I Know Why The (Un)Caged Bird Sings a Prison Song and Other Vestiges of Jim Crow Louisiana.

A poem in response to Louisiana's decision to not retroactively pardoned incarcerated people who were sentenced under non-unanimous juries.

Incarcerated men hold hands in prayer at the Angola Prison Rodeo; Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Until recently, Louisiana was one of only two states that did not require the unanimous vote of a jury, a vestige of a Jim Crow-era law designed to negate the growing power of Black jurors. In 2018, Louisiana residents voted to end the practice, and in 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court found non-unanimous jury verdicts unconstitutional. But the high court declined to make the ruling retroactive, leaving it up to Louisiana and Oregon (the only other state that allowed split juries) to decide whether people already serving time in such cases were entitled to new trials. - Their Sentences Are Unconstitutional — But They’re Still In Prison.; The Marshall Project

Fact: a community of crows can hold a grudge for generations...
Fact: a group of crows are called a murder
Fact: crows are notorious for stealing crops, which made them enemies of agriculturilists and birthed the invention the scarecrow
Fact: crows are known for their high levels of intelligence and adaptability

I come from a place where Jim Crows have always convened around courthouses, callously stealing time and killing hopes of justice. They have held a vendetta against Black bodies ever since they were no longer able to hover over chained ankles, spending generations tooling and re-tooling the law to  benefit ex-enslavers — adapting to changing times to ensure there's always time on the clock for the state's property to be of service.