February 20, 2008
 Francine Lucas-Sinclair never intended to tell her life’s story. The daughter of one of the most infamous — and one of the most successful — drug lords and crime bosses, Frank Lucas, she spent decades trying to hide who she was and distance herself from the past.
Having Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington portraying your father in a critically acclaimed film — American Gangster — has made that next to impossible. Rather than shy away from the spotlight that the film has placed on her family history, Lucas-Sinclair has chosen to take the opportunity to shed light on the often forgotten plight of the children of incarcerated parents.
At Temple University Ambler on February 19, Lucas-Sinclair shared a personal glimpse into her own experiences and how they've inspried her to help other children of incarcerated parents.
“I chose to talk about my life story as it related to my father and how that got me to where I am today,” she said. “I wanted primarily to talk about the organization I’ve begun — Yellow Brick Roads — and raise awareness of the plight of children of incarcerated parents.”
Lucas-Sinclair knows all too well the horror, shame, embarrassment, depression, and emotional turmoil that children of incarcerated parents go through. While the film American Gangster, nominated for three Academy Awards, didn’t show the little girl witnessing the chaos of federal agents bursting into the family home in January 1975 and taking her father away, 3-year-old Francine was there to bear witness to the terrifying event.
 “I believe it was traumatizing. I don’t remember a lot of detail but I remember a stampede of people and that people were terrified,” she said. “I remember being torn away from my dad and being thrown on the floor. It was about a year and a half until he was sentenced — I remember visiting him in prison, though I didn’t know what it was then. It was a very confusing, uncertain time.”
Six years later, Lucas-Sinclair would lose both parents to jail sentences.
“I was nine when my father was released from prison. He couldn’t find a way to make it in mainstream society at the time — there were no job offers, no assistance. He thought there was no other option than going back to the same thing,” she said. “In this instance, as a consequence, my mother was also sentenced to five years — I didn’t see her again until I was 14 — I my father received a 7-year sentence.”
Looking back, before ever realizing the criminal underpinnings of what her father was involved with, Lucas-Sinclair said growing up in the Lucas household, on its surface, “was pretty normal.”
“It was a little over the top — a lot of people around all of the time and a lot of family; grandparents, godparents, cousins, siblings. When my Dad came home, everyone would scatter,” she said. “I think I was 13, watching the film Less Than Zero, that I started realizing what drugs did to people and started putting the pieces together.”
Lucas-Sinclair said she didn’t complete the puzzle until she was 27, when a New York Magazine article went into great detail about the criminal life of her father and “The Country Boys” — at their peak, Lucas was worth upwards of $52 million, owned office buildings in Detroit, apartment buildings in Los Angeles and Miami, and had several thousand acres in North Carolina with 300 head of cattle.
“I never realized the magnitude of it. That’s the way with a lot of children with incarcerated parents,” she said. “You don’t see the person the rest of the world sees, and it’s very hard to see that side. You don’t see the drug dealer, the murderer — you just see Dad.”
Lucas-Sinclair spent many years never staying in any one place for long. In witness protection for a few years, she lived in New Mexico and other locations before settling with her maternal grandparents in Puerto Rico, where she stayed until the age of 23, earning a degree from the University of Puerto Rico.
 “Puerto Rico was a pretty stable environment. No one knew who we were there,” she said. “I came back to the states in 1996. When the New York article by Mark Jacobson came out in 2000, I started using my mother’s maiden name.”
With the 2007 release of American Gangster, Sinclair-Lucas said, “things became completely surreal.”
“I was being asked for interviews all over the world. I think the film did a pretty good job with the general ideas and events — you don’t get a lot of the details (she happens to be one of the details absent in the story),” she said. “Denzel (Washington) is one of the most genuine, generous people I have ever met; very down to earth. I think because of that, his portrayal of my dad was very genuine.”
Reflecting on her own life, Lucas-Sinclair began to research what support structures were in place for children of incarcerated parents. What she discovered was alarming and set her on the path of creating Yellow Brick Roads (www.yellowbrickroads.org), a non-profit organization that takes a hands-on approach to addressing the day-to-day needs of the children of incarcerated parents.
“There are 2.5 million children that have a parent in prison and 10 million in this country who have parents who are in the criminal justice system in some way. The problem is steadily growing,” she said. “As big as this problem is, however, there wasn’t one organization that advocated or sought to take care of the needs of these children. There were smaller organizations on a state level, but their impact was limited to the communities in which they were located.”
 Being an admitted “control freak,” Lucas-Sinclair couldn’t just sit back “and hope that someone else would do something.” Using the successful model of a program in her current hometown of Atlanta, Forever Families — which has a 97 percent success rate with keeping the children involved with their program from a path that will lead them to prison — she developed a 5-day-a-week after school program to help children of incarcerated parents “with a strong focus on academic achievement,” that doesn’t forget “the little things.”
“Children of incarcerated parents have the highest rate of suicide. What we are trying to do is build resiliency so that they are able to face their parent or parent’s incarceration,” she said. “We’re offering sports programs, lessons in money management, language arts, and providing the resources for them to visit their parent each month. Even if it’s just taking a girl to have her hair done — for a teen girl that is huge. It helps them feel good about themselves and builds self esteem.”
Headquartered in Atlanta, Lucas-Sinclair intends to make Yellow Brick Roads an international organization “with chapters in every major city in the United States, and eventually chapters in several foreign countries.”
“We want to provide a safe location where they can spend time with other children that they know will not judge them. When I went through this myself, I thought I was the unluckiest person in the world — someone up there must hate me,” Lucas-Sinclair said. “As I got older, I began to realize that everyone has a life purpose and everything we go through is a learning opportunity — you need to learn for self actualization. I needed to go through what I did and learn what I did so that I could help other children — and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
Part of Temple University Ambler’s series of Black History Month events, Francine Lucas-Sinclair’s lecture was sponsored by the Office of Student Life. The program was also part of the Ambler Campus Spring Cultural Affairs Series. For more information on the Cultural Affairs Series, visit www.ambler.temple.edu/campus_life/culturalaffairs.htm.
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