Can you imagine bringing the descendents of slaves and slave owners to the same table?  Or imagine Mississippi being a state that can teach us how to move forward in race relations?

Sound hard to believe? Not for the 150 people that attended “Truth Telling, Justice & Reconciliation: Beyond U.S. Legacies of Enslavement” – a talk featuring Rev. David Anderson Hooker Friday at Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church.

The speaking event was part of a series of programs and trainings sponsored jointly by Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth – RJOY – and the Prophetic Justice Ministry of Allen Temple as part of The California Endowment’s East Oakland Building Healthy Communities Initiative and a wider campaign to bring the practice of restorative justice to youth in the criminal justice system, to Oakland schools and to the larger community.

Coming to The T.A.B.L.E – Taking America Beyond the Legacy of Enslavement – started in Virginia when descendents of the Thomas Jefferson and of Sally Hemmings, his long time Black mistress, approached Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia for help in framing a way to engage in dialog.

“There was a conflict between the descendents about who should be allowed to attend the yearly family reunion of the Jefferson’s at Monticello,” Hooker said.

The Welcome Table Project, a similar restorative justice based initiative to heal historical harms, is now underway in five counties in Mississippi, headquartered at the once infamous “Ole Miss” university of Mississippi.

Hooker is the Research and Training director for the Coming to the TABLE Program, Policy Director for the Conference of National Black Churches and a minister at the First Congregational Church in Atlanta. As an attorney and mediator, he has spent more than 20 years helping people get beyond conflict to dialog and reconciliation. His resume reads like an international peacemaker: From Sudan, Zimbabwe, Bosnia, Croatia and Cuba, to Georgia and Mississippi, he has worked to help people get beyond trauma and towards healing. He has learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

“In the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission what was present was truth telling, but there was not sufficient opportunity for justice and no peace process that included community engagement and we have seen some of the problems with that approach,” Hooker said. “Because when there is no justice, there is no lasting peace.”

Hooker added that was taken into consideration when they created the framework for dialog, which includes healing from trauma and seeking justice and reconciliation between communities in Mississippi that share a painful past.

The Welcome TABLE project has several major components that include a truth commission that is looking into the 1973 unresolved murders and disappearances in Mississippi between 1945 and 1975. They also are doing extensive oral and audio histories throughout the state and some of the information gathered has helped open criminal cases for murders that were never addressed or solved. Another success of the Welcome to the TABLE project has been the passage of a bill that requires all students to study civil rights movement history and pass a test for high school graduation. The project also sponsors statewide multi-racial black, white, and Choctaw Indian conversations that often lead to action projects.

“If they can do this kind of healing work in Mississippi, you can do it in Oakland,” Hooker said.
 
In Oakland, where the major cause of death for youth between the ages of 18 and 25 is homicide, and where youth of color have disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system, there is an urgent need to find other ways to solve conflicts and to address the harm done to and by youth. That is some of what Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth is trying to do and they are doing it by asking different questions than the ones that are usually asked by the criminal justice system: What law was broken? Who broke it? And what punishment should they receive?

In the current model, when a law is broken it is against the state and often the need of the victims are not taken into consideration. But restorative justice asks different questions: Who was harmed? What are the needs of victims and the community? And how can they work together to hold the offender accountable for the harm?

Since its founding in 2005, RJOY has conducted more than 800 peace making circles and dozen of family conferences, all to lessen the rate in which Oakland’s youth, especially youth of color, are caught in the revolving door of the juvenile justice system.

Judge Gail Bereola, formerly the presiding judge of the juvenile court, introduced Hooker Friday night. She, along with Fania Davis, who is executive director of RJOY, have worked together to create an Alameda County Restorative Justice Task Force that brings together representatives from the police, the school district, the District Attorney’s office and many community organizations.

“Restorative justice allows us to get to some of the root causes of what causes crime,” Bereola said. “We are not trying to supplant the current system, but we need everyone involved to take a hard look at what is going on with our current system and how it is not working for youth or adults. Some of the age group of 18-25 is wrecking havoc on our communities with increasingly heinous crimes. If we were able to lessen the involvement of our youth in prison where they are exposed to a lot of criminal behaviors, a lot of this could be abated.”

They have a long road ahead, but they have already made a lot of progress. RJOY recently received an $850,000 grant from The California Endowment to extend programs into Oakland’s Castlemont Community of Small Schools and the entire Oakland School district has endorsed the use of restorative practices to deal with school discipline. Friday’s event was part of a several days of trainings that were meant to increase the involvement of diverse communities and the clergy in conflict resolution and peacemaking, understanding that the current model of retributive justice does little to repair the harm done to victims or communities that are most impacted by crime. 

Hooker ended his talk by saying, “Justice is the establishment of right relationships, not punishment, not exclusion, not isolation. That’s not justice – that’s violence.

“If we can get to that place and have opportunities for peace and dialog, if we can get to that place, I believe that we can take America beyond the legacy of enslavement.”