Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, there has been a wave of advocacy that has successfully removed police officers from public schools.

But Floyd’s murder did not start the movement. It added fuel to a fire that has burned for decades in communities of color. 

The story of school policing is one that is rooted in the fights for civil rights and education equality. 

In 1948, the Los Angeles School Police Department, which would go on to become the largest school police department in the nation, was created to combat violence in newly integrating schools, according to a 2017 ACLU report. Around the nation, as schools began to integrate, the notion prevailed that bringing Black students into white schools would also bring violence. 

Police presence grew in schools and so did its opposition. In 1971, Boston’s Black Student Federation staged a boycott of its public school system. Nearly half of the Black students in the city stayed home from school during the week of Feb. 8, according to a report in the Journal of Urban History. Among their demands was “the removal of police from schools and surrounding areas.”

Decades later, amid the uprising following Floyd’s murder, a handful of school districts have answered renewed calls to remove police from schools. Advocates say police escalate school discipline situations and their strict surveillance of communities of color disproportionately funnels those students into prisons, according to the ACLU and the Advancement Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. 

Despite their proliferation after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, there is no evidence that school resource officers actually make schools safer.  The Advancement Project identified 62 assaults by school police officers between 2009 and 2019.

In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, the decision to end the school district’s decades-long contract with the local police department came just over a week after his death. In Oakland, the city voted to disband its school police department a month after his death, after falling one vote short in March.

But for both cities, there was a George Floyd before 2020. 

Four years earlier in a suburb of Minneapolis, 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop just outside of Minneapolis in front of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter. 

It was just the latest highly-publicized offense in the fraught relationship between police and the Black community. A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while selling CDs  outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

“We don’t need to tie that history to learning environments in our schools and to also be developing fake narratives around what police actually mean when we are seeing differently every day what police mean to our communities and how that history continues to live on,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis.

Talks of eliminating school resource officers began in the Twin Cities following Castile’s murder, Eban said. 

Nearby, a Minneapolis suburb ended its contract with local police departments in 2017. After several incidents of excessive force, Intermediate District 287 in Plymouth, Minnesota got rid of its police officers and replaced them with student safety coaches, trained to de-escalate conflict and address students’ mental health needs.

The battle was ongoing. 

“We wouldn’t have gotten here, even with everything that happened with the murder of George Floyd, if we didn’t challenge the school district and the school board’s values a year earlier, when the Minneapolis police department had done other racist things,”  Eban said. 

In Oakland, the Black Organizing Project’s work zeroed in on removing police from schools in 2011 after the murder of Raheim Brown, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by an Oakland school police officer. It launched its Bettering Our School Systems (BOSS) Campaign.

After realizing how deeply embedded police were in their schools, the campaign launched efforts to reform the police in schools. Not only was there a school police department, but the schools also contracted a number of city police officers and school resource officers, said Manning.

“Police in schools were normalized,” said Ni’Keah Manning, the advocacy group’s program coordinator. “It was so normalized that it wasn’t even questioned.” 

The campaign started with small reforms, such as formalizing a complaint policy against officers to empower students and parents, and establishing a memorandum of understanding to limit the power the city’s police department had in schools. 

Despite their victories in reform, Manning said the goal was always complete abolition. 

“We knew in organizing that a system will only revert back to doing what it was designed to do. And there is no one to make sure they’re being held accountable,”  Manning said. 

The international uprising caused by Floyd’s murder was a catalyst that created a moment of opportunity,  Manning said.  

“It was divine timing,” she said. 

On June 24, the Oakland School Board voted unanimously to eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department.

Now, in both cities, the next step is providing alternatives to police in schools. 

In Minneapolis, there had been research for at least 10 alternatives prior to the decision to end the contract with their police department, though none had been approved, according to Eban. 

Manning said the work of the next two to three years will be creating a safety plan that gives the community a seat at the table and focuses on restorative practices that emphasize repairing harm caused by wrongdoing, rather than punishment. 

Source art courtesy of Black Organizing Project

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During the mid to late 1990s, a fear of violent youth crime swept the nation, fueled by inaccurate estimates from criminologists and media reports. 

A substantial rise in youth violent crime in the 1980s through early ‘90s prompted criminologist and then-Princeton University professor John DiIulio to write an article in 1995 predicting that a new breed of juveniles were going to terrorize the nation: “super-predators.”

The youth violent crime rate began to significantly decrease that same year, but by the time this was recognized, the damage had already been done. 

James Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University predicted the same thing as DiIulio. In his report for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, he forecasted that by 2005, the juvenile violent crime rate would increase by 20%.

At the time, DiIulio and Fox said their logic made sense. The youth violent crime rate was already at 30 per 100,000 in 1994, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and with even more children being born as a consequence of the baby boomer generation, they said the rate would rise with the population. 

But, DiIulio and Fox didn’t account for outlying factors that could have contributed to crime in their estimates. Instead, they said these children were born different.

The youth crime rate fell faster than it rose. In 1995, the same year DiIulio first coined the term “super-predator,” it had already fallen by nearly 6%, and continued to fall at this rate until it reached about 11 per 100,000 in 1999, where it has flattened out.

A report by the National Consortium of Violence Research found that the quick increase and decrease of youth violent crime during this time could be attributed to the crack cocaine epidemic, an economic recession, high unemployment rates and other factors.

Fox said in an interview with News21 he doesn’t regret what he said because he helped raise an alarm about the need for measures to prevent youth crime, like after school programs, and to an extent it worked. He noted that many cities implemented preventative crime measures, but acknowledged that the conversation created a lot of harsh and punitive laws. 

DiIulio, who now teaches at University of Pennsylvania, later said he regretted spreading his “super-predator” theory, but was not available for an interview. The U.S. Department of Justice deemed his theory a myth in 2000.

Legacy on Life

The Bureau of Justice Statistics first began tracking the number of youth in adult jails in 1993, when there were roughly 4,300 kids incarcerated. By 1999 — six years later — this number more than doubled. Nearly 9,500 kids were in adult jail, and 91% of them were being tried as adults. 

Catherine Jones was one of these kids. 

Jones was 13 years old when she and her 12-year-old brother, Curtis Fairchild, were among the youngest children to be charged with first-degree murder. On Jan. 6, 1999 they shot and killed her soon-to-be stepmother, Sonya Speights, in their Brevard County, Florida, home.

Her uncle, a convicted pedophile who lived in the same home, had been sexually abusing her since she was five. She told a pastor about the abuse, and it was reported to the state. She remembers nothing changing after the abuse was reported. She remembers her father not believing her.

But one person did believe her: Her brother, because it was happening to him too. 

Jones said when Fairchild told her that he was being abused, her 13-year-old mind couldn’t think of an escape other than death. She remembers being in the shower, and her uncle coming into the bathroom and opening the shower curtain to masturbate. When he finished, she said he left 35 cents on the toilet seat. Her father and stepmother were in the other room.

“And I vowed in my head that now, to me, everyone’s responsible,” Jones said. 

When she was arrested, she said she told the investigators and her lawyers about the abuse. In most cases, this kind of trauma would have been a factor in deciding if she and her brother would be charged as adults and, if found guilty, how long their sentence would be. 

Tod Goodyear, who was one of the homicide investigators on the case and now the public information officer for the Brevard County Police Department, said he remembers the abuse coming up, but that his job was to investigate the homicide. He said Jones told him their motive was that Speights was getting in the way of the children’s relationship with their father, but Jones said she did not say this.

Local headlines read, “Police: Jealous kids plotted killing” and “Shooting ends fight for dad’s attention.” Jones said she remembers watching herself be described on television news as “remorseless” and “not appearing to have emotions” because she didn’t cry in court hearings. But she said this reaction was her usual defense mechanism to cope.

“From the time that I was arrested and I received that infamous label of a super-predator or a child killer or the youngest female killer, I was never referred to by my name in headlines,”  Jones said.

Legacy of Language

The way Jones was described was exactly how DiIulio and Fox described the incoming cohort of juvenile criminals.

Fox said he didn’t agree with the word “super-predator,” but instead used phrases like “teenage blood bath” and described children, particularly teens living in “urban” areas, as having “little to live for and to strive for, but plenty to die for and even kill for.”

Fox said his use of the super-predator rhetoric was not racist because the increase of violence he predicted was among both white and Black youth. Critics disagree. 

“If you introduce a framework that dehumanizes a population, you are nevertheless joining ranks with a discursive practice that has long, long existed,” said Geoff Ward, a professor at Washington University who focuses on the racial politics of social control.

This dehumanization is a mechanism of “othering,”  Ward said, and people, especially white people, use it to justify and protect themselves from what is happening to other populations.   

Ward said this concept isn’t new. This framework was used when European colonizers called indigenous people “savages” to justify taking their land. He added that it is used today by the current administration to rationalize harsh immigration policy by labeling certain immigrants as rapists and criminals.

James Forman, a law professor at Yale University and expert on mass incarceration, said people were already scared from the spike in crime rates in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and fear of crime is often a result of the systemic racism the country is built on. 

“The willingness to think of Black people as the other, as the criminal element, is what made people able to mobilize on that fear, to create these harsh laws,” Forman said. “Because people thought, ‘Well, these harsh laws are aimed at somebody other than my child.”

Black and Latino youth were not only disproportionately incarcerated during this time, but they were also disproportionately shown on television and in newspapers being arrested for crimes, reinforcing negative racial biases without explicitly saying it, said Ward. And they still are. 

Jones said when she watched news reports that depicted her as a “remorseless” super-predator at 13-years-old, she began to believe it. 

“I didn’t realize I was numb because of everything I had went through,” she said. “I really thought maybe I was just incapable of feeling.”

Legacy of Law

In the 1996 election, both Republican Bob Dole and Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton ran on platforms to be “tough on crime” and restore “law and order.”

 A 1996 speech by Hillary Clinton came into headlines in 2016, another election year, when a Black Lives Matters activist interrupted a private campaign event to ask for an apology for the mass incarceration of Black Americans under her husband’s administration. 

“These aren’t just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy,” Hillary Clinton said in the speech.

Advocates say initiatives under the 1994 Crime Law passed by President Bill Clinton contributed greatly to mass incarceration, and the super-predator myth added to it by funneling more people, specifically Black and brown Americans, into the adult prison system for longer periods of time.

A U.S. Department of Justice study found that legislatures in nearly every state revised or rewrote their laws to make it easier for jurisdictions to transfer kids to adult court through lower age limits, automatic transfers and handing off the decision-making from juvenile court judges to criminal prosecutors.

It took 21 days for the courts to decide to transfer Jones and her brother to the adult court system, where they were charged and convicted. As soon as their case moved to adult court, they were treated like adults. 

At 13, Jones said she didn’t understand what the right to remain silent really meant. She signed a plea bargain for second-degree murder that gave her 18 years of incarceration and life on probation. She was told if she didn’t, she would spend the rest of her life in prison.

She was sentenced within 10 months without having a trial.

Over 75% of the over 2,800 people currently serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed under the age of 18 were incarcerated during or after the 1990s, according to the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth. 

The campaign also found that Black children are sentenced to life without parole at 10 times  the rate of white children, fueling the racial disparities seen in both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.

“You cannot separate the creation of a justice system from the society that’s asking it to be created,” said James Bell, founding president of the Burns Institute, which works to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. 

Legacy to be changed

Laws passed in response to the super-predator myth are slowly being reversed. The 2012 landmark Supreme Court case Miller v. Alabama ruled that it is unconstitutional to sentence a child under 18 to life without parole without considering how children are different from adults.

Steve Drizin, clinical director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions who has experience representing juveniles charged with serious crimes in the ‘90s, said he began to see a slight reversal in these punitive laws when the juvenile death penalty was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005. 

Around this same time, he said, more robust research on brain development emerged, showing that children’s brains don’t fully develop until their mid-20s, which helps explain impulsive crimes and those that are reactions to trauma.  

While there have been great strides to repair the impact the super-predator myth had on juvenile incarceration, advocates say there is still work to be done. There are 13 states without a minimum age to try a child as an adult and about 95,000 children are housed in adult jails and prisons each year.

Jones was released in 2015 when she was 30 years old. She said she left the worst part of her life behind her.

“The air smelled different. It felt different,” she said. “Once you got past that control room with no barbed wire, it was like everything became so big.”

Jones said when she was first in prison, she thought she deserved to be treated like a “super-predator.” She said the guilt of taking away the life of her stepmother destroyed her, and she lives with it every day, but now it fuels her to create change. 

Jones now works full-time at the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth advocating for children to be treated as such in the criminal justice system. She said children need to be held accountable for their actions, but they need to be held accountable in age appropriate ways.

Between the campaign and volunteering with Fresh Start Ministries to support abused women, she juggles two toddlers. She said she wants her kids to have the security she didn’t have, and wants them to know she will always be there for them.

“Instead of a super-predator, I’m a super-mom,” Jones said. 

Source art courtesy of Newspapers.com

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In most schools, the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education is taught as a major victory for reaching equality in education. The 1954 decision desegregated schools and united Black and white students under one roof. 

What they don’t mention is what the nation lost after Brown versus Board of Education, and how it laid the groundwork for the school-to-prison pipeline.

In a 2019 study by Princeton University, researchers found that Black students were three times more likely to be suspended than white students. 

Forty-five years ago, this rate was the same. 

The first national study on school suspensions by the Children’s Defense Fund in 1975 attributed this statistic to racism among white teachers, specifically in the South. It pointed directly to the school-to-prison pipeline before the term was coined. 

It noted how vague codes of conduct leave room for teachers to assert biases, how exclusionary discipline harms students, and how this kind of discrimination can push a child into juvenile deliquency.

It asked the  federal government to set up a compliance policy to hold schools accountable for “widespread and systematic” discrimination. Although the U.S. Department of Education now has a guidebook and sometimes conducts its own investigations into school districts, no official compliance policy has ever been implemented.

“The U.S. school system was never designed for us,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis. “When the Black community started to build their own schools and develop their own systems, that was essentially and literally destroyed through Brown v. Board of Education.”

Before integration was law, Black schools served multiple functions in their communities. They created classroom environments designed to teach students they could be whatever they wanted to be. Black educators were advocates in their communities and networks of support for their students, said Vanessa Siddle Walker, an education historian and professor at Emory University who has studied the effects of the landmark court case. 

Some, like the Valena C. Jones Elementary School in New Orleans, taught their students to become productive American citizens. The elementary school was fashioned after a Republic with each classroom designated a state with a governor, judge, policemen and other government officials. 

Before there was a Voting Rights Act protecting their Black teachers’ right to vote, Black students were learning to be part of a government. 

After the 1954 decision, historians estimate about 38,000 Black teachers in the South lost their jobs. White parents didn’t want their children to be taught by Black people. If Black schools didn’t shut down, white teachers replaced Black teachers in them. In 1966, American Teachers’ Association, the Black teachers’ organization, merged with the National Education Association, which is still in operation. 

“It became clear that the NEA, particularly in the beginning, was less interested in equality in merging and more interested in just accomplishing a merger,” Walker said. 

The impersonalized approach resulted in a negative environment that does not encourage Black children to have aspirations and lacks advocates, Walker said. By dropping Black students into white schools, desegregation created a harmful environment without specific efforts to address Black students’ needs.

Tiffanie Harrison attended school in Round Rock Independent School District, where she now teaches in Round Rock, Texas. The district is 9% Black. 

“I think that as a student in a largely white community, I was really encouraged to be color blind, which is really harmful because it’s not a thing,” said Harrison. “If you don’t see color, you don’t see people.”

Studies after studies show Black students achieve most when they are taught by Black teachers, and they achieve least when taught by white teachers. 

In Los Angeles, where Southerners had increasingly fled Jim Crow, a school police department was created in 1948 to patrol increasingly integrated schools and protect against foreseeable property damage, according to a study by The Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. 

These origins have led to an atmosphere of mistrust and overcriminalization of Black and brown youth in public schools, said Maria Fernandez, the group’s senior campaign strategist. She said this atmosphere does not address the root issues of a child’s behavior, and instead intensifies them.

For Rosemarie Allen, a social justice educator in Denver with expertise in early childhood development, this feeling is familiar. Black girls receive more discipline in school than any other student.

Allen began attending school about a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She said she was taught by all white teachers, and was suspended and disciplined often. She remembers one teacher describing her behavior as “demonic.”

After the third grade, Allen said, she remembers feeling resentful toward school. She was then pushed out of three middle schools. If she didn’t have a father who constantly supported and fought for her, she said she would have entered the school-to-prison pipeline.

As desegregation efforts progressed, scholars said different types of segregation emerged. 

Special education is one of them, said Steven Nelson, a professor in educational leadership at the University of Memphis and former education advocate at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Black students are overrepresented in special education settings for learning and behavioral disabilities, according to the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools. 

“I have personal experience with it when I kept getting in trouble,”  Allen said. When she was in school, her teachers tried to place her in special education, but the criteria in the 1960s, when Allen was in school, was an IQ test. Her test results led to her being skipped ahead a grade. 

In the 1970s, while Black students were being bused to white schools, the beginnings of the special education legislation of today emerged. 

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students with disabilities are entitled to a free appropriate public education. However, for Black students, advocates say it does the opposite. 

“We may have them in the same school building, so the school building level numbers look OK,” said Nelson, who also taught and advocated on behalf of students with special education needs. 

“But when you look at the special education programs,” Nelson said, “one of the things you see is that you have this disproportionality of Black students being served in those settings, especially in those self-contained settings.” 

The segregation of Black students into special education, he said, contributes to Black students in those settings becoming stagnant. 

Angela Mann, a school psychologist and assistant professor at University of North Florida, said academic performance of students in special education is often not included in the performance of the whole school. She said this can lead to stigma, substandard instruction and low expectations, making it difficult for these students to succeed. 

“It doesn’t matter what curriculum you teach if the child doesn’t feel like he or she can do it,” said Walker, the education historian and professor at Emory University.  

Even though she was smart and did well in school, Allen said her guidance counselor told her she wasn’t college material. She said she got into California State University through the Educational Opportunity Program.

As a college student, she said she still noticed the differences between how Black and white students were treated, and the disparities that existed in higher education. 

“But it never broke my resolve that I was going to make a difference,” said Allen.

She remembers reading the first study on classroom climate while she was pursuing her doctorate degree in Equity and Leadership in Education at the University of Colorado, Denver. It was from 1973.

The study specifically picked students that had the same intellectual abilities. It found that Black students were given less attention, ignored more, praised less and criticized more. It said it appeared to be a “disturbing instance of white racism.”

But there was one sentence that resonated with Allen: “It is the gifted Black who is given the least attention, is the least praised, and the most criticized.”

She said this was the first time she realized and believed that she was not the label her teachers gave her. She said she wished she could call her dad, but he had already passed away. 

“I must have cried for an hour,” Allen said. “If I could just tell Daddy, that it wasn’t me all those years. That it was [racism] and the fact that we didn’t prepare each other for each other, you know? And we still don’t, which is why I do what I do.”

Source photo courtesy of Florida Memory Photos

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In the early 1930s, Robert Carr, a member of the Creek Nation, was expelled for “incorrigible behavior” from Chilocco Indian Agricultural School near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. 

By the time he was 21, Carr had been incarcerated in three different institutions. He died in a Kansas state prison where he was held for stealing $30 worth of food, said his niece, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, a professor and Indigenous studies scholar at Arizona State University. 

It was the height of the Great Depression and, according to Lomawaima, Carr said he committed the crime because he couldn’t get a job and was hungry.

The school-to-prison pipeline –– a trend of school discipline pushing children into prison –– is recognized to have started developing at the end of the 20th century, experts say. But Carr’s story is an example of this phenomenon from decades earlier, when the U.S. government sanctioned, and sometimes operated and financed, hundreds of boarding schools for Native American children that relied on military and carceral practices to forcibly assimilate them into Western culture.

Modern juvenile incarceration disproportionately affects Native American youth, and experts on U.S. Indian policy trace the disparity back to the U.S.’s Native American assimilation policies of the 19th and 20th centuries –– which included boarding schools. Not only were boarding schools often little better than prisons, they intentionally broke up Native American families and triggered trauma that has compounded over generations, leading to many of the disparities Native Americans face today, according to a report by the National Congress of American Indians.

However, Lomawaima said the history of boarding schools is nuanced. 

Native American boarding school students report vastly different experiences, many of which are displayed in Phoenix’s Heard Museum exhibit “Away from Home,” which shows the evolution of boarding schools. Early boarding schools tried to strip youth of their culture and language, but schools changed policies over time and in their final years were more culturally tolerant. Some allowed kids to remake their school policies so they could express and share their culture.

Boarding school policies were just one part of the government’s efforts to undermine Native Americans’ sovereignty and rights, Lomawaima said. These institutions were built on centuries of federal policies aimed at land acquisition through erasing Native culture. 

“It’s not that what happened in boarding schools was directly responsible for every bad thing that happened in Indian country,” Lomawaima said. “But it’s linked to every bad thing that happened in Indian country.”

Lomawaima first learned about boarding school history from her father, Curtis Carr, Robert’s brother. Curtis and Robert entered Chilocco in 1927, when Curtis was 9 years old. He persevered longer than Robert, but ran away at about age 14 because he wanted to see his mom and “he just couldn’t hack it anymore,” Lomawaima said.

Lomawaima’s father rode the rails to California and weathered the Great Depression in a hobo camp, fought in World War II and eventually became a flight engineer and in-flight photographer for Boeing. 

Lomawaima said the stories he told of his boarding school days were mainly lighthearted tales of boyhood pranks on teachers and his school gang teaching him to fish. Under the surface, she knew there was more. 

“Even in the funny stories, you could see the reality of institutional life,” she said.

For nearly a century, the federal government funded boarding schools both on and off reservations. They were started as an extension of government policies aimed at assimilating tribes into Western culture, converting them to Christianity and weakening their cultural and family ties.

The real goal of these accumulated policies, said Addie Rolnick, professor of law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was to “get rid of [Native Americans] as a barrier to settlement,” enabling U.S. settlers to expand west and take advantage of the continent’s rich land and resources.  

Over the years, boarding schools took many forms and Native American students’ experiences varied greatly, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, schools were brutal by many accounts.

Sandy White Hawk, president of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, said boarding school survivors have given consistent accounts of abuse, forced labor, inhumane conditions and attempts to erase Native American culture by cutting students’ hair, dressing them in uniforms and punishing them for speaking their tribal languages. 

White Hawk said she attended a healing ceremony for boarding school survivors where “I don’t know if there was one man who did not share that he had been raped –– and women as well.”

The education was rudimentary and largely focused on training Native students for menial labor, said former Colorado U.S. Attorney Troy Eid, who was also chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission. Many students were forcibly removed from their homes to attend boarding schools against their parents’ wishes. In 1894, the U.S. imprisoned a group of Hopi men in Alcatraz for resisting their children’s removal.

A 1928 government-commissioned survey, now known as the Meriam Report, gave a scathing summary of school conditions, and by the 1930s, the U.S. adjusted its boarding school policies. 

But, Lomawaima said, “There’s policy and then there’s practice and they don’t always line up.” Accounts of boarding school conditions during this time vary greatly.

The Great Depression was particularly hard on Native American tribes, Lomawaima said, and some parents willingly sent their children to boarding schools. They knew that at school their children would at least receive three meals a day, something many parents couldn’t provide.

This was the case for the Carr brothers. Lomawaima said archival records show that in 1926, Cora Carr, their mother, requested her sons be allowed to attend Chilocco. 

In the era her father and uncle attended Chilocco, Lomawaima said children were allowed to go home to see their parents on breaks, a significant difference from earlier school policy. Despite some improvements, though, “it was a very harsh environment” built on strict military discipline and regimented schedules, she said. The school used methods like the “beltline strategy” to encourage students to regulate themselves.

“They would line the boys up in two lines, like running a gauntlet. They hit him with their belts,” Lomawaima said. “As my dad said, if some guy had it out for you, he hit you with the buckle end.”

Lomawaima said her father had fond memories of the Saturdays he spent hunting and fishing in Chilocco Creek with his boarding school gang. He also credited the school for teaching him practical trade skills that he was able to develop into his later career as a flight engineer, but he said those skills didn’t make up for destroying his family. 

More significant boarding school reforms came during the Civil Rights era, though White Hawk said there were still some reports of brutal treatment. During this later period many Native American families developed school pride after multiple generations attended a specific boarding school. Many students have shared fond memories of boarding schools and express regret that so many were closed. 

Patty Talahongva, a Hopi journalist for Indian Country Today who attended Phoenix Indian School in 1978-79, said, “Things changed in the boarding schools over time. What did not change was the quality of education. It was always substandard.” 

Later-era students at some schools took back the experience and made it their own. Talahongva said when she was attending Phoenix Indian School, students shared their culture through tribal clubs and powwow groups. But there were still vestiges of the militarized regimen that had characterized early boarding schools.

Attendance was no longer mandated but Talahongva decided to go to Phoenix Indian School in 1978 because there wasn’t a high school on the Hopi reservation. 

“The only option on the table was to go to boarding school, and is that being forced?” Talahongva said.

Experts say trauma from the boarding school era has been passed through generations of Native American families. They point to the lasting effects of historical trauma as causes of the high levels of PTSD, incarceration, violence and poverty Native American youth face today.

But White Hawk said the trauma isn’t just historical –– it’s present-day. 

“I’m 66 and we still have the generation right here who are the last to have gone to those kinds of boarding schools,” White Hawk said. “It’s not in the past at all.”

But Lomawaima said that, while historical trauma is real, blaming everything on it can mask the fact that, “there’s bad stuff happening now.” It can imply that victims are permanently broken and often lets the victimizers off the hook, undermining the strength and resilience Native people have shown by surviving centuries of colonialism.

Talahongva said the boarding school system was devastating because generations of Native Americans grew up away from their families and culture. If young people returned to their tribes, she said, they didn’t know their traditions or how to be parents.

“We’re healing ourselves,” Talahongva said. “And every generation gets a little bit better.”

Experts like Lomawaima and Brenda Child, professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, question whether too much emphasis is placed on boarding schools as the main cause of Natives Americans’ historic and current trauma, especially since students’ recollections of their boarding school experiences are so disparate. 

In a chapter of a book she contributed to, Child concludes that the boarding school experience does not summarize all the bad things that have ever happened to Native Americans. Rather, it’s a metaphor useful for summing up the many federal policies that accumulated over “the allotment and assimilation era” to undermine tribal sovereignty and allow European settlers to claim tribal lands. 

In some ways, Lomawaima’s father’s experience at Chilocco actually reinforced his cultural identity. Curtis Carr hadn’t been raised in a traditional Creek home; he learned about tribal culture from his gang at school and they developed their own culture of resistance that helped them be resilient in the face of abuse, Lomawaima said. 

Lomawaima said her father taught her and her sister to always resist and question authority. 

“That’s certainly not to say that boarding schools are blameless because they were not,” Lomawaima said. “But it also is just a reminder that they weren’t the only thing going on, not then, not now.”

Source photos courtesy of the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center and K. Tsianina Lomawaima

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One day in June 1964, Gerald Gault and a friend made a bad decision. They made an obscene phone call to Ora Cook, Gault’s neighbor. Cook called the police and both boys were arrested and taken to a detention facility in Gila County, Arizona.

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, establishing the right of children to attorneys, though children’s advocates say legal representation is still uneven.

The juvenile justice system bewildered Gault and his family, according to Supreme Court testimony. Police made no attempts to notify Gault’s parents of his arrest – they only found out later. As Gault’s case made its way through the court, the judge questioned Gault, never with a lawyer present and sometimes without even his parents, and no transcript or recordings were made. The judge sentenced Gault, who was on probation at the time of his arrest, to six years in juvenile detention. Gault’s parents challenged the ruling. 

Had Gault been older – at the time of his arrest, he was 15 years old – he would have been automatically guaranteed the right to a lawyer, a right afforded all adults when they are arrested under the 14th Amendment. But because Gault was a child – and children were regarded differently than adults in regards to criminal justice – he was not given a lawyer or any of the other rights he would have received had he been 18. 

In re Gault, as the Supreme Court case is known, signified a landmark moment in juvenile justice in the United States: children were officially recognized, for the first time, as having the same legal rights as adults. But over 50 years later, legal experts say the goal of Gault’s case has failed: children across the states are still not provided their right to legal counsel.

A 2017 report from the National Juvenile Defender Center, on the 50th anniversary of the Gault case, found that no state guarantees children access to a lawyer. The children who do get lawyers often don’t get them until after they’ve been interrogated by police, must pay for their own “free” counsel, are encouraged to waive their right to a lawyer, or are denied access to a lawyer after sentencing. 

“Even in the cases in which kids are represented there’s wide disparity with regard to the quality and the resources awarded their representation,” said Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers University. 

According to David Tanenhaus, a professor of history and law at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the juvenile system was not designed to have the same formality and procedures as the adult criminal system. Experts recognized that adults and children are fundamentally different – adults require punishment for their crimes, while children and adolescents require rehabilitation – and so they established distinct legal systems. 

“The logic of the original juvenile court is that you should think about what a child needs – so it was more based on needs than thinking about constitutional rights to due process,” Tanenhaus said. 

As a result, the juvenile system was not originally designed to provide youth with a defense attorney. The end result, juvenile defenders say, is a system that is not well-equipped to provide legal help to kids who need it. The rules that had been established to protect kids from the formality and procedures of the adult system failed Gault: he was a youth suddenly facing an adult’s punishment, with no recourse available to defend himself.  

The Gault case determined that children have the same rights to due process as adults, including access to a lawyer, as protected by the 14th Amendment. However, children are still systemically denied this right. 

“Sometimes, children are put in a position where they have to waive their right to counsel or feel that they have to waive the right to counsel,” said Cohen. “In other situations, the quality of counsel they receive is below what the Constitution requires and certainly not what any of us would want if it were our own child who were appearing before the court.”

“the quality of counsel they receive is below what the Constitution requires and certainly not what any of us would want if it were our own child who were appearing before the court.”

Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers University

According to Cohen, there are numerous roadblocks to change. Some are philosophical, like the longstanding belief that justice system involvement is good for children. Others are financial – many public defender offices are grossly underfunded, with juvenile defenders sometimes working enormous caseloads on impossible schedules. 

While Gault did require that youth have access to counsel, it did not require that states establish public defender offices equipped to do so. Because of this, some children — particularly those living in rural areas – are forced to rely on private defense attorneys, according to the 2017 NJDC report.

Instead, overworked public defenders have inadequate time, training or resources to properly handle juvenile cases. This is a problem because cases involving juveniles are a lot more complicated than cases involving adults. 

“It takes a lot longer to represent a child,” said Tim Curry, the legal director at NJDC. “I can’t expect to have one meeting with [a child], go through all these complicated legal situations and expect that to be it.” 

Curry and Cohen agree that another major reason that changes are slow to develop is the structural racism that is baked into the juvenile justice system. Cohen said that while white children offend at the same rate as non-white children, “children of color are disproportionately arrested, disproportionately charged, disproportionately prosecuted and disproportionately incarcerated.”

Since NJDC’s report, some jurisdictions have been working to improve their public defender offices’ counsel to juveniles. Cohen said that while the case moved the juvenile system in the right direction, the standard established by In re Gault remains far from reality. 

“There’s a lot of work that remains to be done,” she said.

Lead photo courtesy of Ernest K. Bennett, Associated Press

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