Johnathan Perkins’ life changed on a spring evening in 2011, as he was walking home from a party.
Then a third year at the University of Virginia School of Law, Perkins, a black man, was stopped by two white University Police (UPD) officers. Claiming that Perkins fit the description of a person of interest, the officers proceeded to forcibly push him onto the police car, search him for weapons, and rifle through his wallet. Perkins asked the officers for their names or badge numbers, which they refused to give. Eventually, they let him go. Humiliated and shaken, he walked home to his apartment as the police car trailed him. He was less than two months shy of graduating.
Two weeks later, at the urging of one of his professors, Perkins wrote a letter to the editor detailing his experience. It was published in Virginia Law Weekly, and the UPD responded quickly with a statement claiming that it had initiated an investigation into the officers’ alleged misconduct. Perkins was then contacted by two UPD lieutenants who informed him that they would be leading the investigation into their fellow officers, whose identities were still unknown.
A little more than a month later, Perkins was studying in the law library with a friend when he received a call from a man identifying himself as an FBI Special Agent. The agent said that he was on the law school campus, and wanted to meet with Perkins and the two UPD officers investigating the incident. Once they sat down, it became increasingly clear that the agent’s focus was not on the incident, but on Perkins.
The FBI agent — who already seemed to know a wealth of personal details about Perkins — allegedly informed him that a civil rights investigation into the incident had been initiated. This was a puzzling development, as Perkins hadn’t filed a police report. He hadn’t claimed that his civil rights had been violated. Moreover, the conduct of the officers as described in his letter to the editor wasn’t egregious – they were sarcastic, rude, and refused to identify themselves, but they never said anything about his race, nor did they physically hurt him.
The special agent cautioned him that a swarm of FBI agents would descend upon Charlottesville to question and investigate Perkins’ friends and classmates. He stated that agents would visit and question Perkins’ new law firm employer, and his mother in Pennsylvania. He informed Perkins that these consequences were unavoidable, as long as his allegations against the two UPD officers were maintained. “…There was nothing about the interrogation that was designed to either corroborate Johnathan’s account or find him to be not telling the truth,” Perkins’ former professor Kim Forde-Mazrui told The Cavalier Daily last month. “It was evident to me that the FBI had a predetermined mission to get Johnathan to recant the statement.”
Faced with the specter of his friends, family, and future employers being dragged into an investigation he hadn’t wanted in the first place, just as his professional life was about to begin, Perkins began to waver. After two and a half hours of questioning, he agreed to sign a statement — which he says was dictated by the FBI agent — recanting the facts in his letter to the editor. The FBI agent reassured him that this would all go away, quietly.
It did not.
The next morning, UVA issued a press release announcing the recantation. Predictably, the story garnered national attention: Perkins was branded a liar, a “race hoax hustler,” another black man “playing the race card.” His law firm job offer — the result of three years of incredibly hard work — was rescinded. A pall of infamy was cast over his entire life.
Privately, Perkins was subject to a “famously stringent” Honor Trial at UVA. At the trial, the two UVA lieutenants claimed to be in possession of video surveillance footage that would disprove Perkins’ original claims. When asked to share the videos, they refused. Perkins was quietly acquitted and awarded his degree, but it did little to dampen the blaze of antagonism. The damage had been done.
In August of the same year, the Vice Dean of the law school received a phone call from an Assistant US Attorney with the Western District of Virginia, who allegedly informed her to preserve any documents related to the incident, as his office was considering convening a grand jury to indict Perkins. The Dean called Perkins and advised that he retain an attorney, which he promptly did.
Perkins and his counsel were left to guess which crimes he could possibly be indicted on. Making a false statement to a federal agent has a five-year statute of limitations; Perkins’ attorney advised that he remain silent until it had expired. For five years, unfamiliar cars outside his home or an unexpected knock on his door brought back the fear that federal marshals were there to arrest him. He was afraid that if he spoke out about the FBI’s involvement, prosecutors would make good on their threats.
This summer – a full six years later – Perkins sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, hoping to learn more about the civil rights investigation. “Based on the information you provided, we conducted a search of the Central Records System,” the response reads, “we were unable to identify main file records responsive to the FOIA.” FOIA requests to UPD and the University also failed to provide any indication that the FBI agent’s interrogation took place as a part of actual law enforcement activities.
Perkins believes that the FBI agent fabricated the civil rights investigation as a tool to push for his recantation. “I strongly suspect that the FBI was brought in by the UVA Police to apply pressure on me in order to obtain a public, police-friendly resolution to the UVA Police Department's high-profile self-investigation,” Perkins said. “A public recantation of my allegations provided that perfect resolution.”
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Charlottesville, Virginia is torn between a bright future and a dark past. It’s a city with a world class university filled with high-achieving, cosmopolitan students and professors from all around the world. It’s also a city where many of the residents can still remember when interracial marriage was illegal (up until 1967), and statues of Confederate heroes still adorn public parks. Neo-Nazis have marched there, brandishing torches and hurling racial epithets, on two occasions in the last three months.
In 2004, Allen Counter, a black Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard, was stopped on campus by two police officers after being mistaken for a robber. They threatened him with arrest when he could not produce identification. Five years later, Cambridge police arrested another black Harvard Professor, Henry Louis Gates, as he attempted to open his own front door. He was charged with disorderly conduct after shouting, "This is what happens to black men in America!"
Perkins’ initial encounter with the UPD is an illustration of the less dramatic, more insidious police encounters black men and women experience so frequently that they have become part of the fabric of everyday life for many communities.
“This is something that happens to all black people,” Perkins said. “You don’t get out of this because you go to a certain school, because you dress a certain way, because you speak a certain way. I want white people to know: You have to believe us when we say these things. In 2011, the community was looking to not believe this.”
Signing that recantation was, according to Perkins, his life's greatest regret. Now, he’s ready to speak out. “You don’t speak truth to power like this without consequences,” Perkins said. “I’m still afraid. I’m sure there will be consequences for speaking out again. But starting today, I won’t let that fear control me.”