by Paul Bass | February 4, 2009 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (35)

Warren Kimbro, who turned around his life after a murder conviction to become a nationally recognized leader in helping other people do the same, died Tuesday night. He was 74.

A relative took him from his home to Yale-New Haven Hospital after Warren complained of chest pains, according to his son Germano.

Warren breathed his last breath at 9:09 p.m. in Yale-New Haven’s emergency room.

Meanwhile, lawmakers at City Hall were voting in favor a proposal he promoted to help ex-cons have a better shot at landing government-funded jobs.

Perhaps more than anyone else in New Haven, Warren’s life traced the passionate and sometimes tragic path of a city that conducted the country’s most intensive antipoverty experiment in the 1950s and 1960s, then regained its idealism as the century turned.

The emergency room where Warren died is up a hill from what was once Spruce Street, where Warren grew up. Urban renewal bulldozers leveled that one-block road as part of the nation’s most expensive per-capita effort to turn down slums (as well as solid working-class streets like Spruce) and test programs to “end poverty.” On Spruce Street Warren began forming a network of trusted relationships that eventually reached into every ethnic, religious, political and economic corner of the city.

He was predeceased by his beloved wife Beverly. He is survived by his son Germano and daughter, Veronica; a brother, Joseph Kimbro; five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

A lifelong community activist who worked with young people in trouble, Warren briefly joined the Black Panther Party in 1969 out of disgust with the limitations of liberal antipoverty programs for which he worked. His home on Orchard Street became the local headquarters for the revolution-promoting party.

During that time, under orders from a party superior, he shot and killed Alex Rackley, a Panther wrongly suspected of being a government informant. The case trial became a national sensation because the government unsuccessfully tried to convict and execute two party leaders, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, in connection with the murder. It became a symbolic forum as well for a debate on whether a black revolutionary could receive a fair trial in America. It also drew thousands of protesters to New Haven determined to “burn down Yale” and the city on Mayday 1970. (They didn’t.)

A less noticed aspect of the trial was Warren’s own role. A reformer rather than revolutionary by nature, Kimbro confessed to the murder, then spent the rest of his life seeking redemption.

“Make Time Count”

In prison he became a model inmate. He edited an award-winning jailhouse newspaper. He started a counseling program for fellow prisoners. A high-school drop-out, he studied at Eastern Connecticut State University through an experimental program for prisoners. Then he ran a drug-treatment program in Willimantic, Perception House, returning to his cell at night.

“Don’t count time,” began Warren’s jailhouse motto, printed at the top of his newspaper. “Make time count.” He did.

His jailers noticed. For the criminal justice system, it was a brief moment of heady experimentation. Top government officials sought to expand programs to rehabilitate rather than simply warehouse prisoners. State corrections commissioner Ellis MacDougall used Warren as a success story, picked up by national media outlets like the David Susskind show, The New York Times and People.

After just four and a half years Warren received a state pardon. It was the shortest incarceration for murder in Connecticut history. Kimbro left jail to earn a graduate degree in education at Harvard.

The most remarkable part of his journey was yet to come. He returned to ECSU as a student dean. Then in 1983, back in New Haven, he became the head of a small, struggling program called Project MORE. Based at the time in the Hill neighborhood, it worked with mostly young men coming out of jail. The goal was to reduce recidivism by helping ex-cons kick drug habits, train for jobs, find work.

With his vision, his contacts with government leaders, and his gift for inspiring people, Warren built Project MORE into one of the northeast’s leading “AICs” — community-based alternative to incarceration centers. The very agency that once jailed Warren, Connecticut’s Department of Correction, would eventually send him millions of dollars a year to work with the state’s most troubled adult population.

Overall, though, a backlash to the experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s led to a withering of public support for rehabilitation-oriented corrections. “If I were arrested today,” Warren lamented often in later years, I would never get the chances I had back then.” That realization doubled his determination to prove that rehabilitation can work, that people who commit crimes deserve second chances like the one he received.

Up until his death, he continued to run and expand Project MORE. Click here to read about some of his most recent work at Project MORE, which included starting a New Haven shelter for women emerging from prison and launching an AIC in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Most recently he helped New Haven’s DeStefano administration craft a strategy for incorporating into the community waves of ex-offenders being released from jail. On Dec. 15 he stood alongside the mayor at a City Hall press conference promoting a “ban the box” proposal to give ex-cons a better shot a government-funded jobs.

Warren also visited jails and other forums where he inspired young black men with his story, seeking to counter the notion that he was in any way a hero for his actions as a Panther. He sought to make internal peace with the ghost of Alex Rackley; he never completely succeeded.

Much of his hometown embraced him as a leader who helped countless young people go straight. Still, Kimbro continued to encounter unresolved episodes from the Panther period. Click here to read a story about Warren apologizing to a fellow former Black Panther, George Edwards, for having tied him up and putting a .45 to his head in a basement shortly before the Alex Rackley murder in 1969. Click on the play arrow at right to watch the exchange.

As the years wore on Warren was determined to tell the whole truth of the Rackley case. He sought to avoid sugar-coating his own actions or those of law-enforcement agencies which regularly broke their own laws to infiltrate and promote violence within dissident groups like the Panthers in order to dismantle them. Warren eagerly revealed his entire story, warts most of all, in a 2006 book entitled Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, And the Redemption of a Killer (Basic).

A Yiddish Lullaby

I co-authored that book, with Douglas Rae. In the process I spent more time alone with Warren than with anyone else outside my family. He opened his soul to me, as well as the compromising files of his past. He wanted me to know every mistake he’d made, way back to his unruly behavior at St. John’s elementary school. People shouldn’t see him as a hero, he insisted.

“Truth be told,” he said again and again, “there were no heroes.”

But there were so many people, from powerbrokers to powerless, broken, convicted drug dealers, who considered Warren an unforgettable part of their lives. A confidante. A guide. A friend. Someone they could trust, turn to for help, share secrets or laughs with.

I struggled to discover the secrets of that Warren Kimbro. They didn’t show up in his FBI file or his criminal files. They didn’t appear in his old love letters or his memories of regret. They didn’t even emerge from interviews with people whose lives he turned around. The book failed to capture that Warren.

Only after the book came out did I glimpse those secrets, when we traveled the state to promote the book.

I saw him hush a hall full of tough felons with his story at Webster Correctional Facility in Cheshire. More than a hundred African-American men drank up his story with wide eyes. They were in a portion of the jail reserved for inmates about to be released. After Warren spoke, some shared their fears about returning to “the life” back on the street. They asked his advice for staying straight. And they showered him with applause.

I saw him melt a library full of bubbes at B’nai Jacob synagogue in Woodbridge. He sang the Yiddish lullaby his mother used to help him get to sleep as a child in the 1930s. The women remembered Spruce Street. They remembered the lullaby, too.

At other libraries, in Litchfield County and in Niantic, I saw Warren convince middle-aged and older small town audiences that people who go wrong can then go right, if given the chance.

In a Channel 30 studio, I watched him transport an interviewer back to a time, and a frame of mind, in which people believed they could make the world better. (Click on the play arrow for a snippet from that program.) I watched him impart the same realism-tempered optimism to my students in a Yale political science class as well as high-school students in a class at Hillhouse.

And in stops around New Haven, I’d inevitably see a beat cop or a teacher or an employee light up just seeing Warren, recalling a door he opened.

In each instance I saw a man who loved people, all kinds of people. He saw their innate goodness, no matter their failings. He believed in them, and he got a charge out of helping them. He understood, deeply, what it means to be human.

Those were his secrets.

Final Gifts

At 74, Warren continued to run Project MORE at full tilt. He was in a gift-giving mood in his final weeks. You had to wonder whether he may have known at an unconscious level that his time was approaching for joining his beloved Beverly.

He delivered expensive presents to Project MORE board members.

Last Friday he emceed a ceremony on the second floor of Project MORE’s current home on Grand Avenue. The event honored ex-offenders who completed a series of Project MORE programs focused on anger management, substance abuse, and job training. They all received certificates and tribute speeches from staffers.

Warren (pictured at the top of this story at the event) ordered up another set of plaques for every staff member working at Project MORE. He and his top staffers gave each one of them a speech, too.

The event’s keynote speaker was William Carbone, executive director of the state Judicial Branch’s Court Support Services Division. In that role, he lobbies the legislature for the money for AICs, then oversees them.

He ended up delivering the final of countless personal tributes Warren would hear in his lifetime. Given Warren’s sudden death four days later, it would serve as the substitute for the retirement dinner that would have drawn hundreds upon hundreds of people whose lives he touched in unforgettable ways.

Carbone spoke of the importance of second chances through “community corrections.” Programs at centers like Project MORE cost taxpayers a fifth of the $30,000 they otherwise spend every year to lock somebody up, he said. And the centers have a good track record of reducing recidivism — both lessening crime in the community and helping ex-offenders become productive citizens.

“Not everybody who gets in the criminal justice system is a bad person,” Carbone (pictured at the event) said. “Some bad things have happened to them along the way.”

That doesn’t excuse criminal behavior, he said. It does mean that often if you “connect them to the right people … they can change.”

One of those “right people,” in Carbone’s telling, was Warren Kimbro. Carbone spoke of spending three decades working to advance community corrections. At every step Warren walked alongside him, or in front. He proved in New Haven, at the grassroots, that second chances work. He proved it well enough that dollars, and other centers, followed.

Warren Kimbro was right. He was in no way a hero for killing Alex Rackley. Nothing he did afterwards could restore the life he stole.

But Warren was a hero nonetheless, for how he made amends.