Social Justice Organizer Learns To Listen And Have Tough ‘Conversations’

By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer

Toni McNeil recalls growing up on the south side of Stockton, a city known more for its crime rate than its graduation rate. A sign outside the entrance to the housing project where she lived read, “Stockton, Someplace Special.”

“Right under the sign folks were selling dope, smoking dope and banging,” McNeil says. “It was really like an oxymoron because you go put a sign up because there’s an airport not far from here. But this is the projects and the red line is further down the street. You don’t even invest in this community, but you put this big old sign, ‘Stockton, Someplace Special.’ Well, now I’m here to make a demand on that sign that’s no longer there.”

Today McNeil, 54, is a social justice organizer with more than 25 years of experience in leadership development and advocacy for the formerly incarcerated, the unhoused and those living in neighborhoods highly impacted by overpolicing, gun violence and mass incarceration.

McNeil is also the founder of Concrete Development LLC, which offers training for individuals and groups in leadership development, conflict resolution and overcoming differences. She recently left Faith in the Valley’s San Joaquin County branch, where she worked with the faith-based community and area residents on restorative justice issues such as gun violence reduction, housing and homelessness, principled policing, and exposing and dismantling the prison industrial complex.

While based in Stockton, McNeil’s advocacy work brings her to the state Capitol often. Her work was acknowledged by the California Black Health Network in May during its inaugural Black Health Equity Advocacy Week. She also was in Sacramento this summer collaborating with Brickhouse Gallery and Art Complex curator Barbara Range and Be Love Holistic’s Teah Hairston as part of a discussion series called “When a Black Woman Speaks.” She recently traveled to South Africa with others doing restorative justice work to learn about how the country is healing from apartheid.

McNeil describes her virtual platform, Anti-Black Conversations, as “a space where people of color can challenge each other’s conditioned mindsets via emotionally intelligent conscious dialogue to reveal the film of white supremacy that clouds the lenses from which we see ourselves and others.” Among the conversations have been, “Life: Why Are Black Men Growing Up In Prison?” and “Breaking Barriers: Exposing and Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex.”

Conversations haven’t always been easy, McNeil admits.

“I was struggling to get clergy and congregations really deeply involved in the work when it came to organizing, especially when it came to organizing with individuals surrounding recidivism and surrounding gun violence reduction,” she says. “People want to engage with gun violence reduction, disruption and prevention, but not necessarily intervention.”

McNeil realized something was amiss, but wasn’t quite sure how to approach it.

“I started this work as an ordained elder, as clergy, but I also was born and raised on the concrete, the block. I joined the church. I got cleaned up. I got saved and all that. What I didn’t realize is that, through salvation and religion, I was kind of moving away or pulling away from those relationships that I had established in the community,” she says.

McNeil had a revelation that changed everything. While driving through a homeless encampment in Stockton, she saw a Black man about her age pushing a shopping cart. She looked directly at him as he crossed in front of her car. The man wouldn’t look at her though.

“The revelation that hit me is that my ‘husband,’ my ‘Boaz’, my ‘Black man,’ was either incarcerated, dead or on drugs in this homeless encampment somewhere,” McNeil says. “I wept. And when I say wept, I mean bitterly.”

McNeil, who was born in 1969, started thinking about the assassinations of civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and the systematic dismantling of the Black Panther Party and how that impacted those who looked to them for hope.

“When I started doing this historical timeline to see what had happened, I realized that what happened is that there was a mass exodus, whether it was drugs, the war on drugs, the war on crime, the ‘three strikes’ law, the birth of the prison industrial complex, enhancements – all of these different things hit us back to back to back to back.

“The mass prison industrial complex – modern-day slavery is what they call it. It really did a number on our community. From there, I wanted everybody to know what the revelation that I was getting was. I wanted people to understand.”

The work was personal for McNeil, but it took awhile for her to put it all together.

“My brother went to prison; my father went to jail, but wasn’t in prison,” she says. “My daughter’s father was in prison. My second daughter’s father was in prison, so with everybody who was locked up, I spent a significant amount of time on a bus, a Greyhound, catching it to prison to visit my man. Then, finally, I was like, ‘I gotta tap out of this, I can’t do this, I gotta focus on the kids, I need to change my life.’”

At the time, McNeil saw everyone who was in prison as “the problem.” She stopped engaging with them and even stopped writing to her younger brother. She felt that she needed to distance herself from them in order to move forward in her life. 

“I disengaged for many years until I started organizing and I realized that I also was a part of the problem,” she says.

McNeil’s brother recently got out of prison after spending most of his life behind bars.

“We have a relationship now and we’re getting to know each other, but it wasn’t until I started doing this work and it wasn’t until I started leaning into individuals that were in and out of prison and really doing leadership development with them that I started connecting with my brother.

“In meeting other individuals that were coming home that had done years – 26 years, 27 years, 33 years – they began to talk to me and share with me the importance and significance of these relationships and being connected to family and building those bridges and repairing a lot of the damage that the systemic oppression and injustice from recidivism has created for the Black family in the Black community.”

McNeil remembers not taking her children on prison visits, not wanting them to see their fathers locked up. A Concrete Development team member who had been incarcerated himself has two sons with life sentences.

“One of his biggest concerns was that he would be in prison with his children,” McNeil says. “He got out, they both went in, and then he ended up going back in.”

The name of McNeil’s organization, Concrete Development, brings to mind the words of a classic Aretha Franklin song, “A Rose in Spanish Harlem.” In it, the Queen of Soul speaks of something beautiful managing to grow and rise through the cracks despite the odds. The name has a deeper meaning for McNeil.

“That same concrete and asphalt is what lines the walls of prison as well. So when I say concrete, I’m talking about the whole thing that has been just oppressing communities of color for years and years and years.”

McNeil provides leadership development for individuals who have been system- or justice-impacted.

“We focus on healing – self-healing, self-development and self-advocacy. We engage them in community work [and] educate them on things in order to disrupt and enlighten,” she says. “We equip them with tools in order for them to learn transferable skills and practical things because when you have been systematically oppressed, something as simple as an email, Google calendars, the things that we use today while we’re working [are] not your normal everyday, like, ‘I’m going to get it right [away].’”

The work also includes lessons on dealing with trauma and grief, and connecting people with resources. Following up is crucial, McNeil says, not just in terms of an individual, but also checking the programs they refer people to.

“We make sure that we connect folks with the programs, but we also make sure that they’re able to engage, that we correct where there are cracks on either side. And then we advocate in order to create programs that may not be already available, but the community is saying that they need.”

The work is important and McNeil has seen it working with “her folks” in Stockton.

“It’s not that they didn’t want to see change. It’s not that they didn’t care about their community,” she says. “It’s that no one had slowed down enough to pour into and invest in individuals in a way to where they really understood.

“We call it ‘breaking down the blah, blah, blah.’ Make it make sense to me. Help me understand. You want me to vote and you want me to vote for the oppressor? You want me to vote for a system that’s not even designed to benefit me? So we have to spend time then going over the history of policing and the prison industrial complex and what the administration looks like and what those campaigns run, code switching and what they really mean when they say a thing. That takes time.”

Formerly incarcerated Concrete Development team members now engage in the work. They’ve done advocacy work at the Capitol, helping raise awareness of then-Assemblymember Shirley N. Weber’s police use-of-force bill, AB 392, and in 2020, fighting for Proposition 17, which allowed people on parole for felony convictions to vote and opposing Prop. 20, which would have increased sentences for nonviolent crimes. Only one has gone back to prison, McNeil says. 

“Now they’re in everything and building, working with other communities that they wouldn’t have necessarily even worked with. Now I see the fruit of it – once you invest the time and you slow it down and you really inform and educate, folks can see their value and how it’s going to benefit them generationally as well.”

All McNeil asks is that folks pay it forward.

“Now you get to mentor and coach and develop others,” she says of participants. “I’m not trying to create an army for me. I’m trying to create an army for our community. If you can lead the block in selling dope, you can lead the block in change and in selling hope. You can organize your community. It’s that simple.”

While others may write off “her folks,” she wants them to see the power they actually have.

“We know what we need. We can see what’s wrong, but we don’t engage with the system because it’s failed us,” McNeil says.

“We outnumber them. There’s 100 of them and 1,000 of us. And those 100 people are voting for policies that impact the 1,000 in the community. I need this 1,000 to understand the significance of their voice. Prop. 17 passed, restoring the voting rights of those who are formerly incarcerated. If you are on parole, you have the right to vote.

“What happens when you put a chain on an elephant and chain it to a stake? That elephant won’t move because their mind has been conditioned to stay there. Prop. 17 passed, the chain came off, but that elephant’s not moving. That elephant, if it was to move, is more powerful than any other animal, or human, in its vicinity. That’s why they chained it. I’m trying to deal with the mind that has been conditioned to stay stagnant in that one spot.”

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