For the People

by Larry Krasner

  But, that day, we were starting over. As we crossed the four traffic lanes between us and City Hall, there was no holiday display up just yet. Nothing was sprayed on Frank’s back at the moment we entered City Hall, where every Philadelphia adult criminal case was tried until about twenty years ago, when our ballooning criminal justice system outgrew it. The increasing numbers of humans arriving on prison buses for court, increasing numbers of chargeable crimes, increasing cases, increasing mandatory sentences, increasing years of incarceration, and increasing everything else that went with it—judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, court officers, courtrooms, probation officers—required more space in a newer, bigger building just for criminal cases, initially called the Criminal Justice Center. The criminal justice system outgrew a structure that had been big enough for the prior one hundred years. We were crossing to City Hall. We needed to start over.

  I arrived an hour early in a courtroom that seated three hundred. About a dozen seats were already filled. A video screen as big as a Ping-Pong table was elevated high enough in the front of the room to be visible from the back row. Two sets of body-worn microphones were laid out at the podium. One was for the livestream. The recorded version would be a keepsake for the graduates and their friends and family; it might eventually spread through social media as one more statement of the Philly DAO’s principles two years in. The second microphone was to amplify my talk when I wandered away from the podium toward the images we would show on the video screen.

  I had interviewed nearly all of the new lawyers who were arriving myself, many of them during the prior year. As in most courtrooms in City Hall, the high walls were covered in oil portraits of retired judges—a tradition for retiring judges. Often their tribe of lawyers (the Brehons for an Irish judge; the Justinians for an Italian; the Barristers for a Black judge) will pay for the portrait, or maybe their friends will pay. A few judges reject the arguably ethically hazy appearance of lawyers paying for things for judges (even in retirement) and choose to pay for the portraits themselves, or simply decline to have a portrait done at all.

  Most courtrooms’ portraits were of white men with waxed mustaches, their high collars protruding up from the collars of their robes. Not so in the space reserved for public events—the ceremonial courtroom, where many of the leadership positions were now held by Black judges and women judges. More recent and more diverse judicial portraits were on the walls of this most public space. Under the oily eyes of judges, our new lawyers were walking in, past where their people would sit, coming inside the heavy oak divider that marks the bar of court. In sport, this would be the playing field. Today their role was to sit in folding chairs and wait for their swearing-in. They were dressed as the new professionals they were becoming, happy and expectant. There were no obvious cliques. And now their people were arriving, although it was hard to know who was with whom.

  I suited up with one mic on each lapel. Twisting wires and cigarette-pack-sized transmitters hung from both sides of my belt. With twenty minutes to go before starting time, people were standing around, talking. I got as close as possible to the video screen in order to block what I could of the slides I would show during my talk as I quickly clicked through them with my remote. I was checking, once again, the sequence of images. The gear was working.

  The hot coffee I brought with me to loosen up a sore throat was cooling down. In my prior life as a trial attorney, I seldom had a sore throat. But now a hoarse voice or sore throat was almost chronic, possibly the result of so much public speaking and so many workdays full of talking through back-to-back meetings. Maybe the frequent travel around the city and country in all kinds of weather was part of it. Or maybe a sore throat just went with my new job of communicating a movement’s new narrative of criminal justice.

  Someone told me Judge McKee had arrived. I went back to greet him and talk through the run of show. Theodore McKee is a Black federal appeals judge in his mid-seventies who served as a federal prosecutor and a state court judge in Philly before being appointed to the federal court. He became the chief judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals for a while, one notch below the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also the guy I used to see shopping in a grocery store wearing a Mother Jones magazine T-shirt. This was the second year he accepted our invitation to preside over our ceremonies. He had worked for decades on the inside in a broken and racist system, wearing different hats. I knew from his talk the prior year that his talk today would be a rousing call to action. I fully expected he would rally the new class to embrace their oaths to seek justice and uphold the Constitution, to reject bias of all types, to elevate equality, to exercise their power with great care, and to uphold the highest ethical standards. It was going to be a good show.

  The time came for me to start. I hid my cup of room-temperature coffee on my side of the top edge of the podium. I asked the new class to cheer for their parents, families, partners, and friends who had gotten them there, wherever they might be. I began clicking through the slides of photos from my books, which were broadcast on the big screen. The first slide was an iconic, close-up image of Dr. King, confidently facing the camera and no doubt eloquently speaking behind a small forest of microphones in his suit and tie to an unseen crowd of unknown proportions. It captured how he appeared from the outside, from the perspective of the crowd. It was King’s public image, the one that reminds us of another photo of a smiling King dressed in tuxedo and tails to accept his Nobel Prize at a posh ceremony. Long after his death, King’s public image would evolve again into a postage stamp and a federal holiday and renamed roadways in city after city.

  The second slide was essentially the same event, but viewed from King’s side of the podium. Once again, King was speaking to a small forest of microphones; but this time the photographer stood behind him, rather than in the audience’s shoes. The shot caught the typewritten text of his speech and scrawled notes handwritten in ballpoint pen, the snaking microphone cables trailing from the microphones and his wrinkled paper cup of water. Beyond all that was the crowd as King saw them, from his spot behind the podium. The shot captured how the outside world appeared from his side, the inside of the movement. King was leaning forward, persuading, energized and straining and pushing against and going over and going around everything that was supposed to be too heavy or too wide or too tall for him to move. The crowd was human: uncertain, certain, rapt, deciding, distracted. The photo of struggle and work from King’s side of the podium and the movement was glorious.

  The third slide, fourth slide, fifth slide went deeper into what that hourly struggle actually was—grittier shots from inside the movement. Here were King and Ralph Abernathy in unglamorous Elmer Fudd hats with fluffy ear flaps snapped back, trudging along on cold pavement during a march. There they were a little later, sitting uncomfortably in the wintry grass on the backs of their workaday coats and rubbing their suffering feet, retying their boots after miles of walking. Another shot was a close-up of an unidentified swollen pair of marching feet, heavily taped and wrapped.

  There was the young, intense, fretful James Forman, Sr. (the Yale professor’s father), dressed in overalls, next to King on a campaign against poverty and obviously chewing over some weighty decision no one else in the picture thought was easy, either. Another slide was a photo of King and Ralph Abernathy being pushed from behind, either by police hands or police words, uncharacteristically flustered and dressed in denim shirts and plain pants, clearly having a bad day. In another shot, King was in overalls, head drooping and looking exhausted while standing on a dark church stage at night. The next slide was of neatly groomed young Freedom Riders, white and Black college students mostly in the frame, singing together inside their bus with National Guardsmen outside, visible through the bus windows. The following slide was that bus on fire and billowing thick, opaque smoke, its Freedom Riders outside now, distraught but alive on the berm of the road.

  Before Judge McKee spoke an
d swore in the new ADAs, we took most of an hour to briefly list the accomplishments of every individual lawyer preparing to be sworn in and to project each of their photos on the big screen while we did it. The phonetic scribbles and my rehearsals for pronouncing their names helped me get through, but I still messed up two or three names. The people whose names I mangled spoke up immediately, correcting me in the room full of people; I smiled. These were no robots. They were the kind of people who speak up when something’s not right, the ones who are so necessary to a movement. They made sure we all saw them and could say their names just as I hoped and believed they will make sure our criminal justice system sees others and says their names.

  Second Thanksgiving—the gathering of our people, the family you choose and that chooses you—came early in 2019. Shortly before regular Thanksgiving, every member of this anti-tribe, my people and our people and their people, watched as the slides on the big screen confirmed the slog of what it means to be inside and part of a movement that matters—the kind of movement that will get you called a troublemaker and worse. They saw the struggling existence that would wear them out, thicken their skin, train them not to respond to the rage of a hostile system by returning rage. They saw its grind of long hours, long distances, and long odds, its pressure and risk and sacrifice and bad days spent fighting the good fight, the fight to find justice for others and knock down the terrible things that get in the way of that mission, even when those terrible things have gone on for a very long time.

  They saw that the glory of a great social movement is not the history of its famous so-called leaders, its prizes won, iconic victory photos, or even its posthumous national holiday and postage stamp. The glory of a great social movement is that slog—just being in it, when you are becoming the power that gets it done, becoming the power that is uncomfortable and makes mistakes, becoming the power that ultimately changes you and changes cities and changes politics forever. One by one, they saw their own faces on that same screen as well.

  We wished them luck. Judge McKee spoke quietly but with growing force, encouraging and cajoling and challenging these new lawyers to seek out and reject bias, to know their purpose, to keep track of the arcs of their lives, and to live up to their oaths. Then they held up their right hands and took that oath to seek justice—justice that includes everyone, that is as broad as society, that is for the people.

  If we and they and our movement are really lucky, they will climb onto our old shoulders and prove that we didn’t do enough by doing even more.

  For Lisa, whose blue-gray eyes somehow see the future.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  From early on, people have always said that I needed a filter, or at least a good editor. I got a great one for this book: Chris Jackson, the amazing chief of One World, who patiently helped me to build something whole from a parts pile of old stories, breathy rants, and threads of thought on minor fixations like statues, buildings, and music. Thank you, Chris, for your vision, literary craft, and grasp of justice, and your diplomacy when my writing got stupid. And thank you to your endlessly talented, enthusiastic team at One World/Penguin Random House: London King; Ayelet Gruenspecht; Daniel Novack, Esq.; Carla Bruce-Eddings; Lulu Martinez; Craig Adams; Mark Maguire; Greg Mollica; and Mika Kasuga.

  An idealistic and futuristic literary agent, Doug Abrams of Idea Architects, got me to Chris Jackson. With the invaluable help of Doug’s colleagues Lara Love and Rachel Neumann, the Idea Architects team nudged me to remember and excavate stories from their piles of dust, and to reflect upon them. Thank you all for imagining this book even before I did, for making a science of your business, and for spacewalking with me in the mysterious universe of writing and publishing a first book.

  Ty Stiklorius, the powerhouse talent manager (and producer) in charge of Friends at Work got me to Doug Abrams. Thank you, Ty, for your perfect, timely advice and for your selfless support of criminal justice reform in your life and in your work. Even in L.A., you are a favorite daughter of Philly.

  Even the idea of writing a book is owed to someone else. That lightbulb was the gift of another ex-Philadelphian, Daniel Denvir. Thanks, Dan, for inspiring me to write and for your incisive journalism in different media, including on criminal justice.

  And thank you to all those people in the good fight who are the protagonists of this book. You outsiders, you different kinds of people who joyfully fight for others, are peacefully taking institutional power back from insiders, and are making that power work for everyone. Named and unnamed, you are here and everyone you serve knows who you are.

  Thank you to my parents, William and Juanita Frances, for their love and their struggle and what it showed me. And thank you to my wonderfully varied extended family for your kindness and support. To Lisa, Nate, and Caleb, who inhabit this book: I love you. Thank you for listening to most of these stories years ago. Thank you, even then, for letting me know that I needed a good editor. You will always be my dearest companions in life.

  THE FOR THE PEOPLE PLAYLIST

  Introduction. Elton John, “Philadelphia Freedom”

  Songwriters: Elton John and Bernie Taupin

  1. Tracy Chapman, “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution”

  2. The National, “Mistaken for Strangers”

  Songwriters: Aaron Brooking Dessner, Bryce David Dessner, and Matthew Donald Berninger

  3. Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

  Songwriter: Abel Meeropol

  4. Frank Sinatra, “My Way”

  Songwriters: Claude François, Jacques Revaux, and Paul Anka

  5. The Clash, “Clampdown”

  Songwriters: Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

  6. Bruce Springsteen, “Streets of Philadelphia”

  7. Drive-By Truckers, “Never Gonna Change”

  Songwriter: Jason Isbell

  8. “Trust in Me” from The Jungle Book

  Songwriters: Robert Sherman and Richard Sherman

  9. U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

  Songwriters: Paul Hewson, David Howell Evans, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr.

  10. David Bowie, “Lazarus”

  11. Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody”

  12. N.W.A, “Straight Outta Compton”

  Songwriters: O’Shea Jackson, Lorenzo Jerald Patterson, Andre Romelle Young, and Eric Lynn Wright

  13. The Clash, “Know Your Rights”

  Songwriters: Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

  14. The Chambers Brothers, “Time Has Come Today”

  Songwriters: Willie Chambers and Joseph Chambers

  15. Prince, “Sign o’ the Times”

  16. Steve Miller Band, “Fly Like an Eagle”

  Songwriter: Steven Haworth Miller

  17. Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”

  18. Arcade Fire, featuring Mavis Staples, “I Give You Power”

  Songwriters: Régine Chassagne, Richard R. Parry, Win Butler, Jeremy Gara, William Butler, and Tim Kingsbury

  Epilogue. Common and John Legend, “Glory”

  Songwriters: John Roger Stephens and Lonnie Rashid Lynn

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Larry Krasner spent thirty years as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney before he decided to run for district attorney in Philadelphia. He is currently serving as the twenty-sixth district attorney of Philadelphia. The son of a crime novelist and an evangelical preacher, he navigated from the St. Louis and Philadelphia-area public school systems to the University of Chicago and Stanford Law School. He won the DA race as a political unknown, riding a wave of popular support in 2017. Krasner has frequently said that he considers criminal justice reform to be the civil rights issue of our time. He describes himself, and his fellow progressive prosecutors, as mere technicians for a grassroots movement for criminal justice reform that has been sweeping the nation and electing progressi
ve prosecutors since long before he ran for office. Krasner lives in Philadelphia with Lisa Rau, his wife of more than thirty-one years, a professional mediator and former Philadelphia judge.

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