Solidarity Building Initiative reflects on five years of liberative carceral education at Cook County Jail

04-03-2023

Celebrating 5 Years of Higher Ed in Jail.  Join SBI on April 20th at their 5-Year Anniversary Kick-Off Pop-Up Event, “Through These Bars: A Behind the Walls Listening Party.” This will be the public's first look into the protest songs created by McCormick’s Solidarity Building Initiative incarcerated students at the Cook County Jail.

Five years ago, the Solidarity Building Initiative for Liberative Carceral Education (SBI) at McCormick Theological Seminary began as a pilot certificate in theological studies for incarcerated learners. Inspired by the work of Dr. Jenny Bride in Radical Discipleship, incarcerated students were invited to engage in theological discourse.  “The students possessed a voracious appetite to learn and engage in academic pursuits. At the end of the course, they wanted to know what was next. More specifically, would McCormick continue to offer theological education,” remembers Jia Johnson, director of the Solidarity Building Initiative.

In 2020, under the leadership of Jia Johnson, SBI was created with social change in mind. SBI’s mission is to utilize the carceral classroom as a location for social change through creative and liberative theological education. The initiative seeks to mitigate some of the material, social, and political barriers that system-impacted individuals (and their communities) experience while incarcerated and upon release. In this way, SBI bridges the gap between learning communities at Cook County Jail with those in the free world at McCormick Theological Seminary and the broader community.  “Higher education in carceral spaces provide incarcerated learners with tangle and entangle resources that nurture their spiritual, personal and professional growth while incarcerated and upon release,” asserts Johnson. The work of SBI reflects McCormick’s commitments to local and global social justice and equity.

Now in its fifth year, the Solidarity Building Initiative’s offers a second certificate in community healing. As both the student and practitioner, in learning labs, students discuss themes essential to community healing such as spiritual activism, personal narrative, lived experience, justice, social change, love, artistic expression, abolition, restorative justice, mindfulness, and body-centered practices. As student practitioners, leaners gain hands on experience facilitating class discussions, peer-led book conversations and leading the learning community in somatic practices for racial trauma in the course “Body Centered Practices for Community Healing”. In the “Healing and Justice Conversation Series”, students lead mindfulness practices, opening and closing rituals and create a practice for community healing that provides individual and communal support in response to injustices.

The course “The Art of Community Healing” utilizes art and spiritual activism as prophetic preaching for public ministers. Students are invited to reimagine preaching for public ministry as an artistic process that transmutes the suffering caused by oppression into proclaiming God’s liberating and healing message. This past fall, “The Art of Community of Healing” was piloted as the workshop “Through These Bars”, co-created by Jia Johnson and The Honorable Hakim Dough.  Applying Resmaa Menakem’s concept of compassionate agitation or wise social activism, which creates social and cultural disrupts for the purposes of healing, incarcerated learners utilized the micro and macro cause and effects, which birthed and prolonged the expansion of black protest music throughout the world, as a template for co-creating their own version of a protest songs for their time and place as compassionate agitation.

“Our ancestors birthed the genera of black protest music when they gave us negro spirituals and the blues. Black and brown people have been using music and songwriting to transmutes the trauma of oppression into communal healing since they arrived on this stolen of land from Indigenous people in 1619.”, states Johnson. In the workshop, “Students engaged the works of healers like Billy Holiday, Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Marvin Gay, Curtis Mayfield and contemporary artist like Kendrick Lamar and Grandmaster Flash to name a few.  They heard for the first time Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit, which is a protest song in response to the legacy of lynching from 1882 – 1968, where there were nearly 5,000 lynching’s of black bodies. This was a transformative for moment for them. All of these artists inspired generative conversation and influenced the students protest song lyrics.”, asserts Johnson.

On April 20, SBI is kicking off a yearlong celebration for their 5-year anniversary with the Through These Bars: A Behind the Walls Listening Party. This will be the publics first look into the protest songs created my incarcerated students in the “Through These Bars” workshop. The program includes a generative conversation, engaging the students’ songs and a community art project. Attendees will have an opportunity to respond to the students’ protest songs by co-creating themes for song lyric for a third song that Richard Wallace and The Honorable Hakim Doug will co-create and produce. The song will be released at the second pop-up event. The Listening Party will be in person and virtual and of course, they will be food. For more information follow the link and register, space is limited. 

“Through These Bars: A Behind the Walls Listening Party.” is April 20 at Little Black Pearl, 1060 East 47th Street, Chicago, IL.

Jia Johnson