Concerned Citizens for Justice will host a conversation with Rev. Kenneth Glasgow about Mass Incarceration and the disenfranchisement of formerly incarcerated people on Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Bethlehem Center, 200 West 38th St.
Rev. Glasgow is the founder and organizer of the Ordinary People's Society. The event is co-sponsored by the Southern Movement Alliance and Project South.
“Our Turn to Dream,” is a 10 minute video of Rev. Glasgow and Michelle Alexander as a contemporary response to the March on Washington and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech.
The Ordinary Peoples Society represents part of the rising Southern Freedom Movement of today. TOPS works on the front lines of the failed drug war and inspires hope in a growing momentum for creating community change, said officials. They have been working against “moral turpitude” laws to help thousands of those convicted of felonies to get their voting rights back.
TOPS founder and organizer Rev. Glasgow participated in the Walk for Dignity, a 122-mile journey from Jacksonville to Sanford, Fla. to build community solutions to violence in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict.
“The failed 40 year war on drugs exposes a war on people," said Rev. Glasgow. "We call on the communities affected by racial profiling and mass incarceration to step forward and not be silent. For when you are silent, you become a co-conspirator in your own oppression.”
"In Hamilton County, as in the rest of the country, one indicator of the racism of mass incarceration is evident in the disproportionate numbers of those incarcerated," said Landon Howard with Concerned Citizens for Justice. "The black population of Hamilton County is 20.1 percent, but in December 2013 the black population of Silverdale Correctional Facility was 44.6 percent."
Through this conversation with Rev. Glasgow, Concerned Citizens for Justice hopes to begin the process of solidifying concrete ways Chattanoogans, and all Tennesseans, can contribute to the work of ending the system of mass incarceration.