Black Women and Police: One Day on My Way to Agnes Scott College

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

This essay is a revisit and an edit to a memory I wrote about 10 years ago, but a memory I hope might help someone else, particularly a Black or Brown woman.

Most of my encounters with police have been rare and routine. Most of the police officers I have dealt with have been courteous and helpful. I have made the occasional phone call about the neighbor whose dog has been running around the neighborhood terrorizing a few people. The police come out, speak with the offender, and the matter is resolved. Yet, I remember this incident…

A police officer discovered I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on my driver’s license. For those of you born late in the 20th century, let me explain. An insurance cancellation suspension was common if you changed cars or changed insurance companies. You used to get a form in the mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles instructing you to record your new insurance or your new car. Occasionally, however, you might not receive the form by mail, and you could easily forget about it.

If your new car/new insurance data had not arrived at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you bought a new car or changed your car insurance, you could end up with this particular type of suspension. You typically had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, show them your new purchase, along with your new insurance card.

In what appeared to be a routine road check for driver’s license and insurance, the Decatur, Georgia Police held me for three hours only a few months after I purchased a car from my elderly uncle. This happened in the spring of 1998 when I was back in college to complete my Bachelor’s degree at Agnes Scott College.

After checking my Driver’s License number the officer stated that I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on the car I previously owned. I showed him my new insurance card on the car I was driving. I knew I would have to straighten out the suspension before I drove any car again. Since I was about a mile from the campus, I asked him if he could radio the Agnes Scott College Police and have someone from that police department drive down the street, and pick me (and the car) up.

I explained that I would have my Mama come pick me up at Agnes Scott and we would go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get the suspension problem cleared up.

“I’m not calling anybody,” he yelled. I pulled out my student ID. He said, “I don’t need that. Girl, get out of the car.” I was a grown woman then in my thirties; and while I might not have looked as old as my birth certificate said I was, I was nobody’s “girl.” I kept my mouth closed, but I am sure he sensed my displeasure.

I got out of the car and he instructed me to lie down in the street. When I asked why are you doing this? He told me to shut up. While I lay down in the street for over 30 minutes, he and another two officers pulled the back seat out of my car. They searched the trunk. If it had not been for the little old man that came out of his house to watch, I do not know what else might have happened. I was terrified, but I suffer from something my Mama used to call, “Your Daddy’s Disease.”

She said my father never showed fear when under pressure. I don’t show it either. Daddy always looked fearless, even menacing, when some horrible event was going on. Then later when everything was all over, he would fall apart, shaking and reaching for a good stiff drink. “That kind of thing can get you killed, Joy,” Mama said, “When someone expects you to be afraid, sometimes the worst thing you can do is look like you have no fear.”

This event was before everyone had a cellphone. A female police officer appeared and asked me if I wanted to call my Mama using her phone. The first police officer decided to write me a simple ticket for driving with a suspended license and he left me standing there in the street. He drove off.

That sweet little old man stood there and talked with me until Mama arrived. He told me he thought the Decatur police were doing some kind of sweep. “They’re looking for somebody that’s up to no good, and they’re tryin’ to find ‘em in these road blocks,” he said. Mama arrived in about 30 minutes and picked me up. My new best friend—that sweet observant little old Black man told me to leave my car where it was until the suspension problem was straightened out.

“Them SOBs are probably waiting somewhere watching and waiting for you to drive off so they can give you another ticket or take you to jail. I’ll watch your car until you get back,” he said.

Mama asked me how my clothes got so dirty. I lied and told her I slipped and fell. She would have had a heart attack if I told her what really happened to her only child. We headed to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The clerk handed me a simple form that I filled out citing that I no longer owned the previous vehicle and therefore had no insurance on that vehicle.

I had to write down the serial number and model of my current car and provide my proof of insurance. The clerk recorded my data and lifted my “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension.” All of this took about 20 minutes.

I did argue my case in traffic court. The police officer rolled his eyes at me as I explained in detail his refusal to call the Agnes Scott College police even after I showed him my student ID. I told the judge every detail and showed him my insurance card, the purchase of my car, and the statement from the Department of Motor Vehicles that lifted my insurance cancellation suspension.

To add as much injury as I could, I said, “I missed my Latin Class because of this!” The judge dismissed my case. I paid no fine. I was lucky. Yet, I sensed that what happened to me was not rare. This kind of treatment happens to women, and particularly Black women and women of color, with a frequency that many people do not want to admit.

Black women encounter more than our share of rudeness and physical intimidation from male police. This offending officer was Black. It’s easy to talk about racist cops, but it is not so easy to talk about SEXIST ones. And for the record, I don’t like Black men who are cops anymore than I like White men who are cops. Here’s the rub…

I consider myself to be an average size woman. By the time I was 50 years old, I managed to gain enough weight to make it to a whopping 135 pounds at 5 feet, 5 inches tall. At the time of this incident, I weighed only about 115 pounds. That police officer was at least 6’ 2” tall and weighed well over 200 pounds. He called me a girl. He told me to shut up. He did not throw me to the ground, Thank God. Yet, just imagine how easy it would have been for him to do so.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

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Barbara Lee, Her Terms

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I was nearing 12 years old when Barbara Lee’s mentor Shirley Chisholm ran for president. The young Barbara Lee was in college then and a single mother when she worked on Chisholm’s campaign. Kamala Harris was nearing 8 years old.

Shirley Chisholm knew that as a Black American woman with roots in the West Indies that she was not likely to win the nomination for president from the Democratic Party.

Yet, Chisholm knew that if we Black Democrats stuck together we could put some real teeth in the Democratic Party platform that ultimately nominated George McGovern, who lost.

Black Congressmen like Walter Fauntroy and Ronald Dellums cut back room deals and ultimately sold Shirley Chisholm out in order to win and/or maintain favor with white men who ran the Democratic Party. Do not bother to be surprised.

When Black American men have access to white men with power, they rarely give up that access in order to stand with any Black woman…and ALL Black women know this by instinct and from experience.

Chisholm ultimately forgave Dellums’ betrayal; and then Dellums gave Barbara Lee an internship in his office which she parlayed into a successful congressional run for Dellums’ old district which was once California’s 9th, now the 12th District.

Much later, I remembered Congresswoman Lee as being the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) that voted against giving then-president George W. Bush the right to invade Iraq shortly after this country endured the tragedy of 9/11.

Lee knew, like most folks with any degree of sense, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorists that struck the Twin Towers on 9/11.

One of the ugliest confrontations I ever had with my then-Congressman John Lewis occurred not long after he, along with the rest of the CBC, voted to grant Bush the power to invade Iraq. I called Lewis a traitor to his face and accused him of violating every principle Martin Luther King, Jr. ever taught him.

“You didn’t even bother to ask for a vote on this!,” I said. I love/d the late John Lewis, but he and the rest of the CBC, were dead wrong for abdicating their duties as representatives in order to grant a sitting president the right to invade another country. The next time I saw him, we hugged. He was feeble. Soon after that last hug, he was gone.

I remember that Congresswoman Barbara Lee had to have extra security because she did not vote in favor of such an invasion in a climate where Americans wanted to feel like we were going after our real enemies.

Instead, Lee used her conscience and common sense, knowing full well that she would be re-elected to her district no matter how she voted. Just imagine if our representatives had enough of a spine to hold on to their principles and to the knowledge that their constituents are in their corner?

Back when Lee took this stand, I was working part-time at my alma mater Agnes Scott College. As the nation was bracing for the possibility of sending US Troops to Iraq, the Agnes Scott College community was having regular talks about the potential for war.

When a faculty member worried that we were heading to war and that there was nothing we could do, I just couldn’t stand that phrase “there’s nothing we can do.”

I said, “You can send a letter of support to California Congresswoman Barbara Lee.”

I have never regretted that suggestion.

What Is In A Name?

Posted on January 2, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

My late mother struggled with infertility for 13 years before I was born. She told me that not only did doctors test my father’s sperm, but that she had her Fallopian tubes blown out with hot water. Many times she was in so much pain from the treatments that she couldn’t bend down to tie her shoes.

When I was born, my parents were 3 and 4 months away from turning ages 40 and 41, respectively. Mama and Daddy decided on the name “Leslye” because it was gender-neutral and also because my father did not particularly care for the practice of men naming sons after themselves.

“A boy either has a reputation to live up to or one to live down,” Daddy used to say. Anyhow, my name, had I been born a boy, would have been “Leslye Charles Allen” which would have included only my father’s middle name.

My late mother discovered the spelling of “Leslye” in a Reader’s Digest article where a young woman with that name and spelling was being sent on a tour of Europe as her graduation present from her parents.

When Mama brought the name and spelling of “Leslye” up to her good friend Esther Flournoy, my Aunt Esther said, “Cooter (their nickname for each other), what will be the middle name if your baby is a girl?”

Mama told me that she honestly did not know. At that moment, Aunt Esther said, “I like names like ‘Faith,’ ‘Hope,’ and ‘Joy.’”

Mama tried all combinations of these names until she arrived with “Leslye Joy.”

The hilarious and thought provoking book “Children’s Letters to God,” first published in 1966, was the very first book given to me by someone other than my parents.

It was given to me by the woman responsible for my middle name. Most of my classmates from Saint Paul of the Cross Elementary School and Saint Joseph High School never knew my first name was “Leslye” until long after we graduated.

Yet, I have had college professors, most notably Dr. Waqas Khwaja, and those wonderful women who cooked and fed me while I was a student at Agnes Scott College, just simply start calling me by my middle name “Joy” as if they all automatically knew that my middle name was the one that had the most love and history behind it. I was and remain warmed by that.

Leslye Joy Allen

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