Jamira Burley, an activist whose family has been shaken by the justice system in part created by the Clintons, has joined the Democrat’s campaign for president

One of Jamira Burley’s earliest memories is watching two of her teenage brothers, ages 14 and 15, face trial for murder. Thirteen of her 15 siblings have spent time incarcerated, and in the course of one year she lost a brother to gun violence and her father was convicted of murder.

When she was five, her legs were too short to reach the courtroom floor. Now 27, she’ll travel the country for Hillary Clinton, whose husband supported “tough on crime” plans that disproportionately affected black Americans, to talk about crime and punishment.

On Monday, Burley joined the Clinton campaign as deputy millennial vote director, after leading a program on gun violence and justice at Amnesty International.

“I’m well aware of the damage the criminal justice system has done to communities of color,” she said with qualified praise for Clinton as the first candidate in over 15 years to put gun violence on the national stage.

“One of the things that I admire about Secretary Clinton is she’s not afraid to admit when she’s wrong,” she said. “She realizes the damage our criminal justice system has done to the American population, and she wants to make reform in ways that’s not harmful to communities and future generations.”

Clinton, she said, has “been willing to own up to it, and she’s been willing to right her wrongs”.

In the early 1990s, Philadelphia saw gun murder rates spike to record highs alongside crime related to the national crack epidemic. Academics and politicians warned of violent young offenders, and by the middle of the decade, some predicted the rise of “juvenile super-predators”.

As first lady, Clinton herself seemed to endorse that notion in 1996. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators’, no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel,” she said at the time.

Activists have argued that Clinton should be held responsible for the impact of her husband’s 1994 crime bill, which imposed draconian enforcement that disproportionately increased arrests in black communities, specifically for drug-related crimes.

Clinton has been lambasted for her “super-predator” remarks in particular, and her husband has struggled to fend off protesters who raised it earlier this year. Michelle Alexander, the influential author of the New Jim Crow, called the comments “racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals” and has argued that Clinton did not deserve the black vote.

After an activist interrupted a campaign event in February and asked Clinton about those controversial remarks, she apologized, saying she “should not have used those words”.

The activist, Ashley Williams, later said that the apology did not go far enough. “She must own her role in the political disaster that befell Black communities,” she wrote.

Burley’s brothers were young teenagers when they faced murder charges, which were brought because the boys had been in a car with others who committed the crime and the teens refused to inform on the others. They were tried and convicted of third-degree murder, and Burley would not see them again until they were in their late 20s.

Four of her brothers were still incarcerated, she said.

Burley said she planned to remind young people that support for the bill, now seen as a “terrible mistake”, was much broader at the time it was passed. There were parts of the 1994 bill that her own mother favored, Burley said, even though her mother was also affected by the justice system herself.

“The crime bills of the 90s were supported by a very diverse group of actors,” Burley said. “My mother can tell you she supported getting more police on the streets.”

A majority of black Americans supported Clinton’s crime bill in 1994 and it largely won passage through support from the congressional black caucus. It was not without fierce, high-profile critics in the black community, though: in 1994, the NAACP called the bill “a crime against the American people”.

Clinton has now pledged to “end the era of mass incarceration” through several means: reforming federal mandatory minimum sentencing; focusing federal law enforcement resources on violent crime, not marijuana possession; investing billions of dollars in re-entry programs; and reforming school discipline practices to end the “school-to-prison pipeline”.



She has also promised to address police violence against black Americans, and said she would ask for $1bn to train police departments on how to overcome implicit racial bias, develop national guidelines on police use of force, and support legislation to end racial profiling.

“The fact that the Black Lives Matter movement and other criminal justice reformers have held her feet to the fire has helped her become a lot more sensitive to how she shows up in those spaces,” Burley said.

Burley has been an advocate for gun violence prevention since her early teens. After her 20-year-old brother, Andre, was murdered in 2005, Burley started a program at her high school to train other students to be violence “interrupters” and peer mediators. It later expanded to 10 other high schools across the city. At age 23, just days after becoming the first sibling in her family to graduate from college, she was hired as the executive director of Philadelphia’s youth commission. In 2014, the White House honored her as a “Champion of Change” on gun violence prevention.

At Amnesty, Burley focused on building a united approach to gun violence, police violence and criminal justice reform, rather than viewing those issues as separate, siloed problems. She also worked to improve communication between Amnesty’s largely white and middle-class membership and young Black Lives Matter advocates across the country.

Part of that work meant educating members about the unintended consequences of some gun violence prevention policies – particularly when policies are only evaluated from the perspective of white Americans. After the Orlando nightclub massacre of 49 people, for instance, Democrats, including Clinton and Barack Obama, pushed to pass legislation barring Americans on terror watchlists from being able to buy guns.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The fact that the Black Lives Matter movement and other criminal justice reformers have held her feet to the fire has helped her become a lot more sensitive to how she shows up in those spaces.’ Photograph: Rhona Wise/EPA

That seemed like an obvious move for many Americans. But at Amnesty, Burley put out a statement opposing the “no fly, no buy” measures as “false solutions to the real threats of gun violence and terrorism”. The plan threatened due process safeguards for Americans, particularly minorities, she noted, given the often secretive and arbitrary nature of the watchlists.

Clinton commands a dramatic 61% of support among voters 19-29, according to a recent Harvard study, compared to just 25% for Donald Trump. That same study found that Clinton has a 76% to 5% advantage with likely young black voters. But she has struggled to inspire the kind of animated and enthusiastic support from young voters that helped propel Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012, especially support among young people of color.

“I don’t care what Hillary Clinton does to try to prove that she’s for black people,” Ieshia Evans, the young protester whose standoff with the police in Baton Rouge was captured in a striking photograph, wrote in an op-ed last week. “We are not going to forget it was her husband, blindly supported by a lot of black people, who put in place the system that has taken so many black men from their families and put them in prison.

“Now she wants to disassociate and say, ‘Well, that was my husband,’” Evans added. “You were there in the background, cheering him on.”



But Burley contrasted Clinton with Trump, and said one of Clinton’s strengths that had won her support was her willingness to talk bluntly about racist rhetoric.

“She’s the one who has called a spade what it is, or called a bigot what it is,” Burley said. “Too many people are trying to be politically correct at a very dangerous time to be politically correct.”