I embarked upon the project of creating a series of prints on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2016. It was before the presidential nomination and election of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate. It was also a year marked by massive community organizing, notably the Standing Rock and Dakota Access Pipeline protests and Black Lives Matter demonstrations about the killings of Black people by police, including Philando Castile, Deborah Danner, Alton Sterling, Joseph Mann, Abdirahman Abdi, Paul O’Neal, Korryn Gaines, Sylville Smith, Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, Alfred Olango, and Bruce Kelley Jr.
It was clear to me that no matter who became president, human rights violations were endemic around the country, and violence and injustice was continuing to disproportionately target people who are Black, Indigenous, immigrants, and everyone in our society deemed “nonwhite.” It was also clear that mass mobilization, protest, and grassroots organizing were crucial to combating institutional, systemic, and individual racism and the white supremacy that is rampant and embedded in every aspect of our society.
Human rights violations are most blatantly evident in policing, imprisoning, and detaining people in the United States. There is growing awareness of the “school to prison pipeline,” the devastation of the racist “war on drugs,” and the mass incarceration of Black men. However, we are far away from preventing these harmful policies from continuing, or from making any sort of reparations to communities who have been affected by these policies, or dismantling the white supremacy that continues to prop up the entire system.
When I first started working with grassroots organizations, a popular slogan was “educate, agitate, organize.” Loretta J. Ross introduced me to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) through a talk she gave in Providence. The UDHR was drafted by representatives from around the world and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 as a common standard for all people and nations. To date, the document has been translated into over five hundred languages. It is a useful framework for understanding systemic injustice in our society. One of the main flaws is that there is currently no legal requirement for the United States to comply with this document. While it is by no means perfect, it can be an entry point for understanding human rights on many levels in our country. I believe this document can be one potential educational tool for grassroots organizing on human rights.
One of the most brilliant writers of our time, Toni Morrison, wrote a series of children’s books, including one she wrote with Slade Morrison called The Big Box. It poetically introduces kids to the concept of imprisonment and systemic injustice. There’s a sentence that’s been circling in my head since she passed: “If freedom is handled just your way/Then it’s not my freedom or free.”
Jelani Cobb’s idea of “contingency citizenship” and Alicia Garza’s description of the conditional citizenship for Black folks eloquently express the heart of racial injustice in this country. To work for human rights justice we must recognize that people are not protected equally, and this is most evident within the criminal “justice” system. We must dismantle the policing and prison system and continue to build a massive resistance to white supremacy in every aspect of our society.
In order for a more just world to emerge through our collective resistance, it is crucial that the voices of those most negatively affected by these issues be at the center of human rights work. This art project centers the voices of folks at Stateville Prison who created images on the UDHR through an artistic partnership with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. The articles they chose to illustrate reflect the pressing issues within our policing system, such as cruel and inhumane punishment, unjust incarceration of people, and the dehumanizing treatment of people as slaves within the prison system. The art created is visually beautiful, inspiring, and demonstrates the cultural leadership the artists bring to this movement.
This is part of a portfolio of work that appeared in Poetry’s December 2020 issue and is excerpted from Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex (Hat & Beard Press, 2020), a collection of poems and essays about human rights accompanied by foam block prints of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by artists at Stateville Prison, edited by Tara Betts, Aaron Hughes, and Sarah Ross. Find the rest of the portfolio here.
Meredith Stern is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. She works in printmaking, zine publishing, drumming, collage, gardening, and ceramic arts. In 2016 she created a booklet of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.