The Healing Project: Finding justice for families of victims of injustice
26th November 2018 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Editor’s Note: In the printed version of this story, Mr. Jones’ age at his time of death was misstated as 48. He was in fact 42 when he died. This version of the story has been edited with that correction.
Ruvella Casmere remembers her uncle, Eugene Jones, as a person who would do what he could to help out his fellow residents of the Carrollton neighborhood.
Jones, for example, frequently volunteered to run to the local A&P supermarket to pick up groceries for an elderly woman on Green Street, Miss Mariah; Ruvella, then a young girl, would sometimes tag along when her uncle drove to the store.
“My uncle was a good man who would help anybody,” Casmere said recently from her current home in Alexandria. “Everybody knew my uncle.”
But Jones’ most selfless and heroic act was to take Ruvella in and raise her as his own daughter when her father departed for the Army. Along with Ruvella’s grandmother, Uncle Genie provided her with the type of stable, positive childhood that her birth parents were always unable to give her.
“He stepped in like my dad,” Casmere said. “He knew my dad was gone and my mom didn’t want me, so he stepped in. He didn’t have to do that. He had a son of his own.”
But on Nov. 19, 1949, four Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s deputies burst into the Jones home, arrested Casmere’s uncle on a flimsy narcotics charge and spirited him away, supposedly as part of a marijuana investigation.
Ruvella never saw her beloved Uncle Genie alive again.
On the following morning, Nov. 20 – just about 70 years ago – Jones’ family found out the 42-year-old former U.S. Marine was dead. The official line from the coroner was that Jones died from circulatory collapse after an overdose of marijuana, a diagnosis that seems ridiculous in modern times.
But Jones’ family knew what had really happened – the Jefferson Parish deputies had beaten Eugene to death, leaving severe cuts on Jones’ head and his body covered with blood.
“My uncle had always been there for me, but now he wasn’t,” she said, “because they took him from me.”
The sudden, tragic killing profoundly impacted young Ruvella, deeply scarring her as she grew into an adult. Vividly remembering her uncle’s death at the hands of white policemen – who were buffeted and shielded by the oppressive segregation of Jim Crow – eventually engendered a deep hatred and mistrust in her heart.
“I was so very angry when they killed my uncle,” Casmere said. “They took a lot from me. It really took me a long time to lose my hatred of white people and policemen. I had to really work hard [to shed her anger] because I was prejudiced. Maybe that’s a person’s way of surviving.”
After decades of burying her pain deep in her memory and clutching to her anger and hate, Casmere received a chance, at long last, for healing and absolution when representatives from the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at the Northeastern University School of Law contacted her.
The Project wanted Casmere to take part in the Project’s ongoing efforts to research and bring to light the many deaths of Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement authorities during Southern segregation and the difficult process of integration. So far, the CRRJ has investigated and amassed documents on hundreds of such cases, especially those in the Deep South, between 1930 and 1970.
The ultimate goal of the CRRJ’s work, say CRRJ officials, is to achieve justice for the murdered men and women, helping modern police authorities to acknowledge the past sins of others, and to bring about healing for everyone affected by those tragic events decades ago. If that happens, change can be affected in how police and communities interact today.
“Unless we do that, it’s likely that police violence and killings will continue without reckoning with history,” said Kaylie Simon, CRRJ’s project director for restorative justice.
Earlier this year, Gretna City officials and law enforcement representatives gathered with CRRJ leaders and members at Mt. Pilgrim Baptist Church in Harvey to memorialize and celebrate the life and memory of Royal Cyril Brooks, who was shot and killed February 1948 by a Gretna police officer after an encounter on a bus.
Brooks’ surviving family members and descendants were on hand as Gretna Mayor Belinda Constant read a resolution passed by the City Council acknowledging Brooks’ death as a miscarriage of justice and apologizing to his loved ones and other citizens for the tragedy 70 years ago.
Then, last month, the Loyola University College of Law hosted “Past Harms, Present Remedies,” a daylong conference convened by the CRRJ to examine the impact deaths at the hands of police continue to have decades later, and to discuss ways to bring about reconciliation between modern law-enforcement agencies and the community, especially the loved ones of those killed.
The conference last month drew about 70 attendees and focused on the killings that occurred in the Deep South – Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia – and the gathering featured Northeastern Distinguished Law Professor Margaret Burnham, the founder and director of the CRRJ; Louis Dekmar, the chief of police in La Grange, Ga.; and Loyola Law Professor Andrea Armstrong.
Also attending was Luvella Casmere, whose uncle was one of the specific cases addressed and examined at the conference. Relatives of Royal Brooks also attended the conference, as did family members of Denver Smith, who was killed in Baton Rouge in 1972 during student riots at Southern University.
Armstrong said last week that CRRJ has files on roughly 30 cold cases in the New Orleans area, adding that with events such as the one held at Loyola last month, the CRRJ is helping to bring about reconciliation and healing in the community here in the Crescent City.
“Participants [at the conference] actively discussed how greater awareness and investigation in those cases could contribute to justice today in our city,” Armstrong said.
The Loyola professor said an examination and re-appraisal of decades-old incidents can reveal how the harms and impacts of those deaths continue to affect individuals and society at large today. Doing that, she added, can positively influence current-day efforts to prevent such tragedies from not only being forgotten, but also repeated.
“Without a full understanding of how certain communities were terrorized and without addressing the harms that were deliberately inflicted,” she said, “it is impossible to design inclusive and justice-oriented policies today.
“Although there are different approaches to transforming these tragedies into positive change from around the world and the U.S.,” she added, “one element common to almost all of them is a full and honest accounting of the harms that occurred. That accounting could take a variety of forms – from a plaque to a prosecution to an investigative report – but it is critical that the accounting for the harm occur in some fashion.”
Simon said that by inviting numerous current police officials to such events, Project staff “want law enforcement officers to learn about this. We can help change modern police practices when we know more about these historical cases.”
“The idea was to give police officers more time to listen to these stories, both about these incidents and methods for reform today,” Simon added.
La Grange Police Chief Dekmar has helped forge the way in helping law enforcement entities to take part in that process. Dekmar recently issued an apology to the relatives of Austin Callaway, who was lynched by a mob in 1940 despite being held in custody by La Grange police.
Echoing Armstrong’s and Simon’s sentiments, Dekmar said that law enforcement agencies must be proactive in doing their part to bring about community and familial healing.
“It is important for all institutions,” said Dekmar, who also serves as president of the Inter-national Association of Chiefs of Police, “including police agencies, that have historically participated in racial or minority injustice to acknowledge the role of their institution and address it through partnerships with those citizens and communities impacted by that history.”
Dekmar said the CRRJ conference at Loyola reinforced his experience addressing the Callaway lynching, and he enjoyed helping teach others about reconciliation efforts and helping all involved to find a way forward. Such efforts help engender trust and cooperation between the community and police that makes the current environment safer for both citizens and officers.
“The lesson that continues to be clear,” he said, “is that past harms and injustices influence and impact police community relationships today, and that the state of those relationships impact public safety, community safety and officer safety.”
Such psychological repair and societal transformation nurtured by “Past Harms, Present Remedies” was embodied by the experience of Ruvella Casmere, who said she came away from the conference feeling like a weight had been lifted off her soul. She said that until the gathering, she had never told any of her six sons about what happened to her uncle; she continued to suppress the lingering devastation of his murder, but with the help of the conference, Casmere was able to unlock her angry and start to let go of it.
“People have a tendency to bury things deep down,” Casmere said. “[The pain] didn’t really register for me until the [CRRJ] people called me. It brought back a lot of stuff I didn’t know I was carrying. I had so much baggage.”
For the CRRJ’s Simon, the most emotional and powerful part of the conference came when attendees broke into smaller discussion groups, where they personally heard the stories of family members who had lost loved ones. Simon said that hopefully such relatives can find solace and peace in the CRRJ’s efforts.
“We wanted to let them see that we aren’t going to let history die,” she said.
This article originally published in the November 26, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
