Testimony of Rev. Janet Wolf, Teacher

I am a United Methodist clergyperson who has served as a community organizer, United Methodist pastor, college professor at American Baptist College, and adjunct seminary professor at several seminaries, including Vanderbilt Divinity School. I currently work with the Children’s Defense Fund alongside our founder Marian Wright Edelman, and the Rev. James Lawson, a man described by Dr. King as the nation’s architect of nonviolence.

In December, 2011, I received permission from the administration at Riverbend to expand our SALT classes, Schools for Alternative Learning and Transformation, to work with residents in Unit 2, death row. I convened a meeting of those interested and asked what they most wanted to learn. I admit I was surprised when Mr. Abu Ali Abdhur’Rahman asked for sessions focusing on community building, conflict resolution and nonviolence. He explained why this was so important and others soon agreed. Our first classes in Unit 2 started in January, 2012, and the 12 inside members named our group the Community Building and Conflict Resolution Circle.

Abu has been a leader in that group for the past almost 9 years, and has served as mediator, mentor, educator, peacemaker, co-facilitator and persistent practitioner of nonviolence and conflict resolution. Largely because of his efforts, Unit 2 is the safest Unit in Riverbend and I suspect, in all of Tennessee prisons, a place where correctional officers prefer to be because of what Abu has defined as our mission: working for community healing, mutual respect, collective responsibility to address all forms of harm, and in everything we do, aiming towards habilitation, conciliation, nonviolence, harmony and a healthy, loving, safe community.

Abu has served as inspiration, architect, and implementation leader in designing, developing and co-teaching our dispute resolution and peace-building curriculum. These classes incorporate the requirements established by the Tennessee Supreme Court to become a certified mediator in Tennessee and equip inmates and staff to effectively address problems in prison, including racial conflicts, conflicts between officers and inmates, suicide, and prison sexual abuse. Abu has been key in adapting the curriculum to the prison environment and developing the protocols for addressing conflict situations – protocols that are now being used by fellow inmates as well as correctional officers. This program works. The warden and other administrators have asked us to expand this training into other units at Riverbend.

We now have four members of our Community Building and Conflict Resolution Circle, graduates of our classes on mediation and negotiation, who have been moved from Unit 2, death row, to Unit 5 or 6, the low side and, with their leadership, we will soon start our second series of classes there.

Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and a nonviolent civil rights leader for more than sixty years, met Abu when she came to Riverbend to engage members of our SALT classes. She joins me in emphasizing the importance of Abu’s work and witness, his leadership and life, wisdom and wit, courage and compassion, vision and voice. He is not the same person who came to prison more than 30 years ago.We both agree that Mr. Abu Abdur’Rahman offers a powerfully peaceful presence, consistent commitment to addressing and resolving conflict, and a generous and gentle spirit of accompaniment with those who are struggling, including inmates, administration and staff.

When our Community Building and Conflict Resolution Circle wrote a booklet for young people who were struggling with school and the streets, with poverty and violence, Abu wrote: “We must learn to consider the feelings and the life of one another, regardless of the tribe or clan one belongs to, or what race or religion one happens to be attached to...We share this earth with others. We are neighbors…We have a challenge, you and I. Let us work and help one another pave a way to rebuild ourselves and our relationships with one another. Love must be retrieved, revived and restored.” This excerpt from our booklet, “Consider This So You May Live,” captures Abu’s deep commitment to healing and peacemaking, to strategic listening and persistent positivity, to building community and resolving conflict.

Abu is a source of life and light for many inside and outside the prison, including me, and I am honored to work with him to build community, transform conflict, practice nonviolence, and create circles of communal healing and hope, mediation and peacemaking.