Greg Harman of the San Antonio Current has published a review of my Tulia book. “Taking Out the Trash is a complex narrative,” Harman says, “demonstrating that even in the starkest morality tales, human nature inevitably harbors innumerable shades and shadows. An indispensible offering in the growing Tulia canon.”
The full review appears below.
Tulia besieged: ‘Taking our the Trash in Tulia, Texas’
By Greg Harman
The story of Tulia has propelled the careers of a handful of journalists and documentary filmmakers. And the now-infamous 1999 drug sting in the small Panhandle town that put 16 percent of the town’s black residents in jail on manufactured evidence by a crooked lawman was to be is being produced as a full-length feature film starring Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry. But the public story has been mostly the domain of outsiders, where out-of-state crusaders are able to unpack all the worst preconceptions of rural Texas — notions not challenged in the least by the obvious racism on display in Tulia a decade ago.
But an insider’s account has finally broken loose, penned by a key player in this devastating drama. Protestant minister and now author Alan Bean opens with the inflammatory headline that first alerted the town’s 5,000 residents that 46 of their neighbors had been busted in the town’s largest-ever drug sweep. It read simply, “Tulia’s streets cleared of garbage.” It read simply, “Tulia’s streets cleared of garbage.” While certainly not polished literature, Bean’s book is better.
The lively, exquisitely detailed, and engrossing read hones in on the ways that national media changed the local conversation for good and ill and chronicles how seemingly supportive state and national human-rights groups frequently competed with each other and sometimes worked at cross purposes with those relying on their assistance to achieve justice. Taking Out the Trash is a complex narrative, demonstrating that even in the starkest morality tales, human nature inevitably harbors innumerable shades and shadows.
An indispensible offering in the growing Tulia canon.
Taking Out the Trash in Tulia, Texas
By Alan Bean
Advanced Concept Design Books
$16.95, pp 386
Friends of Justice 
So a full length feature film starring Billy Bob and Halle is in the offing? I thought that project was dead in the water.
I suspect it is, but people find information about the film when they Google Tulia.
“The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression.”
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
Kelley’s book studies the connections between intellectual rhetoric and social movements.
My own view is that this rhetoric can often result in terrible violence if the focus is strictly on the unjust actions of members of one racial group while the constructive efforts of that same group are glossed over or ignored.
Often the result of this rhetoric is the demonetization of the entire race in the minds of a few, which then is used to justify violent acts against members of that race.
In the following four cases blacks felt justified in killing what each murderer called the “white devils”.
The Zebra Murders of the 70’s carried out by the “Death Angels”:
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=21980
…this group which believed that whites were created 3,000 years ago by a black mad scientist named Yacub who wanted a race of inferiors to rule over. Death Angels believed they could earn “points” towards going to heaven when they died if they killed whites. For them, whites were not human beings but “grafted snakes,” “blue-eyed devils” and “white motherf—–s.”
The Yahweh ben Yahweh initiation murders of the 80’s:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/us/09yahweh.html?_r=1
…”new members were made to prove their devotion by killing a random white person, usually a vagrant. It said Yahweh ben Yahweh told members ‘to kill me a white devil and bring me an ear.’”
The Black Rage defense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_rage_%28law%29
The Long Island Railroad mass murder case 90’s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Ferguson_%28mass_murderer%29
After his arrest:
“In 1994, Ferguson was apparently involved in a fistfight with fellow inmate Joel Rifkin. The brawl began when Ferguson asked Rifkin to be quiet while Ferguson was using the telephone. The New York Daily News reported the fight escalated after Ferguson told Rifkin, “I wiped out six devils (white people), and you only killed women,” to which Rifkin responded, “Yeah, but I had more victims.” Ferguson then punched Rifkin in the mouth.”
The Beltway Sniper murders 2000’s:
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2003/08/the-beltway-snipers-motives
“The white man is the devil,” Malvo said, summing up Muhammad’s thinking.
Malvo said Muhammad told him, “We are going to go to the Washington, D.C., area, and we are going to terrorize these people,” relating how Muhammad hated America for its “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy.”
Notice that each murderer felt justified in killing random white devils totally unknown to them and it is quite possible that some were social activists like yourself.
Choose your words wisely lest you incite another new series of murders in this decade.