Not one person in my section had less than eight years’ experience in the penitentiary. Three of them had more than twenty-five years. One brother was twenty-seven years old, and had been in for ten years. All of these guys were smart, conversational, engaging and knowledgeable about current events. They kept telling me that the fourteen months I had to serve “ain’t shit.” It seemed like forever to me.
“Knock that shit out, Kwame!” one shouted. They were experts. Most were from Detroit or surrounding areas, and they were very familiar with my case. They gave me the best orientation on prison and prison life that I could have ever imagined. It was thorough and detailed, and I received it well. After we dropped the last set of guys off and headed for The Oaks, the guys began telling me more about that particular institution. Oaks is one of two prisons in the state with segregated units exclusively for high-profile inmates. White Boy Rick, an infamous Detroit drug dealer sentenced to life in the 1980s, was housed in the same unit I’d be in. He and I would have opportunities to occasionally greet each other.
I learned about the staff, guards, food, rules and everything else pertaining to Oaks. I also got a comparative analysis of Oaks to several other places throughout the state, with specific instructions on how I could transfer if I didn’t like it. The main difference between Oaks and Bellamy Creek, the other prison with a segregation unit, was that Oaks’ staff was all white, and Ionia, a penitentiary closer to my hometown Detroit, employed far more African-American guards. I wondered if I had been sent to Oaks to make sure I had no sympathizers among the black guards.
More than ten hours after my morning wake-up call at the Guidance Center in Jackson, I arrived at Oaks Correctional Facility in Manistee, Michigan. It was around 4:40 p.m., and we were escorted, still in chains, into the prison intake room where each of us were checked in. I was told to go last. After a quick verbal questionnaire by someone called the “healthcare lady,” our chains were removed, one at a time. Again, I was last. We were taken into another room and strip-searched again, given our brink numbers, and sent out to the yard to find our new homes.
“Stay up!” everyone told each other as they dispersed. I was held back by one of the officers and told that the Warden wanted to speak to me. Warden Cindi Curtin and Deputy Warden Tim Ball took me into a conference room for a brief conversation. Curtin’s been with the Department of Corrections for more than twenty-six years. She was very calm, sincere and knowledgeable, and told me that I was being placed in protective custody because they were “very concerned about my safety.”
“Why are you concerned?” I asked.
She explained to me that over the previous twenty-four hours, she had been out and about asking inmates about me, and had heard a mixed bag of opinions. Some guys hated me. Some loved me.
“So, guys actually threatened me?” I asked. She said she received no actual threat by an inmate or staff member, but Warden Curtin asked me to be very careful, and to watch my back. I told her that I was fine. I had been around these guys my entire life, and that I didn’t expect to have any problems. I also explained that I wanted to move to a Level 1 facility as soon as possible. Protective Custody means that you’re locked up for twenty-three hours a day. At Level 1, you’re free to move from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. daily. The one hour per day that you have out in Protective Custody is with all the other people on your block. It’s also the only time that you have to use the phone and call loved ones or exercise. The conditions led me to believe that P.C. was a bad deal for me, but she politely listened and shut me down with a cool, firm “No.” The Department was locking me in to “keep me safe.”
The Warden gave me an opportunity to use the phone later that night around 8:45 p.m. I called home to talk to Carlita, and Jonas, the youngest of my three sons, answered the phone.
“Hi, Daddy!” he shouted with all the enthusiasm of a brilliant and talented eight-year-old. It was so good to hear his sweet and innocent voice. I missed him so much! I asked how he was doing and where his mother was. I had to hurry, because I was only allowed ten minutes to talk. He told me that she had just taken his brothers, Jelani and Jalil, to basketball practice. Because I only had a few minutes, I told Jonas that I was going to try Mama on her cell phone and would call him tomorrow.
“Wait, Daddy,” he said. “Happy Birthday! I love you very much.” He then said, “Hey, Daddy, if you could have anything in the world for your birthday, what would it be?” I told him, “I wish that I could hug you and your brothers so badly.” That was it. That’s all I wanted. He told me that he really missed me, and I told him I also missed him, and that I loved him very much. I hung up and called Carlita on her cell phone. She answered and started crying as soon as I said hello, which, of course, got me going. I was already on the edge after talking to Jonas.
The Michigan Department of Corrections wasn’t trying to keep me safe; they were keeping me under control. Prisons run smoothly when the routine of daily prison operations is uninterrupted. Prison administrations want the same things to happen every day. No surprises, uprisings, questions, or scrutiny. And certainly no transparency, especially from the media or the public.
I was a media hot potato for the entire department. The MDOC, as well as the Oaks Facility, were inundated with hundreds of calls from press outlets about me, my care, treatment, whereabouts, attitude and more. So, the best plan of action was to lock me up all day and all night. Doing this took away a great deal of administrative concern, because they also knew that I would be very popular in the prison community. They also wanted to isolate me as much as possible from other inmates. The thought of prisoners organizing, thinking, studying and listening is negative to prison administrators in all fifty states. That’s why many prison study groups have been broken up, particularly if they were non-Christian. Also, access to educational programs, legal materials and educational pursuits (beyond G.E.D. preparation) have been all but eliminated in Michigan prisons. The systematic elimination of any access to positive programs has not only fostered ignorance, but has given greater control—typically mental control—to prison officials and employees.
I thanked Warden Curtin for her honesty and forthrightness, and I was escorted out of the building and over to my cell block, 1 Block, a few moments later. This is a fairly large unit, housing 175 men. It didn’t take long before everyone knew I’d arrived, and the inmates greeted me with a display of smiles, frowns, fist salutes and other hand gestures that required fewer fingers. The haters, who were very few in number, kept their distance. I got it all in my first two minutes on the block.
They quickly escorted me to cell 104, and Master Control shut the door behind me. It was a 6 x 9-foot, dark, humid room. Two stacked cement slabs lay across the far wall for beds, with a mattress on top that was just as hard. A small, stainless steel sink with an attached toilet sat close to the bed in the small cell. The cement floor was covered in chipped, gray industrial paint. The cinderblock walls were painted the same color. BOOM! went the door behind me.
Prison was my reality now. No reading materials or television, the only noise came from the loud conversations between other inmates on the cell block. Shouting. Guys would call out daily bets on sporting events to the cell block bookie, who happened to be located in the cell next to me. The process was organized. Inmates quieted their conversations during placement time for bets. The bookie would call out a name, and inmates took turns calling their wagers. New gamblers waited until the veterans were on the books. And then, guys talked. Politics. Women. They talked trash during chess matches. We got out of our cells for an hour a day, but we socialized on “the rock,” or in our cells, on lockdown. A few altercations between inmates involving weapons occurred. In one incident, an inmate was stabbed during a fight with another. The prison alarms sounded throughout the compound, and we were hurried to our cells, locked down for the rest of the day while officers searched for the weapon, fed through a slot in the cell’s steel door while locked down. The guards found the weapon, and de
termined that it was fashioned from the metal prongs inside one of the toasters. So, from that day forward, we had no more toast. Stabbings were normal, but having no toast pissed people off! Insane as it was, I sat through it, stoic in my cell, silently coming to grips with my world.
It wasn’t my first time being locked up. I’d done four months in the Wayne County Jail the year before, after pleading guilty to charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. But now I am here. And as God would have it, the solitude, privacy and harsh reality of this situation has given way to deep and focused reflection, reflection that, driven so deeply, resulted in sincere repentance. And repentance inspired my revelation.
Mine was a monumental time in Detroit’s history, an international story that cast an incredibly bright light on an incredibly painful time. It was a surreal, revelatory period for Detroit citizens, for me, and for my family. It was also a time of hidden political agendas, opportunism and savage advantage.
My story is wrought with public misunderstanding. As mayor, I made history, did some great things, and made some egregious errors. I made many people’s lives better, and pissed some people off. Like any political saga of epic proportions, there are no simple explanations for the direction in which my career went. But there are two sides to the story, and probably three. The world has heard the press’ side for almost ten years, and it’s caused a tidal wave of sentiment against me.
Now, it’s my turn, because I never got a chance to tell my story without editing or interruption. I’m not going to tell you that I’m right and others are wrong. I’m telling this story because what you think you know about Kwame Kilpatrick is largely inaccurate. I’m not a thug. I’m not arrogant. But I am flawed and passionate. I did make mistakes that deserve to be aired out. But I’ll be damned if I deserve to be here, in a Level 4 maximum security prison.
And with that, I thank you for reading. It’s the equivalent of lending an ear, but also lifting up truth. For we know that the truth shall make us free.
Let’s go!
chapter 2
Offensive Lines
I’VE ALWAYS been good at relating to people and motivating them, but I began to truly nurture these qualities at Florida A&M University, in Tallahassee.
FAMU. “FAM.” It was an interesting place—hot, humid and brimming with that slow, Southern vibe. It was quite different from Detroit, and took some adjustment on my part. I arrived there in 1988 and immediately noticed that many black people seemed to have a designated, submissive place in Floridian society. Subservience was foreign to me. It was synonymous with subsistence, and black people in Detroit didn’t do subsistence, especially in my family and community. So I had to contend with that right away, consciously drawing on things that I’d taken for granted back home.
But draw, I did. I pulled from my awareness. My appreciation for the city increased when I compared the collective mindset of some Southern blacks to that of Detroiters. In Detroit, black people saw themselves as the majority, the empowered ones, the decision-makers.
I drew on what we called “Detroit Love,” the unspoken kinship that coursed through the streets like arteries. It linked people, neighborhoods, and entire sides of town. West Side. East side. Southwest. North end.
Detroit Love flowed through the Considine Recreation Center on the North End, and the Joseph Walker Williams Center, on the West Side. We played basketball there as children, safeguarded from the streets, never feeling as if the D was the national murder capital statistics purported it to be in the 1980s. We danced and fellowshipped at backyard barbecues, where anyone who showed up could partake of whatever was on the grill. We gave “pounds” in the streets, those handshakes-to-hugs that brothers gave when meeting. It all acknowledged an unspoken understanding that we were the defiant antithesis of black stereotypes.
I also drew from my family legacy. My maternal grandfather, Marvell “Rub” Cheeks, Jr., our patriarch, taught the entire clan how to live as one. He taught us so well that I felt like I knew his parents, and all of his descendants, although they’d passed long before I was born in Detroit.
I drew from our church, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and its ethos, which was steeped in liberation theology. It stood in the heart of the city, on Linwood Boulevard, just a few miles from the cradle of the 1967 rebellion. The community was the church’s pulse, and the love and support I received from it sustained me. We filled those pews and worshipped as a united people. As a child, I’d soak up the elders’ refrains and reinforcements—Say a poem for us, Kwame! You can be whatever you want to be! That boy smart! That boy gon’ be somebody!—like a sponge. I buried those memories in my spirit, and referenced them when I got to FAM.
I drew from my parents’ support. It never waned, not once during my youth, not even when they divorced. They kept me and my sister Ayanna going, and growing. They remained team players. I lived with both of them at different times – with Dad while attending Pelham Middle and Cass Technical High School with Ayanna, and with Mom in Lansing when she served as a Michigan State Representative. My youngest sister, Diarra, attended Country Day on the other side of town. She’s the actress in our family, an NYU graduate who has honed her brilliant craft working in Los Angeles.
Bernard Kilpatrick and Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick, the doting father and the loving, disciplined mother, drove me, literally and figuratively, to higher heights.
I’d chosen FAMU after my father and I visited two other schools, Central Michigan and Bowling Green State Universities. I was an All-City football player at Cass Tech, and I knew I’d be receiving a scholarship to go somewhere. But it had to be the right place. Central and Bowling Green were too extreme for me. For example, there were fewer than 500 black students at Central, among a student body of 16,000. To say that I experienced culture shock when touring the campus is an understatement. The white kids partied and socialized in ways that were just foreign to me. Also, it was common for football players to be hosted by other players when visiting campuses. They’d show you the academic and social side of campus life. So I went to a party at Central. The kids were drinking, pouring beer on each other, flashing their breasts, screaming “Wooooo!” It wasn’t me. Bowling Green offered more of the same.
Like many people, I believed that historically black colleges and universities were all poor and run-down. My only experience at a black college had taken place just a year earlier, when I participated in the Detroit Branch of the NAACP’s Black College tour. I had a great time, but I didn’t remember much about any parts of the actual tour, or the colleges. We traveled to really small schools like Livingstone, Fisk and Virginia State. We did go to the Atlanta University Complex, where Morehouse, Spelman and Clark are located. But we spent more time talking to girls and trying to get some play than paying attention to the institutions. Our chaperones meant well, but there were only two of them on a busload of teenagers with raging hormones. They made an effort to keep us focused, but lost that battle before they even got started!
However, I do remember not wanting to attend those schools. No one made any prepared presentations, and everything seemed to be very unorganized. This furthered the belief by many of us that black colleges were inferior to their white counterparts.
That stereotype changed in January 1988. Not only had Spike Lee’s movie School Daze made black college life hot again, but one of my father’s best friends, Josh Giles, who coached the FAMU basketball team, asked me to send him one of my high school films.
I admired Josh a great deal. He was born and raised in Detroit, and graduated from Northern High School. He took a lot of kids off the street through basketball. At Shaw College, he became a coach, and then he went down to Florida. He gave my film to coach Alonzo Highsmith, the defensive coordinator at FAMU, who called me. “Man, we wanna give you a scholarship,” I remember him saying. The next thing I knew, they’d flown me to Florida.
The greatest thing I did was schedule FAMU as my third visit. My father and I got off the plane and went strai
ght to a basketball game. As soon as we arrived, they escorted us inside, just as the band stood. It was during a time out when I heard the horns.
Dn-dn-dn-dnnnn-dnnnn-dnnnn-d-d-dnt! They were playing Doug E. Fresh’s “The Show.” The girls started dancing, and the crowd went crazy. I thought, “What the hell is this? I’m goin’ here!”
My father, seemingly reading my mind, looked at me and said, “You probably should come here.”
I had never seen or heard anything like that. Mind you, I was fresh off the plane. I hadn’t seen anything about the football program, and I didn’t know what the campus looked like. We didn’t even know anything about the educational programs. But after going around campus that weekend and meeting everyone, we decided we liked the situation.
I’d never have been there if it weren’t for Josh Giles. He passed away a few years ago, and I give him a lot of credit and gratitude.
After all this build-up, you’d think I would have had a great first year. Well, I hated it. It was 100 degrees every day, and most of the student body didn’t like Northerners. Back at Cass, I didn’t feel like I belonged either, at least not until my sophomore year, because I’d come from a middle school in Lansing, where I was living with my mom. Cass just wasn’t my neighborhood school, so I was a kid without a clique. Freshman year at FAMU was the same way.
On my first day, I arrived on campus with my mother and sister. I was very nervous and excited. We were told to report to the football building. Mom dropped me off and went to the hotel to relax for a while, and I reported to the locker room, just in time for dorm room and roommate assignments.
Surrendered: The Rise, Fall & Revolution of Kwame Kilpatrick Page 3