Straight talk
Last week I was cruising through my Facebook news feed, and, lo and behold, there was a video of Bibb County Superior Court Judge Verda Colvin. Normally, I don't take the time to watch videos because, most times, it's just too silly, but Judge Colvin is not known for being silly. So I hit the play arrow in the middle of the screen.
There she was in her courtroom, boys on her left and girls on her right. I would later find out these children were participants in a Consider the Consequences program sponsored by the Bibb County Sheriff's Office.
This program isn't for well-behaved young people. Rather, it's for children who are having issues. Judge Colvin unfolds a body bag and asks them, "What do you want to do?" She tells them with certainty, "The way you're going, you will go to jail or you will end up in this body bag."
She then turns her attention to the right side of the court room, "Young ladies, whether anyone has ever told you before, you're special. You're uniquely made. Stop acting like you're trash and putting pictures of yourself on the Internet. Stop being disrespectful to your parents. Care about your future. Be somebody. Anybody can be nothing."
Her message was getting through. At least one of the girls started sobbing. Here is this tall, beautiful woman who looks like them, wearing the robes of a Superior Court judge talking straight from her heart. She was equal parts judge, preacher and mama. She tells the girls, "The only one stopping you is you. Do better than what you've been doing." She points directly at them and says, "I don't ever expect to see the three of you back in my courtroom."
As she walks around the small dividing bar that separates the public area from where the attorneys sit and her bench to talk to the boys, she sends another warning to the girls, "Don't let me see you here again."
The judge tells the young men that she's a single parent of a young man. "I know it all. Been there done that." She explains that her son was very popular in high school, but she reminded her son that she was "a little crazy, so don't come up in this house with any mess. So when folks come at you with dope, this gang stuff, just tell them, 'man, I got to go. My mom, she's crazy.'
"I don't know if your moms are like me. I don't know if they told you, 'this is the real deal buddy, you better get it together,' but if your mom didn't say that, consider me you surrogate mom. Don't you come up in here. I'm sick of seeing young men who look like you all ... white and black all together, going to jail for doing something stupid."
Then she tells the grim realities of jail, something they may have heard about but not from the mouth of a judge. "Is that what you want, somebody raping you in the middle of the night, and there's nothing you can do but just lay there?"
She told them her story — the daughter of a single mom who earned below the poverty level. But she didn't use it as an excuse not to go to college. "If your parents don't have money, you can go to college almost free. That's the beauty of it. If you don't want to go to college, get a skill. Do something."
I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about her closing. She told of going to her office and crying after her son got in trouble at school. That's when the boxes of tissue came out. "You're killing them," she said of the young people's parents. They think they have failed.
"When I see you all hurting, it makes me hurt, too. I don't even know you personally, but I love each and every one of you, and I don't want you to have to come to my courtroom and I have to sentence you as an adult at the age of 17. ... I don't want to experience that myself, and I don't want you to experience that."
She turns, takes a tissue and strides to her chambers. When I first watched the video that's gone viral, I had to find some tissue, too. She's been doing this for a year. She didn't know she was being recorded. Thank God for her.
If you would like more information on how to enroll your child in the no-cost monthly program, call Lt. Ellis Sinclair with the Bibb Sheriff's Office at 478-803-2701. Watch the video at http://tinyurl.com/hw3jpsy online.
Charles E. Richardson is The Telegraph's editorial page editor. He can be reached at 478-744-4342.
This story was originally published April 9, 2016 at 7:59 PM with the headline "Straight talk ."