Starting in the summer of 2016, I said many times to many,
many people, "I am using Martin Luther King's strategy."
by David Dessler - August 1, 2021
|
Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech
Memphis, Tennessee - April 3, 1968
|
|
by David Dessler - July 15, 2021
WHO IS EMBARRASSED BY MY EMAILS AND ARRESTS?
In the current case, many observers once had the following opinions about my emails: I embarrassed myself with them. I should have written them differently. And, many think, it was even more embarrassing for me that I got arrested and jailed for the embarrassing emails. These people remained silent. If they thought I was suffering from an illness that was leading to my arrest, they did not offer assistance.
However, as the legal scorecard shows (below), those who arrested me for sending emails humiliated themselves. Anyone who has a low opinion of my emails today simply is not paying attention, or does not understand what has been going on. In either case, the embarrassment is not mine.
My emails are to be judged within the sphere defined by those who have been willing to risk their lives by getting arrested and jailed in the fight for social justice. People in this arena are qualified to judge my emails and arrests. People who have not been in these battles have a responsibility to recognize that they are not qualified to judge my emails and the strategy I used to get arrested.
My work places me in this category: "those who have been arrested and incarcerated to advance social justice." The all-time leader in this division is, of course, John Lewis. He was arrested and jailed 40 times. And these were not just any 40 arrests. Lewis challenged unjust laws where the police attitude was: "We're going to kill these niggers." He had his skull cracked three times. You want an American hero? Here is one of the greatest.
However, as the legal scorecard shows (below), those who arrested me for sending emails humiliated themselves. Anyone who has a low opinion of my emails today simply is not paying attention, or does not understand what has been going on. In either case, the embarrassment is not mine.
My emails are to be judged within the sphere defined by those who have been willing to risk their lives by getting arrested and jailed in the fight for social justice. People in this arena are qualified to judge my emails and arrests. People who have not been in these battles have a responsibility to recognize that they are not qualified to judge my emails and the strategy I used to get arrested.
My work places me in this category: "those who have been arrested and incarcerated to advance social justice." The all-time leader in this division is, of course, John Lewis. He was arrested and jailed 40 times. And these were not just any 40 arrests. Lewis challenged unjust laws where the police attitude was: "We're going to kill these niggers." He had his skull cracked three times. You want an American hero? Here is one of the greatest.
John Lewis said famously, "Do something. Get in trouble. Good trouble. Necessary trouble." That is what I have done.
I am in the subdivision of "those holding a doctoral degree who have been arrested and incarcerated to advance social justice." In this bracket, Martin Luther King Jr., of course, is #1, with 29 arrests. I have been able to find no one who counted up his days in jail. Many times, he was arrested and released. But in his most famous arrest--the one in Birmingham--he was incarcerated for eight days. He did not need all of them to finish that letter, apparently. I would guess MLK spent 55-75 days in jail. When given the choice between paying bail or being incarcerated, or being fined or being incarcerated, he always chose jail. His first arrests were made in 1956, exactly 60 years before the first of mine. In one of them, he was told to pay a fine of $14 or he would spend 14 days in jail. He refused to pay the fine. The Police Commissioner of the city paid the $14, and he was released.
In the game of getting yourself arrested to advance social justice, you must accept the penalty of jail. As MLK explains in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," if you are trying to get rid of immoral laws by breaking them and thus revealing to the world that these laws are unjust, you must show that you are only objecting to unjust laws, not the law in general. To achieve a just society, you want to affirm your respect for law and order; otherwise, lawbreaking would promote anarchy. In short, you go to jail to show that you respect the law. By submitting to arrest and incarceration, one demonstrates clearly that the protest is against injustice in the legal system, not the legal system itself.
MLK had to be guilty of each crime he was arrested for, and be willing to serve jail time for each crime, because he was protesting unjust laws. I was faced with a different problem: unjust arrest procedures. To succeed, I had to modify MLK's strategy in the following way: I had to get arrested but in every case be clearly innocent of any crime.
Recall that MLK Jr. was, in fact, guilty of breaking the laws he broke, and that he broke these laws intentionally, in order to get arrested. For example, somewhere in Georgia one time, he was arrested for "parading without a permit." He was leading a group of civil rights marchers when he was arrested. The town had a law that said, to have a parade, you needed to go to the Sheriff and get a permit. The Sheriff deemed the civil rights march a parade. Of course, MLK and his followers knew he would do that. That's why they marched there. In Birmingham, Alabama, at the end of a long week of unrest in the city, a court ruled that no civil rights demonstrations would be permitted on Friday, April 12, 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. was fully aware of this court injunction--that is why he went into the city to demonstrate. He wanted to be arrested. He wanted to be, in each and every case, guilty as charged.
The point, of course, was to show that these laws were unjust. President Kennedy introduced the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 less than two months after the Birmingham arrest. Americans agreed with King that blacks should be able to protest, to speak out, without having to get a special permit, and without the interference of court injunctions. Laws were changed. Here is perhaps the most famous sentence in the history of civil rights legislation in the United States:
I am in the subdivision of "those holding a doctoral degree who have been arrested and incarcerated to advance social justice." In this bracket, Martin Luther King Jr., of course, is #1, with 29 arrests. I have been able to find no one who counted up his days in jail. Many times, he was arrested and released. But in his most famous arrest--the one in Birmingham--he was incarcerated for eight days. He did not need all of them to finish that letter, apparently. I would guess MLK spent 55-75 days in jail. When given the choice between paying bail or being incarcerated, or being fined or being incarcerated, he always chose jail. His first arrests were made in 1956, exactly 60 years before the first of mine. In one of them, he was told to pay a fine of $14 or he would spend 14 days in jail. He refused to pay the fine. The Police Commissioner of the city paid the $14, and he was released.
In the game of getting yourself arrested to advance social justice, you must accept the penalty of jail. As MLK explains in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," if you are trying to get rid of immoral laws by breaking them and thus revealing to the world that these laws are unjust, you must show that you are only objecting to unjust laws, not the law in general. To achieve a just society, you want to affirm your respect for law and order; otherwise, lawbreaking would promote anarchy. In short, you go to jail to show that you respect the law. By submitting to arrest and incarceration, one demonstrates clearly that the protest is against injustice in the legal system, not the legal system itself.
MLK had to be guilty of each crime he was arrested for, and be willing to serve jail time for each crime, because he was protesting unjust laws. I was faced with a different problem: unjust arrest procedures. To succeed, I had to modify MLK's strategy in the following way: I had to get arrested but in every case be clearly innocent of any crime.
Recall that MLK Jr. was, in fact, guilty of breaking the laws he broke, and that he broke these laws intentionally, in order to get arrested. For example, somewhere in Georgia one time, he was arrested for "parading without a permit." He was leading a group of civil rights marchers when he was arrested. The town had a law that said, to have a parade, you needed to go to the Sheriff and get a permit. The Sheriff deemed the civil rights march a parade. Of course, MLK and his followers knew he would do that. That's why they marched there. In Birmingham, Alabama, at the end of a long week of unrest in the city, a court ruled that no civil rights demonstrations would be permitted on Friday, April 12, 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. was fully aware of this court injunction--that is why he went into the city to demonstrate. He wanted to be arrested. He wanted to be, in each and every case, guilty as charged.
The point, of course, was to show that these laws were unjust. President Kennedy introduced the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 less than two months after the Birmingham arrest. Americans agreed with King that blacks should be able to protest, to speak out, without having to get a special permit, and without the interference of court injunctions. Laws were changed. Here is perhaps the most famous sentence in the history of civil rights legislation in the United States:
|
This is the opening of Section 2000e-2 of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before this legislation was passed, it was entirely legal to deny a job to an applicant by saying, "I'm sorry, you're black." Or: "You're female." And it was Martin Luther King's work that made it possible to push this legislation through. His arrests were necessary. He had to do much more than get arrested. Two months after President Kennedy introduced the civil rights legislation that would include Title VII--a move Kennedy made two months after King's Birmingham arrest--King addressed a large crowd standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. He gave his "I Have a Dream" on August 28, 1963, which was 4 months and 9 days after being released from his Birmingham jail cell.
As I mentioned above, to expose unjust arrest procedures, I had to get arrested and make it clear I had committed no crime. To reveal that what I faced was a corrupt system--something enduring, something systemic, something that was claiming many victims, it was not a fluke and not something invented only for me, I had to get falsely arrested--that is, I had to get arrested on invented charges that were known to be inventions by those who secured the warrants for my arrests. To pull this off, I had to make sure there was nothing wrong and nothing close to being wrong in my actions. If I had actually committed a crime, or if I had ever come close to committing one, the people arresting me would have used my errant behavior as the basis for charging me with a criminal offense. They never did because I never came close to doing anything that could possibly be construed as breaking the law.
The first arrest, on February 28, 2016, was a total surprise. The next five arrests were provoked. That is, I did things (like failing to appear for a competency hearing, writing two students, or writing an email reply to the WMPD Chief who had called to say she was hearing "concerns") that I knew would be used to issue a warrant for my arrest even though nothing I did could possibly be construed as wrongdoing. I was issued an FTA Capias on 5/11/2016. I got a Pretrial Capias on 6/22/2016. And I was arrested on a third "harassment by computer" charge on 1/13/2017. Like the email I had sent John Poma and others on March 18, 2016, the January 13, 2017 email made clear that I knew what I was sending would very likely lead to my arrest on precisely the false charges that were made. Both emails discuss at some length the possibility that the College would arrest me. Both warn College officials that such an arrest would prove to be empty, because in both emails, I stress that I am doing nothing that breaks any law.
The seventh arrest, on February 18, 2019, was almost as surprising as the first arrest, because it was clear in this case that the real reason for my arrest could not be obscured or hidden, even in the short-term. The point is, once again I was able to show that there was nothing I had done that could possibly have justified an arrest. The charges made at the first bond hearing on February 26, 2019, reported in the Flat Hat, were ludicrous. At the end of the third and final bond hearing on March 1, 2019, the real reason for the arrest was revealed, and the Flat Hat reported it. I was put on trial on April 4, 2019. Nate Green sought a guilty verdict. He did not get it. The charge was dismissed. Same old story.
To show my respect for the law, I willingly went to jail. I served 103 days because they helped make my case. I was respectful of the arresting officers in every case. I was respectful of the guards in jail. I was respectful of the judges. The two people I did not respect were the W&M Human Resources Chief, John Poma, and the local Commonwealth's Attorney, Nate Green. My emails reveal the contempt I had for them and what they were trying to get away with.
In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. spent a week in an Atlanta jail, where he was interviewed by a reporter. King said to the reporter that, much to his chagrin, the jail was segregated. He went on to say, "I suppose the thing that wears on me most is the dread monotony. Sixteen hours is a long time to spend within a few square feet with nothing creative to do.” The reporter then asked how he was treated. King characterized his jailers as “very courteous.” You can be sure that he was courteous, too, and that he respectful of the authority of those who jailed him.
My 7 arrests places me in second place in the doctoral category. In third place are "scattered doctors of divinity" during the civil rights era, all with one each. It appears, though the data are incomplete, that I am the first university professor in the history of American higher education to use arrests and incarceration to defend the rights of those struggling against abuse and deprivation.
It also appears, to my surprise and shock, that I may be the first tenured professor arrested by his university. I have known for some time that university arrests of their own faculty are very infrequent. It had not occurred to me that the other arrests universities have made of professors they employed might all be non-tenured faculty. The other two W&M faculty who were arrested--Mike Wilson on Feb 19, 2016, and Gi Sang Yoon on April 17, 2018, both Biology professors--were NTEs.
I would ask of anyone who thinks I made mistakes in the emails I wrote to consider first my purposes and the results I was able to achieve by making reference to my final criminal justice scorecard. See below.
The first arrest, on February 28, 2016, was a total surprise. The next five arrests were provoked. That is, I did things (like failing to appear for a competency hearing, writing two students, or writing an email reply to the WMPD Chief who had called to say she was hearing "concerns") that I knew would be used to issue a warrant for my arrest even though nothing I did could possibly be construed as wrongdoing. I was issued an FTA Capias on 5/11/2016. I got a Pretrial Capias on 6/22/2016. And I was arrested on a third "harassment by computer" charge on 1/13/2017. Like the email I had sent John Poma and others on March 18, 2016, the January 13, 2017 email made clear that I knew what I was sending would very likely lead to my arrest on precisely the false charges that were made. Both emails discuss at some length the possibility that the College would arrest me. Both warn College officials that such an arrest would prove to be empty, because in both emails, I stress that I am doing nothing that breaks any law.
The seventh arrest, on February 18, 2019, was almost as surprising as the first arrest, because it was clear in this case that the real reason for my arrest could not be obscured or hidden, even in the short-term. The point is, once again I was able to show that there was nothing I had done that could possibly have justified an arrest. The charges made at the first bond hearing on February 26, 2019, reported in the Flat Hat, were ludicrous. At the end of the third and final bond hearing on March 1, 2019, the real reason for the arrest was revealed, and the Flat Hat reported it. I was put on trial on April 4, 2019. Nate Green sought a guilty verdict. He did not get it. The charge was dismissed. Same old story.
To show my respect for the law, I willingly went to jail. I served 103 days because they helped make my case. I was respectful of the arresting officers in every case. I was respectful of the guards in jail. I was respectful of the judges. The two people I did not respect were the W&M Human Resources Chief, John Poma, and the local Commonwealth's Attorney, Nate Green. My emails reveal the contempt I had for them and what they were trying to get away with.
In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. spent a week in an Atlanta jail, where he was interviewed by a reporter. King said to the reporter that, much to his chagrin, the jail was segregated. He went on to say, "I suppose the thing that wears on me most is the dread monotony. Sixteen hours is a long time to spend within a few square feet with nothing creative to do.” The reporter then asked how he was treated. King characterized his jailers as “very courteous.” You can be sure that he was courteous, too, and that he respectful of the authority of those who jailed him.
My 7 arrests places me in second place in the doctoral category. In third place are "scattered doctors of divinity" during the civil rights era, all with one each. It appears, though the data are incomplete, that I am the first university professor in the history of American higher education to use arrests and incarceration to defend the rights of those struggling against abuse and deprivation.
It also appears, to my surprise and shock, that I may be the first tenured professor arrested by his university. I have known for some time that university arrests of their own faculty are very infrequent. It had not occurred to me that the other arrests universities have made of professors they employed might all be non-tenured faculty. The other two W&M faculty who were arrested--Mike Wilson on Feb 19, 2016, and Gi Sang Yoon on April 17, 2018, both Biology professors--were NTEs.
I would ask of anyone who thinks I made mistakes in the emails I wrote to consider first my purposes and the results I was able to achieve by making reference to my final criminal justice scorecard. See below.
I said, "I am using Martin Luther King's strategy," and
MLK Jr.'s STRATEGY WORKED
Eleven charges, all completely empty. They were inventions meant to hide the campaign of destruction and defamation that was being carried out against me. I was able to reveal the corrupt arrest procedures that have destroyed the lives of many W&M community members. My case was made, meaning an end to the practice of "sweeping students under the rug," which has destroyed student lives for 300 years.
Had I not been willing to deliberately provoke the five false arrests, I could not have built up the winning scorecard I possess. I was arrested seven times and incarcerated for 103 days for having done nothing wrong Interestingly, every observer has known at the time of the arrests that I did nothing wrong. My innocence was never in doubt. When the Faculty Assembly investigation by Cathy Forestell and Sophia Serghi began in the fall of 2016, the first thing John Poma ruled out as a possible reason for my termination was "misconduct." It was also the first thing Poma ruled out when the EEOC investigated.
An essential part of my story is that no one at any time has believed I committed any crimes. Yet my career was destroyed in a series of arrests that stretched over three years. At every juncture, William & Mary faculty knew I was innocent.
No one has spoken up. Who, in truth, is embarrassed?
Martin Luther King Jr. was heavily criticized during the Birmingham protests that led to his arrest. Most of the newspaper, radio, and TV coverage during that time accused him of being a troublemaker. This was predictable. We saw the same dynamic in my case: I was repudiated by many in the community whose values I represented and was defending. The arrests I was causing irritated many people. I can understand that, and I am truly sorry for the emotional damage my arrests may have caused among members of the William & Mary community. All I can say is, I took the only route I saw that would work. The point now is that my time in jail has been served and there is no more trouble to be made. No trouble, at least, that is good and necessary and must also rise to the level of getting arrested and jailed. I am a scholar again.
THE FUTURE
The future is already coming into focus.
In it, observers will agree: I was in the right and those who arrested me were in the wrong.
Many will say that the arrests were brave. Some will assert: "He put his life on the line." A few might even believe that my willingness to be arrested was heroic. I make none of these claims today, and I hope no one makes them for me in the future. The point is, no one will repudiate me or criticize the actions I took in this episode.
And the emails that were involved will be entirely forgotten.
Had I not been willing to deliberately provoke the five false arrests, I could not have built up the winning scorecard I possess. I was arrested seven times and incarcerated for 103 days for having done nothing wrong Interestingly, every observer has known at the time of the arrests that I did nothing wrong. My innocence was never in doubt. When the Faculty Assembly investigation by Cathy Forestell and Sophia Serghi began in the fall of 2016, the first thing John Poma ruled out as a possible reason for my termination was "misconduct." It was also the first thing Poma ruled out when the EEOC investigated.
An essential part of my story is that no one at any time has believed I committed any crimes. Yet my career was destroyed in a series of arrests that stretched over three years. At every juncture, William & Mary faculty knew I was innocent.
No one has spoken up. Who, in truth, is embarrassed?
Martin Luther King Jr. was heavily criticized during the Birmingham protests that led to his arrest. Most of the newspaper, radio, and TV coverage during that time accused him of being a troublemaker. This was predictable. We saw the same dynamic in my case: I was repudiated by many in the community whose values I represented and was defending. The arrests I was causing irritated many people. I can understand that, and I am truly sorry for the emotional damage my arrests may have caused among members of the William & Mary community. All I can say is, I took the only route I saw that would work. The point now is that my time in jail has been served and there is no more trouble to be made. No trouble, at least, that is good and necessary and must also rise to the level of getting arrested and jailed. I am a scholar again.
THE FUTURE
The future is already coming into focus.
In it, observers will agree: I was in the right and those who arrested me were in the wrong.
Many will say that the arrests were brave. Some will assert: "He put his life on the line." A few might even believe that my willingness to be arrested was heroic. I make none of these claims today, and I hope no one makes them for me in the future. The point is, no one will repudiate me or criticize the actions I took in this episode.
And the emails that were involved will be entirely forgotten.
by David Dessler - August 1, 2021
Featuring the Book of Deuteronomy 34: 1-5