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Curtis Flowers’ Legal Team to be Honored by SCHR

On Wednesday, November 11, the Southern Center for Human Rights will host our 24th Annual Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award Ceremony. Traditionally, we’ve held a formal dinner each year in D.C. This year, we are excited to invite friends and supporters everywhere to join our virtual event honoring our 2020 Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award recipients, the legal team for Mr. Curtis Flowers: Robert McDuff, Max Mayes, Tucker Carrington, Keir Weyble, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Jonathan Abram, David Maxwell, Kathryn Ali, Ashley Johnson, Benjamin Lewis, and Henderson Hill.

Mr. Flowers was tried six times for the murder of four people in a furniture store in Mississippi. Two trials resulted in a hung jury, while the other four trials saw his conviction and death sentence overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. As a result of decades of fearless advocacy and his own courage, strength, and determination, Mr. Flowers was released from prison in December 2019 to await a possible seventh trial. On Friday, September 4, 2020, all charges against Mr. Flowers were dropped.

An instructive and awe-inspiring combination of talents formed a multi-pronged approach to save Mr. Flowers’ life, and to expose 20 years of rampant injustice. You can learn more about the case by listening to season two of the In the Dark podcast with host Madeleine Baran, who moved to Mississippi to meet and interview the people involved in Curtis Flowers’ many trials. The podcast aired in 2018 and expanded a network of support to listeners all over the world. Baran finally sat down to interview Flowers in person this month. We, too, will be joined by Mr. Flowers himself, to introduce his legal team and present the award. Baran and the In the Dark team and listeners are included in this honor, without whom Curtis, his friends and family, and his legal team would have stood alone in the dark.

The virtual ceremony will feature keynote remarks from historian and best-selling author of How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi. His latest book, Be Antiracist: A Guided Journal for Awareness, Reflection, and Action was released earlier this month.

The online event will also feature musical performances from Zoe Boekbinder, Ani Difranco and other musicians from the Prison Music Project, which released the album Long Time Gone earlier this year, created in collaboration with people incarcerated at New Folsom Prison. All proceeds from the album are distributed directly to people impacted by mass incarceration.

We hope you will join us for this year’s event! Tickets are free, and donations accepted. Register here.