The fervent, purposeful crowd felt like Washington on the Mall 50 years ago for the March on Washington and more recently, on Jan. This fact is magnified by those women who are imprisoned.” “Historically speaking, all women have suffered, often in silence, often ignored. “We all know that … these negative and life-threatening abuses of prisoners are illegal, immoral, inhumane and just ain’t right, no matter how one looks at it! This historical oppression of women wasn’t right then, and it ain’t right now! No, this is not what they had in mind when they rose up to demand a better way of life. “They did not want for women to be placed on death row and then, for what may be the first time in their entire life, to be treated equally as men by enduring the same execution rituals and be murdered by the state in the same way. Nor did they expect for women to be forced to live in overcrowded prisons, suffering medical abuse and neglect, or subjected to all of the daily abuses that they currently face. That is not how they envisioned women’s equal rights. They did not make these sacrifices so that today’s women in the 21st century could be imprisoned as they currently are. (Learn more about Kevin Cooper at “These women fighters often were brutalized, bloodied, beaten and outright murdered for taking the stance they took. In his eloquence, he said that the women who fought for equality and justice did not suffer ill treatment for the right to equal opportunity on death row. I am certain Cooper had her in mind when he composed his statement shared at the entrance to Central California Women’s Facility, Saturday, Jan. Death row inmate Kevin Cooper’s plea for the women incarcerated in California’s Central Valley sounded like a salute to another woman who fought for freedom and women’s suffrage, Iya Sojourner Truth, whose speech, “Ain’t I a Woman,” delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, is a classic call for justice from a Black woman to a white constituency that would see her as less than human, and isn’t this the case yet again, when one looks at those enslaved citizens serving time in Central Valley? Gone are their constitutional rights.
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