From the Cradle to Prison Pipeline with Dr. Jeanne Middleton Hairston

Dr. Jean Middleton Hairston, Former National Director, Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools

In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control introduced a new health crisis term: The Cradle to Grave Pipeline. It was defined in an article by Attorney Marian Wright Edelman, founder and executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund. The “pipeline” is a fueled by a long list of deficits, suffered especially by Black children, including, poor health care, inadequate education, parental neglect, damaging role models, drug abuse, unfair targeting by law enforcement and other disadvantages based largely on race. The result, said Dr. Edelman, is a system that put Blacks on a path to prison even before grade school

In an interview with Morgan State Student Journalist Michelle Thigpen, Dr. Jeanne Middleton Hairston, described the historic roots, before and after the Civil War, which created fertile ground for the disproportionate presence of Black people in jails and prisons.

Hairston is a former National Director of the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School, the organization that first pronounced ‘The Cradle to Prison Pipeline’ - a system that begins before grade school.

There was a little 5 or 6 year old girl in Florida who had a temper tantrum and they called the police and put that baby girl in handcuffs and put her in the police car and took her to jail (MT) I saw that. See that, that’s just unacceptable you don’t need be around children. If a teacher, if a kindergarten teacher doesn’t know how to work with a kindergarten child then don’t be a kindergarten teacher!. We have in our country, a history of efforts to control our African-American citizens that is written in slavery, that moved on after slavery as evidenced in the Black Codes, that were established across the South and the Black Codes were simply just another way to prohibit the movement, the literacy, the marital rights, parental rights, et cetera, of former slaves. For example, in Mississippi, one of the Black Codes declared such things as ‘if you are more than 2 or 3 Black men in the same place at the same time, you can be established as vagrants and put into jail.

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Dr. Jeanne Middleton Hairston has studied the causes of racial discrimination throughout her career as an academic scholar, professor, school board member and former national director of the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools.

While the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision is hailed as an end to state-sponsored racial segregation, Hairston says an unintended side-effect was the decision of politicians and education officials to adopt school policies to exert more control as blacks desegregated schools -focusing on control and punishment.

It’s during this time that you begin to see increasing emphasis on behavior, on zero tolerance, on not allowing elementary, middle and high school behavior to occur in the schools.

There was a 5 or 6 year old girl in Florida who had a temper tantrum and they called the police and put that baby girl in handcuffs and put her in the police car and took her to jail.

It’s an unfortunate system but it can be broken, if we just get competent and caring teachers and we get funding for our schools and we get some funds reallocated from the police force to community service.

There’s a lot of work to be done but the beauty of it is, if you look at historical roots: 400 years of being oppressed, and we’ve only had about 56 years of actually trying to work together trying to change it. So, I always try to end any talk I have to help people not be discouraged because as horrific as our reality is today, our ancestors knew a horror equally as horrific. And, they found a way to get through with great dignity and great character that all the world is trying to figure out. How is it, as that sister told us “How can we still rise?” “And still I rise.”