“Dare to dream!”
Over and over, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was wrongfully convicted of a triple murder in 1967, repeated this mantra during a lecture at Concordia last Monday.
He spoke about the “darkness, bitterness and hate” he experienced in prison and how he emerged, almost 20 years later, a free man but also, a changed man who believes we live in a world of “sleeping people” who need to “wake up” and seize every opportunity.
The 67-year-old former boxing champion, bearing a pin with the word “attitude” written on it in, explained how important it is to believe in yourself against all odds but also to act on that belief.
“My attitude and my belief in myself was then, 37 years ago, just as it is now… just because [a] misinformed jury found me guilty did not make me guilty,” he said. “I simply refused to wear the stripes of a guilty person…and I would have refused even to breath the prison’s air, if I could have done so and yet allow my innocence to remain alive.”
Carter, who spent almost ten of his 20 years of imprisonment in solitary confinement because of his defiance, pleaded for the case of a young man who now faces a similar predicament to what Carter experienced.
As executive director of the Toronto-based Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted, Carter is currently defending Kevin Cooper. For 18 years, Cooper has maintained that he has been wrongfully convicted of the triple murders of the Ryen family and their houseguest. This past Monday, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that Cooper’s scheduled Feb. 10 execution in California should be delayed until tests, which Cooper claims will prove his innocence, can be conducted.
Carter urged his Concordia audience to phone and fax California Govenor Arnold Schwarzenegger to show their support for Cooper.
“I am a survivor, and not that kind you see on television these days,” Carter jokingly said, “but a survivor of the American so-called justice system….and since this is black history month, I am a survivor bearing witness to history.”
In that history, “The Hurricane,” said that during his time in solitary confinement, he came to understand that the anger, bitterness and hatred he felt consumed him.
“I wanted to destroy every person that had helped to put me there [prison]. I sat in that cell for years, feasting on hatred as though it was a succulent morsel of buttered-steak.” Then, he said, it happened.
When they took him out of solitary confinement for a physical check up at the hospital, he walked by a mirror and “the grotesque image that stared back at me chocked me back to life,” he explained. “It was the face of hatred and that monster was me.”
When he saw the monster staring back at him in the mirror “it was at that moment that I began to actively understand that if I was going to survive this prison, in all of its deformities, I had to change.”
He then embarked on a journey of self-discovery. He explained that prison destroys everything that is valuable in a human being but that when he resisted the “abnormal, filthy, dangerous nature of prison” that’s when he was reborn.
“My new date of birth [is] Feb. 8, 1985, the day I disappeared from prison makes me 18 years old. Ladies and gentlemen, you are looking at a 67-year-old teenager.”
What’s the point to all of these self-revelations? Carter suggests that “even trapped, at the very bottom of human existence, condemned by history as a triple racist murderer, repudiated by the courts and sentenced to die. I began to understand the magic and the miraculousness of everything.”
Carter says that over the years, people have said that he was a victim of racism but he believes that in the darkness and despair of prison he came to realize, “that there is no such thing as racism. It doesn’t exist because there is no such thing as race. There is only one race of people, the human race and we all belong to that.”
“I learned [the things that] divide us as individuals and nations- race, religion, ethnicity, politics, class and genre- none of those things belong to us. They have been imposed upon us, just as the imposition of guilt was imposed upon me.” Instead, what unites us, he suggests, is mutual respect for one another.
Finally, Carter said that people should envision what they want in order to attain it.
