James C. McKinley Jr. covers the state of Texas for The New York Times.  His recent piece on the racial tension in Paris, Texas is partially a re-write of Howard Witt’s reporting for the Chicago Tribune, but he has uncovered a few bits of fresh material.  I don’t know if Mr. McKinley attended the recent community forum in Paris, but if he didn’t he has seen video footage of the event.  (By the way, you can find a five-minute highlight reel on the Tribune website.)  

Watch the video, re-read Mr. Witt’s article and check out McKinley’s piece and you will get a reasonably thick description of the current controversy.  Black opinion isn’t monolithic, and I doubt white opinion is either. 

In the video clip, for instance, an NAACP representative from Dallas accuses the DA’s office of racial insensitivity; but the local NAACP pointman is more concerned about drug crime on the mean streets of Paris than with civil rights issues.  One middle aged black woman even accuses the New Black Panther Party and other “outsiders” of treating Paris unfairly.

But Brenda Cherry and the Reverend Fred Stovall aren’t the only Paris residents accusing the local power structure of racism.  The issue, in other words, hasn’t just divided the black and white communities in Paris, Texas; it has revealed deep divisions on both the white and black sides of town.

I have visited Paris, Texas on a few occasions–I even have relatives there–but I have never claimed a solid grasp on the facts. 

A few things can be said with confidence, however, even by ill-informed outsiders. Brandon McClelland’s mother, Jacqueline, argues that the initial investigation of her son’s death was sloppy.  It was.  To this day no one really knows what happened to Brandon McClelland and the inadequacy of the initial investigative work is largely to blame.  A bad investigation usually reflects indifference more than anything else. 

Maybe Brandon was run down by a gravel truck; the facts as presently known are highly ambiguous.  Hopefully, the defense attorneys assigned to represent the two white defendants in this case are working hard on an alternative theory of what went down that tragic night.  Until Shannon Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley have their day in court we all need to maintain open minds.  The due process protections guaranteed by the US and Texas constitutions must be honored.

I will have more to say on this story, possibly tomorrow.  In the meantime, read over the most recent story and let us know what you think.

Killing Stirs Racial Unease in Texas

 PARIS, Tex. – The killing of Brandon McClelland, though horrible, never fit the classic description of a lynching. The police say two friends ran him over with a pickup truck after an argument during a night of drinking.

His mother, Jacqueline, says the investigation into his death was shoddy.
But Mr. McClelland was black and the men accused of killing him are white, and his gruesome death has reignited ugly feelings between races that have plagued this small town for generations, going back to the days 100 years ago when it was the scene of brutal public lynchings.

Blacks complain that the justice system is tilted against them; whites complain about the crime, teenage pregnancy and drug use ravaging black neighborhoods.

“I think we are probably stuck in 1930 right about now,” said Brenda Cherry, who is black and is the founder of Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality. “If you complain about anything, you are going to be punished.”

Paris is an agricultural town 100 miles northeast of Dallas that was built on cotton and grain in a part of Texas that shares more with the Deep South than with the West. In 1850, there were 4,000 residents, a quarter of them slaves. A large monument to the Confederate dead stands outside the courthouse, a bronze soldier standing guard, while at the Paris Fairgrounds, no plaques mark the spot where thousands of white spectators watched as black men were burned alive or hanged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Today, 26,000 people live here, about 5,700 of them black. They are concentrated in public housing projects and run-down neighborhoods near the center of town. They send their children to Paris High School, where nearly half the students are black and test scores are low. The best school, North Lamar High School, is 86 percent white, and some blacks complain that the district lines are drawn to keep it that way.

Lamar County’s highest elected official, Judge M. C. Superville, says Ms. Cherry and others who are unhappy with the justice system have exaggerated the role of race in recent events.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding in the community between blacks and whites,” he said. “I do not believe there is systematic racial discrimination in Lamar County. I do believe there is a misperception that that is going on.”

Still, the suspicions and ill will have grown so strong that the federal Department of Justice has dispatched a team of mediators to get residents to begin talking about the problem and to propose possible resolutions.

Last month, about 100 people of all races went to a building on the fairgrounds to vent their frustrations, while federal mediators took notes and tried to keep the peace. The speakers ran the gamut from young members of the New Black Panther Party in Dallas, who accused the local authorities of racism, to older black residents of Paris who chided younger blacks for comparing the problems of today with those of the Jim Crow era.

The few whites who spoke said they were sympathetic to the complaints of some black residents.

Mr. McClelland’s death, on Sept. 16, attracted attention beyond the confines of Lamar County, because, on the surface, it resembled the racially motivated murder in 1998 of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Tex. Three white supremacists hunted Mr. Byrd down and dragged him behind a truck until he died.

Mr. McClelland, 24, was run over and dragged 40 feet by the pickup truck. His mutilated body was found on the side of a road, his skull smashed.

There the similarities to the Byrd killing end, however. Mr. McClelland, an affable young man who worked as a garbage collector and wanted to become a long-haul trucker, had a longstanding friendship with the two men in the truck. They had spent the previous day hanging wallboard and then had gone out drinking after the job.

The men – Shannon Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley, both 27 – fled the scene of the killing, the police said. Later that night, they turned up at Mr. McClelland’s ramshackle home in Paris and told his mother that they had left him walking on the side of the road after they had argued about who should drive.

State troopers at first accepted the men’s story and considered the case a hit and run, but they changed their minds after discovering Mr. McClelland’s blood and tissue on the underside of the truck. Mr. Finley and Mr. Crostley are awaiting trial on murder charges; they have denied running Mr. McClelland down.

 A special prosecutor from Dallas was appointed in November. The Lamar County district attorney, Gary Young, had declined to handle the case because as a private lawyer he represented Mr. Finley against a manslaughter charge in 2003.

“I think we are probably stuck in 1930,” Brenda Cherry, of Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality, said about Paris.
In that case, Mr. Finley shot another friend, who was white, as they were sitting in a pickup. He claimed he had grabbed his friend’s gun and was trying to shoot two armed men who were trying to rob them. Instead, his friend was hit three times in the head by accident, he said.

The district attorney agreed to a plea bargain on the reduced manslaughter charge. Mr. Finley served three years in prison; the robbers were never found.

Mr. Finley’s manslaughter conviction ensnared Mr. McClelland as well. Mr. McClelland was convicted of lying to a grand jury about Mr. Finley’s whereabouts to provide him with an alibi. He served more than a year in prison.

It was this friendship between the men that led the police to conclude that Mr. Finley’s motive in the killing of Mr. McClelland was something other than race, the state police said.

The victim’s mother, Jacqueline McClelland, said that the initial investigation into her son’s death was shoddy and incomplete. The investigators left evidence scattered at the scene: freshly opened beer cans near the body, loose change covered with blood, skull fragments and tissue on the pavement.

Ms. McClelland said it was pressure from civil rights advocates, who held several protests in Paris last fall, that led to the arrest of Mr. Finley and Mr. Crostley. “They would have swept it under the rug, if I hadn’t gotten other people involved,” she said.

Mr. McClelland’s death comes a year after another incident stirred up accusations of racism here. Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black girl, was sentenced by Judge Superville to juvenile prison after she shoved a hall monitor into a wall. Three months earlier, Judge Superville had sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to probation for burning down her family’s house.

National civil rights groups protested what they called the unequal and harsh treatment of Miss Cotton, who spent a year in a West Texas juvenile prison.

Judge Superville denied that race played a role in Miss Cotton’s sentence. He said she had a history of disciplinary problems, and her mother, Creola Cotton, had refused to cooperate with the state’s efforts to change her daughter’s behavior.

But Creola Cotton contends that her daughter was singled out and railroaded. She said she had complained several times to the school district about what she saw as unequal punishments for black and white students. That angered officials, so they retaliated against her daughter, she said.

“We live under a good-old-boy system here: the schoolsthe courthouse, the housing department,” Ms. Cotton said at the recent meeting. “Everybody is relatives or good friends.”

The mayor of Paris, Jesse James Freelen, who is white, dismissed such complaints as the result of “a lack of communication.” He pointed out that the town previously elected a black mayor and now had a black mayor pro tem.

“Once we start communicating,” Mr. Freelen said, “I believe we will find out the problems we believe we have are not as big as we think.”