Valarie asks Parents to read and respond, so I'll do the same. What do you hear this mother saying? What meaning does it have for you? Here's the post: ___________________________________ I am going to say this, then I’m off of it, and off social media for a while: As a Black mother who raised Black sons, the verdict has stirred up emotions that have very little to do with one case and everything to do with a reality many of us have lived. I sacrificed for the education of my children. Because I could not afford private school, I drove six children to four different schools because I believed access mattered. I believed environment mattered. I believed opportunity mattered. Eventually, I moved my family to Allen (in Collin County) because it was considered at the time, one of the best school districts in the nation. What I learned was that academic opportunity and emotional safety are not always the same thing. My son’s first major disciplinary issue came from being late to class. Something that might have earned detention elsewhere resulted in placement in an alternative setting. And once he was sent there, something else happened that many people don’t talk about. He found people who looked like him. Children who had been labeled. Children who had been separated. Children who had already begun carrying the weight of other people’s assumptions. In many ways, they became family to one another. Not because they were bad children, but because they shared a common experience. They knew what it felt like to stand on the outside looking in. When a child feels rejected by one community, they will almost always build another. Years later, one fight, one interpretation of events, and one decision resulted in a felony charge that followed him long after childhood was over, and eventually landed him inside of the prison system. So when I look at situations involving young men of color, I cannot help but think about the things that happen before the headlines. The isolation.

The “Black Laws” demanded that Black Ohioans carry a portable argument for their own humanity—then made the courtroom deaf to it. If you stood on Portsmouth’s public landing in the 1830s—watching the Ohio River carry flatboats, ferries, and rumors—you would have learned quickly that borders are not only geography. They are paperwork. They are who can speak and who must stay silent. They are the price of moving through a place that calls itself “free.” Portsmouth sat at a confluence, the Scioto pouring into the Ohio, a watery intersection that made the town commercially significant and morally exposed. Across the river lay Kentucky, a slave state whose economic and political gravity pulled at southern Ohio. On the Ohio side, statehood came with a promise: slavery was prohibited. But that promise was paired—almost immediately—with a different legal project: making Black life administratively fragile. Ohio’s “Black Laws,” begun in 1804 and sharpened in 1807, were designed to discourage Black settlement and to restrict the rights of Black residents already there. They demanded proof of freedom, required registration with local officials, imposed financial barriers that were enormous by any working standard, and barred Black testimony in cases involving white parties—an exclusion that effectively told Black Ohioans: even if you are free, the law will not reliably hear you. Read the full story at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/02/26/proof-of-freedom/