Kafka in Tulia
By Bob Herbert
Tulia
is a hot, dusty town of 5,000 on the Texas Panhandle, about 50 miles south of
Amarillo.
For some, it's a frightening place, slow and bigoted and bizarre. Kafka could
have had a field day with Tulia. On the morning of July 23, 1999, law enforcement officers fanned out and
arrested more than 10 percent of Tulia's tiny African-American population. Also
arrested were a handful of whites who had relationships with blacks.
The humiliating roundup was intensely covered by the local media, which had
been tipped off in advance. Men and women, bewildered and unkempt, were paraded
before TV cameras and featured prominently on the evening news. They were drug
traffickers, one and all, said the sheriff, a not particularly bright Tulia bulb
named Larry Stewart. Among the 46 so-called traffickers were a pig farmer, a forklift operator and
a number of ordinary young women with children.
If these were major cocaine dealers, as alleged, they were among the oddest
in the U.S. None of them had any money to speak of. And when they were arrested,
they didn't have any cocaine. No drugs, money or weapons were recovered during
the surprise roundup.
Most of Tulia's white residents applauded the arrests, and the local
newspapers were all but giddy with their editorial approval. The first
convictions came quickly, and the sentences left the town's black residents
aghast. One of the few white defendants, a man who happened to have a mixed-race
child, was sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. The hog farmer, a black
man in his late 50's named Joe Moore, was sentenced to 90 years. Kareem White, a
24-year-old black man, was sentenced to 60 years. And so on.
When the defendants awaiting trial saw this extreme sentencing trend, they
began scrambling to plead guilty in exchange for lighter sentences. These ranged
from 18 years in prison to, in some case, just probation.
It is not an overstatement to describe the arrests in Tulia as an atrocity.
The entire operation was the work of a single police officer who claimed to have
conducted an 18-month undercover operation. The arrests were made solely on the
word of this officer, Tom Coleman, a white man with a wretched work history, who
routinely referred to black people as "niggers" and who frequently
found himself in trouble with the law.
Mr. Coleman's alleged undercover operation was ridiculous. There were no
other police officers to corroborate his activities. He did not wear a wire or
conduct any video surveillance. And he did not keep detailed records of his
alleged drug buys. He said he sometimes wrote such important information as the
names of suspects and the dates of transactions on his leg.
In trial after trial, prosecutors put Mr. Coleman on the witness stand and
his uncorroborated, unsubstantiated testimony was enough to send people to
prison for decades.
In some instances, lawyers have been able to show that there was no basis in
fact — none at all — for Mr. Coleman's allegations, that they came from some
realm other than reality.
He said, for example, that he had purchased drugs from a woman named Tonya
White, and she was duly charged. But last April the charges had to be dropped
when Ms. White's lawyers proved that she had cashed a check in Oklahoma City at
the time that she was supposed to have been selling drugs to Mr. Coleman in
Tulia.
Another defendant, Billy Don Wafer, was able to prove — through employee
time sheets and his boss's testimony — that he was working at the time he was
alleged by Mr. Coleman to have been selling cocaine. And the local district
attorney, Terry McEachern, had to dismiss the case against a man named Yul
Bryant after it was learned that Mr. Coleman had described him as a tall black
man with bushy hair. Mr. Bryant was 5-foot-6 and bald.
In a just world, this case would be no more than a spoof on "Saturday
Night Live." Instead it's a tragedy with no remedy in sight.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the William Moses Kunstler Fund
for Racial Justice, the Tulia Legal Defense Project and a number of private law
firms are trying to mount an effort to free the men and women imprisoned in this
fiasco.
The idea that people could be rounded up and sent away for what are
effectively lifetime terms solely on the word of a police officer like Tom
Coleman is insane.
Source: NYTimes
Op/Ed, July 29, 2002
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 13
December 2011
