Entrepreneurs in Training (EITs) welcome Glazier and other volunteers at a prison event in Lancaster, Calif.

GAMES AND ICEBREAKERS are often used at business conferences to create some fun and make strangers comfortable with each other. But at a recent meeting of Defy Ventures, which helps people from prisons prepare for life on the outside, one empathy-building exercise quickly turns dead serious. It’s called Step to the Line, and though not a word is spoken, much is revealed.

On a sunny Saturday in mid-January, about a dozen former inmates from two Los Angeles halfway houses gather for the event at a modern downtown office complex. They are met there by a group of volunteers, men and women from the business world recruited to lend their expertise on writing résumés, polishing personal statements and perfecting business plans.

Defy calls the event a Business Coaching Day, and it’s led by Andrew Glazier ’97, the nonprofit’s national president and CEO. It’s part of the organization’s overall prison rehabilitation program called CEO of Your New Life, which aims to build self-confidence as well as skills.

At Defy, the group exercises are meant to be healing. They help participants develop a healthy self-image and positive attitudes. The organizers provide a well-studied set of aphorisms to live by.

Shame is destructive. Learn to forgive, not judge. You are not defined by your mistakes. You deserve a second chance. Foreswear negative labels. You are not criminals, convicts or felons. You are EITs— Entrepreneurs In Training.

Above all, realize that the solution is already inside you. Many of the same skills that brought you success as, say, a drug dealer can be applied to any legal enterprise.

In short, to quote Defy’s main motto: Transform the Hustle.

Glazier listening to an EIT share his personal statement during a coaching day.

GLAZIER HIMSELF COMES from a privileged background that could not be more remote from the life experience of his incarcerated clientele. For the public face of Defy Ventures and its chief fundraiser, that disparity can be a handicap, he concedes. Sometimes he finds himself forced to answer questions of class and race when pitching new potential donors.

“In the funding community now there’s a lot of interest in seeing people who have ‘lived experience’ running organizations and working in the nonprofit space,” he explains. “I think part of it comes from the idea that, look, for a long time it’s been just a bunch of well-meaning white people who come and work in communities of color. So sometimes I find I still battle this credibility stuff: What are you doing here?”

Glazier understands why people perceive a disconnect between his upbringing and his prison work and why they might challenge his street cred, so to speak. But he bristles at being “on the receiving end” of that mistrust. “It can be an uncomfortable spot to be in,” he says. “Look, I can’t change who I am. I do know that it’s critical to have people with lived experience within our organization, informing our work. And we do.”

If you’re looking for personal information on Glazier, you won’t find much on social media. He’s not one to overshare; so he keeps a light digital footprint, mostly on LinkedIn and all about business. But Glazier opened up during a casual lunch recently at the Wasabi Japanese Noodle House, a five-minute walk from his Wilshire Boulevard offices in Koreatown. He talked easily about his evolving life goals, his family, education and the circuitous career path that brought him to the transformative prison work he never dreamed he’d be doing.

Unlike many other Angelenos, Glazier’s roots in the city run deep. His mother descended from immigrants with a long history in Los Angeles. Her maternal relatives arrived from Italy, just in time for his great-grandmother to be “born off the boat from Sicily” in 1908.

Glazier’s father was a doctor who worked for the Veteran’s Administration, where he met his mother, who worked as a secretary for the agency. They married, had three children and settled in Studio City, a well-to-do neighborhood in the eastern San Fernando Valley.

Glazier attended Harvard-Westlake, a college prep he calls “the most elite private school in Los Angeles.” Today, he concedes that his exclusive education had put him in a protective bubble, cloistered from the social ills mushrooming all around him.

But all that changed on April 29, 1992, the day the Los Angeles Riots erupted over the verdict in the Rodney King case.

One of Defy’s entrepreneurs in training, referred to as EIPs.

GLAZIER WAS 16. “I had lived my whole childhood in the valley, and I had no idea what was going on eight miles away,” he says. “Then the riots happened. I remember seeing Rodney King getting beaten on TV. Then the city burning. And even in the valley, where it wasn’t nearly as intense, you could still see all the smoke coming over the hill.

“That was really a moment for me of waking up: Oh, my life is not their life. There are things happening that are really close-by that I’m really not aware of. And when I suddenly had greater awareness of my opportunity and privilege, it felt all the more extreme, which in part, I think, drives me to do this work.”

Yet, Glazier never actually planned to work in prison reform. Until recently, if you had told this classically trained cellist with an MBA and a medium build that he would someday wind up working with hard-core prison inmates, he would have scoffed at the notion.

Nothing was further from his mind when he applied to college. He picked Pomona because he wanted a small school, and his parents wanted him to stay close-by.

The Claremont campus also had a strong academic appeal. “I’m a huge fan of the liberal arts,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what you get a degree in, because you’re learning critical thinking and writing. And that’s the education I came out with—a degree in critical thinking and knowing how to write, both important skills that are hard to find.”

Glazier majored in international relations, studied Spanish and Japanese, and spent a semester in Pomona’s program at Tokyo’s International Christian University.  At first, he considered joining the foreign service, but that plan never materialized. (Fun fact: his suitemate during junior year was David Holmes ’97, a U.S. State Department employee based in Ukraine who recently testified during the impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump.)

After graduation, Glazier took time to explore. He returned to Japan and taught English for a year. He travelled, settled down and started a family. From 2001 to 2004, he was chief of staff to Marlene Canter, then a newly elected member of the Los Angeles City Board of Education.

“Originally, I wanted to be an elected official,” he recalls, “but five years of working in local and state government sort of cured me of that impulse.”

Nevertheless, the experience continued to stoke a civic calling. The problems he saw in L.A. schools opened his eyes to new realities—kids who are afraid to go to school, who can’t read, who smoke weed in the hallways.

“This is where you really start to see inequities in the system, to see more of the injustices that exist in society,” he says. “I spent my life in private education; now suddenly I have this front-row seat in public schools, and you think, ‘How is this even possible?’”

Glazier then switched gears and joined a small real estate development team, managing an award-winning restoration of historic bungalows in Silverlake. On that job, he recalls, he met and interacted with people with criminal histories for the first time, giving him a glimpse into the challenges they face after prison.

EITs welcoming a volunteer at the start of a Defy coaching day.

Meanwhile, Glazier also went back to school, earning his master’s in business administration from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management in 2006.

Two years later, he decided he’d had enough of real estate, which “didn’t feel meaningful to me.” In October of 2009, he took a job with City Year Los Angeles, a nonprofit that plunged him back into those vexing education problems. The agency works with AmeriCorps volunteers to serve as tutors, mentors, and role models for students in Los Angeles, grades three through 10.

The job gave Glazier his entrée into nonprofit work, where he finally found his mission. He stayed eight years with the education agency, having ascended to second in command in the Los Angeles chapter.  When he decided to leave—again with no job lined up—a friend referred him to the opening at Defy, which had recently launched a new Southern California branch.

Glazier has come to see parallels between the problems in public schools and those in public prisons. “They are both large bureau­cracies within the state government that are dealing with large numbers of people who are in need of intervention and education,” he explains. “So some of the basic reform ideas that apply to public education apply to prisons too.”

In either system, steering an organization in a new direction can be a herculean task. Glazier was well aware of the enormous challenge when he entered the criminal justice reform world three years ago, full of optimism and ambition. But he had no idea of the organizational landmines that awaited him at Defy Ventures, where a scandal was about to shake the nonprofit to its foundation while abruptly catapulting Glazier to the top job.

DEFY VENTURES WAS FOUNDED in 2010 in New York by a charismatic woman named Catherine Hoke, a UC Berkeley graduate and former Wall Street executive. But in 2018, she was forced to resign in the midst of accusations of sexual harassment, misuse of funds and misleading donors with inflated performance reports.

Glazier said the controversial leader had come to personify the organization. She had a golden touch for fundraising and promotion; she courted powerful people in politics and Silicon Valley and had a knack for drawing high-profile media coverage. When she stepped down, Glazier says, Defy seemed doomed, as donors rapidly retreated.

Hoke has denied the allegations, though she previously admitted having sex with ex-prisoners participating in a similar program she had established in Houston in 2004. After being banned from Texas prisons in 2009, she resurfaced in New York where she later faced the new allegations from former Defy employees. An internal investigation, conducted by an outside law firm, found evidence of personal impropriety, but no proof that program results were embellished, donors misled or funds misused.

Glazier joined Defy in May of 2017, charged with building the new L.A. chapter. But before he had completed his first year on the job, the scandal hit, and he was suddenly promoted to president and CEO as the organization ran out of money.

Glazier recalls how he perceived the promotion: “You’re in charge. Here’s a dumpster fire.”

The newcomer scrambled to keep the sinking agency afloat. He was forced to lay off two thirds of the staff, then proceeded “to engineer a turnaround.” Today, the agency is back on solid footing.

Defy’s top goal, says Glazier, is cutting the rate of recidivism, the all-important measure that tracks the proportion of released offenders who return to prison over time. Nationwide, the rate has remained stubbornly high for decades. According to the most recent study released in 2018 by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 83 percent of inmates released in 2005 had been re-arrested at least once within nine years. Most, 68 percent, were re-arrested within the first three years. The study followed a random sample of 67,966 prisoners from 30 states, including California, Colorado and New York, all places where Defy programs operate.

Defy’s strategy is essentially simple: Help men and women inside prisons prepare for a successful re-entry by teaching them business and career skills and personal development. Once they’re released, the agency provides continued support through a structured program to help them get a job or start a business.

While still in prison, participants engage in a seven-month curriculum that culminates in a Shark Tank-style competition, in which they pitch their ideas to a panel of business leaders and investors. After graduation and release, winners can bring their ideas to fruition through Defy’s Business Incubator.

ON ITS WEBSITE, Defy tracks results by the numbers: More than 5,200 prison participants, 4,800 volunteers, a one-year recidivism rate of 7.2 percent, an 84 percent employment rate and 143 businesses incorporated over the past eight years.

Like Defy itself, several of these small enterprises go on to employ former prisoners. Two Defy graduates work for Glazier at the agency’s spare and utilitarian offices, where the décor is corkboards and calendars.

Quan Huynh, the organization’s post-release program manager, joined the Defy program as a participant in 2015 while serving a life sentence for murder. He had been convicted in connection with a car-to-car shootout on the Santa Ana Freeway between his Vietnamese gang and members of a rival gang in the other car. He did time in some of the state’s toughest prisons, including Soledad and Pelican Bay.

“For the first 10 or 12 years, I never thought I was going to go home,” says Quan, whose parents fled the Vietnam War when he was an infant. At his parole hearing, he gambled on telling the truth, admitting he had lied in court and coached witnesses. His honesty paid off.

After his release, Defy helped him start his own cleaning company in Fountain Valley. Today, he is founder and CEO of Jade Janitors, currently with six employees, including five who were formerly incarcerated. He was Glazier’s first hire at Defy in 2017.

Another volunteer offering feedback to an EIT at a California prison.

When asked, Quan thinks before offering a job assessment on his boss. “He’s very strategic and organized,” he says. “He’s all about systems and processes. He does not micromanage me at all. He empowers me. He sets the goal and sets high expectations, and we follow through with it.”

For Quan, that management style says, “I trust you.”

PRIVATELY, GLAZIER CAN “sometimes seem a little socially awkward,” Quan says, but he’s confident in the spotlight as Defy’s workshop leader. “He’s right in his comfort zone right there, actually connecting with the participants.”

During the recent Business Coaching Day, Glazier is clearly comfortable leading the icebreakers. In one, he asks people to introduce themselves by dancing their way from their seats to the front of the large hall.

“Quan, have you got some good dance music ready?”

There is no room to be bashful in this exercise. The participants, both budding entrepreneurs and volunteer counselors, make their way to the front, displaying individuality in their step. They strut, stroll, glide, vamp and slow-walk their way to the front, announcing the nicknames they gave themselves. There is Graceful Grace, Fantastic Frank, Kind Kyra and Bashful Benny. And here come Musical Michele, Ambitious Albert, Incredible Ian and Resilient Raul.

In the role of moderator, Glazier as Awesome Andrew is a cross between a motivational speaker, group therapy leader and game-show host. By the time these icebreakers work their wonder, the room is buzzing with laughter and chatter like a nightclub at midnight.

But when it comes time for Step to the Line, Glazier asks for silence. He instructs the group to form two lines along blue tape laid on the floor a few feet apart. Volunteers stand shoulder-to-shoulder on one side facing the Entrepreneurs in Training on the other. Then they all take two steps back from their respective lines, making the distance greater between them.

Glazier ’97 leading one of Defy’s signature exercises, Step to the Line.

Glazier then reads a series of questions. For each one, participants must step forward to their line if they feel the statement is “true for you.” As the exercise goes along, people on both sides of the divide step forward and back with each question, revealing both differences and commonalities.

Soothing guitar and piano music start playing, relaxing as a spa. Glazier’s words float over the room like spiritual meditations. “We don’t do shame at Defy,” he says, speaking slowly with deliberate pauses. “We’re forward-looking. We do empathy. Now, empathy is not pity. Nobody is asking for anybody to feel sorry for them. Feeling sorry for someone isn’t built on respect. But empathy is built on respect and shared humanity. Empathy says that I see you. I hear you. And I understand.”

The first few questions are for fun.

I like scary movies.

I know who Billie Eilish is.

I was the class clown.

As the statements get more probing, responses reveal social divisions. Only two of the EITs, but half of the volunteers, indicate their parents paid for private schools. Only one former prisoner earned a four-year college degree; most dropped out of high school.

Yet people on both sides share sad experiences, with random movements back and forth from the line of truth.

I struggle with my self-confidence to this day.

My mother or father have been to jail or prison.

My parents split up and their divorce deeply wounded me.

I’ve lost someone I love to violence.

An EIT hugs members of his family during an emotional Defy Ventures graduation exercise.

When the questions turn to crime, the results are both surprising and shocking. Surprising to learn that many of the mostly white mentors have been stopped or questioned by police for no reason, and almost all have been arrested. Shocking to see what the EITs have endured in prison. The majority have spent more than four years behind bars, a few more than 20. The visual of men stepping back or remaining on the line as the number of years are called out makes for a powerful moment. Even more so when Glazier asks about a harsh psychological punishment.

I’ve spent time in solitary confinement. (All but two step foward.)

More than two years. (Two men step back.)

Three years. (Three men remain.)

Five years. (Two left.)

Seven. (One man still on the line.)

Ten years. (Finally, all have stepped back.)

The exercise has succeeded. It has stirred passion and compassion, even from this casual observer. And it has forged strong bonds among this unlikely team of strangers, as indicated by their collective shared movement when Glazier delivers the final statements.

I feel proud of the person I am becoming.

Everybody steps up to the lines, and a couple give high fives across the quickly closing gap.

Okay, last one. If it’s true for you, let me hear it. I love being part of the Defy community.

The session ends with cheers, laughter, spontaneous hugs all around.

BEHIND FENCES TOPPED with razor-sharp wire, students from the 5Cs sit next to incarcerated students each semester in classes taught by Claremont Colleges professors at the California state prison in Norco.

They are part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program, an international effort introduced locally by Pitzer College in 2014 and expanded in 2018 to include courses from Pomona College and the other 5Cs. The classes inside the 3,600-inmate California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) are part of the groundbreaking Inside-Out program created by Temple University Professor Lori Pompa in 1997—an effort that took ‘outside’ undergraduate students into classes with ‘inside’ students serving sentences in Pennsylvania prisons. Since then, it has expanded to more than 150 colleges and universities at some 200 jails and prisons.

Education isn’t the only goal of the college-credit classes; it’s also an attempt to create dialogue between groups with profound social differences. But the inside and outside students are equals in the classroom: They read the same materials, complete the same assignments, earn the same college credit and in small ways start to echo each other. As one incarcerated student in Professor Jo Hardin’s Math 57 class, Thinking with Data, writes:

In the future I hope to organize communities that focus on sustainable, environmentally beneficial practices. With the skills I learned in this class I feel prepared to communicate and interpret complex scientific data in ways that are easily understood and enjoyable to contemplate. Also by broadening my interactions with young scholars I’m exposed to the issues pertinent to the change makers of tomorrow.

Ultimately, the differences are stark. The outside students get to leave after class and return to a bus where their cell phones and lives await. The inside students at the medium-security men’s facility will eventually be eligible for release, but for now their lives are confined by both fences and regulations. They answered questions about the program in anonymous handwritten responses, including this one from a student in Linguistics 114, a course on language and discrimination taught by Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at Pomona:

I thought I would just be an outcast for the rest of my life, but my interactions with the outside students showed me that not everyone will judge me, and maybe I’ll get to find a place I fit into society after all.

And another student:

Being part of an “inside-out” class also makes me feel like a regular person, not an inmate. It is a welcome reprieve from the highly punitive correctional environment that I live in.

And another:

Being treated like a human and not a monster.

The buses leave The Claremont Colleges at 12:30 p.m. on the days of classes at the prison. Six courses were offered in fall 2019 and another half-dozen this spring, each meeting once a week. The students and professors must be cleared by prison security and undergo orientation, as well as being tested for tuberculosis before classes begin. They invest a full afternoon for one class, often returning to campus as late as 5:30. “Walking into the prison for the first time, it felt incredibly surreal,” says Pomona student Sarah Sundermeyer ’21. “But I think that feeling of trepidation dissipated as soon as we were inside the classroom with the other students. They were so warm and friendly and just open and willing to share in a way that I don’t know that I expected.”

An experience different from what they expected is a common refrain. “I guess it’s been more striking how unremarkable it is,” Hardin says. “You think, ’Oh, this is a really big deal.’ Everybody says it’s really impactful, and in some ways it has been. But in terms of the class structure and the class dynamics, it’s really just a class.”

“And that’s what you’re actually trying to do, right?” interjects Holliday. “Part of the innovation is treating people who are incarcerated like people—and that means treating them like students, for us.”

The courses are partly tailored for the setting, with Hardin’s data class focused on interpreting such information as census statistics and medical research, but also on the probabilities involved in DNA analysis of the sort used in criminal investigations and trials. Discussion is also an integral part of the model. “The topic was statistics and right off the bat people were saying, ‘I feel I’m reduced to a number in the system,’” says Ahana Ganguly ’21.

Holliday’s class examines linguistic prejudice in the educational system as well as the criminal justice system. “Every single inside student had a story about being told that they talked ‘ghetto’ or literally having the Spanish beaten out of them in school,” she says. “When people tell you your language doesn’t work because of their racism, you don’t use your language. And then what happens to you in school? It’s really, really powerful. And maybe in some small way, you know, what the program is trying to do is just restore a little bit of the dignity that they lost through the way they were treated in the educational system to begin with.”

Inside students earn course credits and a small amount of time off their sentences. Outside students earn credit and a first-person experience of a system most had considered only in theory.

“I think the greatest benefit actually—I hope—accrues to the larger society,” Holliday says. “What does a world look like when every judge, every lawyer, every politician has had a real human connection with someone that’s incarcerated? And we know our students go on to do wonderful things. They’re going to grad school; they’re going to law school; they’re going to be important and powerful. I want a generation of people that have had that experience and seen how fundamentally unfair our system is, that have the power to change it when they get out.”

Involvement in research or activism involving the criminal justice system is nothing new at The Claremont Colleges, with a decades-long tradition among many faculty, particularly at Pitzer. Pomona Professor of Religious Studies Erin Runions has facilitated writing workshops inside a women’s prison and teaches a popular course on Religion, Punishment and Restoration that is now part of the Inside-Out program.

But it was Pitzer’s Tessa Hicks Peterson—an associate professor of urban studies and assistant vice president of community engagement who also heads the Office of Consortial Academic Collaboration—who piloted the first Inside-Out course, Healing Arts and Social Change, which took place at CRC in the spring of 2014. Since then she has worked to spread this model to the other Claremont Colleges, with the support from the 7C Deans and many engaged faculty.

The expansion came with the support of a $1.1 million grant Pitzer received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2018 and is now run by Pitzer’s Tyee Griffith, founding manager of the Justice Education Initiative. In fall 2020, Pitzer will become the first Inside-Out program in the nation to offer a pathway to a bachelor’s degree for incarcerated students, who previously only have been able to earn associate’s degrees. The first class of incarcerated students to earn bachelor’s degrees in organizational studies from Pitzer would be in 2022.

All of these are complex issues, of course, involved in crime and punishment. Even on the Claremont campuses, a club called the 5C Prison Abolition Collective staged a panel last fall examining the ethics of Inside-Out that included formerly incarcerated speakers as well as Pomona’s Runions, a longtime activist and Inside-Out professor. Some who support the dismantling or reduction of the prison system over traditional reform contend that the Inside-Out program makes participants complicit with the system itself.

“There’s an idea that this ‘makes the prison look good,’” Peterson says. “But the prison is not necessarily pushing for this: We are really advocating for it on behalf of those inside who have asked us to do it. We’re there because we’re invited; we’re there because it’s their right to education, just like anyone else’s. And the educational experience is really transformative and does often provide a level of agency, like any educational experience does. That in and of itself is what we hope will change the system—both girding the folks inside with that sense of agency and education but also girding our 5C undergraduates with knowledge about this system, that for many people they have a luxury to not have to know and care what’s happening in these facilities that are state-run, that our tax dollars are going to. So we’re complicit with these institutions, regardless of whether we’re teaching inside or sitting here ignoring them. Those of us involved feel like we’d much rather be complicit with a solution of educating ourselves about these institutions so that we can become better advocates. Because certainly, you can’t teach inside without having resulting very strong feelings about the prison-industrial complex. It’s just impossible.”

The ideas a professor or student comes in with are not often the ones they leave with, says Darryl Yong, a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd who serves as faculty liaison for Inside-Out.

“It’s so black and white at first for many students,” he says. “Then when they see it and experience it, they realize it’s way more complicated than they could have possibly imagined. I think that complication is part of the learning. You learn by feeling squeezed in both worlds. Even the experience of having to walk through the gate, walk to our classroom, just being in the space, understanding what people are subjected to, it opens your eyes.”

Pomona students and others say they walk away changed.

“I love that idea that learning could provide an escape, and education could provide a kind of inner freedom for them and for us as well, as Claremont students,” Sundermeyer says.

SIMPLE TRAFFIC STOPS escalate, ending in unnecessary deaths. In courtrooms, justice is not always served. And in prisons, the voices of many of the incarcerated sound alike.

As a sociolinguist, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Nicole Holliday specializes in the study of how language and identity interact. More specifically, she focuses on the many implications of a central question: What does it mean to sound Black?

Holliday’s research on race and intonational variation examines wide aspects of society, including political speech. Yet there are few areas where the impact of race and linguistic differences is more stark than in the criminal justice system.

In just one example, in 2015 a college-educated African American woman named Sandra Bland was arrested in Texas after a minor traffic stop turned into a confrontation. Three days later, Bland died in jail in a suspicious death that was ruled a suicide.

After hearing the dash-cam audio of the incident, Holliday and fellow linguists Rachel Burdin and Joseph Tyler analyzed it and wrote an article, “Sandra Bland: Talking While Black,” that was published by Language Log, a linguistics blog hosted by the University of Pennsylvania.

With the help of linguistics tools such as the software program Praat and spectrograms that provide visual representations of variation in pitch, the researchers argued that the state trooper and Bland were, in essence, speaking different languages.

“What we did is we went through and used this annotation system, and we coded where the phrases are broken up and where the pitch moves up and down, the voice moves up and down, for each of them,” Holliday says.

“What we came to was she is using an identifiably African American tone pattern and he is not really matching her. So she starts in one place. He starts in another place. And it’s clear that as the situation escalates, he’s increasingly interpreting her as disrespectful, hostile, something like that. She does a few things in particular where she uses these kinds of tones, where her voice falls and rises on the same syllable. This is a pattern that we see more frequently with African American speakers.

“With the officer, he doesn’t really do that at first, but as he moves through the interaction with her, he starts to be more like that. So we think there is a mismatch in his expectations of what she was supposed to sound like as a respectful citizen. But this mismatch is fundamentally about the fact that she speaks African American English and he doesn’t.”

Bland died in jail after an incident that appeared to start with no more than a failure to signal. Her family ultimately sued, settling a wrongful death suit for $1.9 million. A misdemeanor perjury charge against the state trooper, Brian Encinia, was dismissed after he surrendered his law enforcement license and agreed not to work in the field again.

Another prominent case examined by linguists is the outcome of the trial in the shooting death of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in Martin’s death.

In a paper titled “Language and Linguistics on Trial,” Stanford University Professor John Rickford, now retired, and co-author Sharese King, now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, argued that the testimony of key prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel, a 19-year-old Black teenager, was dismissed as not credible because she spoke in African American English, contributing to the not-guilty verdicts. Jeantel was on the phone with Martin as the incident unfolded.

“They lay out all of these moments where she’s using these features of African American English that could clearly be misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with the variety,” Holliday says. “So basically, she’s speaking really differently than the lawyers, than the jury, than the public.

“There are a number of features of African American English that Jeantel employs that may be unfamiliar to mainstream listeners. For example, Rickford and King point out the use of ‘zero copula’, or the omission of the overt ‘is’ or ‘are’ verb in a sentence. Jeantel also uses differences in use of plural and possessive forms, which are also forms that may distinguish African American English from mainstream varieties.”

Jeantel’s testimony included phrases incorporating those styles, and some listeners may be unable or unwilling to hear beyond a highly socially stigmatized way of speaking.

“So when you hear somebody speak this way and you have these biases, you might just say, ‘Oh, this person is not educated and I’m going to stop listening,’” Holliday says.

“People attach a lot of judgments about morality and character to the way that people talk. And these biases that we have are almost always racist, classist, sexist, problematic in some other way, but it’s not the fault of the language. The language just varies. And that’s a natural part of what language does. But the variation gets interpreted as a problem.

“It’s very transparent that people’s ideas about language aren’t really about language,” she says. “They’re about other sociological phenomena.”

Paul Kiefer ’20 outside the Shabazz Restaurant in Durham, N.C., adjacent to the state’s oldest mosque.

PAUL KIEFER’S JOURNEY of faith and inquiry already has taken him great distances. An American Muslim from Seattle who converted as a teenager, Kiefer ’20 studied abroad in Morocco during his junior year to experience the Arabic-speaking Muslim world. Back home in the United States, he looked toward the American South as he prepared to write his senior thesis in history.

There, he was an outsider of a different sort, a white Muslim gathering oral histories and conducting research on the Southern Black Muslim community that emerged in North Carolina in the 1950s and has grown deep roots in the Tar Heel State—a place where the festival of Eid is sometimes celebrated with fried fish and grits.

“They’re doing it right, the whole Southern thing,” says Kiefer, who was partly drawn to the region because of his family’s history there, though his relatives were not Muslim.

The Black Muslim community in North Carolina that was first planted by the Nation of Islam and later gravitated toward the teachings of W. Deen Muhammad is the subject of Kiefer’s thesis, “A Crescent Moon Rises in Dixie: The Foundation and Development of a Southern Black Muslim Community, 1955-1985.”

“Paul is writing about a topic few historians have investigated. So his work is filling a gap in our collective understanding of the Nation of Islam in the South,” says Tomás Summers Sandoval, associate professor of history and Chicana/o-Latina/o studies. “The archival work he’s done so far is already helping to write that history.”

Kiefer’s research weaves source material such as mosque records and contemporary newspaper reports with oral history interviews he conducted in North Carolina during a Summer Undergraduate Research Program project before his senior year.

“We often think of Islam in the U.S. as a present-day story but Paul’s work is a reminder of the importance of both Islam and Muslims to the U.S. past,” Summers Sandoval says. “At the same time, his work helps us better understand the roles various congregations and faiths played in the mid-century quest for Black liberation and autonomy in the South.”

Islam was not truly new to the South when it was imported from Northern cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore in the second half of the 20th century. Kiefer found records of Black mosques in the South as early as 1928 and a Black Muslim farm by 1943, though those groups were members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, not the Nation of Islam.

Even less widely known: Islam’s original roots in the South preceded the Civil War.

“About 15 to 20 percent of enslaved people in what became the United States were Muslims,” Kiefer says. “There are many well-documented examples of Muslims who practiced openly, who ran Friday prayers on plantations, who wrote letters home. At least three actually wound up going back to West Africa thanks to letters they wrote home in Arabic.”

The history of Muslims in the South is a story worth telling, and Kiefer plans to tell many more. He has applied for a Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship and the NPR Kroc Fellowship, both designed to develop journalists as well as storytellers in other mediums. While awaiting fellowship announcements in the spring, Kiefer also plans to apply for public radio jobs, pursuing his determination to uncover little-known stories and histories.