A Redemptive Path Forward: From Incarceration to a Life of Activism

Activist Lucky debuts with a harrowing as well as hopeful account of how he turned his life around after founding the Dallas Bloods gang and surviving a stint in prison. Beginning with his 1980s childhood in East Dallas, Tex., Lucky recounts how growing up in a housing project “filled with drugs, alcohol, and violence” led to his hustling drugs as a teen, and to his establishing a Dallas chapter of the Bloods gang in 1993. At 20, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for drug possession. Recalling the “dismally reliable pattern in these courtroom dramas,” he writes, “a Black kid was charged, a white expert was brought in to explain how the drug world worked, an all-white jury listened and deliberated, and... they passed down a guilty verdict.” Fortunately for Lucky, several transformative encounters in prison—including with Imam Willie Fareed Fleming, who helped Lucky parlay his leadership skills into influencing fellow inmates to do good—led to his early release and a role with a nonprofit devoted to eliminating urban violence. While the redemption arc is immensely moving, it’s the unflinching way Lucky calls out systemic inequality—and the welcome corrective he offers to dehumanizing portrayals of those disproportionately affected by it—that cuts to the core. This should be required reading. (May)