The murder charge can not dissuade Sharpton's brother from the Crusade for Voting Rights

The murder charge can not dissuade Sharpton's brother from the Crusade for Voting Rights https://i0.wp.com/www.eresviral.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/El-cargo-de-asesinato-no-puede-disuadir-al-hermano-de-Sharpton-de-la-Cruzada-por-los-Derechos-de-Votación.jpg?fit=219%2C146&ssl=1

The murder charge can not dissuade Sharpton's brother from the Crusade for Voting Rights











This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and the New York magazine.







The last weekend of March, Kenneth Glasgow had planned to conduct a strategy in Atlanta with other Southern organizers on how to help approve the Florida ballot measure that would result in the most radical restoration of voting rights in the criminals in more than a century. Glasgow, a former inmate who had served 14 years for robbery and drug offenses, is a pioneer in the felony movement: an Alabama minister and activist whose just outrage usually exceeds the energy of three people. At a minimum, I needed to return to Georgia on Monday morning to train people across the country on how to go to jail and register inmates to vote. But now he was worried about his other job. "Pastor Kenny," as he is known in his hometown of Dothan, is a kind of chief social worker for the most disillusioned people in one of the most desolate places in the Deep South, a mostly black section of the city. called "The Bottom". As it happens, it is also the half brother Y Reverend Al Sharpton's nephew, a piece of family history that has shaped his life for better and for worse.

That weekend, a close friend who had stayed at a house halfway managed by a small non-profit organization in Glasgow, The society of ordinary people (TOPS), had been charged with assault after a weapon altercation. Now, on Sunday night, Glasgow needed to rescue the guy, pick up his stuff from the rehabilitation house and escort him to drug rehabilitation. However, before that happened, a 26-year-old named Jamie Townes stopped Glasgow in front of the brown duplex that serves as half of the house. A reputed drug dealer, Townes had the habit of leaving his Monte Carlo running down the street, and that night he had left around 10 to discover that his car had disappeared. Townes thought someone had taken Monte Carlo as a joke: would Glasgow help him find it?



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Glasgow agreed, reluctantly. He said he did not know Townes well, but in a neighborhood where many people do not have cars or driver's licenses, and public transportation does not exist, Glasgow said it transports five to ten people a day. "It's normal for me to take people to get their Social Security card, to go to the store, to take them to see my family," said Glasgow, who is short and stocky, with a bald head and a scrawny white goatee. In this case, "I was like, 'Ugh, I have to go back to Atlanta, man.'" But if he refused to help, "I would lose all respect in the neighborhood:" What kind of guy are you? Will not you take someone to look for a car when you're the only one who has a car? "

Except that night, Glasgow did not have his car, he was borrowing a friend's, a new black Camry. So he and Townes, along with the man who hoped to return in rehabilitation and his friend, piled into the vehicle. A few minutes later, they saw the lost car as it turned a corner. His hood was very wrinkled and he was heading straight for them.

The Monte Carlo hit them hard, cutting the driver's side of the Camry. Glasgow tried to retreat, but something hit them from behind, he said, as if they had been followed by a second vehicle. Now Glasgow really panicked: were they being ambushed? Had they gotten into a gang war? "Lower your head, lower your head!" He shouted to his passengers. He said he then heard two quick bursts of gunfire. He pressed himself lower in the seat and waited.

The police arrived almost as soon as the shooting ended. Glasgow watched them inspect the Monte Carlo, which had stopped 60 meters from the road. Townes was also up there, talking to a couple of officers. Glasgow said he had been too busy covering himself to notice that the younger man was getting out of the car. It was at the police headquarters that he learned the identity of the person who had stolen the Townes car: a 23-year-old woman that Glasgow had never heard of, named Breunia Jennings. Even before taking the car, he had been acting strange that day, ranting on Facebook, shaving his head. Now she was dead.

The killer, the police said, was Townes; the weapon, a .40 caliber semiautomatic pistol he had brought with him when he and Glasgow went to get his car. Townes was being charged with capital murder.

That's how Glasgow was. Under Alabama's complicity law, anyone who intentionally incites a crime is as guilty as the person committing it. The charge was more than terrifying for Glasgow. The capital murder is punishable in Alabama by life imprisonment or lethal injection, and Houston County not only has the second highest incarceration rate in the state, but also As of 2013, had more people on death row per capita than any other county of its size (or greater) in the country.

The shooting scene that claimed the life of Breunia Jennings, 23, in March in Dothan, Alabama.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


And the murder charges risked paralyzing one of the most effective leaders of the voting rights movement for serious crimes at a critical juncture. If Glasgow and his fellow defenders could get Amendment 4 approved in the all-important state of Florida, it would be a victory over the efforts of some Republicans to employ a bag of tactics to suppress and dilute the votes of blacks, immigrants and liberals. Practically overnight, 1.4 million people would be eligible to vote, one of the largest flows of new voters since women's suffrage became the law of the land.

Glasgow moved in a haze of shock when a camera took his police picture, while putting on an orange jumpsuit, while a guard pushed him into a cell. He kept thinking: This is crazy. I am innocent, I am innocent. But also: Finally you have me Finally you have me



Kenneth Glasgow and Al Sharpton share the same hooded eyes and a stubborn set of jaws. But the famous civil rights activist has a keenness and an approach that comes from having money and training, and a retinue of employees and managers who can be delegated. Glasgow has on its back and in its head a large community of people, infinitely needy, and manifests itself in its perpetual air of distraction and an enthusiasm to help and please that may seem its own form of need.

When Al was in first or second grade, in the early 1960s, his parents, Al Sharpton Sr. and Ada, brought Ada's 16-year-old daughter from their first marriage to live with them. The girl, Tina Glasgow, had been raised by Ada's parents, sharecroppers on a farm 25 miles northeast of Dothan. Tina and her stepbrother loved each other. He helped young Al, who was already gaining fame as a child preacher, to write his sermons; He called her "Moma Tina". But when Al Jr. was nine years old, it was discovered that his father and Tina had a sexual relationship. The two moved, and Tina gave birth to Kenneth in May 1965.

Al Jr. and his mother quickly moved from living a middle-class existence in Queens: his father owned a small-time property, "a man from the favela, to be honest," Sharpton wrote in his autobiography. "Go tell the pharaoh"- Scrape at a Brownsville location. "The people in the churches who used to say, 'Hey, here comes the preacher child,' smiling, they said, 'You know what your father did, right?'" Sharpton told me this summer. "I had to live in shame. He was very bitter. " The impact of sudden poverty changed the course of his ministry. "When we moved to Brooklyn, they did not pick up the trash every day, the police did not come when you called them in. A lot of my activism was driven by: I saw the difference in zip codes."

Tina and Mr. soon separated, and mother and daughter were reconciled, to the point that Kenny and Al Jr. would be seen in the uncomfortable family dinners that Ada insisted on organizing each week. She liked giving away Kenny with stories about how Al used to line up his stuffed animals and his sister's dolls and exhort them to accept Jesus in their hearts, so Glasgow did the same. "I put the dolls and everything my grandmother had so I could preach to them like I used to, I always wanted to be like my brother." But Al Jr.'s fury in Tina and his father kept him aloof. "It was uncomfortable in the sense that Kenny was my nephew and my brother, and I could not tell him that," Sharpton recalled. "It's a child, how do you explain that?

Glasgow shed tears as he delivered his Sunday sermon at the Alabama Baptist Church in the Dothan's Bottom neighborhood.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


It was Ada who told her grandson the truth about their relationship, when she was around 5 years old. "I could not understand what he was talking about," Glasgow told me. Kenny was small for his age, and his left hand was deformed, two of his fingers little more than stumps. "People used to point me out," that's him, he's there, "and I thought they were talking about my fingers, so I used to hide my hand." Later he realized that they were talking about the circumstances of his birth. As he wrote to his brother two decades later, "I was born as the bastard son and the curse was transmitted from generation to generation."

When Kenny was 12 years old, Tina moved with her son to Dothan, where her grandfather still lived. For a couple of years, Kenny seemed fine. Then, as Glasgow says, an acquaintance of Tina asked Kenny to buy him some grass. The man turned out to be a narcotic, and Kenny was arrested. He had always been a sensitive child, a "water baby", he called himself by his tendency to cry, and the arrest confirmed his worst feelings about himself: "I was born a mess, my fingers got messed up. I'm in bad shape. "

It was the dawn of the crack era. After high school, Glasgow got a decent job as a dog hunter; He was married briefly and had a couple of children. He started using drugs more often and started going in and out of jail, lying to relatives and friends, increasingly reckless and occasionally delirious, he said.

In those years, in the late 80's and early 90's, Glasgow and Sharpton had almost nothing to do with each other. Sharpton had founded his National Action Network, and a brother addicted to drugs was hardly an asset to his political ambitions; In the south, the controversial champion of Tawana Brawley and the Central Park five he was so vilified that Glasgow rarely recognized his half brother. But Sharpton's influence on him remained powerful. "When I hit [got high]Alfred, I would start preaching! "Glasgow wrote Sharpton from prison. "Yes, preaching and prophesying. I would like to visualize the Scriptures in my mind and see vivid images of people's lives. "

Glasgow hugs a member of the church after giving a sermon this summer.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


Glasgow spent most of his 14 years behind bars in the Florida state correctional system, for much of that time studying history and religion, he said. He gravitated towards Islam, which he found intellectually and spiritually liberating, especially his precept known as zakat (charity), and ascended from rank to become the chief minister of the Muslims at the Polk Correctional Institution in Florida. Then, around 1994, "in the middle of the prayer once, I said: 'In the name of Jesus,'" said Glasgow, "and all the Muslims looked at me like ..." He mimicked an expression of exaggerated horror. "I knew that my Muslim days were over." During a season in solitary confinement, he read the Bible from beginning to end.

Glasgow and a friend who was serving a sentence of life had the idea of ​​the Society of Ordinary People in 1994. Glasgow developed a vision plan: TOPS "will consist of many different programs to help people from all walks of life , from the worst criminal to the best Christian. "

On May 23, 2001, he appeared before the Orlando judge who had presided over his last case. Glasgow was free to go home. in a video He did for TOPS, summed up those years: "Fourteen cases of different drugs, two armed robberies, two or three batteries and a great robbery". Then he added an important warning: "That's my criminal record, that's not my life record."



It's a suffocating late-July morning at Wiregrass, as the region surrounding Dothan is known, for a native thin-leafed plant that used to be everywhere but has almost always disappeared. This southern corner, where Alabama, Georgia and Florida converge, is largely rural: small cities and fields of peanuts and bushes of overgrown trees that are crawling with mosquitoes. Dothan is the regional center, surrounded by the usual expansion of shopping centers and chains. The closer you get to the Fund, the higher the density of pawnshops and payday lenders will be.

Glasgow is on bail while waiting to find out if a grand jury will charge him with murder, and we meet at the shopping plaza where the TOPS headquarters are located. The place is so modest that I keep driving despite having visited it several times. A few years ago, the now fiancée of Glasgow, Rodreisha Russaw, who also serves as director of the TOPS program, decided to animate the offices to make them more welcoming, but the regular customers stayed away, anything too pleasant established a standard that they did not meet . They think they could live up to it.

Glasgow at the Dothan headquarters of The Ordinary People Society, or TOPS, its small non-profit organization.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


At a gas station at the end of the road, we picked up two large bottles of Coca Cola to keep the caffeine in Glasgow and soothe his anxious stomach. Then we start your rounds. Dressed in a gray leisure suit that is removed from his body like a pair of loose pajamas, juggles with three phones, the two he normally carries, plus that of his son. They buzz incessantly in his lap: his mother; his fiancee his children several employees and clients of TOPS; one of his lawyers with a strategy question; his brother, Al, watching him.

In the center of Dothan, we passed the red and beige brick courthouse in Houston County, next to the sheriff's department and a couple of blocks from the police. Its proximity to the main road that cuts the lower part of the rest of Dothan seems highly symbolic. Even in Alabama, a state known for its ruthless criminal justice policies and overcrowded prisons, Houston County has stood out. The racial and class disparities in the way justice is delivered in this part of the state "are extremely serious," said attorney Bryan Stevenson, author of best-selling books. memories "Just Mercy"and founder of the Montgomery headquarters Equality of justice initiative.

The Dothan prison established bail policies that discriminated against the poor until a 2015 class action lawsuit, which the city resolved, led to reforms. This year, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Alabama Appleseed reported Blacks represent 61 percent of the defendants in Houston County whose assets are seized by prosecutors. In a 2016 investigation, The New York Times he found that Doug Valeska, the district attorney from 1987 to 2017, systematically channeled wealthy defendants into diversion programs that would allow them to avoid incarceration. (Valeska did not answer to requests for comments.) Meanwhile, minorities and the less affluent often face juries mostly whites, long sentences, and crushing fees and fines.

What nearly sunk Glasgow when he returned from prison in 2001 was the $ 40,000 in child support that had accumulated since he was locked up. "I fell flat on my face," he told me. "I went back to use drugs, I went to ruin". An order for non-payment of child support sent Glasgow to the county jail. He was locked up again almost immediately for a $ 200 traffic ticket. "Nobody [in the family] would help me with the [bail] money, "Tina told me this summer while sitting at her computer, reviewing the bank statements. "It was: 'Oh, he's just going back to smoking drugs.'"



Above: Moma Tina's Mission House, run by the mother of Glasgow, feeds up to 300 people per day. Below: "Moma" Tina Glasgow, in her TOPS office. Behind her is a picture of Glasgow in the 1970s, dressed in a brown shirt.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


From the beginning, TOPS had the feeling of a DIY gadget made from offers in second-hand stores and scrap parts, driven by the strength of Glasgow's personality and his mother's faith in it. Building the organization and keeping it together gave Glasgow an approach that it had never had before. It started with a pizza that had been donated from a restaurant near the card store where Tina worked and a contribution of $ 2,500 from a local car dealer, later mayor of Dothan, to a tent where Glasgow could preach. "I called my mom and I cried like a baby," Glasgow said. "Nobody of that caliber had trusted me before." To their surprise, the white evangelical churches were often more receptive to their requests for help than the black ones: they had more money and donations to donate and less judgment towards the Recipients of their charity. "Many in the black faith community did not want to identify with ex-convicts," Sharpton told me. "Kenny did it, being himself, he used it as something external instead of hiding it, which broke the stigma."

Not that one of America's most famous black preachers helped his own prodigal brother early on, Sharpton admitted. He tended to dismiss his brother's ministry as "driven by his own pain as a former criminal," he said. Only after he started going to Dothan to visit Ada, by then sick. Alzheimer's disease and with Tina as her primary caretaker, Sharpton realized what Glasgow was trying to achieve. "I went down to my mother in the nursing home and Kenny said, 'I want you to come and see my place,'" Sharpton recalled. "And I said, 'Do you have a place?'" Glasgow took his brother to the TOPS headquarters. "That's when I said: 'He's serious.'" But their relationship was too complicated for mentoring, their personalities were very similar, and Sharpton believed that Glasgow needed distance more than he admitted. "He wanted my advice and my advice, but he did not want to be overshadowed, where people said, 'Oh, he's just acting like his brother,'" Sharpton told me. "So it's this double thing of wanting to know me but not wanting to be dominated."

Glasgow is the half brother and nephew of Reverend Al Sharpton. The two are shown in January 2017 in Washington, organized by the Sharpton National Action Network.
(Courtesy of Kenneth Glasgow)


Glasgow operates on the principle that "God never wastes anyone, so TOPS does not either." The main mission of the organization is to help get people out of the criminal justice system and keep them out of their reach. Tina has a soup kitchen that feeds up to 300 people per day. Glasgow's oldest daughter, Kenyetta Rich, serves as an internal bail bond agent, which ensures that transient clients get to court and pay their fees and fines on time. As for Glasgow, he is a switch, a type of first responder who intervenes to resolve conflicts before they intensify and people end up hurt or behind bars. For ex-offenders and their families, even minor interactions with the police can be dangerous. "The worst thing you can do is call the police to someone," he said.

He was traveling with Glasgow one day when he received a call about an argument that had broken out between two women who were staying in one of the other intermediate houses of TOPS. "Okay, now you're going to see what I have to deal with all the time," he said, sighing. We drove a few blocks to a two-story house with an empty pool in the middle of a neglected backyard. Inside the house, two women looked at each other alternately and refused to make eye contact, while a roommate tried to explain what had happened, something about the lack of food stamps.

Glasgow gathered them around a kitchen table for what I assumed would be a discreet conversation aimed at calming the situation. Instead, he began to argue aloud with both women, seeming to face each other, exaggerating each other's complaints about the alleged faults of the other. After about 20 minutes or more, the dynamics changed, now the women were not angry with each other; They were angry with Glasgow. ("It's the routine of the common enemy," he told me later. "I make them start fighting with me.") Feeling that the mood changed, the decibel level went down and he diagnosed the real problem: the two sad women and Scared In the months since his release from prison, they had been the main supporters and closest friends. Now both were leaving the middle house, returning to families who did not especially love them or who knew how to help them. "I've seen this happen many times in jail," Glasgow told them. "Right before people leave, they choose fights because that way it's easier to separate." The women let that happen. When Glasgow urged them to make peace, they fell into each other's arms and cried.



When Glasgow returned home from prison in 2001, he tried to register to vote in Houston County, but was told that his record of felonies in Alabama made him ineligible, possibly forever. Glasgow believed that voting was essential to help ex-offenders reintegrate into their communities, to feel and act as if they had a stake in the future. "I got angry, just to be honest," he said. "I said, 'Okay, since you will not let me vote, I will make sure that everyone I know can vote.'"

Alabama's vote-deprivation law was part of the extensive post-Reconstruction effort throughout the South to deny blacks their position as full citizens. Under the state Constitution of 1901No one could vote who had pleaded guilty to a crime of "moral turpitude", an indefinite phrase that electoral officials interpreted as a general prohibition that applies to almost any serious crime, from exposing a child to a meth lab to rob in a store or drive under the influence. Only the ex-convicts who obtained the pardon were able to recover their voting rights, an onerous and arbitrary process that demanded the presentation of a DNA sample to the State. Anyone who had outstanding fees or fines was prohibited from submitting a petition.





Similar laws stripped 6.1 million The current and formerly incarcerated Americans of their right to vote in the 2016 elections, more than 280,000 of them in Alabama, make serious crime deprivation "by far the largest form of voter suppression we have," said Danielle. Lang, lawyer from Washington DC. -based Campaign Legal Center. Those numbers have multiplied fivefold since the explosion in mass incarceration that began in the 1970s. Nowadays, blacks are deprived of their rights at four times the rate of all others, according to the Sentencing project. The state with the most notorious record is Florida, where more than half a million African-Americans, or a fifth of the state's adult black population, are banned, and where in 2000, George W. Bush outclassed Al Gore with only 537 votes to win the white house. This is the law that state voters will have the opportunity to cancel in two days. If 60 percent of Floridians vote in favor of Amendment 4, the only ex-offenders who will not be able to vote will be murderers and sex offenders.

But the barriers to black political participation were so acute in Glasgow's hometown; Although a third of Dothan's population is black, the city has never had a black mayor, police chief or superintendent, and Houston County has never had a black district attorney or district judge. While contemplating this reality, Glasgow had an epiphany at the beginning of the years: "People who are in jail, who have minor offenses: they do not have serious crimes, so they can still vote." It took a little more logic: "Wait a minute, what about the people in the county jails who were accused of serious crimes but have not yet been convicted? They could also vote!" He started going to jails around Wiregrass, demanding that they be allowed to register people awaiting trial, telling inmates: "These are laws that were written to perpetuate the institution of slavery, if you can not vote, you are basically a slave."

It was a bold tactic that apparently no one had ever tried. Among the admirers of Glasgow was Stevenson, who had already won MacArthur Prize "genius" for his work on behalf of death row inmates, but he was still largely unknown outside the world of criminal justice. Glasgow approached him as soon as he got out of prison: "Could he be a legal assistant? A fly on the wall? Could you just be my mentor or whatever?" And he said, 'Yes, let's go.' " Glasgow's perspective was essential, Stevenson said, at the time, there were very few organizations headed by ex-offenders, especially in the South. "He's really smart, he's very hardworking and he's compassionate," Stevenson said, but what impressed him the most was that Glasgow was "very strategic," willing to take an incremental approach to change and work with Republicans when necessary, and very persistent.When a bipartisan bill was enacted in 2003, it made it easier for former criminals to petition to recover His voting rights, Glasgow himself used the new process of forgiveness to recover what he called his "freedom papers," and he was so excited, he wore them around his neck for months.



Above: despite his arrest, Glasgow has continued to work for Amendment 4, which would restore voting rights for most former offenders in Florida. He visited this jail in Jackson County, Florida, to try to register people awaiting trial. Below: a sign near the entrance of the TOPS headquarters shows Glasgow holding a sign that says "I vote because I am a citizen".
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


A breakthrough came a couple of years later. In 2005, the state attorney general issued a silent opinion that concluded that the language of "moral clumsiness" had been interpreted too broadly and that crimes such as possession of drugs for serious crimes, violations of the law of Alcoholic drinks and DUI for serious crimes were not disqualifying after all. Glasgow and his allies discovered it almost by accident, and he took the news very personally: as his only condemnation of Alabama had been for drug possession, "it turned out that I never lost my rights," he angered. "I could have voted all the time."

Realizing that thousands of people in prison had the same right unknowingly, Glasgow joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which successfully sued for their right to enter state penitentiaries and register eligible prisoners, such how he had been enrolling people in county jails. In 2008, the problem exploded again. Barack Obama ran for the presidency, and when Alabama Republican Party officials learned that Glasgow had started a major prison registration campaign, they tried to stop him and his volunteers. The Republican Party believed that Glasgow was targeting black inmates, that is, probably Democrats, said Ryan Haygood, then a lawyer with the NAACP and now director of the New Jersey Institute of Social Justice. "He actually had a pretty decent number of whites who wanted to get their voting rights back," Haygood said. "Who knows how they were going to vote?" So Haygood started another lawsuit, the election officials backed down quickly and Glasgow was allowed to resume its reach in prison. Alabama is now one of three states that allow people to vote in prison. ( Maine and Vermont are the others.)

the weather The deprivation of serious crimes has changed drastically in recent years. Many conservatives continue to argue that prohibiting convicted criminals from voting is a sound public policy: "If you are not willing to comply with the law, then you should not have a role in making the law for everyone else," Roger from the Center for Equal Opportunities Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation opined En la Revista Nacional de este año. Como mínimo, los dos argumentaron que la restauración automática era una mala idea: "Tiene sentido esperar un período de tiempo ... para asegurarse de que el delincuente realmente haya entregado una nueva hoja". Pero incluso una gran organización sin fines de lucro financiada por Los hermanos multimillonarios Charles y David Koch se han pronunciado a favor de la Enmienda 4 de la Florida, y las encuestas han fijado el apoyo en más del 70 por ciento. Las dinámicas raciales también han cambiado. Si bien los negros están privados de sus derechos de manera desproporcionada, aproximadamente dos tercios de los que recuperarán su derecho al voto en Florida, casi un millón de personas, pertenecen a otras razas (algo que los anuncios a favor de la Enmienda 4 dejan claro).

Mientras tanto, en Alabama, la Legislatura mayoritariamente republicana en mayo de 2017 finalmente aprobó dos partes de legislation Glasgow había estado presionando por mucho tiempo. Uno alivió el requisito de que las personas que buscan restablecer sus derechos de voto primero deben pagar todos sus honorarios y multas. the second el carácter moral oficial limitó a 47 delitos graves, desde asesinatos e incesto hasta el narcotráfico y la falsificación, reinsertando automáticamente hasta 76,000 personas, el Proyecto de Sentencia Dear.

Los proyectos de ley se convirtieron en ley justo a tiempo para el enfrentamiento entre Doug Jones y Roy Moore para el escaño en el Senado de los Estados Unidos que quedó vacante cuando Jeff Sessions se convirtió en fiscal general. Y la máquina de registro de votantes de Glasgow entró en acción: durante unas semanas, él y los voluntarios de TOPS visitaron 32 cárceles y prisiones y registraron un estimado de 5,000 votantes. Personas como Spencer Trawick, de 22 años, de Dothan, quien se había declarado culpable de robo en tercer grado en 2016, una condena que lo habría descalificado bajo la antigua definición de vileza moral, pero no bajo la ley. nueva ley. "Muchas personas, cuando cometen un delito grave, sienten que todo su mundo se ha destruido, porque hay muchas cosas que no se pueden hacer", Trawick dijo entonces. La nueva ley ofrecía un rayo de esperanza, sugirió: "Mucha gente va a correr hacia ella".

El esfuerzo llamó la atención de Breitbart Noticias, que decía un titular alegando que un "Ejército de Soros" estaba usando ex convictos para arrebatarle las elecciones a Moore. La historia explotó en los medios de la derecha, momento en el que Glasgow, quien efectivamente recibió fondos de un grupo que apoyó Soros, dijo que se convirtió en el objeto de una nueva y feroz ira en las redes sociales y en las calles de Dothan. "Nos acercarían personas al azar que nos decían: 'Te estamos observando'", me dijo la prometida de Glasgow, Russaw. "Veríamos a la policía al otro lado de la calle con cámaras sobre nosotros. La policía haría muchas paradas en las personas de la parte inferior: "¿Qué sabes sobre Glasgow?" Recibimos llamadas que no pudimos rastrear, la gente lo llamó la N. Intentaban enviar a diferentes mujeres a su manera. Las mujeres llamarían pidiendo por él.

Glasgow ya no era uno de los favoritos entre las autoridades locales, debido a su tendencia a desafiar las prácticas locales como Black Lives Matter de un solo hombre. "No están acostumbrados a nadie, especialmente a un ex delincuente negro, ex crackhead, que les habla así en Dothan", dijo Glasgow. "No están acostumbrados a que ninguna persona negra les explique sus leyes".

Glasgow at the front entrance of the Jackson County jail in Florida.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


Mario Williams, an attorney from Atlanta who worked with Glasgow on several cases — including a lawsuit on behalf of the family of a 22-year-old Dothan man named Christopher Thomas, who’d been shot to death by police in 2012 — saw how Glasgow would rattle cages. “Kenneth would come in and say: ‘Hey, let me see that complaint. I’m gonna make sure the whole world knows about it, because I’m gonna call my news station,’” Williams said. It got to the point, Glasgow said, where the Houston County district attorney, Valeska, would ask prospective jurors if they knew him or attended his church. (David Jamison, president of the Southeast Alabama Coalition for the Homeless, said this happened to him a couple of years ago when he was up for jury duty at the Houston County courthouse. “I was outraged,” Jamison said. “I was invited as a citizen to be on jury duty. I thought, ‘This is not right.’”

Soon Glasgow was getting slammed for being a media hound, not unlike his brother. “I’d say, ‘He’s getting on the news because if he doesn’t, nobody’s gonna pay attention,’” Williams said. “You write a letter to the city of Dothan about discrimination or some other constitutional violation? They’re gonna ball up that complaint and throw it in the trash can.”

On Dec. 12, 2017, the day of the special Senate election, Glasgow was handing out leaflets with his troops, troubleshooting and driving people to the polls. At one point, precinct workers in Dothan rejected two parolees for lacking proper identification. Glasgow convinced them to accept the men’s correctional paperwork — “I said, ‘Surely, y’all not gonna tell me that their fingerprints and their mug shots and their jail records is not ID.’” Dothan was Moore country, and Glasgow’s crew felt the hostility. “People were harassing us; they were calling us nigger,” he said. By the end of the day, Glasgow was sure they’d lost.

He went home and called Sharpton to commiserate. “He tells me: ‘Keep your head up. You did a great thing today, don’t be discouraged.’” Glasgow was still despairing, the TV turned off, when he received a congratulatory text from his friend Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-executive director of a leadership training institute whose alumni include Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer. “He called me [back], and he’s just weeping, and he was like, ‘But I thought they called it [for Moore],’” Henderson recalled. The initial predictions were wrong: Late returns from heavily African-American counties — where Glasgow and company had concentrated their efforts — shifted the race toward Jones. He eventually won by a margin of almost 22,000 votes, including 96 percent of blacks.



Four months after Jones won the election, on the morning of April 6, 2018, Glasgow appeared in court for a preliminary hearing on the capital murder charges. The seats were packed with supporters from as far away as New York and California. He sat at the defense table in his orange jumpsuit, his arms and legs shackled, his skin ashen. During his two weeks behind bars, he had been trying to stay calm by doing what he knew: preaching to fellow inmates and registering them to vote. But his distress was evident in the slump of his back and the stony set of his weary face.

In the 17 years since he had left prison, Glasgow had become the most famous civil-rights advocate no one had ever heard of. Now he was in danger of being transformed into the Willie Horton of felony re-enfranchisement. Glasgow’s detractors couldn’t contain their glee. “Is this real?” Donald Trump Jr. crowed, tuiteando the Daily Caller story about Glasgow’s arrest. To contain the vitriol, one of the first things Tina asked Sharpton was to stay out of it. “I said, ‘All right,’” Sharpton recalled. “‘But you know good and well that Kenny wouldn’t do nothing like that.’ She said, ‘I know, but let us deal with it.’” For Sharpton, the hardest part was that he didn’t want his brother to feel abandoned all over again. During his own many stints in jail for protesting, Sharpton said: “My father never came and seen me. Never sent word. And I wanted to maybe even that out — for Kenny to know his big brother came for him. Strategically it might not have been the wise thing. But emotionally that’s what I wanted to do. I did not want him to feel deserted.”

A Bible in Glasgow’s SUV.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


At the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Russ Goodman raised suspicion about many of the decisions Glasgow made that night in March: When Townes discovered his Monte Carlo was missing, why hadn’t Glasgow sought help from police? How could Glasgow not have seen Townes get out of the car? After the shooting started, why hadn’t Glasgow tried to flee to safety or to call 911? “He had every opportunity to do something to get out of the situation,” Goodman argued.

At this, Judge Benjamin Lewis, a Republican and former state legislator not known for being particularly friendly to defendants, seemed incredulous. “You think it would have been better for him to flee the scene?”

But the biggest mark against Glasgow was that he’d initially told police that the car’s owner, Joi Williams, had been the driver. He’d called her immediately after the accident, and fretting over whether her insurance would pay for the damage caused by another drive, Williams said she suggested that he tell police she’d been behind the wheel and had wandered off to get help. Meanwhile, Williams would show up and tell investigators the same thing.

Glasgow made a half-hearted effort to pass Williams off as the driver, which he admits was ridiculously stupid and says he never would’ve done had he known someone was killed, but by the time he’d arrived at the police station, he’d told the truth.

After listening to the testimony, Glasgow’s Dothan-based attorney, Derek Yarbrough, was adamant: Police and prosecutors hadn’t offered “a scintilla of evidence” showing his client knew Townes had a gun or intended to commit a crime. Yarbrough noted that the two other passengers in the car hadn’t been charged. “If you’re going to charge somebody with complicity to commit capital murder, every one of them in that car would be guilty.”

The judge seemed somewhat skeptical of the prosecutor’s case as well. “I’m still waiting for what he actually did that made him complicit in the crime itself,” he told the prosecutor at one point. The following week, Lewis issued his order, sending the case to a grand jury for a closer look; meanwhile, Glasgow was free on $75,000 bail.



In late April, I ran into Glasgow at the grand opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, the haunting memorial to lynching and mass incarceration established by Stevenson. Glasgow had been holed up in Dothan, too depressed to do much of anything, but Stevenson had urged him to attend and another donor had paid his way. “It was the first time I got to see him since any of this happened, and I just wanted to give him a hug,” Stevenson told me. “I’m presuming his innocence, and more than that, I’m standing with his character.” Stevenson knew better than most people the danger Glasgow was facing — the zealousness of prosecutors in Houston County, and the difficulties ex-felons face in getting a fair trial. People who’ve spent years in prison tend to feel forever stained, he continued, and “I wanted [Kenny] to know that I know he’s still the same person that I’ve known for a good while now.”

Surrounded by old comrades, Glasgow seemed revived, even ebullient — “How ya doing?” he called, waving to “Orange is the New Black” author Piper Kerman, fresh from moderating a panel.

But back in Dothan, the mood was very different. At the TOPS annual banquet on May 4, Glasgow’s 53rd birthday, the tables were decorated with sunflowers and the chairs were draped with gigantic yellow bows. But the room was half empty — not a big surprise. Some of Glasgow’s allies were “running scared that we’re going to be judged based on the outcome of Kenny,” said his friend, Dorsey Nunn, who heads the California-based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. Daryl Atkinson, another leader of the movement to help ex-felons reintegrate into society, had signed on as one of Glasgow’s attorneys. He echoed Nunn after a conference call with dozens of advocates for criminal justice reform: “There’s folks on that call today whose organizations are running like roaches.”




Although dapper in a dark suit and bright-blue shirt, Glasgow seemed jittery and disappointed at the poor turnout. He kept ducking out during the speeches, checking his phone in the hallway, and his mother, regal in a black jacket and long skirt, went out to give him a scolding. Later he told me that the fundraiser, a major source of TOPS’ revenue for the year, raised only about $5,000, one-fifth of its usual take.

In the weeks after the preliminary hearing, Glasgow’s lawyers reported that they were hearing that police were asking suspects in other cases if they had any dirt on Glasgow and about his possible involvement with drugs. “Several Dothan police officers have made comments regarding my client and the charges that have been brought against him which are not merely misinformed but are outright false,” Yarbrough wrote to police Chief Steven Parrish, copying District Attorney Pat Jones on the message. Several of the people questioned “felt intimidated or actually threatened by the officers’ words and accompanying actions.”

Jones declined to comment, citing rules of professional conduct. Dothan police Capt. Will Benny defended the handling of the case. The idea that the charges were politically motivated is “just ridiculous,” Benny said. “I can say that in this exact set of facts and circumstances, what we know evidence-wise, anybody else in Mr. Glasgow’s position would have been charged the same way he was.”

The first grand jury came and went in late June, apparently without the case being presented. In mid-July, Glasgow’s daughter Kenyetta was arrested in the parking lot of Southeast Alabama Medical Center, where she had been under treatment for symptoms related to diabetes, and charged with public intoxication; though she wasn’t in her car, it was also impounded. The charges were soon dropped. “I feel like it’s a part of the pattern because everybody knows who my daddy is,” she said.

Later in the summer, Glasgow was leaving his mother’s house, driving his fiancée’s newly purchased Ford SUV, when he was stopped by police, who ran his license plates. The dealer plates came back as stolen, and despite Glasgow’s protests that they were legal, he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of receiving stolen property. Once again, Glasgow’s face was plastered all over the local news, and Jones’s office moved to revoke his bail.

Then police interviewed the dealer, who confirmed that Glasgow had the right to use the plates. Two hours after seeking a court order to lock him up again, the DA’s office withdrew its demand.

A few weeks later, a second grand jury was convened and adjourned, and while the proceedings are secret, Yarbrough heard rumblings that evidence had been presented in Glasgow’s case, though once again no action was taken. (Townes is in jail — the judge found probable cause and refused to release him on bail — but he hasn’t been indicted either.) I checked in with Glasgow several times over this period. He was agitated, then irate, then resigned, then irate again in the realization that the capital-murder charges could be hanging over his head indefinitely — and that, in the meantime, he and his family and his organization might continue to be under low-grade but constant surveillance. “It hinders your work. … Even if you’re strong enough to deal with it, it hinders anyone who deals with you,” he told me. “It’s psychological warfare.”

Cellphones buzz incessantly with calls from Glasgow’s mother, his fiancée, his kids, his lawyers, various TOPS staffers and clients, and Sharpton.
(Nina Robinson for ProPublica)


He’d been spending a lot of time in Florida, trying to support the Amendment 4 campaign by registering as many voters as he could, including some in rural jails, and doing community outreach with other groups to make sure those new voters actually cast their ballots. The entire Florida election felt deeply personal. Back in 2007, Glasgow had been one of a noisy contingent of activists who had persuaded then-Gov. Charlie Crist to revamp the clemency process so that regaining the vote for ex-felons would be almost automatic — until the next governor, Rick Scott, jammed the brakes. Now Scott was running for Senate, and Tallahassee’s African-American mayor, Andrew Gillum, was narrowly ahead in a tight race to replace him as governor. Even if Amendment 4 lost, Glasgow said, a Gillum win could save the day. Glasgow had work to do in Georgia as well, where Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has charged that her Republican opponent engaged in voter-suppression tactics reminiscent of the pre-civil rights era.

Williams has a theory about what’s going on with the pending murder charges, one shared by many of Glasgow’s supporters: Police and prosecutors know they have a weak case and are doing their best to make Glasgow’s life miserable, in the hope that they might find something else to charge him with or that he might make a mistake. “Let’s take ex-convict Kenneth Glasgow and say he’s at it again, he’s gone back to his old ways,” Williams said. “Let’s destroy his reputation so we can decrease the number of people who listen to him, follow him in his march for constitutional rights for disadvantaged people. That’s really the endgame.”
(“Mr. Williams is entitled to his opinion,” Benny, the police captain, said in an email.)

Black leaders and activists have always been targeted, Sharpton reminded Glasgow during their daily chats: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Muhammad Ali and, of course, Sharpton himself (during a 1991 protest over the killing of a black youth by a white mob in Brooklyn, he took a steak knife to the chest). “You chose to answer a calling for leadership,” Sharpton told his brother. “Let them beat up on you, so the victim doesn’t have to be beaten up on.”

Sharpton often recounts a lesson he learned from Ali decades ago, while the two were watching boxers spar at a Pennsylvania training camp — “A champion ain’t just one that can throw a punch.” The real test, Sharpton said, is how well Glasgow taking a punch. “If you get knocked down and get up off the ground, you have the chance to be a champion. But if you don’t, people will remember you as a good puncher, but he had a glass jaw.”

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