that this will make things worse?

Herbert Thompson: I think it’s going to take the focus off those matters. We’re seeing it already in New York City – the mayor is talking about the budget for the days ahead, and so much of the work will be on the rebuilding of the city that the ordinary stuff of the city’s life — like education, for example – will not be given attention. That will probably be also true for the country and that’s too bad.

Marianne Arborgast: Maybe the most startling change that you advocate is the de-criminalization of drugs. How did you arrive at that conviction?

Herbert Thompson: Well, I first heard that addressed by a bishop, the suffragan bishop of New York, Walter Dennis. I was a priest in New York at the time. And when Walter said it, I was shocked and I could not agree. But over the years, as I have seen this phenomenon move into our communities with a virulent force, and recognized that whole nations have been sucked into its lifestream, this drug culture ... What is Colombia’s chief export today? Drugs. Places like Nigeria and Jamaica – even Afghanistan. A major part of the economy is the growing of opium.

Marianne Arborgast: I just read that Pakistani intelligence services forced farmers in Afghanistan to plant opium to fund the war against the Soviet Union, and that now it’s the major source of heroin on the streets in the U. S.

Herbert Thompson: Isn’t that extraordinary? It’s ironic and extraordinary, but we have created an economy around drugs that makes billions of dollars that goes to support the economy of nations, and therefore it’s got to have customers. And I think now that the legalization of some of these drugs will as least take out of it the high profit, and make it less attractive to people to be involved in it.

There is a book written by a man named Claude Brown, titled Manchild in the Promised Land. He made it through the gang and the drug stuff on the streets of New York City, in Harlem, and went on to college and became a social worker, but then would go back to the community to talk to the young people about their lives, about going back to school and making something of themselves and making a contribution. And a kid asked him, "How much money do you make?" And he said, "Forty to 50 thousand dollars a year." And the kid said: "You mean you work all year long and all you make is 40 or 50 thousand dollars? And you’re telling me to stop what I’m doing so I can become like you?"

Marianne Arborgast: And probably for many of them, the choice isn’t even 40 or 50 thousand dollars, it’s more like minimum wage at McDonald’s.

Herbert Thompson: Exactly. So if you legalize the stuff and take out the high profit incentive that there is for these young people — and you’ve got some places where kids are selling drugs and supporting the whole family – I think we can begin to change something of the dynamic that consumes their lives and draws them into the system — makes them drug addicts, make others drug addicts because they’ve got to sell it. There’s this whole way of life where you begin to seduce kids into using it at a younger and younger age to get more customers. We’ve got to cut that off.

Marianne Arborgast: What kind of response have you received to your statement from the larger church – from the other bishops, for instance, or from people in your own diocese and elsewhere?

Herbert Thompson: I have been amazed. The response has been overwhelming. We printed 20,000 of these. We have gone through that and have put out another 20,000. People are using it all across the church. I just got back from New Zealand – I went for their synod meeting of our companion diocese. They have copies of it and they’re using it down there. The situation that we have here in our country with the prison industrial complex is an international phenomenon as well.

Marianne Arborgast: Do you have any specific thoughts as to what churches might be doing to begin to address some of these issues in concrete ways?

Herbert Thompson: Well, what is happening here in Cincinnati is we recognize that we have to change the whole culture of the police department in this city. That is not an easy task, but it can be done, because in the end they are civil servants and they work for us and they are there to protect us. And so it’s a matter of churches and citizens working to reclaim those aspects of life in their communities that belong appropriately to them and are accountable to them. We have in Cincinnati, on the coming ballot for the November election, an amendment to our charter – because currently in our city a chief of police and those in the upper command can only be appointed or promoted to those positions from within the department, which means that you get the same culture over and over again. So there is an amendment calling for a change in the charter to allow for the appointment of a police chief and those second in command from outside. [Ed. note: The amendment was passed on Nov. 6.] The churches are, for the most part, behind that ballot initiative. I think that it’s an important one, and I think that it will help to change not just the police department, but the culture of Cincinnati as well. Because it will say to our community that we are serious about change and that we cannot continue in the same way.

Marianne Arbogast, who lives in Detroit, is The Witness’ Associate Editor.