Kelly Whalen and Cassandra Herrman invested years of their lives making “Tulia, Texas” and their dedication is being recognized. The piece they created for the PBS program Independent Lens was recently nominated for an Emmy.
According to the folks at Independent Lens, “TULIA, TEXAS shows how America’s war on drugs and its over-zealous law enforcement, combined with racial divisions, have exposed deep-seated animosities and even starker injustices.”
But Whalen and Herrman dealt with a painful subject in a compassionate and understated way. The Independent Lens website now features a “Tulia talks back” section with comments from folks on both sides of the drug sting controversy. The program comes in for some criticism from those who didn’t like seeing their community branded as uniquely racist; but the comments are generally appreciate, even laudatory.
Page Lacey Heisser, a woman who grew up in Tulia, left this comment. “One of the strengths of the film is its plain explanation of how rural economics, politics and small town justice converge to influence decent citizens of a town towards making such bad decisions. I think Tulia—like other small towns—is made up of women and men who are focused on their families, their jobs, local sports, church events and keeping their heads above water.”
Page wishes “Tulia, Texas” was a mandatory part of the school curriculum in her home town. I appreciate her focus on the confluence of “rural economics, politics and small town justice” because all three get plenty of attention in “Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas”, my soon-to-be-released take on the story. Racism was a factor, to be sure, but reducing a complex phenomenon to a single factor introduces grave distortion. Herrman and Whalen avoided that trap and the results are illuminating.
Friends of Justice joins the many admirers of this excellent documentary in congratulating the filmmakers on their Emmy nomination.
I conclude with an ironic sidenote. For decades, Tulia maintained a rough-and-ready equilibrium between church-going Puritanism and frontier town anarchy by allowing a string of bootleg bars to proliferate in the Sunset Addition, the black section of town. A former Tulia mayor once told me that Joe Moore, a hog farmer sentenced to 90 years for allegedly selling drugs to Tom Coleman, did the community a service by running a bootleg bar. Tulia was able to maintain its status as a “dry” Bible Belt community, but anyone who wanted a bottle of hootch could scoot across the tracks to Joe’s Funz-a-Poppin’ joint.
Funz-a-Poppin’ was bull-dozed in the early 1990s while Joe was cooling his heels in jail on drug charges equally as bogus as those filed in the name of Tom Coleman. But times have changed. In the last general election, Tulia voted to allow the sale of alcohol in local stores. You still can’t buy “liquor by the drink” in Tulia, but the recently opened “Polo’s Sports Cafe” has a BYOB policy and doesn’t admit minors. According to my Tulia contacts, Polo’s has a pool table, music and dancing–the same recipe that made Funz-a-Poppin’ popular with locals back in the day.
As the demise of dry laws suggests, Tulia is gradually evolving into a majority-minority community. The drug sting was, among other things, an attempt to forestall the inevitable. It could be argued that the Tulia of 1955 was a more prosperous and functional community than the Tulia of today; but that kind of town is no longer sustainable in the rural Panhandle.
Friends of Justice 
Kelly and Cassandra portray the tragedy of Tulia’s drugwar with care and art. Avoiding the pitfalls of noble and demonic caracatures makes this by far the best piece done on Tulia. It took me several years before I was able to view this painful chapter of my life, but it was well worth the sting. Thanks, Kelly and Cassandra.
No pun intended by “well worth the sting” eh Nancy?
I expect that Polo’s will come under much closer scrutiny than Funz-a-poppin did back in the days.
This is awesome, but getting the story together was done by you all I believe? So you did a wonderful job or this would not be happening either.
God Bless Friends of Justice.
I really enjoy reading about the downfall of Tome Coleman and of how he framed people when they were guilty of nothing but being from the wrong side of the tracks so to speak. A similar situation was tried in Oregon County Missouri back in the early 1990’s when a Sheriff and his cohorts attempted to frame several innoscent people on drug charges so they could have the peoples homes and farms seized and sold and the farms owners sent to prison; Tom Coleman would have fit right in with this corrupted bunch of crooked law officers who controlled the Court and Sheriff’s Office of Oregon County Missouri.
how dare you stand outside and judge. i was raised and work in tulia. thedrug bust was done wrong but that does not change the fact there was and still is a problem. after it is over all that was created is a place where drugs are bad and there id no law to change things. drive around and look at the drug houses and praise these two people that made the movie and have done nothing to improve life here now.