My mother has been saying it my whole life. Fifty-one years of hearing it. And on May 16, 2026, the same day she passed away and left me with the torch to continue this work, 800,000 people proved she was not just warning us.
A Baton Rouge teenager once appeared on camera as proof that violence prevention could work. Two years later, he is charged in a shooting that killed 17-year-old Martha Odom. Their stories are not separate tragedies. They are connected by the same policy choices, budget cuts and abandoned promises that leave one child dead and another held by a system that failed to hold him sooner.
Louisiana's child welfare system was built to protect children. For Black girls, it has become another door into the pipeline.
Jada and other Black girls often take the first steps toward the delinquency pipeline in the schoolroom, where teachers too often misread curiosity as sassiness—or as Louisiana law describes it, "willful disobedience."
The state of Louisiana is building a long-needed door for women leaving prison. But for girls leaving childhood detention, there is no threshold, much less a door.
