Latest news with #Levering
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Yahoo
Former corrections workers battle CoreCivic opening Leavenworth ICE detention center
Marcia Levering, left, on Thursday shared her story of being attacked by an inmate at a CoreCivic-run detention facility in Leavenworth, Kansas, and the resulting 16 surgeries that left her disabled. She was supported by her friend and another former detention employee Shari Rich. (Morgan Chilson/Kansas Reflector) LEAVENWORTH — Around the corner from a defunct for-profit prison owned by Tennessee-based CoreCivic, Marcia Levering walked carefully across a grassy field to a podium at Ray Miller Park, aided by her cane and a friend, to speak out against the company's desire to open an ICE detention facility. Levering, who now lives in Nebraska, worked at the CoreCivic's Leavenworth Detention Center for 10 months beginning in 2020 before she was stabbed four times by an inmate — once in the ear, once in the right arm, and twice in the abdomen. She shared her experience at a Thursday press conference hosted by ACLU Kansas, Cross-Border Network for Justice & Solidarity and Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, speaking out against CoreCivic's desire to reopen the prison and house immigrants. 'As usual, we were understaffed,' Levering said of the attack. 'There are two officers in Q building, when there should have been seven. I was in training for a new position. The day of my assault, on Feb. 6, 2021, I was coming out of my office. Unit Four accidentally buzzed open the wrong door, allowing an inmate to come out, throwing boiling water in my face and stab me four times.' Levering said corrections officers expect to be in danger, but a pattern of understaffing and poor working conditions made the job much more dangerous than it should have been. The CoreCivic facility closed in 2021 when its contract with the United States Marshal's Service ended. Reports by oversight agencies when the Leavenworth facility closed highlighted problems at the facility, including understaffing and the use of 'triple bunking' in cells, a practice of adding a third bunk to a cell designed for two inmates. Leavenworth citizens and others from across the state have stepped forward to protest CoreCivic's plant to reopen, speaking out through public rallies and at city meetings. City officials heard and responded. The most recent step in disagreements between the city and CoreCivic officials was a lawsuit filed March 31. The city said the company had not followed a proper permitting process to reopen. Shari Rich, who worked at the CoreCivic facility for 13 years, attended Thursday to put her voice to those urging the city of Leavenworth to keep the detention center closed. Her first years with the company were good, and she considered the facility well run. But in the last six years, it steadily deteriorated, she said. 'I worked control,' she said, explaining that was the eyes and ears of the building, keeping oversight of what was happening. 'And usually we had two to three officers up there at all times. At the end, when she (Levering) got hurt, there was only one person manning that whole place. There are 24 pods.' Using her hands, Rich counted how many doors and gates that was for one person to watch, a total that came to more than 45. 'So one person was manning that whole place,' Rich said. 'This was inevitable,' Levering interjected about the attack that left her partially paralyzed and for which she underwent 16 surgeries. 'A matter of when.' Esmie Tseng, spokeswoman for ACLU of Kansas, said the Thursday press conference was a way to keep the issue in front of the Leavenworth community. Although organizations put the event together, she said it's important that the city be the focus. 'I definitely want it to be more of a bridge for the folks that have these stories to tell, who know firsthand the impact that the facility had on them,' she said. 'I think we need to keep remembering that there are people who are at the heart of this.' Tseng said the city's officials have stepped up for those who shared their disagreement with CoreCivic reopening. 'It sort of took on its own momentum, right?' she said. 'I think it's such an issue that, like, really spoke to people. I really want to make sure that CoreCivic doesn't just get to dominate the conversation.' CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin disagreed, calling the facility's opponents 'politically extreme, out-of-touch, outsider groups that want to tell the people of Leavenworth what to do.' 'The fact is the Leavenworth community wants our facility, the 300 jobs it will create, and the $2 million in annual local revenue it will generate,' Gustin said. 'It's time for the city commission to reject outside groups from hijacking this issue for their own political gain at the expense of the Leavenworth economy. Elected leaders should tell these outside groups to stop sending the message that the public safety profession is not welcome in Leavenworth. 'CoreCivic will operate a safe, transparent, and accountable facility that will be positive for the community,' he said. William Rogers, another former employee of CoreCivic, has become a grassroots advocate, filling out Kansas Open Records Requests and tracking down building permits and emails as he fights to stop the company from reopening a facility. When speaking about holding an inmate, Dillon Reed, as he died, Rogers' voice broke and he struggled to go on. 'I still see Dillon Reed at night sometimes when I go to bed,' Rogers said. 'He was a good kid. He should have never died in there. He died because of staff negligence. People are humans in there. They're inmates, but they're humans. I think every one of us need to understand that these people have families. They have people that love them. We had a job to do, and we failed that day.' Rogers received pointed out that CoreCivic promised in emails, which he provided to Kansas Reflector, to use local contractors to do all the upgrades the facility. But when he got a copy of a building permit for the complete removal and replacement of the roof, the contractor was a Texas company, Bass Roofing and Restoration LLC. CoreCivic also offered, in emails from CoreCivic's John Malloy: 'A one-time impact fee payment of $1,000,000 An annual impact fee payment of $250,000 An annual impact fee to the police department of $150,000″ The company also said it expects to employ 300 to 350 full-time employees with a total salary and benefit package between $25 million and $30.2 million per year. Sister Jean Panisko, with the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, was the opening speaker Thursday. 'We're Catholic women, religious, devoted to the work of justice, peace and upholding the integrity of creation,' she said. 'We applaud the city commissioners for their actions, for listening to our community and protecting the city by suing CoreCivic, asking them to apply for a special-use permit with money provided by our government.' Panisko said CoreCivic is promising conditions won't be the same, but she said the facility 'wasn't closed by chance.' 'It was shut down by the previous presidential administration after serious reports and ultimately finding mismanagement, abuse conditions,' she said. 'The closure was and continues to be an indictment of a failed system, one that prioritizes progress over people, efficiency over empathy and contracts over projects.'
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
One family's stories prove to be a window on Black struggle and persistence in American history
Anyone who has embarked on a search for their ancestors knows the feeling of just wanting more — more knowledge, more insight, more proof of lives lived. Who were these long-gone people, beyond a paper trail of census records, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of history shaped them? Author and historian David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his biographies of Black intellectual pioneer W.E.B. DuBois, has spent his life mining the past, but his knowledge of his own family line was incomplete. With more than a dozen books and most of a lifetime behind him, Levering, 88, resolved to change that, setting out on a journey to both reclaim his family history and anchor it in the story of African Americans in this country. He got more than he bargained for. The story Lewis tells in 'The Stained Glass Window' was inspired by an antique window in an Atlanta church, a portrait of a mother and child modeled on the features of his maternal grandmother. That grandmother, Alice King Bell, was raised in the vital and historically significant Black community of Atlanta and was known and remembered by her family. But as Lewis went further back in time, he found forebears whose stories had never been fully told. His task tested the limits of his expertise, so he got further help from an expert genealogist, who assisted him with interpreting results from genetic testing. With that newly available information came a surprise. Lewis, an African American, discovered that he had at least three white ancestors, the legacy of the slave era, when white enslavers coerced Black women into sexual relations. In a revelation that 'reduced me to several days of incoherence,' he learned that one of his great-grandfathers, James W. Belvin, was white, and that despite having a white wife and children, Belvin had fathered five children with the author's enslaved great-grandmother Clarissa King. White people, enslaved Black people, free people of color — they all made up Levering's familial mix, a group of individuals whose lives personified the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. This personal road map gave him a framework for telling the story of African Americans of all social classes and skin tones, from pre-Colonial times to the 1950s. In many ways it's a brutal account — the terrors of slavery, the violence and injustice of Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction throttling of Black rights and opportunities that caused many of Lewis' ancestors to flee the South. It's also a story of immense courage, grit and determination. The most revealing thread, in terms of what Black citizens have both endured and achieved, concerns his Atlanta-based family. In the late 1800s Lewis' white great-grandfather Belvin, in declining health, bought Clarissa King a property in Atlanta and stipulated that it should remain in her family. This enabled Clarissa and her family to flee rural Georgia and move to the most vital African American community in the South, one that eventually produced both Lewis' father, a minister and college president, and his mother, a teacher, artist and social force in the community. Atlanta liked to call itself the 'city too busy to hate,' but its power structure challenged even the most resolute of its African American citizens. Black Atlantans were continually denied pathways to opportunity and achievement. The history of the willful neglect and underfunding of Black education, which Lewis chronicles in excruciating detail, is shocking and painful. A divide between the Black professional class and the Black working class hampered the community's ability to unite and form a political force. Lewis is astute about the way middle- and upper-class Black residents, many of them mixed-race, guarded their own resources and failed to agitate for full rights for all Black people until they were swept along by the unstoppable tide of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But in the main, this is a story of strength and endurance and unselfishness. Following Lewis' father's struggles to raise money for the cash-starved institutions he led, I wondered at the source of his courage and tenacity. Perhaps he was paying forward the unselfishness of Levering's two aunts, who worked long hours and daunting jobs to help fund his father's and uncle's education. The horrific violence unleashed on Black Americans in the South — whippings, beatings, burnings, shootings, lynchings — in the name of denying them participation in the American democratic experiment shows how essential voting rights are, and how easily they can be taken away. Lewis brings to this book his passion for history and his expertise in researching little-known nuances of the African American story: Black slaveholders in South Carolina; the predicament of free people of color in the South; the way a backlash from a 19th century slave revolt choked off hard-won liberties enjoyed by free Black people. As is often the case, Levering's strengths are also his weaknesses. He can tell a riveting story, but at times the narrative is bogged down by citations and attributions. As the story moves forward to that of his immediate family members, it becomes a kind of testament that mentions everyone who touched them: fellow ministers, sorority sisters, institutional colleagues. It comes to resemble a family history written for a limited audience, rather than the more broadly based American saga of the book's earlier sections. Despite these limitations, 'The Stained Glass Window' is a major accomplishment in its reach and scope and reconnection with the past. Perhaps only an 88-year old two-time Pulitzer winner could have brought the necessary skills and perspective to the task. If Lewis felt that he owed a debt to his family in writing this book, consider that debt repaid — with interest. Mary Ann Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
08-02-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
One family's stories prove to be a window on Black struggle and persistence in American history
Anyone who has embarked on a search for their ancestors knows the feeling of just wanting more — more knowledge, more insight, more proof of lives lived. Who were these long-gone people, beyond a paper trail of census records, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of history shaped them? Author and historian David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his biographies of Black intellectual pioneer W.E.B. DuBois, has spent his life mining the past, but his knowledge of his own family line was incomplete. With more than a dozen books and most of a lifetime behind him, Levering, 88, resolved to change that, setting out on a journey to both reclaim his family history and anchor it in the story of African Americans in this country. He got more than he bargained for. The story Lewis tells in 'The Stained Glass Window' was inspired by an antique window in an Atlanta church, a portrait of a mother and child modeled on the features of his maternal grandmother. That grandmother, Alice King Bell, was raised in the vital and historically significant Black community of Atlanta and was known and remembered by her family. But as Lewis went further back in time, he found forebears whose stories had never been fully told. His task tested the limits of his expertise, so he got further help from an expert genealogist, who assisted him with interpreting results from genetic testing. With that newly available information came a surprise. Lewis, an African American, discovered that he had at least three white ancestors, the legacy of the slave era, when white enslavers coerced Black women into sexual relations. In a revelation that 'reduced me to several days of incoherence,' he learned that one of his great-grandfathers, James W. Belvin, was white, and that despite having a white wife and children, Belvin had fathered five children with the author's enslaved great-grandmother Clarissa King. White people, enslaved Black people, free people of color — they all made up Levering's familial mix, a group of individuals whose lives personified the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. This personal road map gave him a framework for telling the story of African Americans of all social classes and skin tones, from pre-Colonial times to the 1950s. In many ways it's a brutal account — the terrors of slavery, the violence and injustice of Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction throttling of Black rights and opportunities that caused many of Lewis' ancestors to flee the South. It's also a story of immense courage, grit and determination. The most revealing thread, in terms of what Black citizens have both endured and achieved, concerns his Atlanta-based family. In the late 1800s Lewis' white great-grandfather Belvin, in declining health, bought Clarissa King a property in Atlanta and stipulated that it should remain in her family. This enabled Clarissa and her family to flee rural Georgia and move to the most vital African American community in the South, one that eventually produced both Lewis' father, a minister and college president, and his mother, a teacher, artist and social force in the community. Atlanta liked to call itself the 'city too busy to hate,' but its power structure challenged even the most resolute of its African American citizens. Black Atlantans were continually denied pathways to opportunity and achievement. The history of the willful neglect and underfunding of Black education, which Lewis chronicles in excruciating detail, is shocking and painful. A divide between the Black professional class and the Black working class hampered the community's ability to unite and form a political force. Lewis is astute about the way middle- and upper-class Black residents, many of them mixed-race, guarded their own resources and failed to agitate for full rights for all Black people until they were swept along by the unstoppable tide of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But in the main, this is a story of strength and endurance and unselfishness. Following Lewis' father's struggles to raise money for the cash-starved institutions he led, I wondered at the source of his courage and tenacity. Perhaps he was paying forward the unselfishness of Levering's two aunts, who worked long hours and daunting jobs to help fund his father's and uncle's education. The horrific violence unleashed on Black Americans in the South — whippings, beatings, burnings, shootings, lynchings — in the name of denying them participation in the American democratic experiment shows how essential voting rights are, and how easily they can be taken away. Lewis brings to this book his passion for history and his expertise in researching little-known nuances of the African American story: Black slaveholders in South Carolina; the predicament of free people of color in the South; the way a backlash from a 19th century slave revolt choked off hard-won liberties enjoyed by free Black people. As is often the case, Levering's strengths are also his weaknesses. He can tell a riveting story, but at times the narrative is bogged down by citations and attributions. As the story moves forward to that of his immediate family members, it becomes a kind of testament that mentions everyone who touched them: fellow ministers, sorority sisters, institutional colleagues. It comes to resemble a family history written for a limited audience, rather than the more broadly based American saga of the book's earlier sections. Despite these limitations, 'The Stained Glass Window' is a major accomplishment in its reach and scope and reconnection with the past. Perhaps only an 88-year old two-time Pulitzer winner could have brought the necessary skills and perspective to the task. If Lewis felt that he owed a debt to his family in writing this book, consider that debt repaid — with interest. Mary Ann Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.
