Bail keeps these moms in jail on Mother’s Day. So strangers are posting it for them (www.washingtonpost.com)

An article by Jocelyn Simonson - and a great way to celebrate mother's day.

“Money kept them in. Black love got them out.” That is the slogan of Mama’s Bail Out Day, an effort of grass-roots organizations from across the country to bail out mothers and other caretakers who are sitting in jail simply because they cannot afford to pay bail. From Oakland, Calif., to Montgomery, Ala., to New York City, nearly two dozen organizations affiliated with public defenders, local Black Lives Matter chapters and other activists for racial justice are raising money to post bail for strangers so they can spend Mother’s Day at home with their families.

Mama’s Bail Out Day brings together two critical frontiers in the fight of racial justice movements to end mass incarceration. The first is the rise of community bail funds, whereby grass-roots groups have increasingly begun to use revolving pools of money to post bail on behalf of strangers. Second, Mama’s Bail Out Day is part of a critical effort to include the experiences of women in the narrative surrounding the fight against mass incarceration. In particular, the effort concentrates this power on the plight of women of color, especially African American women and trans women, who are far more likely to be arrested, held on bail and sexually abused in jail than their white and cisgender counterparts. Taken together, this unprecedented coordination of efforts to bail out poor people of color exemplifies the kind of mass acts of resistance that can disrupt the status quo in the criminal-justice system.

Full article.