I am deeply grateful to journalist Sheldon Alberts for this thorough treatment of my work with Friends of Justice. The media tends to believe that the blatant injustice in little places like Tulia, Texas and Jena, Louisiana naturally rises to public attention. It ain’t so. I was supposed to hook up with Mr. Alberts on September 20th in Jena, but the lack of cell phone contact that day made it impossible for us to find each other. So, last month, he made a special trip to Arlington to interview me.
Sheldon Alberts is from Melfort, Saskatchewan, a town just down the road from Weyburn, my father’s hometown, so he was deeply interested in the influence of Tommy Douglas in shaping my outlook. Douglas, for all you non-Canadians, became Premier of Saskatchewan in 1944, and introduced a province-wide heathcare system in 1961 that became the model for Canada’s current medicare system. Prior to his career in politics, Douglas was pastor of Weyburn’s First Baptist Church and my father, Gordon Bean’s Sunday school teacher. Although his New Democratic Party never gained power at the national level, Douglas was voted the greatest Canadian of the 20th century.
Although no one, to my knowledge, has ever made note of the fact, the rise of the Cooperative Commonwealth party was the Canadian equivalent of the civil rights movement; an improbable movement focused on justice for the little guy. At 54 (I’ll be 55 in a few days) I have just recently come the age where I start wondering why I am driven to do what I do.
I should note that three families were involved in overturning the injustice in Tulia: the Beans, the Gardners, and the Kikers. Charles and Patricia Kiker (my wife, Nancy’s parents), aren’t mentioned below, but they played a pivotal role in that fight.
‘A nose for injustice’
| Sheldon Alberts |
| CanWest News Service |
|
JENA, La. — The highway leading into Jena, La., from the west is a narrow, curvy stretch of blacktop surrounded by towering southern pines that block the horizon. In the morning, with heavy fog pressing tight against the treetops, it is a landscape that can inspire a sense of dread.
It was like that last Jan. 26 when Alan Bean first drove into this little oil and lumber town to investigate reports of a brewing race scandal.
Bean, an unassuming 54-year-old Canadian, arrived here knowing only the sketchy details of the town’s troubles. He’d been told of nooses hanging from a tree, of racial clashes between whites and blacks, and of a local prosecutor’s overzealous pursuit of a half-dozen African-American teenagers.
“I had the sense that I should be scared. Had I done this five or six years ago even, I would have been petrified,” says Bean. “There was this fog hanging from the trees and covering the road. It really does create an eerie aspect. But I realized I had become good at this. I knew what to do.”
Bean, the executive director of the Texas-based Friends of Justice, had been invited to Jena by the parents of six black students in a heap of legal trouble.
In December 2006, LaSalle County district attorney Reed Walters had charged the six teens with attempted murder for beating a white student named Justin Barker.
Bean sensed the adult-court charges were excessive. Although Barker was knocked unconscious, he was discharged from hospital within hours of the assault.
After more than a dozen trips to Jena throughout the early months of 2007, Bean linked the attack on Barker to an incident the previous September, when white students hung nooses from a tree black students had asked permission to sit under. It would transform the “Jena Six” from local controversy into an internationally known case that in September spurred the largest civil rights rally in the U.S. since the 1960s.
“Alan was the first one in Jena. He has been there on the ground, repeatedly, on a shoestring budget, talking to witnesses, talking to families, figuring out what happened,” says Richard Cohen, executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Atlanta.
“Alan is like a human divining rod. He has a nose for injustice, and a talent to bring it to light.”
But the story of how Bean came to uncover the Jena Six story is as long and winding as the roads he has travelled in Louisiana.
Born in Calgary in 1953, Bean moved three years later with his family to Yellowknife, where his father was a radio operator for the Department of Transport.
It was there that Bean began hearing his father’s stories about the social gospel of Tommy Douglas, who had taught Sunday school to a young Gordon Bean in Weyburn, Sask.
“Tommy Douglas was my father’s hero,” Bean says. “Even though my father was kind of a fundamentalist Baptist, he had a very progressive Ôhelp the little guy’ view.”
When the family moved to Edmonton in the early 1960s, one of the first things Bean saw on the family’s new black-and-white television was Martin Luther King’s speech at the March on Washington. Although not yet a teenager, Bean felt a calling. “Even now, I cannot talk about King’s ÔI Have a Dream’ speech without becoming emotional,” says Bean.
“When I see systems that are so clearly racist in their effect, if not in their intention, it just makes my blood boil.”
Determined to emulate Douglas and King, Bean became an ordained Baptist minister and preached in churches from Medicine Hat, Alta., to British Columbia.
He moved to the U.S. in 1986 with his wife, Nancy, an American, after becoming disillusioned with the Baptist Union of Western Canada.
The couple eventually settled in the Texas panhandle town of Tulia, population 5,000, where their lives took the dramatic turn that ultimately led Bean to Jena.
Bean and an associate, Gary Gardner, played key roles in bringing national attention to the 1999 arrests in Tulia of 46 men — 39 of them black — in a massive cocaine sting. The arrests were made by an undercover cop hailed in the Tulia newspaper for getting the “scumbags” off the streets.
The Tulia drug case devastated the town’s small black community. One man received a 60-year prison term for allegedly selling one-eighth of an ounce (about three grams) of cocaine; dozens more were convicted and received lengthy sentences.
But what Bean and Gardner discovered was that the undercover detective who broke the case fabricated most of the drug buys, and had himself been arrested on theft charges. No drugs, moreover, were found on any of the defendants. In 2003, Texas Gov. Rick Perry pardoned the defendants.
“We didn’t have any funding. We were basically subsidizing the work out of our family’s savings account,” says Bean. “But a tremendous amount of good came out of it.”
The Tulia case left Bean convinced African-Americans were victims of a “new Jim Crow” segregation — a legal system that routinely over-prosecutes blacks.
“It’s the American reliance on the strategy of mass incarceration as a response to poverty-related dysfunction,” Bean says. Inspired by the results in Tulia, but ostracized by the town’s white community, Bean relocated to Arlington, Tex., where he runs Friends of Justice from his home.
“I think this is a really meaningful way of doing ministry as a Christian pastor,” Bean says. “I never really felt I was accomplishing anything in traditional pastoral ministry.”
Bean’s work in Tulia drew the attention of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which in early 2007 urged him to take a closer look at an obscure case stirring emotions in central Louisiana.
Long before civil rights leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson could even pronounce Jena — it’s JEENA — Bean spent hours in the county courthouse, reading witness statements and interviewing the jailed teens.
The result of Bean’s investigation was a 5,000-word narrative that concluded Justin Barker’s beating was the violent climax of a months-long conflict that began with the noose incident.
More significantly, Bean pointed to prosecutor Walters as a central antagonist. Walters had warned students at a school assembly that he could ruin their lives “with a stroke of a pen,” a threat Bean says the prosecutor carried out by unnecessarily charging the Jena Six with attempted murder.
Armed with his version of events in Jena, Bean contacted Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune and Tom Mangold of the BBC, whose early reports on the Jena Six sparked international media interest.
“We never wanted to say, in Tulia or in Jena, that these people were necessarily guilty or innocent,” Bean says in an interview at his Texas home. “The question is, are they getting equal justice? Are they being railroaded?”
The Jena Six case has been Bean’s greatest success in eight years as a criminal justice reform activist. But he is resented by many white residents of Jena, who reject Bean’s assertion that Barker’s beating was spawned by earlier racist incidents. “Alan Bean is seen as the one who created the illusion of Jena, La., as this racist town,” says Craig Franklin, editor of the Jena Times and a critic of Bean and the Jena Six.
“I am sure that some of the families of the Jena Six hold him in pretty high regard. To the rest of us, his version of events is filled with a lot of untruths.”
Bean stands by his investigation. Moreover, he believes he’s filling a vital role among justice reform activists in the U.S. — ferreting out new facts and crafting public opinion in order to ensure defendants get a fair shake from the legal system.
“Almost never does anybody intervene for drug defendants or people accused of a violent crime at a pre-trial level, where the evidence is still ambiguous and nobody can tell whether they are innocent or guilty,” Bean says.
“Nobody intervenes and says, ÔThis process stinks.’ In places like Jena, it’s important to tell the whole story.”
Prosecutors eventually dropped the attempted murder charges against five of the Jena Six and transferred their cases to juvenile court. The adult-court conviction of one student, Mychal Bell, was overturned.
The Sept. 20 protest in Jena attracted more than 20,000 people. But at the height of publicity surrounding the case, Bean slipped quietly into the background.
The spotlight fell instead on Sharpton and Jackson who — despite having never been to Jena until days before the rally — were eager to take centre stage.
“I realized that when we were able to bring people of national prominence into the story, it would be a cutthroat competition for the microphone,” Bean says. “It was inevitable we would be pushed aside.”
Friends of Justice 