To Fight Against Something is Not The Same Thing As Fighting For Something - James Monteiro

To Fight Against Something is Not The Same Thing As Fighting For Something - James Monteiro

I woke up in Rhode Island Hospital, chained to the bed with a marshal sitting in a chair on the side of me and his first words were...I didn't think you were going to make it.

Three weeks later I was transferred from custody at Rhode Island Hospital to the Intake Security Center in Cranston and placed in solitary confinement due to my wounds being so severe, that I was unable to be in population.

While in Solitary confinement my windpipe began to close up from an infection I had gotten from the tube that was down my throat and I was slowly losing the ability to breathe every day the more my throat swelled up. I began to go unconscious as from lack of oxygen and were it not for some very other determined brothers who were in lock-up with me banging on the doors and a CO that just happened to be doing his job that day and checking on us...I would have died in that cell.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

I was brought back to the hospital where my throat was immediately sliced open with a scalpel to give me oxygen and but for the grace of Allah (God) I survived.

My anger in those days was so deep-rooted and great that I felt it my duty to make sure someone paid for the injustices that I went through, for the injustices my closest friends, brothers, and comrades Marc Murry, Herbie Jenkins, and Corey Fields went through.

My anger was taken out on everyone that lived on the other side of Hope Street, and anyone who was making a night deposit down Thayer street because In my wounded mind someone had to pay for what they did to me for what they did to us and for the years of abuse, discrimination, oppression, and racism that we went through and were going through.....

It wasn't until I ended up on New England's Most Wanted and they (the police) were going to my mother's house telling her that they were going to shoot me and I had no place to go, not even to lay my head at some of my closest family members homes, that my mother received a call from a friend of hers that lived down Blackstone Boulevard telling her, "Carole, if James needs someplace to hide out you tell him he can come here." and until I watched the movie Sarafina with Whoopie Goldberg in South Africa under apartheid that I began to understand....that by me retaliating in that I had, like a straight-up savage who cared about no-one or anything, way that I had become no better than the thing that I hate the most...

We are so much more than we give ourselves. 

And to fight against something is not the same thing as fighting for something.

And a man or woman is a thinking man or woman...they never operate off emotion.

James Monteiro is the founder and director of Reentry Campus Program, working both within and outside the Adult Correction Institution of Rhode Island to ensure that adults in transition homes have a college degree pathway that is integrated into the support systems needed upon release.

Monteiro, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, spent most of his adult life in and out of the penal system, serving a ten-year sentence in one of the country's most violent prison systems Baltimore Maryland's Penitentiary.

There, Monteiro went back to school earning an associate's degree in Psychology with Honors and upon release earned a bachelor's degree in Community Development at Roger Williams University s College Unbound program.

Monteiro has won the Rhode Island NAACP Joseph Lecount Award for his work founding the Billy Taylor House a program that provides workforce development and enrichment opportunities to youth ages fifteen to twenty one in the Mount Hope community of Providence.