The Visions to Peace Project

Twenty-year old Tumi McCallum, a devoted college student and anti-prison activist was recently found dead in her apartment in New York City. It seems she may have been killed by her boyfriend — based on investigations to date and his own confession, as reported in various news accounts:

Cops: Ex-Boyfriend Confesses to Killing NYU Professor’s Daughter

Slain NYU Student’s Boyfriend Implicates Self

Based on what we know so far, it seems that she is yet another young Black woman who is no longer alive because of intimate partner violence. Intimate partner violence refers the violence that goes on between people in close intimate relationships..for example between boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, and same gender relationships as well. When it comes to young people, people often use the term dating violence – violence between people who are dating each other.  Dating violence is the cause of a great deal of harm, abuse, injury and death to young people, especially young women. It happens in every community. As a Black woman, I am addressing this issue in relation to Black girls, young Black women and other young women of color. Tumi McCallum is one such Black woman.

The story of how Tumi was found is all too familiar to me. Neighbors smelled her decomposing body and called the building superintendent and then the police to investigate the smell. Candace Ritchie, my very close friend in college, was  also killed by her boyfriend and discovered the exact same way.  Days after Candace’s death in her own apartment, days after no one knew where she was, the stench of her dead body spreading through the building is what alarmed neighbors that something was terribly wrong.  Tumi and Candace were both 20 years old when they were killed. Candace was fiery, revolutionary, passionate about justice, forgiving, brilliant, serious, and fun. Seemingly, every molecule of her body was committed to social change and serving her Black community, especially young people. From what I’ve read about Tumi McCallum, she seems very similar.

Candace and Tumi were committed to working against the violence of the government and the violence of the criminal justice system. Sadly, they were not able to escape the violence in their intimate relationships. It is likely that Candace’s boyfriend didn’t mean to kill her.  She died as a result of suffocation. It seems he put a pillow over her face to drown out her cries and screams and  At any point, violence in relationships can turn deadly — whether intentional or not. We must recognize this.

There are far too many like Candace and Tumi. Many don’t have backgrounds that would attract the attention of journalists. Tumi was the daughter of two NYU professors, one who has done prominent political work in South Africa. Candace’s step father was a local politican. Yet despite some individual cases receive, when people think about the kinds of violence that impact young people of color, intimate partner violence is usually missing from the conversation. Why is this?

We need to have more conversations about dating violence in the lives of young people within our communities. We have to work to change the dynamics of interpersonal violence that operate in our everyday lives, while working to understand and address the underlying causes  and the overarching systems of violence in society — like racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and the criminal justice system.  We have to figure out ways of doing all of this at the same time because all of these issues of violence are connected. As advocate for women in prison, Tumi spent much of her young adult life working at these intersections. Let us honor her life work and legacy as well as that of my friend Candace and the many other young women of color who have died by discussing, creating, and practicing community-based ways to stop dating violence.

What if the neighbors of Tumi and Candace intervened? Decided to work with them and create a plan for how they were going to keep these young women safe? What if people decided to call the young men who killed them on their obsessive, controlling and abusive behavior? Told them it was not acceptable, that they would work with them to help them change or work with them to get them some help? They may have refused and this may not have worked. The truth is that there may not be one single action that would have saved their lives. But the power of many caring actions and interventions from many families, friends and neighbors could have saved their lives and others.

If you know violence is going on next door, in your apartment building, with a friend or someone else you know, then It IS your business. If you notice signs — someone’s intimate partner (boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, boo, whatever!!) is overly controlling, suspicious, angry and jealous, this too is also your business. How dare we say that someone else’s life is not our business?!! Talk to other neighbors, talk to other friends, they see and hear what’s going on too. And ask them, let’s sit down and discuss what’s going on and figure out how we might be able to make this stop. This is not a call for groups of people to beat down abusers because we can’t end violence with violence.

No, this is a call for you to care.. that you could save someone’s life.

Johonna
Visions to Peace Project
www.visionispower.org

Here’s a statement about Tumi’s life and work as an anti-prison activist from someone who knew her best:

A message from Cassandra Shaylor at Justice Now, 8/9/2007:

It is with great sadness that we write to our allies and friends about the recent death of one of our former interns, Tumi McCallum. We hope to shine some light on the person Tumi was, particularly given the extremely limited discussion of her life in media coverage of her death.

Tumi came to Justice Now through a class she took with Julia Sudbury at Mills College. While working with us, she provided invaluable assistance to people in women’s prisons in a number of extremely important ways. As an advocate, she provided a vital lifeline to the outside for people in prison. She corresponded with people in women’s prisons facing severe and life-threatening medical problems,providing them with crucial information and advice. Even after completing her required hours for schoolcredit, Tumi continued her work with Justice Now, far surpassing what was initially required. Her commitment combined with her skills allowed her to take on more complex work.

Tumi advocated on behalf of a woman in prison who was in need of medical treatment but had been told by prison staff that nothing could be done for her. Tumi’s strong conviction that this was untrue led her, as an undergraduate, to research the law and determine that the prison was in fact unfairly denying treatment. Tumi also advocated for a women in prison suffering extreme medical neglect and identified her as a person who might qualify for alternative sentencing. If successful, this is a process that would allow the woman to be resentenced and released from prison. Because of Tumi’s identification of this woman’s situation, Justice Now currently is working to secure her release.

Tumi was a brilliant writer and a passionate advocate, all of which was tucked behind a humble and patient demeanor. She always had a smile on her face, and she approached all of her work with tremendous energy and careful attention. Through our Human Rights Documentation Program, she focused on the issue of hepatitis C and collaborated with a woman inside to write an opinion-editorial to accompany the upcoming release of our report on the pandemic of hep C in prison. As an example of her dedication and sensitivity, though the California Department of Corrections refused to allow her to visit the prison because she possessed a South African passport, she took on the challenge of taking the words of a woman with whom she could not visit face-to-face and turning them into a powerful article. Because she took great care to consider all available information from the woman inside, even without meeting her she was able to write a piece that our colleague inside felt fully represented her.

As someone who had experienced living under a police state as a child in South Africa, she had a long-standing understanding of policing and imprisonment, which, she argued, “worked at oppressing my community instead of making it safe and protecting it.” She was born at the end of the Apartheid system and was on the run with her family from the police, who were pursuing her mother for her activism against Apartheid for many years. She drew parallels between those experiences, the prison industrial complex in the United States, and the treatment of Black people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, all of which fueled her passion for racial justice. She was fully committed to social justice work, in particular the struggle against the PIC. As she wrote in the last line of her letter requesting an internship at Justice >Now, “[this] is the ideal place for me to begin my activism against the policing system and to end violence against our communities.”

Tumi had plans to come back to Justice Now in the fall and had expressed her conviction that this was to be her life’s work. Her sharp political insights, her intense commitment to social justice, her quiet assuredness, and her generous spirit are a great loss to all of us. She will be greatly missed, and we join her family, friends, and the larger community of social justice activists of which she was a part, to honor her life.

In solidarity and in hope for a world without violence in all its forms,

all of us at Justice Now