One morning in 2019, Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes was released from Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, and traveled 70 miles south to Carnegie Hall. That night, he stood before a crowd — flanked by a horn section, string quartet and backup singers — and sang words he’d written during his nearly quarter-century behind bars.
He’d been convicted of killing a cab driver during a robbery in 1996, when he was 21 years old. “I had no value for life back then,” he once told a reporter — and that included his own life, which he tried to end while in prison. Now 45, he sang over a steady pulse of piano chords: “Can’t we agree there’s something wrong, if I feel the need to scream, ‘My life matters’? And why in the world, to you, does that feel like an accusation?”
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