All the candidates got their few minutes with the microphone. Two or three of them hit me for not having been a prosecutor. When they did, my campaign strategist Brandon Evans watched a woman open her purse, pull out a 3 × 5 card, and apparently write down my name. By her side, others were writing something on their candidates’ lists at the same time. Much later, Brandon told me that was the moment when he realized we just might win, even though our traction was uncertain. We were doing okay in the wards, among people who followed and participated in local politics. But what about the unlikely voters, and not just the activists I knew? What about the political outsiders who hadn’t marched and protested but who might come out to vote if they were excited?
Using a combination of old-school political craft like door-to-door canvassing and new-school tactics like mass texting and social media–based campaigning, which are particularly effective with young and Black voters, my activist friends were proving they did politics better than politicians. Doors opened for our canvassers. People responded to our texts. Our message was welcome, and we could feel it resonating. We were close, three weeks out. A supportive union, the carpenters, conducted a poll that had us basically tied for first, with a margin of error that meant we were first or second. It was our first poll of the campaign. The other leading candidate in the race had big support from centrist politicians, had raised a lot more money, and had announced his campaign several months before we did. But the poll said we were even with him. Our campaign was no longer “hilarious.” The message was spreading.
With just six weeks to go, other candidates focused on paid media. Two well-funded contenders produced TV commercials attacking each other. It’s likely their political operatives had written and produced the commercials weeks prior, when our campaign was not viewed as the threat it became. It’s also likely that both candidates wanted to believe their money would turn into votes. Money was among their strengths, so they believed in it. One of them had spent $1.2 million of his own money on his campaign, while our campaign had raised a few hundred thousand dollars from several hundred donors. We couldn’t afford television commercials. We watched the ads on television. I was intimidated by the other candidates’ ability to pay for TV advertising and amused by the fact that, as the two candidates punched each other, they left us alone. They were hurting each other, but helping our campaign.
With twenty-one days to go, our campaign started getting support from outside groups. It helped. I hated the corrupting role money played in politics, but I had no way as a voice for broke people seeking local office to raise much money myself in a broke big city, especially with my platform. In a political game that too often works better for money and power than it does for marginalized people, outside money can level the playing field—at least until we change the troubled rules of the game.
In Pennsylvania, in 2017, the law allowed people or groups that were not coordinating their efforts with a campaign to spend whatever they wanted on attacking or supporting it. A political action committee called the Safety and Justice PAC, funded at least in part by liberal billionaire George Soros, decided to support my campaign. I didn’t know it was happening. The PAC had already supported several other progressive candidates for chief prosecutor in other jurisdictions. Mailings, radio ads, and television ads were imagined, written, and produced without my knowledge or input from me or anyone else in my campaign. The PAC bought airtime without our knowing it. Members of the PAC were so meticulous about avoiding even the appearance of coordination between my campaign and their activity that their mailings supporting my campaign went to other houses on my block, but not to mine. My next-door neighbor was the first person to tell me there was a mailing. It was the first time I knew support would come at all, much less what it would say.
The first time I saw the mailing, I thought I was doomed. It focused on my work defending Occupy and Black Lives Matter activists. I was proud of that record. But wasn’t my message radical enough already? Wasn’t this a step too far, when polling showed we were so close? The answer was no. After the ads started, for the first time I found that people I had never met knew me before I entered the door for public forums. Some talked to me about our platform even before I spoke about it. Strangers wanted selfies before the event. Our message had already resonated. But the media ads and mailings were amplifying a solid message across the city. Momentum was building.
It was April 30, 2017, two weeks before the primary election. I was suited up and walking in the bright midafternoon sun to the front door of the district attorney’s office, a place that looks directly at City Hall. I was by myself, walking toward the power that was waiting outside the office’s doors. I didn’t understand how much the power was going to help me, because the power was itself different.
Retired city council member Marian Tasco, at close to eighty years of age, was the power. Born in 1937 in the South, she taught school as a young woman but gravitated toward politics. She was a born political phenomenon from her early years for her command of the political army that first swept Black political power into office in Philadelphia, culminating in the election of Philly’s first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, Sr., in 1984. Four years later, in 1988, Tasco was elected to the city council for the first of eight consecutive terms. She chose to retire in early 2016 and turn the city council seat—and, at least nominally, the ward—over to Cherelle Parker, a mentee she had embraced as a teen, ever since spotting Parker’s fiery eloquence during a high school oratory contest.
Marian Tasco is a diminutive, charming, affable woman known for her lifelong love of dancing the night away and lack of interest in candidates’ connections. But she was mostly known for the power of her political influence, usually wielded to help vulnerable people, and mightily exercised as the ward leader of “the Mighty 50th Ward,” which under her command became the city’s biggest single vote-generating ward. Marian and her 50th Ward were also the persuasive leaders of a coalition of several of the highest-turnout wards in the diverse, liberal Northwest section of the city.
The sidewalk outside the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office on a sunny afternoon was Tasco’s deliberately provocative choice for a press conference, her polite way of telling everyone exactly how things were going to be.
One after another, nearly every prominent elected Black and brown woman politician in the area came to the stage in brightly colored suits, many in heels. They were dressed in pink, yellow, white, teal, baby blue—like a flower garden in full bloom the day before May first—a bold contrast to the male politicians who were staying noncommittal in their suits of navy and gray. The women, and the message they were about to send, were hard to miss, which I’m sure is exactly what Tasco planned.
As the women spoke, briefly and forcefully, one by one, their reasons became clear. Two had been schoolteachers. Many were mothers. All of these elected officials had answered the late-night calls of their troubled constituents when tragedy struck their families from both ends of a gun. They knew where the people’s money belonged—in prevention, meaning education mostly, but also in treatment and economic development that could beat back poverty. Increasingly, public resources had been hijacked to pay for jail cells, and they wanted it back. They wanted to lock up people who did vicious things, but even then they wanted the process to be accurate and to be fair. They had lived the reality of criminal injustice and racial injustice, had seen it in their homes, their families, their classrooms, and the lives of their constituents and sororities and places of worship. They wanted change and had decided to use their power now rather than hold back in an uncertain election for district attorney, where most of the male politicians were unaffiliated.
My task was to say little during the sunny sidewalk press conference, which I achieved, as one powerful woman after another endorsed our campaign, lauded our dedication to fairness, and commended our platform with superlatives as proof of why Philadelphians should vote for me.
In Philly politics, this was nuclear power. Not only was the Mighty 50th and its coalition of wards on board, but a big and influential swath of Black sorority power, church power, and community power was there, planting its brightly colored flag at the very door of the district attorney’s office.
I didn’t see what was happening behind me, but was later told that several DAO employees had trickled out the front door and stepped into the press conference, not realizing what awaited them. Most of them hurried off as they exited. A few smiled and stayed.
A few days before the May 16, 2017, primary election, I was standing in the dark outside the entrance to the First Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street near Twenty-first, a liberal church that has a rich history in an affluent, mostly white part of town. There were Black Lives Matter banners hanging on the church’s Victorian Gothic gates, facing the sidewalk.
The church was designed in the late 1800s by Philadelphia’s preeminent Victorian Gothic architect, Frank Furness. Frank was a wild man, a Civil War hero for the Union whose uniform was pierced in battle by three different bullets that somehow never wounded him. Like his personality, his brilliant architecture was a jumble of tension, strength, and variability. He disassembled and reassembled old motifs in ways that pointed toward movements in design yet to come: form follows function, Louis Kahn, skyscrapers.
In the late 1800s, Furness designed six hundred buildings, mostly in Philadelphia, many of which have since been destroyed. He designed this Unitarian church for his father, William Henry Furness, a famous and prominent minister. Frank carved into the church’s stone front several images of a flower turning toward the sun, each in a different position, as if turning its stone petals to follow the sun’s actual motion along the axis of Chestnut Street over the course of a day. His father deserved statuary.
Frank Furness’s father, the Unitarian minister William Henry Furness, was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A prominent theologian, William Furness wrote books about Jesus that rejected the notion of miracles, including the notion of a miraculous birth. But Reverend Furness is best remembered as a strident reformer and committed abolitionist. During his life, William Furness’s opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act resulted in President James Buchanan discussing indicting him for treason at a cabinet meeting. Abolitionist senator Charles Sumner recovered in William Furness’s home after suffering a severe beating by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks for his abolitionism. And William Furness was a featured speaker at a public gathering of Philadelphians on the date and time of John Brown’s hanging for Brown’s assault on Harpers Ferry, where two of John Brown’s sons died trying to capture weapons that they hoped would supply a slave revolt. The crowd that day was divided between white racists from Philadelphia and elsewhere and Philadelphians—many Black—who sympathized with Brown. The event was a near riot and an unlikely triumph for Philadelphia police, who managed to keep the peace.
In more recent times, the Center City Unitarian church had become a genteel, progressive, and somewhat diverse congregation known for its activist events and for allowing large, alcohol-free and therefore all-age punk and rock concerts to take place on a full stage in a basement so cavernous it accommodates several hundred people.
I loved the church, but it was punk that brought me there that night, so close to the election. The band Sheer Mag, which had just grabbed a four-star review in Rolling Stone for its debut album, had invited me to come and speak at their show, as long as I also performed a Clash song of my choosing. I chose “Clampdown” a week earlier so they had time to rehearse.
The Clash were in my musical pantheon, and “Clampdown” was my favorite, with its persistent refrain of “I’m not working for the clampdown / No man born with a living soul / Can be working for the clampdown.” It’s a scorching, defiant refusal to collaborate with an oppressive government that brings the “clampdown” on people regardless of the consequences: “The judge said five-to-ten, but I said double that again / I’m not working for the clampdown.” Or at least that’s what I thought it was about in college. I caught its spirit, but the song’s English references were lost on me. I later found out it was about the programming of English youth into factory workers who are forced to wear “blue and brown” to work. I assumed “blue and brown” somehow referred to “brownshirt.” Close enough.
Standing in the dark outside the Furness church, I looked west and mused that from where I stood I could almost see the University of Pennsylvania’s Class of 1923 Ice Rink. Sometime in the early 1980s, I saw the Clash play live there, maybe ten blocks west and a block south on Walnut Street. The underappreciated opening act that night was the great Peter Tosh, who was murdered not too long after, nasally intoning “Legalize It.” He was a good choice to open for the Clash, who followed with their sometimes reggae-influenced punk. They came onstage in an ice rink wearing white workmen’s overalls for a few thousand wildly appreciative fans who enthusiastically confirmed that they were the only band that mattered.
Sheer Mag let me onstage early to speak to the sold-out crowd of six hundred or so standing, mostly white hipsters, as a decoy for what would come later. If the crowd thought I came to speak, they wouldn’t expect me to come onstage later and sing. When I took the stage to talk, the crowd was friendly and loud in greeting me, so I took a chance and told them to be quiet or I’d lock them up. They laughed. I spoke for two minutes about mass incarceration, interspersing without attribution a few snatched lyrics from “Clampdown” into my argument that they should vote in a few days for our campaign. A few young Clash lovers smiled broadly when they recognized the lyrics. Most listened, but didn’t catch the references to an earlier generation’s music. Others were just talking and waiting for me to get off the stage so they could hear the band. Sheer Mag was great, and so deafening that I ran outside as soon as they started playing, in hopes of preserving my hearing enough to be able to sing (more like yell) when I returned to do “Clampdown.”
Temporarily protecting my ears didn’t help much. When I finally went back onstage, I couldn’t really hear above the crushing volume of Sheer Mag and the roar of the surprised crowd. Tina Halladay, the lead singer, and I stared down toward the edge of the stage, both of us reading the handwritten lyrics scrawled in block letters on a sheet of paper taped to a massive speaker. She had just learned the lyrics that I had forgotten long ago. I hollered away, but because the event was being livestreamed, I deliberately stopped singing when we hit the lyric “Kick over the wall, ’cause government’s to fall / How can you refuse it?” I was, after all, asking people to vote for our campaign so we could take over government from the inside, not literally make it fall. I didn’t think I needed that sound bite right before election day, even though I could have explained it as a metaphor for government being taken over democratically by the people in an election.
Four days before the only election day that mattered in Philadelphia in 2017, I was embracing just a little caution about what I said and did, even if only in the middle of performing a song that none of the other candidates would have dared sing or yell, written by a band they didn’t love and performed by another band that hadn’t invited them to perform it anyway. My caution about delivering those lyrics felt awkward, like a slight retreat from the campaign’s spirit.
“Clampdown” is a song about rejecting imposed uniformity. It’s about knocking down a system that should fall because it crushes people who are different, a system that lived in American courthouses through people like Dee Volo. That kind of government should fall, and no one born with a living soul should work for it. But in my travels through the city—from the churches to the hipster hangouts to the ward events to the steps of the DA’s office flanked and lifted up by elected women who knew that even within government they were different, I’d seen that people who are different have all the power they need when they align.
I’d seen that government can do something other than clamp down. It ha
s the potential to do the will of so many different and aligned people. If government couldn’t be changed by outsiders using the tools of democracy, if an election couldn’t destroy the clampdown, then maybe revolution was our only option. But I had seen a path to something else—a fulfillment of the idea that different kinds of aligned and mutually supportive good people were everywhere, just like the members of a Philly jury, and the ones who wanted something better could build their own government that would fight for justice. They could build government, not just tear it down. Without necessarily knowing one another, these “different” people in their splintered groups were already together on criminal justice reform. And in the most unlikely, often seemingly powerless corners of the city, we just kept finding them.
CHAPTER 13
Protest Clampdown
You have the right to free speech
As long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it
—The Clash, “Know Your Rights”
Power does what it wants, but it doesn’t always win. It’s not always easy to see this. When I was a kid, I watched on television as Chicago law enforcement officers abused their power during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Police were rioting against peaceful protesters. Anti-war demonstrators were met with violence and hundreds of bogus arrests, all organized and supported by the city’s authoritarian mayor, Richard Daley. The lesson for the nation was clear: No matter how illegitimate power is—even when it undermines the law and the Constitution—it can’t be stopped. Power does what it wants.
For the People Page 22