Newsletter JUNE 2024
Brown Skin Written by Tee Taylor, social justice intern at CTJC As a little girl, I wanted to be my best self to help others be their best version. If I were to be honest, I did not exactly know what I wanted to do. It became abundantly clear after learning about the darkness that hides behind those who look like me, who have the same skin color and hair texture as me, and who are simply different in general. I realized that it was my duty as a Black person, a Black female, a Black non-binary queer person who had pushed past the odds that were stacked against me to help others. To help move through them with a systemically oppressed pattern and narrative that was so adamant about ruining the lives of others who were marginalized. My background started in Mississippi growing up; I eventually became immune to the prejudices and discrimination along with the false narratives that were pushed onto me and my peers. While I started volunteering as an intern at CTJC, I heard of a situation in Mississippi that continues to reign fire within my bones. A woman by the name of Bettersten Wade was looking for her son, Dexter Wade, for months without the help of the very police who are supposed to “protect and serve.” They were the same people who kept the truth that would change this mother’s life and her family forever. This was something that I would not wish for my worst enemy, let alone a mother, to experience. “She asked neighbors, searched abandoned houses, called detectives, and posted messages on social media begging him to come home” (Warren & Lee, 2023). After calling, worrying, and looking for her son, she was finally called to come to Hinds County Penal Farm. Taken past the gates that seemed home to several gravesites with numbered mounds of loosely packed dirt passing by them as she was led to the back of the clearing of markers, Bettersten Wade and her sister found the end of the search for her son. She walked right up to a grave where her flesh and blood were buried. Dexter was killed only an hour after leaving his mother's home with a friend while crossing the street. Not only was he killed by a Jackson police car, but the police also knew that his name was Dexter and that Bettersten was his mother. Instead of contacting her, the police decided it was better to let her worry for 172 days (about five and a half months), plagued with uncertainties as his body lay unclaimed for months in the Jackson morgue. Not only was Dexter, who had struggled with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, leaving behind a heartbroken mother, but there also were two little girls who would grow up wondering where their father was (Schuppe, 2023). After paying the $250 fee to claim Dexter’s body, it would take several more weeks for Bettersten to give her son the proper burial he deserved, as she needed to figure out exactly where his body was under the mounds.
To make matters worse, Dexter Wade was just one of 215 bodies later found buried in the unmarked graves behind a jail outside of Jackson, Mississippi, only a three-hour drive from my mother’s house. I believe Bettersten would have benefited from a center like CTJC to help her in not only searching for her loved one but also to provide the support for the feelings of heartbreak and grief that only a community could offer. Nobody connected with her as the police continued to use gaslighting tactics on her when she would ask for simple information or leads on anything dealing with her son. I have found that the importance of CTJC is that it has provided for those in the Black and Brown community to be seen as individuals and not just another number. If you are currently reading this, think for a second. Have you heard anything about the bodies being found in Mississippi? Or that there were still mothers and other family members trying to advocate for their loved ones who were only guilty of not being white? Quick history lesson: Where did “police officers” come from? Well, if you were thinking from the early 1700s, they began as “Slave Patrols,” establishing a system of terror to squash slave uprising with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners, you would be right. This was started and created in the Carolinas, progressing over the South until the end of the Civil War. One of the things I always wondered was how there were so many lynchings that went without justice, how people felt that they could just come into an individual’s home, take an individual out of their homes, beat or torture them, and leave them for dead without the slightest bit of worry about consequences, especially with the 13th Amendment stating the freedom from slavery.
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