Episode #229: Leon Kennedy
“As a rule of thumb, I have always shied away from talking about my family, because I felt like I defamed and shamed [my] family so hard,” says Leon Kennedy.
Leon’s grandparents were no ordinary people: his grandfather, Joseph Lowery, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then brought Martin Luther King Jr. into that influential organization; his grandmother, Evelyn, was also a civil rights icon in her own right. Leon grew up with luminaries such as Rosa Parks, Abraham Woods, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Fred Shuttlesworth, Reverend Calvin Woods, and Andrew Young going in and out of his family home.
“When I was a kid coming up, in my mind, they weren't civil rights icons or activists or revolutionaries,” he says. “They were aunts and uncles to me, because they were always at the house… these guys weren't superheroes to me. It was just normal.” Still, he was raised with a certain ethical standard, instilled from his association with such an august crowd, which he describes in the following way: “Be kind, be honest, don't lie. Treat people the way you want to be treated. Help somebody, make sacrifices, have integrity, all of those core principles and values.” And above all else, he notes it was not a mindset that was limited to the advancement of one’s own community, but rather, principles that were looking to elevate all of humanity. He remembers conversations that focused not only on overcoming racism in America, but on the experience of oppression happening anywhere in the world as well. “We are all one people,” he says, describing the sentiment. “We all don't want to suffer. We want to thrive, we want to be able to see people heal, get medicine, those commonalities. We all need food, we all need shelter. Those things that never change. We're more alike than we are apart.”
But when his parents divorced at a young age, it broke Leon. While his father was a prominent lawyer at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) before following Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, his mother struggled to make ends meet. With no real male role model around the house to reel him in, Leon started to rebel. “I was in neighborhoods and in places where I maybe shouldn't have been,” he recalls.
When he was about 12 years old, his mother began to fear he was hearing voices. But when she took him to a psychiatrist, he assured his mother he was only “hearing music.” Indeed, Leon grew up in a home which was rich not just in the civil rights leaders who passed through the door, but also musicians—Lou Rawls and Harry Belafonte (“Uncle Harry”) were regular visitors. Leon describes how he started performing music for family as a young child, and he sings and writes songs to this day.
Then in 1982, his mother insisted he attend an all-white high school in Birmingham, Alabama. It was tough. “This is the South, and the mindset and the mentality in the South is so oppressive,” he recalls. “It was in the South, it wasn't like that elsewhere. In the birthplace of the civil rights movement, it was ugly… I get to this point in my life where I feel a fight in me, even if I don't know what I'm fighting for.” Leon would physically confront his white classmates when they called him the N-word.
Yet his wild side did not abate, and during one drunken escapade in Virginia, he shot a man. “He wasn't bothering me,” Leon admits. “He was minding his business. He was the epitome of a victim! I was completely wrong. I was so out of my mind, just out of sorts.”
The man went in and out of a coma, and eventually they had to amputate his leg. The court was threatening to give Leon four life sentences if the man died; luckily he did not, and what is more, he couldn’t identify Leon. Still, Leon was convicted and ended up serving nine years in prison before being released on good behavior. “I don't know anybody up there,” he recalls of his time behind bars. “I'm young, I'm homophobic. If you looking at me crazy, I'm swinging, I'm not scared to fight.” He also immersed himself in reading and in music, and having been raised in a devout Christian family, it was the first time he learned about other faiths.
After his release in 1996, married to his best friend from childhood, Brigit, and they started a family. He was working at a lumber yard, and making good money, too. Then two years later, he happened by a bank in an out-of-the-way part of town, largely covered by trees. “That criminal element was still lingering in me, obviously,” he describes of that moment. He just couldn’t erase the thought of a potentially big score from his mind. And finally, he gave into the temptation, and called up a former inmate he’d known who was in New York, asking him to come down and help with the job.
The robbery went off without a hitch, but they soon realized that a tracking device had been hidden in with the money. Sure enough, Leon estimates that nearly 450 law enforcement officers began closing in on them, with helicopters hovering overhead, and meanwhile, they had bags of cash and guns strewn around the home. Leon describes their thinking: “We're not going back to prison, so we're going to hold court in the street. This is it! This is part of the deal.” Securing their bullet proof vests and arming themselves to the teeth, they began to step outside to face their fate… when his brother grabbed him by the belt to pull him back inside, pleading with him to give up because otherwise the police might very likely kill everyone in the house. “So I just fell on my knees, and I laid the gun on the ground,” Leon recalls. His wife passed out; he kissed her pregnant belly, and gave himself up.
Back in prison, Leon missed the birth of his daughter, and only came to know her through visiting hours. He felt helpless— his wife divorced him, while his daughter had to work through anger issues, and refused to talk to him for five years. And the experience of being in a maximum security prison was excruciating. “Bottom line, you are not a human anymore. When you come in Alabama, the prison system is the culture, and you are less than a man or a woman.” But Leon managed, despite the difficulties, and describes being a “model prisoner” during his second stint in prison. He immersed himself in all the self-help classes the institution offered. “Then vipassana comes into play, and they wanted to try it here,” Leon tells, referring to the intensive meditation taught by S.N. Goenka.
Leon joined the 10-day course after passing through a comprehensive screening process. That retreat was made into a documentary, The Dhamma Brothers, which one of the course teachers, Jonathan Crowley, spoke about in a previous podcast episode. For Leon, the experience was transformative. “By the fourth day, I had a crying crisis. I was a weeping from my soul,” he recalls. “This is one of the worst prisons in the country, and we transformed that gym into a meditation center! It's a place of peace and serenity, and it was amazing. It was something I'll never forget. We finished the course, and it was a success.” Although he did his best to keep the courses going so other prisoners could benefit, he describes how the prison chaplain accused them of “devil worship,” and so the “meditation experiment” was, unfortunately, not continued.
While the prison conditions Leon faced were hard in their own right, that intensive meditation course was especially challenging, as it can be for most anyone who takes part, whether in prison or not. “Suffering is suffering, I don't care how you try to put lipstick on a pig, it is still a pig with lipstick on! Suffering is suffering, and we are all vessels individually comprised that have different levels of what we can contain,” he remarks, and goes on to share how he benefited from the practice. “I could be one, so I could be whole, because it's of me, it’s not outside of me. It's not something external, it's me, it's the breath. And I use that to hone in, it’s my laser beam so to speak, my focus on what I'm trying to do.”
The meditation also made him look at his aunts and uncles in the Civil Rights Movement with even more reverence, if that were possible. “When I would think about my forefathers, and what they had to go through, the mat made me look at them a little bit different,” he says, referencing the constant death threats that many of these folks faced from the KKK and other White Supremacists. “It made me respect their bravery, because they were imminent danger of losing their life.”
In 2003, Leon suffered a physical setback, which was diagnosed as a mild stroke. His continued health problems led to a transfer to a lesser security facility in 2006, where he served out his sentence. However, the state of Virginia then took custody of Leon for the remaining time from his initial sentence. In that Virginia prison, his body finally shut down and he collapsed; it turns out the earlier diagnosis of a heart attack was an error, he actually suffered from multiple sclerosis (MS). This led to a prolonged and challenging stay in the infirmary, where he faced immense physical and emotional difficulties, including the inability to communicate and the need to re-learn basic functions. Although he maintained his newfound vipassana practice as best he could, this health scare rekindled his Christian faith. He believes that ultimately, it set him on a course to become a better man.
Eventually, his sentence ended, and Leon was released back into the world. “I was just thanking God… and when it came time for me to focus, I knew how to focus on the breath [through vipassana meditation],” he says. “Now, I'm an advocate. In the Alabama prison system, I lobby against the parole board, because the oppression is so great there. The Alabama prison system is likened to a third world country, it is terrible! They're dying in there at an exponential rate from drug overdoses, officer killings, and they're killing each other… and they're suffering so bad. So I advocate for them, I go in to lobby, I give talks about meditation and my experiences. I'm not the guy I used to be, and I don't miss the guy I used to be! I love who I am today.” Leon has also seen a boost in his musical career. He sang background for Earth Wind and Fire, and last year performed at event following Angie Stone. He has other projects in the works, such as with Ludacris and CeeLo Green.
Leon is aware that the meditation that has so transformed his life comes from a Burmese lineage; reflecting back on the universal quality of this practice, he connects it to the ethics instilled in him as a child by those Civil Rights luminaries, and he speaks to the solidarity he feels with the Burmese people’s struggle. “How can [one] know what's going on [in Myanmar] and not reach back? That speaks to a different discounting level of your humanity,” he says. “So whether it be Myanmar or any place in the world where there is oppression and suffering, this suffering and these injustices have been going on since the beginning of time. It is a blessing to be a part of that cloth or personhood where you can be a part of the solution, to be a light shining in a dark place, just a spark. So to my brothers and sisters in Myanmar and other places in the world, where they're being oppressed, slaughtered, genocide, starved, enslaved: Whether it be Vipassana, Christianity, Islam or whatever it is their special place where you find that strength and you can just hold out, and hope against hope.”