The freedom within.(transformations)

Just when 1 thought I'd escaped my likely fate, I went to prison.

I had been visiting a friend in Crystal City, Virginia. I left her hotel around 9:30 in the evening and called a cab back to D.C. As we drove down Jefferson Davis Highway, a cop stopped us. He pulled his gun, told me to get out and put my hands up. I said "get that f----gun out of my face." Four more cars arrived. The cop who arrested me had overheard the private security guards on their walkie-talkies saying that they were looking for a black guy who had stolen $50 and that they had seen me getting into a cab. I had $223.94, a Rolex and a rack of credit cards. I saw the man I had supposedly robbed for the first time at my trial.

I brought my own lawyer to court, but the judge said he had known my court-appointed public defender for ten years, that he was good for the job and that I could not use my own lawyer. When I protested, the judge said, "We can either do this with you here or with you in the bullpen." Half of my jury was selected while I was in the bullpen. I was sentenced to seven years.

It was all unjust. But none of it, not one fact of my case, is unique. It happens to one in three black men, every day.

I had found the paths to success in college and then in training with well-known brokerage houses. I had built a profitable financial consulting firm working 70 hours a week, always trying to make more, prove more, be more. I thought that if I could close one more deal, break one more record, trespass one more line, maybe I wouldn't walk around feeling like my colors were spilling out with no border to define them.

I can still taste the metallic rage I felt that first day in prison. I was shackled hand and foot, being led by two black captors who were "just doing their jobs." The prison--with its gun towers, its gangs led out each morning to work in the fields or slaughterhouse for 13 cents an hour, its overseers of every color on horseback--had been standing for over 100 years. They pushed me into my cell. Snow blew through the broken window and piled up on the thin plastic mattress.

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