On Mother’s Day 2024, the GDC Abolitionist Working Group organized a Solidarity with Mothers Day Protest at the Huron Valley Women’s Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This was in part to support our incarcerated comrade Krystal Clark who is locked up there and facing severe life threatening medical neglect.
Over 50 friends, family members, and comrades lined the road across from the prison to let the mothers and everyone imprisoned there know they are not forgotten and together we must struggle to destroy the carceral system – abolish police, prisons, and capitalism.
We lined the streets w signs calling to “Free Krystal” “Abolish Prisons” “Free the Moms” “Tear down the walls” and blasted music and speeches into the yard where our captured loved ones could hear us and were able to wave back at us. We chanted “Free them All” and read poetry. Krystal was able to call from inside and we were able to share her heart wrenching and powerful words with the protest. She let us know how much the event meant to everyone inside. Krystal’s family members also spoke.
GDC would like to thank all the family members that showed up and participated. There was a strong feeling of solidarity. We also want to thank Detroit Jericho, Justice for Gerard Movement/Turning a Moment into a Movement podcast, and everyone that attended and spoke.
We will continue to organize and fight for a world without prisons. Stayed tuned for next steps regarding the campaign to bring Krystal home.
Speech from comrade Keysha:
Good afternoon, everyone! My name is Keysha and I’m with the Washtenaw General Defense Committee.
We are all here this Mother’s Day in solidarity with all mothers, and all women, and all people, separated from their children by prison bars.
Prison is the violent ripping apart of families, communities, neighborhoods. Prison is the attempted disappearing of our loved ones who have been deemed inconvenient by the state. But what does it mean to be inconvenient, or even dangerous, to a societal order that would violate, attack, lock away its people? That would separate mothers from their children with glee?
Let’s not forget the slave-catching origins of the police force, either. Because it is a force— of control, of domination. One that every criminalized person throughout this country’s bloody history has resisted. Resisting the carceral system is resisting one’s own disappearing.
No one disappears. No one is unremembered. It is a force of violence to attempt to erase someone, to disappear them into this iron labyrinth. But this hot blood that connects us all, that flows from our beating hearts, the essence of our combined resistance, is stronger than any prison.
We stand here not as teachers, or as saviors, but as students in this world, as a single, endless family connected by a shared understanding of the violent repression we all must confront. We are all touched and implicated by the United States’ carceral system. To me, that is not only a symbol of hope, that I am connected with all of you and all of you with me, that, inside or outside, we are all connected; but it is also a promise, a proclamation. As long as my heart beats, as long as this blood runs through my veins, I will fight side-by-side with you, my sisters! We must reject the forced disappearing, the enforced silence, the attempts of this carceral system to make fear and compliance the natural leading order!
Poem by Diane Di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #2”:
The value of an individual life a credo they taught us
to instill fear, and inaction, “you only live once”
A fog over our eyes, we are
endless as the sea, not separate, we die
a million times a day, we are born
a million times, each breath life and death:
get up, put on your shoes, get
started, someone will finishTribe
an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars
breathe destiny down on us, get
going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons
will see to it when you fall, you will grow
a thousand times in the bellies of your sisters
FREE THEM ALL! ALL PRISONS WILL FALL!
