Sister Helen Prejean, activist for social justice
In a speech given at Amherst College Friday night Sister Helen Prejean condemned capital punishment and urged social awareness and involvement.
She spoke of not just the death penalty but all injustice and inequality: “We have to expose evil—we have to actively resist it.”
Past the scheduled start time of 8 p.m., people crowded into Johnson Chapel to hear her speak. The chapel’s white-painted wood, vaulted ceiling, high walls interrupted by windows and dignified portraits of old men, and column-supported balcony would look spacious were people not filling the solid pews. Many found space only on the red carpeting, and sat there when the talk began.
The title of the talk, “Dead Man Walking: The Journey,” referred to Sister Prejean’s 1993 book Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the U.S. and her journey to helping and speaking out for the dispossessed.
The dean of students introduced Sister Prejean by talking about her Pulitzer Prize nomination, Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and Honorary Doctorate from Amherst College. Sister Prejean introduced herself by saying “I’m a “suth’nuh,” and a storyteller.”
She began by speaking briefly about spirituality. “In all religions love of god is linked to love of neighbor,” she noted. Love of neighbor became central to her finding her way along her journey. She used the metaphor “oil to light” to describe the change that people can make in their lives.
Growing up in a Catholic family was about love, she said, and a little fear – “one mortal sin and you’re in hell” – but mostly love.
Sister Prejean became a nun at the age of 18 in 1957, when all nuns wore habits.
“The habits scared people,” Sister Prejean said, and the audience laughed. “We made kids cry.”
When Vatican II gave the message ‘relate to the people’ in the early 1960s, the nuns of her order took the oppurtunity, Sister Prejean said. They discovered that habits were first used in 17th century France because unmarried women could only go out in public dressed as widows. The sisters abandoned the 300-year-old tradition, which began as a way to reach the populace, in order to reach people better.
The nuns also looked at the social change of the period and questioned why they weren’t active in it.
Sister Prejean supported the civil rights movement, she said, but didn’t get involved: “I sang songs.”
“It wasn’t until 1980 that I woke up.”
She made her way from the suburbs into New Orlean’s inner city.
Personal involvement, Sister Prejean said, is what impassions the heart.
“When we are priveleged we do not know we are priveleged.” She contrasted her private school education, where she had courses in public speaking, with the public schools in the city, where teachers bring toilet paper for the school.
“We have decimated low-income housing in this country,” Sister Prejean said, listing it along with lack of health care as additional problems facing the poor. For blacks in particular, she said, police brutality is a problem in New Orleans.
She agreed to write letters to a prisoner on death row, Sister Prejean said, because she was working with the poor and she knew that people on death row were poor.
It was 1982 and Lousiana hadn’t executed anyone since the ‘60s. She ended up accomanying the man to his death.
When she learned no one visited the man she was writing to, she began to visit him herself. He was always grateful and so clearly human, Sister Prejean said.
Then she learned the details of his crime: he and his brother shot a teen-age couple in the back of their heads.
She was outraged, she said. “It is part of our moral sensibility to be outraged over the death of innocents.”
“I’ve been consorting with the enemy,” is what she said her next thought was.
“I was hanging onto principle by a fingernail,” said Sister Prejean, but she maintained her moral opposition to the death penalty.
“Every human being is worth more than the worst thing they ever did.” She drove home the point by asking the audience to consider being judged solely by the worst act we ever did.
She considered it her biggest mistake and an act of cowardice not to go to the victims’ families at this time. Our society, Sister Prejean said, pushes the victims’ families out of sight and out of mind.
She called her New Orleans Survivors group for the families of murder victims—whose killers, she noted, often have not been apprehended—"one little bitty Rolaid in the big stomach of pain of life.”
Watching the murderer of a loved one executed does not help one to deal with the loss, Sister Prejean said. The father of the murdered girl declared that the execution was a good thing for him. “He kills him again and again in his mind,” Sister Prejean said, adding that he goes to the prison gates for every execution now.
“’If I succumb to hatred I know it will eat me up,’” is how the father of the boy described the situation, said Sister Prejean.
About the electrocution process itself, Sister Prejean said an unmentioned group is the prison guards who have to carry out the execution. It takes a huge emotional toll on them, she said, citing one execution supervisor who resigned from his job and died six months later.
At the end of the speech, she came back to religion.
“Jesus Christ is a lion– we climb on his back and see where he takes us,” is how Sister Prejean described her view of Christianity. She objected to the way many people use religion:
“Jesus is a poodle we take out and walk around to justify what we’ve already decided.”
The speech was the first in a series of lectures celebrating the opening of The Center for Religious Life at Amherst College. In closing, Sister Prejean said she hoped the Center would be about more than just asking “‘so how do you pray?’” and become a source of raised awareness about, and involvement in, social problems.
In the comment period, an audience member informed Sister Prejean that the governor of Pennsylvania had signed an execution warrant for Mumia Abu-Jamal on Thursday. Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1981 of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. Sister Prejean said that there are questions about Abu-Jamal’s guilt, that he has been a strong voice for African-American people, and that the prison has kept the media away from him. She then asked for audience members who were going to talk or do something about the incident to give out times and places to the rest of the audience.
Sister Prejean ended the comment period with an appeal against people being so disconnected they don’t feel anything.
The audience gave standing ovations, each over half a minute, to Sister Prejean at the conclusions of both the speech and the comment period.
[Written for Chris Yurko’s 1999 Fall Journalism 300 class, but not a well enough written news article to be accepted: Seuss article fulfilled this assignment instead.]
[fragments:]
She is a consummate storyteller.
the walls – interrupted by windows and portraits of old men painted to look dignified -
A large part of being a nun is making your way to the poor, the dispossessed, the excluded.
responded to a comment about the fact that the movie Dead Man Walking does not exhort against the death penalty, saying that the movie is art not advocacy.
She decried the fatalism of the many people who say “’there will always be poor, there will always be racism.’”