by MOSES Publications | May 21, 2025 | Advocacy, Featured, MOSES activities, WISDOM
How to Talk Effectively with Legislators About Our Issues
Tips from WISDOM Training Sessions
By Sherry Reames
- Do some research in advance about the committee or individual legislator you’ll be talking to. If possible, get advice from other members of MOSES or WISDOM who have met with these committees or individuals in the past.
- Spend some time looking at the information that’s available on the web. The legislature’s official website, legis.wisconsin.gov, gives a capsule biography of each legislator that includes their education, professional experience, organizational memberships, committee assignments, etc., and there are even links to the bills they have authored or supported in the past. The legislators also have their own websites, which tend to emphasize their life experience and the issues they have chosen to campaign on.
- Give your testimony or make your visit as part of a group, if possible, and decide in advance which of you will present each issue or aspect of an issue.
- Don’t be disappointed if you end up talking with an aide instead of meeting the legislator in person. Often the aides have more experience and expertise on our issues than the legislators they work for.
- Your speaking time will be limited (just 2 minutes, if it’s a budget hearing!), so use the time well. Jot down the points you want to make, and consider practicing with a stopwatch.
- Try to say something they are likely to remember because they haven’t heard it before. If you have a powerful personal story, use it. If not, at least mention your own experience or expertise on the issue. If you have recent data or statistics from a reliable source, it’s good to include that, too. If it’s a budget hearing, be sure to give them an estimate of the numbers involved and the anticipated savings.
- Speak as clearly as possible. Avoid jargon and acronyms that your hearers may not recognize.
- Be prepared to answer questions about your issue and to counter likely objections. But don’t bluff; if necessary, it’s ok to say you don’t know and will get back to them with the answer. Then follow through, of course.
- Prepare a written version of your testimony that you can leave in the legislator’s office or email to them later. This written version can give more details, statistics, and sources than you have time to present orally and should also include your contact information.
- Take good notes (or ask someone else in the group to do so) about the response you receive from each legislator or staff member. How receptive did they seem to our positions on the issues? What questions or objections did they raise? Did they promise to support any of our asks? Did they make any helpful suggestions about ways to proceed?
- If you met with an individual legislator or aide, follow up a few days later with a note thanking them for their time and suggesting your willingness to continue the conversation.
by MOSES Publications | May 21, 2025 | Organizer
Organizers’ Corner
By James Morgan
Greetings, MOSES members!
I recently had the pleasure of visiting with congregants at Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society, one of our member congregations. My discussion centered on the value of relationships, individual and collective, and how relationship-building is one of the key components in building a base for collective power. I expressed how speaking or thinking about relationships often brings to mind terms like kinship and connectedness, and how there are degrees of relationship: familial, public, etc.
For me as the Organizer for MOSES, building strategic, meaningful, and trustful relationships is imperative in how I think about my responsibilities and duties to our organization. As our President, Saundra Brown, often says, one-on-ones are a key component in building relationships in our organization and in building collective power.
Relationships bring a feeling of community, which keeps us all involved and confident in our contributions to the organization. In relationships, we come to understand that we are not alone in our values, ideals, and principles. Being in relationship with one another gives us the ability to support one another as we tackle difficult issues relating to justice.
The scope of relationships within MOSES, an organization of many faiths and cultures, of people with diverse backgrounds and of different ages, makes us unique in our ability to build collective power to right some of the wrongs that we have chosen to address.
Let’s Stand Together Strong! Let’s Do MOSES!
by MOSES Publications | May 21, 2025 | Featured, Newsletter, Racial Equity, Reviews
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan, Viking, 2023
Reviewed by Pam Gates
And what a story this is! It may shock and embarrass us white Northerners, who like to think we have a better handle on decency in relations with “other” Americans than our Southern counterparts. This story is from America’s heartland, Indiana, though it wanders a bit into Ohio and even to places a little further north, like Wisconsin.
Another aspect that makes this story so compelling is its uncanny parallel with today, exactly one century later. The person behind the rise of the Klan in Indiana, D.C. Stephenson, had his eyes on the White House, where now another very troubling person casts phobic views and controls over a new set of decoys and scapegoats – a whole century later.
Timothy Egan is an excellent writer. This book is gripping. I usually do my reading before bed, but I had to give that up with this one; it didn’t settle me down for a peaceful night! And the sad thing is, it’s all true. Egan’s research is thorough. He prefaces his book with this author’s note: “The following story is true. Dialogue and internal monologue are verbatim from court testimony, oral histories, autobiographies, letters, diaries, and newspaper quotes.”
Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, chooses stories from American history that he delves into and reports on in depth, stories we have probably heard about, such as the Dust Bowl during the Depression. He writes a whole book on the topic, telling us things most of us never knew. The one about the Dust Bowl is titled The Worst Hard Time, one of nine books listed at the beginning of A Fever in the Heartland, under “Also by Timothy Egan.” Based on my experience with three of Egan’s books, I would recommend every one of them to a reader curious about different phenomena in America’s history.
But, back to Indiana and the rise of the Klan. D.C. Stephenson rolled into the state in 1922 from thoroughly undistinguished beginnings in Oklahoma. He was a complete unknown, making grandiose claims as to his background, but he built an empire, slowly exerting control over thousands, who paid dues to wear a sheet and ostracize or terrorize fellow humans of other races or religions. Bank owners, newspaper editors, state court judges, mayors, sheriffs, townsfolk — all signed up to be Klansmen. Stephenson cast a wide net that engulfed whole communities with its power.
A trial eventually brought all this to an end, a trial with powerful testimony by the woman in the subtitle. I won’t reveal more than that; you need to read it for yourself. It won’t take long! I had the book from the library on a 14-day loan, and I finished it easily in those 14 days.
But I will share with you some observations from the last chapter, just before the epilogue, as the Klan fell from grace after the trial ended in November 1925. Egan quoted a Chicago Tribune editorial that he said “sounded like a bad fairy tale”: “It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct; and a state of terror was substituted for law.”
“But,” Egan asks, “was it really an aberration?” He then describes a lynching in Marion, Ind., the last known lynching of Black people in Indiana, and possibly the last north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It took place in August 1930, five years after the Klan began its fall into ignominy. A mob pulled three young Black men from the local jail and hanged them in the public square. Thousands witnessed this. No indictments were ever issued.
Egan does a wrap-up in his epilogue, following up on those who fought the Klan throughout its rise, as well as those who led it. And he makes broader observations. “What if,” he writes, “the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s there still, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland.”
These quotations also give you a sample of Egan’s excellent writing. I urge you to read this book!
by MOSES Publications | May 21, 2025 | Restorative Justice, RJAC Racial Justice for All Children, Schools
By Shel Gross
In my career as a lobbyist, I learned that the road to policy approval can be long and circuitous. I can point to policy “wins” that were 15 years in the making. While it wasn’t quite that long, the odyssey that led to the Leadership Board’s approval of the Racial Justice for All Children Task Force issue paper on Restorative Justice and School Wellness put me in mind of those days. Different interests and efforts mixed and matched over a number of years, resulting in something really quite simple in the end: we could use our presence on the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Superintendent’s Wellness Advisory (SWA) to promote a variety of topics important to MOSES members.
We identified six interrelated topics to promote: community engagement; mental health staffing and practices; restorative justice staffing and practices; transparent communications regarding disciplinary practices and outcomes; recruitment and retention of staff of color; and staff training in research-based approaches to reducing exclusionary discipline and enhancing student well-being.
The first landmark along this road was a March 2021 MOSES Position Statement in support of a set of MMSD Safety and Security Recommendations (which was, of course, preceded by the work needed to bring this forward). Among the recommendations were a three- to five-year plan for holistic implementation of restorative justice (RJ) in the MMSD and creation of the SWA to involve MMSD staff (including new RJ coordinators), community partners, families, and students in developing a plan for enhancing youth and community roles regarding school safety.
These concerns found a MOSES home in RJAC, which had been formed the previous year. They also became of increasing importance, given the MMSD Board’s decision to remove School Resource Officers (SROs) from Madison high schools, as well as the impacts of the pandemic on student and staff well-being. But while RJAC members increasingly engaged with MMSD around these wellness concerns, they still lacked organizational structure and focus.
Another landmark was a listening session that RJAC convened in January 2024, to learn what MOSES members felt were important elements of school safety. This was a response, in part, to recognition that MOSES members were divided over the issue of SROs, but that “school safety” consisted of much more than the presence or absence of police in schools. Over 40 people attended, and we heard a wide range of concerns and ideas. While an RJAC subgroup was able to organize these into five main areas, the task force was not able to prioritize them; all of them felt important, but “all of them” felt like too much for the task force to take on.
The throughline for all this work was Barbie Jackson. Barbie had brought forward the earlier position statement and was asked to join the SWA in November 2023. In May 2024, she started pulling together some folks from MOSES and RJAC to support her work with the SWA. As the group started looking in more detail at the SWA’s ambitious agenda, we noted that many of the issues raised in our January 2024 listening session were among them. At that point, we recognized that the SWA had given us the opportunity to work on our wide range of concerns in a manageable way. The Leadership Board’s approval of the issue paper on Restorative Justice and School Wellness then gave Barbie – and the group working with her – the ability to bring all of MOSES into this advocacy work.
It is critical to underscore that this work is consistent with the MOSES mission of eradicating the systems of mass incarceration. Involvement in this system often begins in the schools. As the issue paper notes:
MOSES affirms restorative justice and other wellness-enhancing practices to create an inclusive culture and climate that increases well-being for all students and reduces behaviors that currently lead to exclusionary practices, such as suspensions, expulsions, and police calls. MOSES opposes exclusionary discipline in Madison’s schools. We seek new ways to respond, rather than persisting in exclusionary discipline practices that frequently are preliminaries to criminalization.
And because these exclusionary practices fall disproportionately on Black and Brown students, these efforts are also a critical part of addressing the racial disparities inherent in these systems. They clearly align with the RJAC mission to eradicate the childhood-to-school-to-prison pipeline.
Now the work of taking specific actions begins. RJAC members will deepen partnerships with those MMSD administrators directly involved in the six topics we selected, prioritizing those we hope to act on in the near term as our first step. Our continued relationship with the SWA will help us build partnerships and actions for change.
by MOSES Publications | May 21, 2025 | Life After Prison, Profiles
Meet Returning Citizen Leon Irby
By Sherry Reames
When Leon Irby entered prison in 1972, he was facing the kind of sentence that could, under the right circumstances, have allowed his release on parole as soon as 1999 or 2000. As things turned out, however, he wasn’t released until another 25 years had gone by. When I asked what kept him behind bars for more than 50 years, he said, with a wry smile, that he was a “‘60s social activist” in his youth and never let himself be reconciled to the system that was oppressing him and other prisoners.
Leon nearly always resisted in nonviolent ways, having been influenced by Martin Luther King Jr. But he continually aggravated the authorities by filing complaints, participating in hunger strikes, writing letters to the press, and calling unwelcome attention to problems the authorities were trying to conceal. He also learned enough about the law to file appeal after appeal on behalf of other prisoners as well as himself. And sometimes his appeals succeeded! One of his important cases established the right of Wisconsin prisoners to file civil actions to correct errors and falsifications in their records. Another case made it harder for prison authorities to make unjustified use of solitary confinement.
The authorities retaliated against Leon, of course. They stood back and allowed other prisoners to beat him up. They tried diagnosing him as mentally ill and sought court permission to medicate him against his will, but the judge ruled that he was sane. They kept him in solitary confinement for years, and even sent him to the Supermax at Boscobel. (He responded by filing a suit over conditions there.) They also shipped him out of state to the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas – where, in an irony they presumably didn’t expect, he found more humane treatment than he’d seen and experienced in Wisconsin.
Leon’s most important victory over the system, of course, was his ability to survive all those ordeals. He finally emerged from prison in January 2025 with his mind and spirit still intact. Allies at the UW Law School, including professors Kate Finley and Zoe Engberg and their students, had been working since 2017 to get him released on parole, and Attorney Laura Yurs and her assistant Danté Cottingham pitched in at the end to satisfy the final requirements from the parole board. Leon has already lectured to one of Professor Engberg’s classes, sharing some of his hard-won knowledge of the prison system.
Leon has a lot to teach non-lawyers too, as I discovered in a couple of half-hour conversations, because he knows so much about the history of Wisconsin’s penal system, as well as its current problems. He has started attending the MOSES monthly general meetings, and I hope many other MOSES members will get to know him. We have a lot to learn from his experience and insights, and I hope we can repay some of that debt by sharing our knowledge of Madison as he looks for a job and more permanent housing here.
