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The Current Transcript for May 24, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

What I’m saying is happening a lot is two gangs feuding. And one gang showing up at a party where another one not invited and then the guns come out.

LAURA LYNCH: Gangs and guns, a deadly mix that one Toronto police inspector says is leading to more violence, more shootings, more deaths on the city's streets. There's one town in California that thinks it has the solution, a program that has seen the number of gun-related crimes drop and left more young men alive. It employs ex-convicts to work on the streets, trying to persuade others to give up crime and it actually pays the gang members to turn their lives around. That's in our first half hour. After that, how slaves saved one of America's great universities.

SOUNDCLIP

Georgetown University sold the Georgetown slaves in 1838 and nobody from Georgetown has ever gone looking for them.

LL: Richard Cellini is a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, DC. First intrigued then dismayed by his school's history, he went looking for them. He found descendant Maxine Crump and together they learned what happened to her ancestor - a man who was sold in order to save and build Georgetown. And coming up after that…

SOUNDCLIP

The way you get prosperous in the 21st century is through knowledge and ideas and collecting money them, and Canada doesn’t have an ecosystem that takes us to making money off of ideas.

LL: Jim Balsillie of Blackberry fame put out the warning months ago. Well, the Liberal government has promised to finally put an innovation strategy into place. We'll hear from three people who will be watching that outcome closely to make sure they get it right. I'm Laura Lynch sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Paying criminals to stay out of trouble

Guests: Devone Boggan, Jooyoung Lee

SOUNDCLIP

I think the community is rightly feeling shocked and outraged. I mean, they’re angry with this senseless act of violence. There’s a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. You are given the same solutions to the same problem.

LAURA LYNCH: That was pastor Sam Aragones with the Rexdale Alliance Church responding to the shooting death of a pregnant woman that shocked his Toronto community last week. Toronto is just one of the cities across the country trying to find a solution to gun violence on its streets. One place Canadian communities may look to for a different kind of approach is Richmond, California, and a program called the Office of Neighbourhood Safety. The ONS identifies perpetrators of violence and works with them, providing job training, mentorship, and a stipend. The program was created in 2007 in a year that saw 47 homicides in a population of just 100,000 people. Since that time, gun violence in Richmond has plummeted. Joining me is the founder of the Office of Neighbourhood Safety, Devone Boggan. We've reached him in Richmond, California. Hello.

DEVONE BOGGAN: Hello.

LL: How familiar is that sentiment to you, that people are tired of seeing the same old solutions to the same problem that don't turn out to be solutions at all?

DEVONE BOGGAN: It's so very familiar and it's unfortunate because as we continue to go down these dead end roads we continue to see lives lost that don't necessarily have to be lost the way they are being lost.

LL: What makes your program different from other gang intervention programs that already exist?

DEVONE BOGGAN: Well, the first thing, it's not a gang intervention program and albeit gang intervention and prevention programs are important. You can facilitate a gang intervention or gang prevention program and never, I mean, absolutely never doing that great work never touch a young man who is responsible for shooting a gun to solve conflict. And so what makes this work very different is that it is not gang prevention or intervention. It is going right to the individuals that we know to be our most active firearm offenders who’ve avoided any sustained criminal consequences for their actions and engaging them in a partnership that begins to change the trajectory of their lives.

LL: Okay. So let's talk about that. You target the most violent members of the community. How do you go about that first stage? How do you identify them?

DEVONE BOGGAN: Well, the first thing to understand is most law enforcement agencies do have a good idea about who they believe have allegedly been responsible for gunfire in the city. So you have to have access to that kind of intelligence and information. The second thing is you've got to have credible individuals, typically credible non-law enforcement individuals who aren't afraid to engage in those neighbourhoods most besieged by gun violence and deploy those individuals in those neighbourhoods to seek out, observe, understand what the nature of gun violence is, understand who is driving the gun violence, and then aren't afraid to connect with those individuals and develop a relationship that derives or provide opportunities for those young people involved.

LL: And who are those special people?

DEVONE BOGGAN: Well, in the city of Richmond, believe it or not, we were able to convince the city government to hire formerly incarcerated members of the Richmond Community who had firearm offenses in their backgrounds, who were able to demonstrate that they had completely transformed their own lives so that they could in fact be affective models for the individuals that we wanted to engage. So we called them Neighbourhood Change Agents. They are vested, full time city employees for the city government of Richmond. This is a non-law enforcement agency, the first of its kind with one sole focus: reduce firearm-associated injury and death.

LL: Okay. So those change agents who you yourself identify as ex-cons. they go into the communities, they look for these guys. What's the common denominator on among the people that you identified as being good people to recruit for your program?

DEVONE BOGGAN: They are babies growing up in war zones. All of them. Throughout your growth and development, from the time you are an infant you experience bullets, death, tragedy, trauma, and you grow up and now you're 16 years old, you’re 17, you’re able to understand a little bit and you've actually experienced it directly because friends of yours have died. You may have been injured yourself by a firearm. And each time one of these incidents occurs everybody's pointing in the other or opposite direction - they're the enemy. And so you grow up believing that they – whoever ‘they’ are on the other side of town, whoever came through your neighbourhood shooting - is the enemy and you find yourself feeling that it is your responsibility to protect your community from the enemy or retaliate on behalf of your community on the enemy.

LL: So if that's the life they have known, how do you convince them to join your program, which is run by government, run by authorities who they would normally tend to run away from?

DEVONE BOGGAN: That's a great question. Well, it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of demonstration that you're not already or that you're not in any way what they've already experienced. I think it's very important to understand that most of these young men lack real healthy access to positive relationships and so we just keep at them, we just keep at them, we just keep at them. And then we've got something that we have to offer them - what we call our Advanced Peace Operation Peacemaker Fellowship.

LL: What’s the fellowship?

DEVONE BOGGAN: The fellowship is a seven touch point, high touch point engagement where we are, for example, every day engaging these young men multiple times a day by multiple people. Two, we work with them to create a life map, which is essentially a goals and objectives opportunity. The third thing we do is we connect them to social service opportunities that they may not have been accessing. We actually take them and we stay with them throughout the process until they let us know that the process is working and that they're more comfortable doing it now on their own. The next thing we do is we connect them to what we call a ‘privileged stipend.’ After six months of this 18-month non-mandated fellowship - that is they can tell us to go to hell and some of them do, 20 per cent of them tell us to go to heck - and what we do is after six months they become eligible for a stipend of up to a thousand dollars.

LL: So you're paying them to stay away from violence and guns?

DEVONE BOGGAN: No, we're not. We never asked them to put their guns down. We're stipending them. We're paying them for the accomplishments that they achieve through their life map. We believe that the process of achieving goals and having exposures that they don't have access to and now these new relationships that they haven't had access to will eventually allow them to put their guns down on their own and history has demonstrated that throughout this work, since June of 2010, when it was launched.

LL: What difference has it made to gun violence in the community?

DEVONE BOGGAN: The numbers say that 94 per cent of our fellows, after becoming a fellow, is alive five years after his fellowship experience. 84 per cent of our fellows haven't been shot or injured by a firearm since becoming a fellow. And this is the biggest number - 79 per cent of our fellows have not or are not a suspect in a new firearm crime since becoming a fellow. That’s huge. The city of Richmond in 2015 experienced a four-decade low of firearm assaults in that year.

LL: In the realm of statistics keeping about these kinds of crime statistics, that's really not a long period of time. Are you satisfied, based on the time that you've been doing this, that this really is the result of the program and not some other factor?

DEVONE BOGGAN: Absolutely.

LL: Why?

DEVONE BOGGAN: Because the young men are alive and because the young men that most law enforcement agencies working gun crimes in the city of Richmond would tell you, they're not on our radar after you all of began to engage them. I think when you are able to actually touch the very young people who are most responsible for gun violence in a way that you would never touch them before, things change.

LL: There's something else that you do, that we haven't talked about yet, with these young men. You take them on trips outside of the city sometimes and you take men who probably would have been shooting at each other and put them together. Tell me about that.

DEVONE BOGGAN: Yeah, well, the fifth element of our fellowship is the horizon building exposures and each fellow has an opportunity to travel outside of the city of Richmond. Believe it or not, you be 13 years old to 27 years old involved in gun violence in the city of Richmond and really never left your neighbourhood. And so what we try to do is to expose them to all of the many resources out in the state of California. And really what we're trying to do is to help them to understand that the world is much bigger than the city of Richmond. You know, it's very difficult to dream about things that you don't even know exist.

LL: Mr. Boggan, I am betting that despite the success that you know here and despite the length of time it's been in place, I'm betting at the beginning and probably even now there are some people who still do not like the idea of paying young men—

DEVONE BOGGAN: That’s a great point.

LL: --who use gun violence to get out of that realm and also paying ex-cons to work in your program.

DEVONE BOGGAN: The fact of the matter is, in most jurisdictions where gun violence is prevalent, particularly urban communities in this country, the clearance rates, or the closure rates, or prosecution rates for gun crimes is under 40 per cent. So that means that six, seven times out of ten, I have an opportunity to escape any criminal consequences for my actions. So if I'm walking the streets and law enforcement alone cannot, or prosecution alone cannot, or investigations alone cannot keep me from becoming a serial shooter, why not allow something else, that absolutely can do that, to engage me in a way that keeps this community safer?

LL: Do you think this is a model that could work in Toronto, for example?

DEVONE BOGGAN: If you have a good understanding of what the nature of gun violence is in your city, if you have access to those individuals who are in fact inflicting that gun violence on a community, and you've come to a place where you realize that you can't arrest your way out of this serious problem, and you are willing to make a long term commitment and investment on focusing just on that problem, absolutely it can work.

LL: Mr. Boggan, thank you very much for your time.

DEVONE BOGGAN: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

LL: Devone Boggan is the founder and director of the Office of Neighbourhood Safety. We reached him in Richmond, California. Well, this has been a bloody year in Surrey, B.C., Toronto, and in Halifax where gun violence is on the rise. And those communities that have lost the most to maiming and murder are seeking new strategies to help reduce the violence. Jooyoung Lee is a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who specializes in researching gun violence and he is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

JOOYOUNG LEE: Hello. Thank you for having me.

LL: You were just listening in on our last guest. What do you make of the program in Richmond?

JOOYOUNG LEE: I'm very much in support of the program that is out in Richmond, mainly because it's a non-punitive way of addressing gang violence and gun violence in a community that has been plagued by waves of chronic gun violence. And I think that there's a tendency amongst the mass public and policymakers to think that the most effective way of reducing gun violence is to get tough on crime, is to send more police into communities, or is to create neighbourhood gang injunctions that make it illegal for young people to be out in public together. And there's just no good social scientific research that shows that this is effective over the long haul. So any time you can engage young people in their communities and create a mentoring situation where folks who may be at risk of committing violence are helping others get out of that situation, I think it's a positive thing.

LL: But are you satisfied that the statistics, so far, prove that the program is working? Or do you need more data to measure it?

JOOYOUNG LEE: I think that's one of the longer term questions. You know, in social science we tend to like looking at data over longer periods of time and so while there has been a drop, a precipitous drop in gun violence in Richmond, I think that it would be very interesting to see how this program continues to do over the long haul.

LL: You heard him, Devone Boggan, say that they aren’t paying program participants to put down their guns there. They're paying them for staying in this training program that he's got. That do you think of that?

JOOYOUNG LEE: I think that's another interesting approach. I mean, all of this is based, I think, on a trend in social science research. So I have colleagues like Andy Papachristos at Yale University who does work on social networks and he finds that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by a small number of individuals imbedded within these dense networks of people who are at risk. And I think any time you can take those individuals, who are at highest risk of committing violence or becoming victims of violence, and provide them with alternatives, provide them with job training, or connect them with people who can give them other opportunities, you remove the catalyst for many of the shootings in communities.

LL: But critics say it’s tantamount to rewarding criminals. Is that fair?

JOOYOUNG LEE: I think that that's a cynical way of thinking about it. The alternative is-- I mean, my question would be: What would be the alternative? The alternative would be to just continue down this path where we pump funds into policies that haven't been proven to work. You know, we don't need to look far to see that the experiment of mass incarceration has had disastrous effects on the lives of individuals, families, entire communities and cities have been ravaged by this approach of just locking people up and just punishing them. So I think we're at that we're at a point where the question should be: What's the alternative? And the alternative picture, especially in the US, has not been an effective one.

LL: Shifting, then, closer to home. Tell me what the state is of gun violence in Toronto and across Canada.

JOOYOUNG LEE: Well, I think in Canada and in Toronto the gun violence here is not high, especially compared to other places in North America. A lot of times after shootings in these tragedies there's a tendency to hit the panic button and to think that Toronto and Canada as a nation is somehow approaching the rates of violence in the US in other parts of North America. But if you look at statistics, you see that Toronto is one of the safest cities in North America. And Canada, as a nation, is one of, if not, the safest countries in North America, if not the world. So I think in a global comparative perspective Toronto and Canada is doing quite well when it comes to gun violence.

LL: So what do you make of this year's increase then?

JOOYOUNG LEE: So, the year-to-date stats show that crime rates have gone up this year and that has caused a lot of people to become very panicked and worried. But year-to-date stats are notoriously difficult to interpret. We have years, for example, where there's a spike in gun violence or crime rates over a span of months, but if you look at Toronto over the last five to ten years you see that gun violence rates in homicide rates in violent crime rates have been pretty consistent. So it's too early in a sense to tell. And on top of that, we also have outlier years where there'll be a historical trend and then one year or two years will sort of fall off that trend and then the next year will return to the historical average.

LL: Well, does that mean you just sort of let things be? You don't try to intervene? You don't try to make things improve?

JOOYOUNG LEE: No. And I think that that's one of the most productive conversations that's come out of this latest set of shootings in Toronto and broadly in Canada, is that folks are now getting together and trying to think collectively about what we can do to further reduce the risk of gun violence. Because even though Canada is doing quite well globally, there's always room for improvement and I think that's one of the conversations that we need to be having.

LL: Are there any programs like the ONS in Canada?

JOOYOUNG LEE: I actually haven't heard of anything that's identical to that program, but in the city of Toronto, for example, there are a number of different non-punitive approaches to reducing gun violence and those include things like after school programs where youth, who may be at risk, are connected to mentors who have grown up in their community. There are other programs where youth can join basketball or soccer leagues. There are arts programs. There are programs that help young people get jobs.

LL: But not paying them. I’m thinking that would be politically a hard sell.

JOOYOUNG LEE: it might be a hard sell, but, again, I think that we have to think what would be the alternative? The alternative is just to lock people up. And the alternative is just to increase the kind of police presence in neighbourhoods that are already feeling the strain of that presence. And look, I'm not saying that police aren’t an important part of the solution. You know, police do amazing work every day and we need their help in solving these kinds of problems. But the big problem is when we get tough on crime we tend to create a situation where police engender distrust with those that they need help from.

LL: Okay. We’ll leave it there. Thank you so much.

JOOYOUNG LEE: Thank you.

LL: Jooyoung Lee is a sociology professor at the University of Toronto. He was here with me in our Toronto studio. Well, what do you think? We'd like to hear from you. Should we consider paying high risk offenders if they show they can change? Let us know. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or me, @LauraLynchCBC. Post on this story on our Facebook page. Or email us by clicking on 'contact' at cbc.ca/TheCurrent. I’m Laura Lynch. This is The Current.

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How the slave trade ensured Georgetown University's existence

Guests: Maxine Crump, Richard Cellini

LAURA LYNCH: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: theme]

LL: Still to come, motivating innovators to help Canada compete on a global scale, but first, learning the painful truth about the roots of Georgetown University. It was a seemingly inconsequential mystery but one that stymied Maxine Crump for decades. The former TV news anchor knew that she was a descendant of slaves as an African-American growing up in rural Louisiana; that was simply a given, but she was also Catholic when most slaves were Protestant, Baptist specifically. Catholic churches in the American South were generally less interested in opening their doors to slaves. Baptist churches were still segregated but at least their doors were open. In February, the mystery of her Catholic heritage was finally solved, but the explanation was startling. The founder of a research group called Maxine and said his team had identified her great-great-grandfather. His name was Cornelius Hawkins, he was a slave and he was Catholic, owned by some of the most prominent Jesuit priests in the northern United States. In 1838, Cornelius and 271 other slaves were sold to three Louisiana plantations to help secure the future of the leading Catholic institution of higher learning at the time. Today it's called Georgetown University. Richard Cellini called Maxine that day. He's the founder of the Georgetown Memory Project and he joins us from Boston. Maxine Crump joins us from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Hello to you both.

GUESTS: Good morning, Laura. Thank you for having us.

LL: Oh my pleasure. Maxine, can you first of all just describe the phone call that you got in February from Richard?

MAXINE CRUMP: At the time I was driving toward my hometown of Maringouin and he's telling me that he’d discovered that there is likely a connection between those enslaved owned by Georgetown, that names are connected to my family. I was listening with doubt because we just don't get the idea that we're going to know our slave ancestors. I was hoping but I didn't really think so, but when he said the name Cornelius Hawkins, I said this is real because the name Cornelius has been passed down four times in our family and I did know that we were Hawkins.

LL: Richard, tell me about that phone call from your perspective. That was like a cold call for you to just call her out of the blue.

RICHARD CELLINI: Yes, it was a cold call over a distance of one 175 years in some respects. Georgetown University sold the Georgetown slaves in 1838 and nobody from Georgetown has ever gone looking for them, so those are difficult calls. Every time it's like the very first time.

LL: This one was the first time, wasn’t it?

RICHARD CELLINI: Yes, but in a way, I hope I never get used to those because I think they're meant to be sort of special and difficult. To call people in the space of 20 or 30 seconds and establish a bond of trust so that you can begin to share some of their ancient family history with them is not an easy thing to do.

LL: Maxine, your great-great-grandfather was the first slave the Georgetown Memory Group identified. Richard, how many have been identified since?

RICHARD CELLINI: Out of a grand total of 272 slaves that were sold in 1838, we have now positively identified, documented, and located 210 of them in Louisiana. I got involved in this because I contacted Georgetown and I said what happened to the slaves and they told me that the university had looked into it a couple of years ago and discovered that they all quickly died. Within a couple of weeks of landing in Louisiana, they all died of a mysterious fever and left no trace and no descendant.

LL: We know now that’s not true, so let's go back. Walk me through what we now know about Cornelius and the 271 other slaves who were sold to save Georgetown.

MAXINE CRUMP:: Hearing the name Cornelius Hawkins, the next thing that came to mind it answered a mystery question that had been living in me and that is, how do we become Catholic? I wondered that because blacks weren't Catholic because they didn't practice Catholicism in slavery. So, we wondered, how did we become Catholic on that side of the family and that answered that when he said The Jesuit priest.

LL: Tell me tell me the tale of Cornelius.

MAXINE CRUMP: He was a 13-year old who was on the Saint Catherine with his parents, Patrick and Lady Hawkins, and some of his uncles. At 13, with the idea that the Jesuits didn't have young people to work, children to work, and older people to work, I wondered if Cornelius had started working on the Jesuit plantation. But knowing that when he came to Louisiana, he did work and that he was working in cotton fields at the time. If he had not worked, and he started picking cotton, that was a pretty hard and harsh situation. Also, I've learned that the owner did not live on the plantation and that meant that those who were on that plantation were under an overseer. The Jesuits were concerned, I’ve learnt, that the overseers in Louisiana were known for their harshness. Also, he was unable to practice his religion because there was not a nearby Catholic Church. There was a visit from Jesuits, and Richard you correct me on the information because this is all new to me, came and learned that they were not keeping their word to have the families be able to practice their Religion.

RICHARD CELLINI: That’s right. I think in 1848, so about 10 years later, there was one visit from Georgetown, a Jesuit priest looked in on them and discovered that they weren't, as Maxine said, hey weren't able to practice their religion. That priest made a recommendation back to Georgetown to provide funds for a chapel and a minister, but as far as we know, Georgetown never acted on that.

LL: Maxine, when you found out why, which is that Cornelius was Catholic and had been close to his faith for his entire life, it must have been complicated to learn that the leaders of his faith and your faith once owned him, once owned your ancestors.

MAXINE CRUMP: Yes, very complicated and painful. We had grown up as devout Catholics, and in talking with my sister and some of my cousins, they said they would they would sit in church often and ask how could the priest stand there and look at a church that had people sitting on one side of the church that were black and people on the other side of the church, they were white and stand there and tell us about the love of God. In fact, one of my cousins said, I wondered why he didn't just say I can't do this anymore. So, to think that we were experiencing that helped me to see how the church could sanction slavery to the point of owning them. I also was told that Georgetown came about because of Irish Catholics, and that the Irish were so disrespected at the time in America that they didn't have enough wealth to sustain a university like Georgetown without slavery. Being Catholic was more important, so to use slave labour made sense to them.

LL: Richard, that brings us to the point of talking about the actual sale of the slaves. How important was the sale to the university's survival?

RICHARD CELLINI: Critical. Not only did the slaves build Georgetown and sustain it from 1789 when it was founded until 1838, in 1838, the slaves rescued Georgetown University in the form of being sold to Louisiana for $115,000, in 1838 money, which today would be about $3.3 million, not taking into account compound interest. With compound interest, it would be about $3.6 billion, B as in billion. So, at every step along the way, the Georgetown slaves secured the future of the university. They built the university, they sustained it, and finally in 1838, they rescued it.

LL: And paid quite a price. I understand there are some rather poignant descriptions of the day that they were sent to the ships to be taken away.

RICHARD CELLINI: Exactly so, yes. People who were dragged crying and screaming onto the boats and begging for rosaries, falling to their knees and praying, asking why they were being treated this way.

LL: So, this happened with Georgetown. Were there other universities involved in the slave trade as well?

RICHARD CELLINI: You know, that's an area that's a little beyond my expertise. I know that there are many elite universities, the University of Virginia, Brown, and others that relied to some degree, and had some connection economically, to slavery. I think it's fair to say that at that period in the country's history, the entire national economy and all of its institutions rested on the institution of slavery. Maxine will tell us more about this, but, you know, Maxine very eloquently says that the American slaves not only fed and clothed the entire nation with their labour, but they also founded and paid for the nation's great institutions.

LL: Maxine?

MAXINE CRUMP: Yes, I would say that my pride, and Cornelius, and my other relatives who were enslaved, built the Southern economy, which in a sense built the American economy.

LL: Did the Georgetown Memory Project help you to identify more of your ancestors?

MAXINE CRUMP: Yes, Cornelius’s parents, his brothers and sisters. We're finding out just how many people we are related to in our hometown now because I'm getting emails from them once they have checked with the Georgetown Memory Project and found out who else was on that boat. They're finding out that we were pretty much all related growing up, and I remember my parents used to make it to make it their business to always tell us who we were related to. As we find out, some of them we didn't know we were related to, we were. Turns out so far, none of us are married to our relatives.

LL: [laughs] Have you had any kind of a reunion together?

MAXINE CRUMP: My family gathered at the site of Cornelius’s grave, my brothers and sisters, and was photographed by the Catholic commentator which is the first connection to the Catholic Church that we've had so far.

LL: And where is Cornelius buried?

MAXINE CRUMP: He’s buried in Maryland at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Cemetery there.

LL: Which testifies to the fact that he remained Catholic until his dying day.

MAXINE CRUMP: Oh, yes, definitely, and all of his descendants are devout Catholics. In fact, my brothers and sisters and my parents worked in every part of the church. We were involved in every area. All the boys, Eucharistic ministers, the choir, the Catholic Daughters, every part of the religion we were in. We followed Lent, no meat on Fridays, all of that. We went to every Latin service, we would devout rosary praying, hand folding, confession, Easter duty, everything you can be Catholic. Very devout.

LL: What was it like for you finding Cornelius' grave for the first time?

MAXINE CRUMP: It was-- I think my emotions were not fully there when I first saw the place. I was excited to know that it existed and my reaction was, he's been here all the time and we've come to the cemetery to bury other relatives so many times or to visit the graves of other relatives and we didn't know he was there. So, I was having those feelings but they didn't come to the surface until I went back and put flowers on the grave. And when I set those flowers down I just was flooded with emotion and I was just overcome and surprised that I had those emotions, as if I had just buried him or we had just buried him and I was putting flowers on.

LL: What kinds of emotions were coming up?

MAXINE CRUMP: Sad. I had tears.

LL: Sad that he had died? Sad that you didn't know who he was? Sad for the life he had lived?

MAXINE CRUMP: You've covered it. Yes, yes, all of that.

LL: Richard, you run a tech company in Boston and you're Caucasian, so where did the idea come from for the Georgetown Memory Project.

RICHARD CELLINI: I have no idea. But I'll tell you this, one of the things that was most compelling to me was I saw last autumn, when there were protests at Georgetown, an online copy of the 1838 sale agreement, the handwritten document that was used to cover the purchase and sale all of these 272 individuals and what struck me at the time was that they had names, they had first and last names and ages and some of the people listed were as young as two months old and some were in their 80s. And they their physical infirmities were described as well. Some were lame. Some were sickly. Some were, what today we would call, people with mental disabilities. And it was a profoundly moving document for me to read, because these were, this is obvious in a way, but, let me say it, they were real people with real names and real families and real lives and this was not an abstract historical incidence. And I don't really even consider it something that's in the past. I consider it something still very much part of the present.

MAXINE CRUMP: I think you're right, Richard. I don't think it's obvious to people that they were real people, because I hear people today talk about “the slaves” as if that's means something different than the rest of us, in that that was something in the past. And, actually, the attempt, once the slave industry ended and slaves were laid off, people called that freedom. That wasn't freedom. They were laid off. And then those who didn't have slaves wanted to say, well, why do we have to live among these people you have told us are not quite fully human? So, then the country made laws to keep them separate and therefore we had the Jim Crow laws and so we've had racism until today. So no it's not in the past. It has changed forms.

LL: And that is the living legacy of it all. Richard, you mentioned earlier that when you initially talk to people at Georgetown University about this, you were told, oh, they all died. But what are they saying now?

RICHARD CELLINI: Georgetown is really struggling with this. You know, Georgetown has a working group that the president organized that has been studying this for almost a year now and they continue to study it and weigh and evaluate different recommendations and different possibilities. The story broke in The New York Times about a month ago and there's been lots of coverage since and they're very good people and earnest and sincere people at Georgetown who are considering their deliberations, but Georgetown has not reached any conclusions about what, if anything, it might or should do about the situation.

LL: But how many direct descendants do you think there are from the Georgetown slaves?

RICHARD CELLINI: Thousands, ten to twelve to maybe fifteen thousand. We've already identified a thousand of them. I receive phone calls all the time now from descendants who got my telephone number from either the Georgetown Memory Project or just on the Internet. And, frankly, many of them are in tears because they're discovering their family history for the very first time.

LL: Maxine, I'm curious to know, has Georgetown reached out to you at all?

MAXINE CRUMP: Yes. I emailed the president to compliment him for putting together this group at the university to study this and I got an email back from someone at the administrative level saying that the president has read your email and they will be back in touch with you.

LL: And?

MAXINE CRUMP: Not yet.

LL: Nothing yet. What do you want Georgetown to do to honour the 272 slaves?

MAXINE CRUMP: You know, I can say what I want, but since there are so many descendants, there will be other things that people will think. I think I would like to Georgetown to continue studying what they think needs to happen and I'm hoping that they will consider the descendants as a resource for that conversation so that we can have some input and so that they can have our voices when they determine what they need to do. And I'm hoping that they will understand that we're not just talking about what slaves want, but maybe they will recognize, what Richard just said, that many institutions in America were part of building itself on the free labour of those that they enslaved and that there will be an opening of this conversation in the country and not some sort of settlement that ends this conversation and puts it away once again. Since this goes all the way to today and how there are barriers, subtle and unconscious, but they're still barriers to those who face them. Whether they're visible to the largest society or not, we know we face them. And this conversation needs not stop until we have ended those barriers, because this is America and America needs to live up to who it says it is and it says it's the land of the free, freedom for all. So we need to have full status for Americans who are Americans and that colour shouldn't matter and until we've done that this conversation needs to continue. America can do this. America has shown its greatness and what it can do and this is one of those things it can and must do. America created the slaves, America bred slaves for labour, and we belong to America and America has to do right by its Americans.

LL: It sounds, if I'm if I'm hearing you correctly, Maxine, is that one of the things you are not seeking is you're not looking for reparations.

MAXINE CRUMP: Oh, I'd be happy with reparations.

LL: Okay. All right.

MAXINE CRUMP: I mean, just Cornelius was valued at 900 dollars at age 24 and he gave his life. Sure, reparations would be fine.

LL: What else? I understand what you're saying about wanting to have the conversation and moving things forward. Are there other concrete steps that you'd like to see taken in the short term?

MAXINE CRUMP: Well, we educated white people free and Georgetown could maybe look at scholarships for its descendants. We’re now the Georgetown family. We have been and just didn't know it. All of us would like, maybe now, to have the opportunity for our descendants to be able to be educated at Georgetown too and I'm sure that Georgetown can figure out how to do that without disrupting things too much.

LL: Richard, what do you think the university should do?

RICHARD CELLINI: Well, first of all, I think Maxine is absolutely right. She's making a very, very important point. Between 1789 and 1838, Georgetown did not charge anybody tuition. So, all of those people who attended Georgetown University attended on free scholarships that were essentially paid for by slave labour. That was Georgetown's business model. Cornelius and the other Georgetown slaves literally paid the way for those people to go to Georgetown and receive a free education. And, ironically, the people they were putting through Georgetown were, in many cases, the sons of wealthy Southern plantation owners and slave holders. So, I think it's absolutely right that Georgetown should extend scholarships to descendants of the Georgetown slaves. But, more broadly, I don't approach this relationship as a matter of justice. I approach it as a matter of love. These people are our people. The descendants and the Georgetown slaves are members of an ancient and honourable branch of the Georgetown family. There's no statute of limitations on generosity and kindness. No logic is required. All that's required is love. I love these people, our people and their faith and their history and their strong family ties and their brains and their brilliance and their hard work and their industry. I'm proud to have them as members of the Georgetown family. I just want Georgetown to recognize them as they do any other member of the Georgetown family. I'm proud. I'm proud that we're all in the same family now.

MAXINE CRUMP: I am too and I also would recognize that anyone who had written the cheque at that time to cover the debt at Georgetown would have been on it in some recognized way, name publicized, maybe even on a building at Georgetown and so those who did save Georgetown need to have that same recognition. Their names, all 272 names, need to be placed in honour at Georgetown.

LL: Including Cornelius.

MAXINE CRUMP: Absolutely.

LL: I'm wondering how often do you go to visit his grave now?

MAXINE CRUMP: Well, I've guess I've been about six times so far. I think I visit his grave more than my parents’ graves.

LL: Do you ever make any promises to him?

MAXINE CRUMP: No, but I do send love to all the years that he paid for our heritage. I do.

LL: Maxine and Richard, thank you very much.

RICHARD CELLINI: Thank you for having us.

MAXINE CRUMP: Thank you.

LL: bye bye.

MAXINE CRUMP: Bye.

LL: Maxine Crump is the great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius Hawkins, one of the Georgetown slaves sold in 1838. She's also a member of the Georgetown Memory Project. And we reached her in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Richard Cellini is an alumnus of Georgetown University and is the founder of the Georgetown Memory Project and we reached him in Boston. We invited Georgetown University to comment on this story, but we haven't heard back. I’m Laura Lynch, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you’re listening to The Current.

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What should Canada's innovation strategy look like?

Guests: Chad Ballantyne, Dan Breznitz, Erika Mozes

LAURA LYNCH: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[cheering and clapping]

VOICE 1: Welcome to demo day!

VOICE 2: It’s a busy table, I guess everybody wants to raise money. There you go.

VOICE 3: People have fought for these spaces for weeks. It was like Game of Thrones. They have fought to the death.

VOICE 4: It’s a new way to get new customers, to get more exposure, to grow your network, and it’s all free.

VOICE 5: We are like Facebook, but all over the world.

LL: Those are some sounds from Startup Canada's day on the Hill earlier this month. Entrepreneurs and innovators come across Canada came to Ottawa hoping to catch the eyes of investors and turn their new ideas into growing businesses. The event also served as a kind of focus group for Canada's new innovation strategy. The Liberals have signaled their innovation agenda as a strategy for growing the economy. Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development has been tasked with crafting that agenda. Here is how he described the stakes while talking to a crowd of Toronto's business elite in April.

SOUNDCLIP

NAVDEEP BAINS: Our responsibility is to make a bold innovation. We have a collective responsibility now, Ladies and Gentlemen, to bet on innovation and doing things differently. At the end of the day, innovation is an end to itself. It's a path to growth, the path that leads to a strong middle class and good quality jobs for all Canadians. If we had any doubt that we needed to act, we need only to look at how other countries around the world are dealing with global changes that we talked about. We are an innovation race. The stakes are very, very high.

LL: If innovation is a race, most experts agree Canada is already lagging behind. Among OECD countries, Canada's private sector innovation capacity ranks just 22nd and our business sector ranks 26th for spending on research and development. There's disagreement on exactly what government can and should do to improve our record. This morning we convened our own panel of experts to weigh in, including innovators and entrepreneurs. Dan Breznitz is the Munk chair in Innovation Studies at the University of Toronto and he joins us from London, England. Erika Mozes is co-founder of Hyr, an agency looking to pair employers with shift workers and she joins us from New York City and Chad Ballantyne is the founder of The Creative Space, a shared office hub in Barrie, Ontario. Hello to you all.

GUESTS: Hello.

LL: Dan Breznitz, let's start with you. Why is can the lagging behind?

DAN BREZNITZ: Well, first of all we're lagging behind partly, maybe mostly, because of the way we have done our policies in the past and I think you can already ask one of my colleagues on this panel why she's in New York and you get a very good answer to what happened to a lot of Canadian invention when you try to make them into innovation. The second thing is that apart from policies to stimulate growth, we have an environment that makes it very difficult for Canadians to actually finally have a product and service to sell it and make a profit on the market, and that's a regulatory environment. Once you have problems both in the beginning and when you actually try to make profit, and you have United States an hour away, why should you stay in Canada?

LL: I promise you we will get Erika's answer on that, but I just want to ask you, the government says innovation will be a foundation for economic growth but to what extent do you think the government has turned those words into action?

DAN BREZNITZ: I think that we should all be optimistic that at least we have a government that actually says that, and admits we are not doing well. We are all waiting to see what is it that they will actually do.

LL: So, nothing yet.

DAN BREZNITZ: Not really.

LL: Chad Ballantyne, you were there at the Startup Canada conference that we heard some tape from earlier. What is it like for innovators such as yourself to see the government actually paying attention to this?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: I think we're all encouraged with what we're hearing and even using the word innovation is great. As you've mentioned, Canada is lagging behind. I think our biggest push was to make sure that we're taking care of our entrepreneurs which are the ones that feel that innovation and create it. Our job on the Hill that week was to challenge the innovation agenda to be a little more broadly scoped.

LL: And so what are your concerns then with what you've seen and heard from Ottawa so far?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: It seems like it's kind of the same old that they're investing in, large what they're calling clusters, and R and D in the tech sector, which is great. We think we should still continue to invest in those areas, but they're ignoring or forgetting about the thousands of bright lights across Canada in communities that may not have the privilege of having university or incubator accelerator, but there are still centres and communities of innovation.

LL: And you're pushing that agenda with the government?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: We are, yes.

LL: As I promised, Erika Mozes, you're watching this innovation agenda unfold from the other side of the border. Your company was founded in Toronto and then you decided to move it to New York City. Why?

ERIKA MOZES: I think the biggest thing, frankly, is just access to early stage capital. There really seems to be a lack of that early stage capital, being able to fundraise the dollars necessary to bring an idea to life in Canada. You come down south of the border and there's multiple, if not hundreds, of early stage venture capital firms or groups that are willing to listen to your idea and willing to actually write a cheque to you in order to bring that idea to life. That's very important for an early stage company, such as ours.

LL: Did you tried to make it work in Toronto?

ERIKA MOZES: To be honest, we didn’t stay long mainly because we knew that the access to capital just was not in Toronto, and neither was the supportive ecosystem that you get in a place like New York City, which is the second largest tech sector in the United States next to Silicon Valley. We have access here, not only to money which is so important to early stage companies, but also to people better able to collaborate with; being able to have all of those all in one city, all within blocks of you, is very important when you're starting out.

LL: So what would it take then to keep people like you here in Canada?

ERIKA MOZES: Number one, that early stage capital that I mentioned at the very beginning is probably one of the most important things that the government could do. This also comes when people are investing in your company at an early stage, it also comes by advice and mentorship, so if there was more access to an early stage capital and mentorship, I think it would be a different story about Canadian companies coming south of the border.

LL: That supportive ecosystem that you talked about, does that exist here?

ERIKA MOZES: I think it does, but on a much smaller scale, and I think that that's the issue that you're having with companies that are coming down to the US, or you have companies that might establish themselves in Canada, but they still come down to the US at that very early stage in order to get that mentorship and money, and then maybe they go back. That is something that, with our company, that we do hope that we do establish ourselves here, we get big here, that we are going to come back to Toronto when we are able to launch and come back to the Canadian market.

LL: Chad Ballantyne, I'm wondering what do you make of Erika's experience?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: I think we hear it all the time. Of course, Erika is further along than a lot of entrepreneurs and startups that we see, say here in Barrie, but it's common, we hear a lot where capital is a problem and I think we need to start to consider a micro-funding agenda. Countries all over the world, developing countries are doing it, and I think it's really helpful especially in early stage startups. I think they need that support—

LL: What is micro funding?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: Just lesser funds for smaller projects. I mean, these entrepreneurs, these startups that are now all over the world, are in their later stages. They started in their basements, in their garages, in their small towns, and it's difficult in these areas where the capital is not there. Nobody wants to take a risk on you, you're too small--

LL: But are those micro-funds, are they coming from government rather than investors?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: No, they would come from a number of sources. I think they're starting to pop up even here in Canada. We have agencies, government funded yes, that are supporting kind of early stage entrepreneurs.

LL: Dan Breznitz, what do you think? Is this one place where government could step in?

DAN BREZNITZ: So let's start about what should be really important to this innovation agenda that we have not done. Innovation happens in the marketplace and it happen with agents, meaning either people or companies that actually do things. If we want to have innovation and economic growth, we have to stop treating it just as a problem of higher education. We have to figure out how we help the agents that actually do innovation, be they entrepreneurs, small companies, medium size companies, and maybe even big companies that want to start to innovate. That means that we have to think about direct financing of those activities, especially in the early stages instead of just talking incentives. Talk incentives are good, but yes.

LL: Again, I ask you, are you talking about government investment?

DAN BREZNITZ: Yes, it's very clear that in the stage it kind of is now, if government wouldn't do it, other agents will not join us. I would think that we have a lot of finance, but without singling of the government, they will not be the first movers.

LL: Erika Mozes, you're not the only one who packed up and took your idea elsewhere. Andrea Palmer is the CEO of Awake Labs in Vancouver, and that's a company that's developing technology for a wearable device that helps people on the autism spectrum and their caregivers monitor their anxiety. She and her co-founder were looking for local funding before they had a prototype.

SOUNDCLIP

And around the same time, I was talking to some of my Chilean friends and they said there's this program in Chile, it's called Startup Chile, and their goal is to bring in international companies to Chile to create this culture of innovation and this entrepreneurship ecosystem. They help you with your Visa and they give you funding to hire people to develop your prototype, and help you live in Chile really. And so I applied just on a whim, you know maybe I can find money in Vancouver, but if I have to, this is a good backup and then November came and I needed $15,000 and so I packed my bags and I moved to Santiago.

LL: And now Andrea Palmer is back in Canada and testing her product in Vancouver, courtesy of Chile. Dan Breznitz, I'm just wondering what you mentioned before about government getting involved in the investing, I would think there might be some timidity on the part of government to do that because what if they end up funding failures?

DAN BREZNITZ: They should. They should fund a lot of failures. As a matter of fact, if we don't fail a lot, we're not innovating and we're not trying hard enough. However, what we should also fund is the ecosystem around it and the reason probably they came back to Vancouver, the ecosystem that we heard about, and that means that even if you fail in that project you now have people that are much smarter, much more experienced, and they will try again and again until they succeed.

LL: Erika Mozes, what do you think of that idea of allowing government to get big into the game of this, of funding different kinds of businesses and startups. Would an innovation agency have made a difference to you?

ERIKA MOZES: It would actually depend on what the requirements would be. I mean, I know in a past life I did actually work with government in a pharmaceutical role in order to get government funding. The hoops that you had to actually go through in order to get the funding and the due diligence, for an early stage company, it would probably be next to impossible in order to meet. I think that one of the greatest things that the government could do is to encourage more angel groups and angel investors for early stage funding, that’s something that is here in the United States. Angel groups are groups of high net worth individuals that come together and they decide to bet on early stage companies, and it's much easier to go through due diligence with an angel group because obviously the requirements for what you would have to give them, in terms of your idea, would be lower. For example, maybe you wouldn’t have to show them traction with customers just as of yet. So, in my opinion, for early stage innovation, I would think that if the government were to look at how to encourage more of those groups, that that would probably be more advantageous than they themselves funding it.

LL: Chad Ballantyne, I’m wondering do you think there is any role for government in this you? You mentioned private sector before, but is there something government can do?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: Obviously, yes. If they're going to invest what they said, about 800 million in their innovation agenda, I just think they could spread it out across innovative communities across Canada, so the investment is there. I think it should be there, I think they should invest, we're saying it doesn't have to be in the large clusters of large sums of money. These micro-funds that could be supported or presented across Canada would go a long way because we're working with, likely Startup Canada, it is 150,000 entrepreneurs, 400 supporters, 300 volunteers. We’re a volunteer based, primarily private funded sector, so with a little bit of support from the government will go a long way because we have that energy and that army that's just passionate about innovation.

LL: Dan Breznitz, what do you think of the idea of focusing on clusters?

DAN BREZNITZ: It depends. To be very honest, many countries have done that. Not all of them succeeded. I would actually focus on the entrepreneurs and companies that want to innovate and less on deciding whether you know which technology would win the marketplace. I would also want to say one thing, we constantly talk about VCs and angels and we have to remember—

LL: By VC, you mean venture capital?

DAN BREZNITZ: Yes, venture capital and angels. They prove themselves to be helpful only in information technology and biotech, and I'm completely with Chad that we should be innovative in all industries, and in those industries, there is no way that angels and venture capitalists will ever help.

LL: I just want to shift gears for a moment. Erika Mozes, you’ve written on the role of gender in the fields of tech and entrepreneurship. What does Canada's innovation strategy need to include when it comes to the experience of women?

ERIKA MOZES: One of the most interesting things that I found when I entered this world was just the sheer lack of women that are in the tech community and even in the entrepreneur community, and here in the United States, I find that there's a lot of women groups that are talking about how are we going to change it instead of when is it going to change. I think that is very important. It's very encouraging to see the Prime Minister now talking about gender equity in a broader sense, just in terms of pay equity, transparency. I think one of the biggest things, as a women entrepreneur, would be great to see is that there are role models out there; that there are other women entrepreneurs that could be mentored, also women that are they themselves and funding other entrepreneurs. I read an article not long ago that only four percent of venture capitalists in North America are actually women, and that women are more likely to fund other women, as well when it comes to entrepreneurs. It would be great to see some policy that comes out from government that would help women investors and women entrepreneurs grow organically.

LL: What's your experience been as a woman and a co-founder and entrepreneur?

ERIKA MOZES: I’ve been the only woman in way too many rooms. I think that’s a sad thing to see. One thing the government could do to encourage more women to become entrepreneurs, and actually encourage all Canadians to be entrepreneurs, is through education. The government has a role to play in education and we should be raising entrepreneurs from a young age. We should be teaching kids how to problem solve, how to be social media savvy, how to program, how to write scripts, and really encourage that entrepreneurship from a young age. I know even for myself, it took me until I was 38 to decide to go out on my own. It never actually occurred to me that this could be a career path. We should be encouraging young women and all young Canadians that this could be a path for future growth and innovation for our country.

LL: Chad Ballantyne, how often have you seen gender issues come into play in what you do?

CHAD BALLANTYNE: Up here in Barrie, it's actually great. The space that we run here, we’ve been doing it for seven years, it’s almost a 50/50 split between men and women startups and entrepreneurs. A lot of the leaders in our community are women and it's a great thing. We have a great split, it's a great ecosystem up here, and we're just seeing some great things.

LL: Dan Breznitz, what else would you like to see decision makers on Parliament Hill keep in mind as they etch out this innovation agenda?

DAN BREZNITZ: I would like them to keep in mind that this is over the long haul. If we want to change the dynamics that we have been talking about in this panel, they will not change in three to six months and not even in four years. So, we need to find a way that no matter what will be the name of a Minister or Prime Minister, all Canadians will know that they are allowed and encouraged to be entrepreneurs no matter what age they are, and what is their gender.

LL: And how optimistic are you that that will happen with this government?

DAN BREZNITZ: I'm optimistic they will try. I hope that they will create a way for this to be sustained not budget by budget and government by government, and if they do that I will be extremely hopeful because we have one of the best potential for innovation in the OECD and right now we are one of the worst.

LL: All right, we will leave it there. My thanks to all three of you. Goodbye.

GUESTS: Thank you.

LL: Dan Breznitz is the Munk chair in Innovation Studies at the University of Toronto and he joins us from London, England. Erika Mozes is co-founder of Hyr based New York City and Chad Ballantyne is the founder of The Creative Space in Barrie Ontario. I’m Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. We’re ending today’s show with voices from Baltimore where yesterday Edward Nero, one of six police officers who had been charged for his role in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, was acquitted of the charges against him. Freddie Gray was 25 when he was chased and arrested by Baltimore police officers, then thrown in the back of a police van. On that so-called rough ride, Gray suffered severe spinal cord injuries resulting in his death a week later, and that's just over a year ago. It touched off citywide protests. Last year at this time one of our producers, Pacinthe Mattar, was in Baltimore working on a documentary about policing in the wake of the unrest. There she visited Freddie Gray's neighbourhood in west Baltimore where a rally for Freddie Gray drew hundreds of people out to the street. She was stopped by a young man named Lonnie Moore who began talking about his experiences living in Baltimore and they were soon joined by another resident named Jarrod Jones. They were strangers to each other but they were soon exchanging stories of life as a black man in Baltimore. Our last word today goes to Lonnie Moore and Jarrod Jones in Baltimore. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: In some cases they call you names. I've been called Nigger, Thug, any name you can think of by police and some of them are white and some of them are black. You know, it’s not a black and white thing it's a civilian police thing.

VOICE 2: And the people that aren’t from here, and like I said, never grew up in environments like this, they think, I think they think we are making this stuff up.

VOICE 1: I think they think we’re playing the victims.

VOICE 2: Yeah!

VOICE 1: You sell drugs, what do you expect? You deserve to die. C’mon man.

VOICE 2: That’s your fault cuz you live there. My father was a firefighter. My aunt owns a hair salon. My grandfather worked for the city of Baltimore until he passed away. Know what I’m saying? We didn’t need or have to live where we live at in this city, we chose it because we love this city, we love our neighbourhood, and we have hope that things will change and things will get better. You know what I’m saying?

VOICE 1: That’s why I told her those kids being brave enough o demonstrate, I salute them, too.

VOICE 2: Absolutely.

VOICE 1: Because they gave us a platform for us to speak as we are speaking now.

VOICE 2: Yes, they did.

VOICE 1: Without them doing what they did, we’d be ignored, know what I’m saying? They don’t put brothers like this in front of the camera. They’re not gonna put him on CNN, they’re not going to put me on Fox 45. They want to interview them, know what I mean? They don’t understand that there are intelligent black men that come from the ghetto.

VOICE 2: We’ve been crying about this stuff for the last 30,40 years, and they’ve been bawlin’, and bawlin’, and bawlin’ and bawlin’ and sooner or later, something is gonna boil over. It’s going to boil over.

VOICE 1: I don’t mean to speak negatively, but that what took place earlier was a sample of our injustice. The fact that we weren’t sure if they would be tried or charged, if they don’t convict those police….oh my God…it’s gonna—

VOICE 2: They think Monday was bad?

VOICE 1: Unfortunately, it’s going to be bad. We’re not promoting negativity like that—

[crosstalk]

VOICE 1: We’re just speaking from the environment we come from.

VOICE 2: That’s all. It hurt me—I cried watching Bill O’Reilly talking about stuff that he--

[simultaneously] Knows nothing about!

VOICE 2: He ain’t never been harassed by the police.

VOICE 1: He ain’t never been searched for no apparent reason, being grabbed at and everything.

VOICE 2: C’mon man, the police will grab you, make you pull your pants down in front of people, you know what they tell you? Lift your sac up..

VOICE 1: SO they can search under there.

VOICE 2: Lift up your sac. That is a violation of your human rights right there. They are not supposed to be able to do that, but they do that because they know that they can and nothin’ will happen.

[crosstalk]

VOICE 1: And that goes to the question you asked me earlier. You said how many Freddie Grays do I feel exist in the city of Baltimore? He’s Freddie Gray. I’m Freddie Gray. We all Freddie Gray.

VOICE 2: They just ain’t killers.

[Music: Extro]

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May 24, 2016 full episode transcript

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