portrait of Harry Grammer

GIVING THEIR DIGNITY BACK

OBAMA FOUNDATION FELLOW HARRY GRAMMER ON USING HISTORY AND CULTURE TO TRANSFORM JUVENILE JUSTICE

Like so many things in the West, poet Harry Grammer blew in from someplace else. Now he is a quintessential Angeleno — transplanted from Chicago. I first met Harry in 2011, when we were both doctoral students at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. He was in his late 30s, lived in Topanga Canyon, and seemed to emit a youthful aura of patchouli. He always had an organic chocolate bar, which he’d share with anyone who was around. He wore a hemp bracelet and carried a soft, leather-bound journal. Always talking about FLOW, a city project for bringing poetry into urban youth jails, even then he was reimagining the possibilities for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth.

Today, Harry Grammer is the co-founder of the New Earth Foundation, a think tank and outreach facility in Los Angeles dedicated to those very goals.

Twenty years ago, he and Yana Simone, his co-founder and wife, began conducting poetry workshops in dozens of correctional facilities across the Greater Los Angeles area. New Earth has just been tasked with the redesign of Camp Gonzalez in Malibu, a youth corrections center that the couple is turning into a state-of-the-art education facility.

This year, Harry was selected as an inaugural Obama Foundation Fellow, one of 20 pioneering changemakers chosen from more than 20,000 candidates. The fellowship will support Harry in his community work and help him chart a course to move his ideas to a national platform.

Linda Ravenswood recently spoke with Harry from his home office in Woodland Hills. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Linda Ravenswood:

So, what in the world is it like being awarded the inaugural Obama Foundation Fellowship?

Harry Grammer:

Exciting. [He stops and we laugh.] Three weeks ago we were with Michelle Obama and I had the opportunity to introduce her to Yana and it was a really beautiful thing, because I really want everyone to know Yana is such a huge part of the successes here at New Earth.

LR:

Yana . . .

HG:

Yana is the works in the clock! Yana knows all.

LR:

Where were you when you heard you won?

HG:

Right, so I was in my office in a meeting, and all of a sudden I’m getting this unknown caller for like 30 minutes. And finally I realize it’s Logan, the head of the Fellowship. And so I step out and call her from another office and she says, “Are you sitting down?” And she’s like, “We’d like to invite you to be a fellow at the Obama Foundation.” And so yeah, I just absolutely freaked out, whooping and hollering and just going bananas. And one of my colleagues, Anthony, came in and said, “I hope that was a good call?” And I said yes, but I couldn’t tell anybody anything for a couple of weeks, until the Foundation made the announcement.

LR:

What was it like meeting President Obama?

HG:

So we’re there in a big circle at the Foundation, the other staff members from the Foundation, all the other fellows, and President Obama is walking around being introduced to people. And he comes up to me and I say, “Hi President Obama, it’s such a pleasure to meet you. My name is Harry Grammer.” And we’re shaking hands, and he slaps me on the elbow and says, “Man, I know who you are!” And it’s just the best. So wonderful. And later on we’re at a barbecue at his best friend’s house in Chicago, and he comes over to me and says he wants to introduce me to some people, and he’s got his hand on my elbow, and he just starts telling everybody who I am, pouring forth my history and what I’m trying to do. And it’s like he knows me as well as I know myself. And we’d just met.

LR:

How did it feel to be home in Chicago?

HG:

Yeah, it was really fun to be home — it was another full circle kind of feeling. And Chicago wants our help, too. People are demanding that we shut down these broken facilities. We need to do this, we have to demand that we repurpose and redesign the services for our youth.

The driver is the research — because it tells us most people are incarcerated for technical violations — and what we have to do is reestablish and deliver people their human rights. We have to give their dignity back to them — and we do this through policy. I know the process for shutting these prisons down, turning them into colleges. I want to shut all of these places down and reimagine them, and redevelop them as educational facilities, across the country and internationally. We want this to be a global movement. I want to bring in beauty and design. I want to educate, not incarcerate. My new phrase is Opportunities, not Eulogies.

LR:

In all of this work, how come you never seem rattled?

HG:

You know, growing up and in my 20s I started to keep cool as a way of protecting myself. It’s a way to find a place where I remember that no matter what stresses are going on, everything is going to be okay and that I have to hang tough, and live moment to moment. I always try to remember that, if I can make it through those moments and not get stirred up, always keep it real, and have that gentle heart beat, I can always remember everything is going to be okay.

[He pauses.]

Now mind you, there are times when I need to get loud, but I don’t want to be regarded as an angry black man.

[He pauses.]

Of course, I am loud, and of course, I am a black man.

[Laughter]

Doc, did you know that Camp Gonzalez has been turned over to New Earth?

LR:

You mean that youth probation center you took me to in the Malibu mountains?

HG:

Yes! That same one, and it’s amazing because that’s the detention facility I started working at all those years ago. So I’ve come full circle. Yesterday we received $1 million from the state to turn it into a full curriculum, culture building, team building, educational facility. We just received renderings from the architects and the design team. And we have our eye on five other facilities that are slated to close over the next three years.

We will turn Camp Gonzalez into our vocational training center for the students, a still-unnamed center. After we do the renovations and reopen in January 2019, we will ask the first cohort to name the place.

LR:

How are you designing the curriculum at the new Camp Gonzalez?

HG:

For the first two months, there will be no classroom work. We’re going to do culture building, and team building and we’re going to talk history. Of course we will do our Wilding programs, with trips away from the facility, camping in the mountains, and trips with the Water Keepers on the ocean. And then and only then, after the first two months, then we’ll go into the classrooms. We’re going to be partnering with Los Angeles Trade Tech and L.A. Kitchen, educating the students in the culinary arts, in construction — and not just hardhats and hammers. It’s going to be admin, and matching students with employers, so when they’re ready to graduate, they’ll have a great place to go. Because no one is going to leave our facility without a job. And there’s going to be support after they’ve graduated, with housing and with emotional support. This is the project that is going to change the whole face of the juvenile justice system.

LR:

Stunning. [We’re quiet for a while.] Harry, do you want to talk a little bit about your incarceration when you were a kid?

HG:

You know, I’ve never talked about that. But okay yeah, I mean I was here in Los Angeles and…

[He stops.]

All this happened when I was 16. We’d come out from Chicago, and we were living here in Los Angeles. And you know, I was hanging around with the wrong crowd. It was a house burglary; no one was in the house, we just went in through the sliding glass door. It was Christmas week, and there were two other boys with me, and they took the presents from underneath the Christmas tree. It was a police officer’s house, in a white neighborhood. And so, we went into their room and we took, you know, his gun and badge as well. I just had no idea, I was just stupid, you know, we were just acting stupid. So the one guy had a car, and the other guy just jumps on the hood, acting stupid, and we just start rolling through the neighborhood whooping and hollering, and we get pulled over by the cops. And the guy with the car gets a ticket. But the police have no idea we have all this stuff in the trunk of the car! They have no idea that we had just robbed this other police officer’s house. So the next day, after the police officer whose house we robbed reports that he was robbed, they put it together that three black youths were in that neighborhood. And that next afternoon, there came a knock at the door and it was the police questioning me in my living room.

LR:

Whoa.

HG:

Yeah. And the guy just questions me so hard, and my parents aren’t there. I’m just alone in the house, and he’s talking at me. And I just deny it. Deny, deny, deny, deny, deny. And the cop says, “If I find out that you’re lying to me, I’m going to put you [in] jail.” And I just say whatever. And they leave. And I call my friends, and I’m like, “You have to get rid of all that stuff.” But the cops come back a little while later and they just bust open the door. And they smash my face against the wall. And back then, I had really long hair, and in my house I was shirtless, and just walking around with bare feet, and so they throw me out of my parents house, and it’s one of those days in Los Angeles when it’s pouring rain, so I am completely wet, and half naked, and basically I just look like Kunta Kinte. And they just throw me in the back of the police car, and instead of taking me to the station, they just drive me around my neighborhood. Just to ridicule me.


And so they locked me up. And when I got out, I mean, I was 16 years old, and my head was still not on straight. And I had some more run-ins, even after that, with the police. Like I got shot at, six to seven months later, and that’s what happens — if you don’t have mentors, and you don’t have people to provide accompaniment.  They gave me five years probation, so I was on probation till I was 21 years old.

LR:

How long were you in there, Harry?

HG:

Like five or six months.

LR:

Were you in a place like the camps that you serve today? Like Camp Gonzalez?

HG:

No, no. I was in juvenile hall. They can keep you there for up to two years. And I slept in a cell. On a cot. That’s what happens when you come from a place of not much opportunity.

LR:

So without mentors or accompaniment, how did you break that cycle?

HG:

Well, I’ve got to say that it was the love that I felt for my first wife, the mother of my older children, you know. And also, I loved football, and there were some scholarship opportunities. So there were things to work towards. I was still young, but there were some professional goals, even then.

LR:

Thank you so much for talking about that, Harry. Last question: How does poetry fit into all of this?

HG:

Oh, well now. That’s the heart. And I made a promise to myself to return to my poet’s heart. Because that’s the foundation of the whole outreach. That’s where we started 20 years ago. And even though we’re building a new farm, at Camp Kilpatrick in Malibu, that $50 million new facility, and opening a new state-of-the-art youth facility in the Valley, I know that I’m turning home again to poems. And in the next couple of weeks, when I have time, I’m going to return to the poems, ’cause that’s where it all started, and that’s where I’m always turning.

LINDA RAVENSWOOD

Linda Ravenswood is a poet and performance artist from Los Angeles. She is the editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Press, and the co-founder of The Melrose Poetry Bureau. She was shortlisted for poet laureate of Los Angeles in 2017.