You may have already heard about the U of I’s recent dismissal of James Kilgore due to a right-wing smear campaign. A petition is circulating to have him reinstated. I met James shortly after he arrived in Champaign-Urbana in 2009, fresh from doing six and a half years in prison. I recall when he showed up for a youth speak out following the police killing of Kiwane Carrington. He looked on curiously, but kept his distance, as I was to find out because he was still on parole and wearing an ankle bracelet. Since then, James has slowly immersed himself in the community and joined the local fight to transform the criminal justice system which he knows from the inside-out.
He began by holding a reading group for Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. He later helped put together a series on mass incarceration for the University YMCA, which culminated with a speech by Angela Davis, longtime prison abolitionist.
Over the last two years, Kilgore has worked with C-U Citizens for Peace and Justice to confront the local manifestation of mass incarceration ― a proposed $20 million jail expansion. He is also member of a group called Citizens With Conviction that has convinced the City of Urbana to “ban the box,” a national campaign to eliminate the question on a job application asking if an individual has a felony conviction.
Additionally, he published two novels fictionalizing his years living in Zimbabwe and South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s: We Are All Zimbabweans Now, and Freedom Never Rests. In 2013, he won the Daniel Singer Foundation Millennium Prize for a non-fiction essay about his recent visit to South Africa, “On Returning to Where the Heart Is.” When he was fired from the U of I, he was planning to teach two classes in Global Studies for the Fall that drew upon his own first-hand experiences.
I have also seen another side of Kilgore, that of a man who loves children. When my wife and I were in the hospital with our son Jake, James was one of the first to come visit us and hold our newborn baby. If we needed a night out, James gladly came over to play with Jake. When he was little, Jake liked to play with James’s glasses, taking them off, and putting them back on. Now that Jake is two, he sees him and yells out “James”!
I know few men who are as publicly affectionate toward children as James. At meetings and events, I often saw James willing to take over child care, a frequently overlooked responsibility for any truly community organization, and a duty many times left up to women. Kilgore gave me the idea that men too could take care of children.
Over Spring Break, when Kilgore’s own son Lonnie was home from school, I had the opportunity to watch the NCAA finals with the two of them, who are both sports fanatics. I got to see them interact, share the names of their favorite players, and could tell where James first gained his love for children.
Jim Dey of the News-Gazette would like to portray Kilgore as a “terrorist” and have him run him out of town. I think we have much to learn about forgiveness from James, who lived through the years of reconciliation in South Africa. He has served his time and now focuses his energy on addressing today’s major civil rights issue ― the mass incarceration of more than two million people, the majority of them black and brown. He has renounced violence and turned to achieving social justice through education, writing, and community organizing.
Please consider signing the petition to restore James’s contract at the University of Illinois. For more read this editorial in the Daily Illini.