Introduction
Molotov Cocktail or Science Experiment? I first heard about “Eric” on the evening news when I saw the headline “Teen Arrested for Bringing Explosive Device to D.C. School.” The story immediately caught my attention. It sounded serious, and as a defense attorney practicing in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile court, I knew I would likely see Eric in court the next day. Indeed, as fate would have it, just as I walked into the courthouse, a teenage girl approached me to ask if I could represent her brother—Eric. Coincidentally, I had met Eric’s sister a few months earlier in a drama workshop at a local high school. As I checked in with the court staff, I learned that I had already been appointed to Eric’s case.
Within minutes of talking to Eric in the juvenile lockup, I realized that what sounded so shocking on the news wasn’t so serious after all. Eric was a typical thirteen-year-old boy who was watching a movie and saw someone with a Molotov cocktail. Eric thought it was “cool” and wanted to see if he could make something that “looked” like that. He grabbed an empty bottle from under the kitchen sink and started filling it with household products—bleach, Pine-Sol, stainless steel cleaner—whatever he could find. He didn’t research it. He didn’t look up “Molotov cocktail” on the internet, and he didn’t know if any of the products he grabbed were flammable. He was just being creative. He taped up the entire bottle with black tape and put a long piece of toilet paper underneath the cap so it hung out of the bottle like the wick of a cocktail. After admiring his design, Eric put the bottle in his book bag so it wouldn’t spill on his mother’s white carpet and moved on to his next source of entertainment for the day. This all happened on a Saturday night, and like most thirteen-year-olds, he had completely forgotten about it by Monday morning when his mother drove him to school.
As he did every school day, Eric walked through a metal detector and put his bag on an electronic conveyor belt. A police officer assigned to the school as a “school resource officer” saw the bottle and stopped Eric to ask about it. Eric responded without thinking, “Oh, that’s nothing. You can throw it away.” He walked on to class. Little did he know this was the beginning of a very long and painful ordeal for him and his family in juvenile court.
Eric was pulled out of class, questioned by the police, and arrested. No one believed him when he told them he forgot the bottle was there and was not planning to blow up the school. Eric spent the night in the local juvenile detention center and was brought to D.C. Superior Court the next day. The prosecutor charged him with possession of a Molotov cocktail, attempted arson, and carrying a dangerous weapon. When I heard the prosecutor read out the charges, I kept expecting there to be more to the story—maybe a letter or some cryptic online message by Eric threatening to hurt a teacher. Maybe Eric was sad, isolated, and bullied by his classmates. Maybe Eric had a history of depression and dressed in all black. None of that turned out to be true. There was nothing more to the story.
Quite to the contrary, Eric was a happy and creative Black boy living in Southeast D.C. with his mother and little brother. Although his father was in prison at the time, Eric was raised in a large close-knit family, including two older sisters in college and another in the U.S. Air Force. His mother worked in a hospital and catered food a bit on the side while studying for her nursing degree. His father was a college graduate who had worked for many years as an emergency medical technician before his incarceration. I visited Eric’s home many times and met many of his family members over the next several months. I saw nothing other than a well-adjusted boy who loved to show me his kittens and play with his brother. He was active in youth theater, participated in the city’s local youth orchestra, and tutored second-and third-grade students in reading four days a week. He also enjoyed youth activities at church. His teachers described him as calm and respectful, and he had never been in trouble at school or with the police.
The only thing that could really explain the school’s extreme reaction to Eric’s duct-taped bottle was our country’s outsized fear of school shootings. And for a while, I accepted that as the reason. I let myself believe that our schools were just being extra careful in the era of mass violence. But then something happened that forever changed my view of this case. Several months after I met Eric, I shared his story at a conference in New Haven, Connecticut. When I finished, a White woman walked over and said, “My son did exactly what you described. He tried to make a Molotov cocktail and took it to school.” When I asked what happened to her son, she said, “They rearranged his class schedule so he could take a chemistry course.”
No, we are not just afraid of school shootings. And we are not just afraid of children with guns. We are afraid of Black children. There was nothing Eric could have done or said that day to convince the police or anyone else that he was not a threat to the school.
Eric was suspended and banned from all after-school activities. For the next nine months, he met weekly with a probation officer, was forced to attend anger management classes, and had to pee in a cup to prove he was not using drugs. At the city’s expense, lawyers on both sides of the case spent hours investigating, preparing, and arguing about every legal question we could think of. Our defense team even hired an arson expert to prove that the liquids in the bottle would never catch on fire and the toilet paper hanging out of it would never work as a wick. Only after months of advocacy were we able to persuade the judge to dismiss Eric’s case under a special law in D.C. that allows a judge to throw out a juvenile case when it is “in the interest of justice.” Fortunately, our judge thought the school and the police had overreacted. Unfortunately, the dismissal could never undo the agony, embarrassment, and fear Eric and his family experienced that year.
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That was ten years ago, when Eric was thirteen—one of the most important years in his, and any child’s, life. He was in his early adolescence and beginning his teenage years. For most youth, adolescence offers a prolonged period of self-discovery from age ten to nineteen—and sometimes into the early twenties. It is the time when children complete their formal education and develop the mental, emotional, and social skills they need to succeed and thrive as adults. Although family remains important, adolescents seek independence and begin to forge new identities apart from their parents. Parents and teachers hope their children and students will grow into healthy young adults with a positive sense of who they are and a robust idea of what their futures might hold.
Adolescence is a time when young people enjoy the freedoms of childhood while starting to figure out how to be an adult. We hope they will be curious, creative, and at least a little adventurous. We anticipate that they will take risks, test boundaries, and challenge authority. We expect them to show off for their classmates and be fiercely loyal to their friends. We are not surprised when they are impulsive, make poor decisions, or even experiment with sex or drugs. And despite our nervousness about the seeming recklessness of adolescence, we tend to show teenagers a great deal of grace. We are confident that most youth will grow out of their mischief. “Boys will be boys,” the adults say. Girls are “just going through a phase.” The risk and adventure of adolescence is socially accepted as a rite of passage, and maybe even encouraged as a source of amusement. But those rules apply only if you are White.
Eric’s adolescence looked quite different. While White youth have the freedom and privileges of adolescent irresponsibility, mischief, and play, Black youth like Eric are seen as a threat to White America. Two boys made a “Molotov cocktail,” but only one was treated like a criminal. I was struck by everyone’s refusal to believe Eric when he said the cocktail wasn’t real. There was nothing intimidating about his appearance or suspicious about his behavior when he entered the building. Eric put his book bag through the conveyer belt without hesitation. He answered the resource officer’s questions freely and handed over the bottle immediately when he was asked about it. He was searched thoroughly and clearly had nothing else in his possession by the time he went to class. With the bottle safely in their custody, the officers were able to remove any potential threat from the school and have the fire department examine the bottle’s contents to confirm that it wasn’t flammable. Yet nothing dispelled their fears. The officers and administrators treated Eric like a potential mass murderer—evacuating the school, disrupting learning for everyone in the building, and arresting him in front of his classmates and teachers.
By the next day, the whole school knew Eric was the reason for the evacuation. And everyone had their theories—teachers, students, and staff. Some, knowing that his father was incarcerated, speculated that “maybe his father put him up to it.” Others thought he did it to get a day off from school. Still others were convinced he was a terrorist with a master plan to blow up the campus. Students started calling him “Osama bin Laden” and yelled out, “Ticktock boom!” whenever he walked by. Very few thought he was just being curious and creative. Although his teachers admitted that he was a quiet kid who had never been in trouble, they claimed not to know him well enough to say he wouldn’t do anything violent. It was only those who knew him best—from drama, art, and the youth orchestra—who could see Eric for who he really was: an imaginative child who was just being a child.
Eric’s arrest was a very public event that took on even greater importance in his thirteen-year-old mind. Every choice the adults made that day was critically important to Eric’s development. The school resource officer created negative attention for Eric at a time when status and reputation matter a lot to young people. The police embarrassed him in front of his classmates when we want teenagers to develop a strong social network and feel good about themselves. Eric was still trying to make and keep friends, win approval from the adults in his life, and walk the thin line between fitting in with the crowd and standing out with a unique style and diverging interests. The public spectacle branded him a “troublemaker” when we want young people to resist the negative influence of students who are into mischief and gravitate toward those who are well behaved and excelling in their classes.
The arrest caused many to underestimate Eric’s potential at a time when young people begin to internalize what others think of them. This was especially true for Eric, who was already thinking about what he wanted to do “when he grew up” and was keenly aware of what his teachers thought he could and could not achieve in the future. The school also suspended him when we most need to help adolescents think wisely about their actions and improve their decision-making skills. They excluded him from the drama program when we most want to encourage creativity and surround youth with mentors. And they removed him from class and structured activities when we most need young people to be supervised by adults who will keep them focused and help them regulate their emotions and control their behaviors.
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This book grew out of my anger and indignation about what happened to Eric. But Eric is just one of the Black teenagers whose stories I share in this book. I have met many Black teens in the last twenty-five years whose adolescence was interrupted by police encounters like the one Eric experienced. And I have met many Black youth who were dehumanized in the court system instead of nurtured and supported in their community.
My first memory of juvenile court occurred when I was a college freshman in Durham, North Carolina, interning at the local district attorney’s office. On my first day, I was instructed to meet the prosecutor at the courthouse at 9:00 a.m. As I turned down the hall leading to the youth division, I stopped dead in my tracks. Eight boys—mostly Black and Latino—were being escorted down the hall in a single file by a bailiff. They had metal handcuffs tight around their wrists. “Belly chains” locked their arms and hands close to their stomachs, and metal links connected the shackles on each of their ankles, clanking loudly as they walked slowly and clumsily from the awkwardness of the restriction. I had no idea we chained children in courts and detention facilities in America. As a Black woman born in the South, all I could think of was Alex Haley’s 1970s television miniseries
Roots. The imagery of slavery was unmistakable. But this was 1988 and slavery had ended more than a century before. That image has stuck with me. That was the day I knew I wanted to go to law school and fight for children.
My shock and outrage about the way we treat Black children in America continue today. In my first year of law school, I took a clinical course—much like an apprenticeship—that allowed me to represent children in special education, abuse and neglect, and delinquency cases. The children I met in New Haven looked like those I met in Durham. They were Black and Latinx in a city that had plenty of White children. And their judges, lawyers, and bailiffs, like those I saw in North Carolina, were almost all White.
[ . . . ]
This book is for everyone who cares about improving the lives of Black youth in America. It is for everyone who wants to change the way Americans view and engage with Black children. And it is for everyone who is willing to radically reduce the footprint of police in the day-to-day lives of Black youth. But, most important, it is for everyone who believes that Black children are children too.
Copyright © 2021 by Kristin Henning. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
