The vocational college once served Black students in Topeka, Kansas. Now, it's the site of a women's prison.
The shock of that change was captured in the moment, more than 40 years ago, when a friend first told Pitts about the school. “At that time, we were standing in his front yard and he kept looking across the street and he started talking about the college and why he came [to Topeka],” said Pitts. “I’m trying to figure out which college he was talking about because all I could see was a prison.
“At this stage, you’re dealing with a lot more of ‘my dad or grandpa went there,’” said Pitts. “But most people I have to tell what it was. They’re going ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was there’ or ‘I was in prison there and I never knew that.’” Instead of serving as spaces of opportunity, intellectual growth, and belonging, some schools have become all too literal conduits into the prison system and increasingly are even designed to look ever more like carceral facilities.
And yet even state prisons like Topeka Correctional offer their own versions of such devastation. For one thing, the sexual violence that pervades incarcerated women’s lives in prisons is all too obvious at Topeka Correctional. In 2009, thea “complex black market” of contraband and bribes as well as a sex trade that women incarcerated at the facility were coerced into participating in.
“Whoever wrote that document,” Pitts told me, “they knew, at the time, that Black people had no recourse and no ability to fight, but they knew that there would come a time when their children would be able to stand up and fight and find this document. So, when I found that document it shocked me.” “This is my philosophy,” he said, “with which I’m pressing everybody: you don’t wait for them to define the success or failure of your community. We must go through the process through the regents and educational-approving and ability-granting entities to open those schools ourselves. That’s what our children are waiting to see. They want to see us make a commitment to their future.”
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