David CookThe last time Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson was arrested, the 28-year-old mother was handcuffed and carried off the ground by police – one held her arms, the other her legs – out of a Nashville legislative committee room, where she and six others had come to do all they could to block passage of laws that would weaken labor unions in Tennessee.
The time before that, after witnessing firsthand the moonscape-like destruction of mountain-top removal, she had sneaked onto West Virginia coal mine land and chained herself to a mining truck.
“We shut down the mine for five hours,” she said. “We got arrested for forced trespassing and conspiracy to commit a crime against the state.”
That’s what the law calls it: crimes against the state. But Henderson, an Ooltewah High graduate and leader in the local Concerned Citizens for Justice, doesn’t see it that way. Her actions are born from her conscience: that part of ourselves that feels like a fire, pushing us to do the right thing, come what may.
When laws are unethical, when every other option has been tried, when lives are at stake, sometimes, whispers the conscience, breaking laws is the most moral choice of all.