Melissa Harris-Perry: Jelani. In the East African language of Swahili Jelani means strength. In June 1996, when Carmen and Seve Day welcomed their fourth child into the world, they named him Jelani. He was the fourth of five children and the youngest of his parents' three sons. The Days reared their children in a small town and in a loving church family. Like so many families who worship in the pentecostal tradition of the Church of God in Christ or COGIC, the Days emphasized reverence and kindness, and like so many Black families in this country, the Days taught their children the value of excellence and achievement.

Jelani Day grew up hearing a message familiar to many, you have to be twice as good. Handsome young beloved connected, Jelani, the little boy, now man, named for strength was destined for great things. At 25 years old, Jelani had already begun to do them. He attended and graduated from Alabama A&M University, a historically Black college in Huntsville, Alabama.

There, he pledged Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, the nation’s first fraternal organization founded on the campus of a historically Black college. This fall he enrolled in graduate school at Illinois State University, with the goal of pursuing a career in speech pathology. In August, Jelani Day went missing. Jelani's car was found a couple of days after he was reported missing and it had no license plates or keys. Ten days later, Jelani's body was found in the Illinois River. He was 60 miles from his campus, in a town where less than 1% of the population is African American and where he's had no known connections.

Jelani was found in a river but he was an avid swimmer who competed on his school's swim team. It took the local coroner’s office more than three weeks to identify Jelani’s body and notify his family. The family ordered a second independent autopsy and said in a statement on Facebook that there are contradicting facts between the preliminary autopsy and the second one. Because of this contradicting, the family is in the process of ordering a third autopsy. Here is Jelani's mother Carmen Bolden Day in an interview with CNN at the end of September. She's talking about how the local police have handled the investigation

Carmen Bolden Day: To them, Jelani didn't mean anything. There's no effort. There's no push. There's no nothing that was being done about my son. I did all land work, me and my kids. Me and everybody that never knew Jelani. My family, friends, strangers did all the land work. My son didn't get any type of help and I'm pissed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Police are continuing to investigate Jelani's death but his family members and the fraternity at Alabama A&M University and local advocates, well, they all have concerns over Bloomington Police Department's handling of the case. They're asking for federal investigators to intervene and take over. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and the story of Jelani Day is where we begin today's episode of The Takeaway. With me is Linda Foster, President of the Bloomington-Normal NAACP Chapter. Welcome to the show President Foster.

Linda Foster: Thank you so much.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Also here is James Wright, assistant professor at Florida State University specializing in policing. Welcome to you as well Professor Wright.

James Wright: Thank you for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now as we start our conversation, I want to acknowledge that so much of what I said here at the start about Jelani and about his life has been reported this month in a multi-article series penned by John Fountain of the Chicago Sun-Times. Professor Wright, I don't want to start with you here because it was genuinely difficult to find real human information about Jelani and not just like the statistics about him. I wonder about the ways that we don't talk about Black victims with the same kind of humanity and fullness that we often see with other victims.

James Wright: I think it's really important to acknowledge that. I think when we think about Black victims we don't humanize them enough and we only see them as a statistic. When we think about the issue with Jelani, he was trying to be somebody. He was trying to do something more with his life. He was trying to elevate himself and then we see that the continual narrative within society is that this is just another Black boy lost.

I think it's important for us to recognize the humanistic element that comes with it when we think about Black boys and Black men that are missing or unidentified and we really think about the human impact that it has not just on himself but on his family. We heard it from the first audio that you play when his mother was crying for the police to help. I think this is just emblematic of a bigger problem with the relationship between the police and communities of color.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Foster, let me come to you on that because I find it difficult to hear the pain in the voice of Jelani's mother, Mrs. Day. Have you been working with the family and I'm wondering what you know about how they're feeling and about how the broader community is feeling in Bloomington right now?

Linda Foster: As a mother, I can only imagine the pain and the anguish that this family is going through. It doesn't take much to know that he was loved, he was valued, and that he will be truly, truly missed. I've met Ms. Day and the siblings and yet the ideas that the things that they have faced and I live right here in the Bloomington normal area.

To know that all of us have a responsibility to help this family, do whatever we can to let them know that we are here and that we care about what is happening and that we don't want anyone else to have to face what they're facing today. You asked me about our interaction, we're here and we have made ourselves available and we'll continue to be that help as they will allow us to be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Wright, let me come to you on this. This is one of those stories that the facts were changing a bit. We're watching it in national news, we're trying to figure out what's happening. I was thinking that even over the weekend there was the story of the African American woman who was found in the back of a police van.

I got to say like my first impulse was, oh, my goodness. Had she been left there by the police? Surveillance video seems to say that's not what happened. I'm wondering about how all of these kinds of stories really seem to reinforce a sense of the lack of humanity. Just that that Black people, Black families, Black communities are hurting are sad, are worried, are concerned for our loved ones.

James Wright: I think you hit it spot on. The lack of humanity that exists when we think about the relationship that exists traditionally, historically, and currently now, with the police in Black communities. I think part of this is the notion that we don't exist as humans and we are just seen as expendable within society from the standpoint from police officers sometimes. I think this leads to a broader narrative that what relationship should exist between the police and the community.

It doesn't have to be antagonistic but when we see examples of Jelani, we see examples of David Robinson, a boy that went missing in Arizona. We see examples of Chiesa Jacobs. She had been missing in 2016 and the police said that she'd probably just ran away. I think the lack of attention to the humanistic element when it comes to the Black community is what triggers a lot of these emotions. Historically, if we don't have the best relationship, to begin with, this is just deepening the tension and the frustration that exists between the police and the community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Mrs. Foster, what can you tell us about the existing relationship between this police department and the community that you in part serve at the NAACP?

Linda Foster: Thank you so much for asking that question. We have several police departments as I stated earlier. Bloomington Normal, Bloomington has its own police department, Bloomington police department, and then we have normal police department. Then we have Illinois State University Police Department. Then we have our Sheriff's department. There's many agencies within this Central Illinois Community.

The relationship is a work-in-action and what I mean by that we are constantly rebuilding and building on our relationships by having different vehicles in which we can come together, come together for the greater good. We have an organization called MAPP, Minority and Police Partnership in which we meet quarterly area of the month as needed to have these hard conversations about relationship building at Black community.

The other pieces that we know these individuals, we know the chief of police, of all of these agencies. We have a relationship that we can take time out to have the conversations about how do we better have a community that is one community. I say full agencies, but it's still one community. You constantly have to work at it so that we are being the community in which we all can be proud of.

Now it's not perfect. No, it's not but we have some solid ground here that we're working on. I appreciate the relationships that were built in our community, and that we will continue to harvest ideas of making our community that one feels comfortable in once feel safe in, and one feels as though that they can make a difference in.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Wright, I hear from President Foster there this desire to build relationship, can you help us to understand just from a national or even historic perspective, if this timeline in Jelani's case is typical when we're talking about a missing person and a recovered body, or what's this long.

James Wright: I think with Jelani's case, it was a little bit longer than usual. Oftentimes, we'll see that there is more local detail that's put into finding a missing person case. I think Jelani's cases is emblematic of other cases of Black individuals that have gone missing. I think it was a little bit longer than usual. I think it was a good idea for them involve state and federal entities to help them think that through the case of Jelani and other cases.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, because of the ways local authorities have handled the case, Day's family and friends have requested assistance from federal authorities. I want to just play you a clip for a moment of Jelani Day's mother in an interview with CNN.

Carmen Bolden Day: Him and my youngest daughter, they both are going to be doctors, Dr. Jelani Day, Dr. Zaina Day. They have this competition with each other to make sure their GPA's stay up, my son wasn't involved in the streets. He wasn't a gang banger. He wasn't nothing, but I guess if that could have been their narrative, then it would have been, oh, let's forget about him but he was a productive citizen. I raised a good young man.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Still with me are Linda Foster, President of the Bloomington-Normal NAACP, and James Wright, who is assistant professor at Florida State University. Dr. Wright, what does it mean that Jelani's mother felt she had to describe her son as a good young man?

James Wright: It's unfortunate that in society, when something happens to somebody that identifies as Black or Black American, that the first thing we always have mentioned is that they weren't a gang banger. They weren't doing drugs, they weren't selling drugs because the assumption is in American society, that if they're Black, they're up to no good.

I think it's something that happens too often when I think about myself, when I think about other individuals that are in the academic spaces or these other corporate spaces, we automatically have to tell people, listen, we are not a threat to your humanity, as well as you shouldn't be a threat to my humanity. The fact that she had to mention that without the preconceived notion that he's not just reiterate how society views Black Americans and insist that at this point.

Melissa Harris-Perry: President Foster, I know that your organization, the Bloomington-Normal NAACP, along with other community members have been holding events and rallies for Jelani Day, do you think that community leaders are listening? Do you think that your police who you've been working to build these relationships with are listing?

Linda Foster: I think that they are in a position, whereas they are doing the best that they can. We are just a community that doesn't have these events that happened often. Yes, we can do better law enforcement can do better at communicating with the families so they can do better with the man for us, putting enough of this attention to what's going on right now. They can do better at training. How do you address these issues and not just wait till it happens.

Our law enforcement I believe are in a position that they can only go up from here and that it's unfortunate that we still deal with the issues of what matters, what life matters, Black lives do matter, and that it is important and it is imperative that all law enforcement is aware of this and that we as a community have to be more impactful in making sure that they do know that and that we do care and that our loved ones are valued. There's a long history of why police are police and it was because of us doing slavery time.

We want to take that narrative and change it so that policing is supposed to be for all but the first word in policing is serve, serve its members of his community. We would like to continue this conversation come up with ways as a community to better help instruct on how the process to work and that is a work for every individual, not just white women. I have to say that because that get it right for them, they need to get it right for us as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That point that you make about the fact that they can get it right, Professor Wright, let me come to you on this because I know that you two have been working to address community policing relationships in communities where you are in Florida. Can you talk to me about what some of those programs look like and whether or not they're moving these police forces towards getting it right.

James Wright: Yes. We know that historically in Florida and in particular thinking about the south with these slave patrols, that there's a very negative perception of police officers because of the founding. What we're doing in Florida actually is reconciling and thinking through the history of the police departments, and then particularly thinking about in Florida, think about in Tallahassee, how can we change this narrative so that police forces can understand the predatory nature that they have had in this antagonistic nature with Black people in Florida and in particularly Tallahassee.

We're working with our local sheriff and we're trying to get our local PD to implement these history classes to understand what happened in Tallahassee, the history of policing so then the hopes they can prove police relationships, because if we don't reconcile it that history, if we don't start thinking about institutionalization of things, institutionalization racism, systemic racism, we'll never have a police force that will truly be equitable for all. That's one of the things that we're doing with the Sheriff's department here in Tallahassee.

Melissa Harris-Perry: James Wright is an assistant professor at Florida State University working both in the academy and on the ground to do around policing. Linda Foster is the President of the Bloomington-Normal NAACP and said, so clearly what we needed to hear this morning, Black lives do matter. Thank you both for your time.

James Wright: Thank you for having me.

Linda Foster: Thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity to share with the community and then your listeners. We understand that there are racial disparities in everything that Black and brown people are involved in but we're on this battlefield, the NAACP is on this battlefield to make it more equitable.

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