David Scott, a moderate black Democratic congressman from Georgia, has been getting hate mail laced with swastikas the n-word.  Recently, a Swastika was painted on the sign outside of his office after a contentious public meeting in Smyrna, Georgia. 

In a New York Times column, Gail Collins documents recent cases of anti-health care reform protesters packing heat at contentious town hall meetings. 

While CNN personality Lou Dobbs lends credence to the idea that Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen, health-care protesters (aided and abetted by reputedly sane politicians like Chuck Grassley) have been darkly hinting that reformers, given their way, would end up euthanizing seniors. (more…)

On December 19, 2007, Grace Head, a 66 year-old resident of Arlington, Texas, set her Doberman Pinscher on two black neighbors, Silk Littlejohn and Broderick Gamble after telling them they had to abandon their home.  Then, while Gamble was fending off the dog, Grace Head struck Ms. Littlejohn across the head with a 2-by-4.  Not satisfied with this atrocity, Head jumped onto the hood of Gamble’s Toyota Camry and started stomping.

This is not your average granny.

On Tuesday, August 10, 2009, Grace Head was sentenced to 180 days in State Jail and a $4,000 fine.  It was the lightest sentence allowed by law.   (more…)

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

What happens when the state of Mississippi takes a man to trial five times and fails to obtain a final conviction?

If the defendant is Curtis Flowers you try him a sixth time.  So far as I can gather, no American accused of murder has ever faced trial on the same facts six times.  But if it takes ten trials to convict Flowers, the state of Mississippi, represented by District Attorney Doug Evans, is determined to do it. (more…)

The jury has returned a guilty verdict on a misdemeanor assault charge in the trial of Grace Head.  More importantly, jurors clearly believed the crime was racially motivated whether or not Ms. Head was suffering from bi-polar disorder. 

This appears to be a reasonable verdict in a difficult case.  There was little ambiguity on the guilt-innocence issue, but Grace Head’s bizarre behavior revealed both racial animus and serious mental health issues.  To what extent should we hold disturbed people accountable for their actions? (more…)

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

Why has a black man named Curtis Flowers been to trial five times on the same murder charges?  When Curtis goes to trial for the sixth time he will establish a new national record for the number of times a single defendant has been tried for the same murder.  A big part of the answer lies buried in the history of the town Curtis grew up in. (more…)

A bizarre encounter on December 17, 2007 has evolved into a riveting drama in a Fort Worth, Texas courtroom.  Grace Head, a 66-year old resident of nearby Arlington, stands accused of ordering her dog to attack Silk Littlejohn and her fiance Broderick Gamble.  While Mr. Gamble grappled with Ms. Head’s Doberman Pinscher, the defendant struck Ms. Littlejohn across the side of the head with a two-by-four.  She then jumped up and down on the couple’s Toyota Camry while smashing the vehicle with a tree limb. 

Shortly after Ms. Head was arrested and bonded out, racist graffiti appeared on the Arlington couple’s garage door.  Head is not accused of scrawling the hateful slogan, but many in the civil rights community hold her responsible for the act. 

The charge against Grace Head is aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and criminal mischief.  Prosecutors are claiming, albeit half-heartedly, that the crime was motivated by racial animus. 

Silk Littlejohn is a friend of mine.  Half a year after this tragic incident, Arlington Mayor, Dr.Robert Cluck, asked the Community Service Division of the Department of Justice to convene a meeting of concerned Arlington citizens.  I was one of the 150 people who attended that meeting and, at the end of the day, Ms. Littlejohn and I were among a dozen or so people appointed to an “Arlington Coming Together” committee which has been meeting regularly for the past year. 

Relations between the Arlington couple and Mayor Cluck have been far from cordial.  When the grafitti appeared on their garage door, the City offered to have it removed, but there was no official statement of regret and outrage.  When the couple refused to remove the message themselves until they saw some official expression of concern, the City had it removed without their permission. Ms. Littlejohn believes that Arlington Coming Together was a stop-gap diversion designed to create the impression that a hate crime was being taken seriously. 

She may be right.  Recently, Mayor Cluck and the Arlington City Council decided to disband ACT in favor of an advisory committee hand-picked by city council members. 

These developments have left some ACT members with some serious questions.  Fifty years ago, Arlington was a little, primarily white, community situated between Fort Worth and Dallas.  Things have changed.  Arlington is now a city if well over 300,000, her schools have long been majority-minority and the community has a developed a multi-ethnic flavor.  But with only one non-white member on its city council, the highest level of Arlington’s city government doesn’t reflect the rapidly shifting demographics of the community.

Grace Head has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.  She says she doesn’t remember the episode and claims she would never use racial epithets.  Three psychiatrists have testified that the defendant is bi-polar and often doesn’t take her medicine, factors that might have sparked a psychotic episode.  These witnesses have admitted that everything they know about the defendant comes directly from her–they have no way of peering into her soul and determining what motivated her vicious behavior.

One thing is certain, Silk Littlejohn and Brederick Gamble did nothing to incite violence apart from being black in a predominantly white neighborhood.

Is Grace Head Mentally ill?  Most likely she is.  But the prisons of Texas prisons are awash in inmates with serious mental health issues.  The bar for criminal insanity is set very high and the question will eventually fall to the subjective judgment of twelve Tarrant County jurors. 

Where do we go from here?  The couple’s pastor, the Rev. Frederick Haynes, has rallied the people of his south Dallas Friendship West Baptist Church in support of his parishioners.  Chockwe Lumumba, a civil rights attorney from Jackson, Mississippi, has been retained to represent Littlejohn and Gamble in a possible civil suit against the defendant and the City of Arlington.  (Lumumba, incidentally, represented Curtis Flowers in the second of five trials he has endured in Mississippi.)

The City of Arlington has worked hard to get the victims of this crime to back away from the aggressive pursuit of legal claims.  The DA’s office is prosecuting this case at the couple’s insistence but appears to have little heart for the fight.  This case has been on the docket for months, but Ms. Littlejohn wasn’t asked to tell her story to prosecutors until a week before trial.  The DA’s office didn’t try to find psychiatric experts to rebut claims of legal insanity and appear to be angling for a criminal insanity verdict. 

Can these issues be addressed through our adversarial legal process?  To some extent, yes.  Actions have moral and legal consequences and that’s what the courts are for.  But the criminal justice system won’t bring closure to either the victims of this assault or the City of Arlington.  If they are serious about making things right, representatives of city government might want to sit down with Rev. Haynes, Silk Littlejohn and Broderick Gamble and talk things through.  One session won’t accomplish much,  series of meetings is needed.  One way or another, the city of Arlington must reckon with the enormity of this traumatic incident and address the questions it raises.  This matter must not, and will not be swept under the rug.

You can find coverage of the first day of testimony here, and coverage of the second day of trial here.

 Yesterday Friends of Justice received both sad and joyous news.  As we mourn the passing of our great friend, Marilyn Clement in New York, we rejoice in the birth of Iris Antonia Thompson Ibara in Cambridge Massachusetts. 

Like, Marilyn Clement, Lili Ibara Thompson is one of the unsung heroes of the fight for justice in Tulia, Texas.  In early 2000, Lili was working as a Vista volunteer in Plainview, Texas, twenty-five miles south of Tulia.  Friends of Justice was just 16 days old when we met Lili at a Martin Luther King Day event.  Hog farmer Joe Moore had been sentenced to 90 years in prison a month earlier, and a former track star named Cash Love had just received multiple 99-year sentences.  When we told Lili about some of the other cases of prosecutorial misconduct we had recently witnessed she was horrified. 

Lili Ibara Thompson is a practical, what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it sort of person.  Her immediate thought was that we needed to get the Tulia story to the media.  Retired Baptist pastor, Charles Kiker, and wheat farmer, Gary Gardner, had both written narrative accounts of the injustice we were witnessing and Lili fashioned these accounts into a pitch for the Texas Observer.

When the bundle of materials Lili sent the small but highly-respected monthly landed on the editor’s desk in Austin he handed it to Nate Blakeslee, an aspiring journalist who had just signed on with the Observer.  Nate arrived in April of 2000 and his in-depth investigative piece, The Color of Justice, was published in June of that year.  We were able to secure several hundred copies of Nates article and one Sunday morning, Lili helped stick copies of Blakeslee’s article under the windshield wipers as Tulia’s faithful gathered for worship.

Lili has a law degree but she is currently working as a social worker in Boston because legal work seemed too detached from a hurting world.  It is fitting that Lili and Jeremy Ibara Thompson should bring a child into the world on the same day Marilyn Clement left this world.  We come and we go but the work of justice goes on.

sunrise, sunset
swiftly fly the years,
one season following another,
laiden with happiness,
and tears

“Working for the common good is a wonderful way to live – a wonderful way to spend a lifetime. I entered that work through no virtue of my own, but through the mentoring and nurture, support and inspiration of a whole community of people all over the world… A community that taught me not to be afraid, but to live with a sense of fearlessness. It included the movement for justice in my town, my country and around the world … all taught me to be unafraid.”  Marilyn Clement

Marilyn Boydstun Clement, a tireless worker for civil rights and universal health care, died Monday, August 3, in New York City. She marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. She worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In 2004 she founded Health Care Now!, an organization devoted to single-pay, universal health care.

 I knew Marilyn when we were students together at Tulia High School. I was a senior when she was a freshman. I graduated from THS in 1950, and don’t know that I saw her again until there was an all school reunion at picnic time 50 years later. I had learned that she was a social activist and sought her out to tell her the story of the Tulia Drug Sting. She provided a valuable contact to Margie Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Randy Credico and Sarah and Emily Kunstler at the Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice.  Through these invaluable contacts we were able to secure nationwide media coverage and state-of-the-art legal assistance.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Marilyn lived most of her adult life in New York City. In February, 2004 Patricia and I and Freddie Brookins Sr. took a trip to the Big Apple, where she provided several venues for telling the Tulia story as well as providing wall-to-wall sleeping space for us in her efficiency Village apartment.

There will be a memorial service for Marilyn sometime this fall in New York City. I probably will not attend, but I do plan to give a gift in her memory to Friends of Justice.

I hope some of you can join me in that gesture.

 Charles Kiker

Charter Member of Friends of Justice

The New York Times has a brief obituary and you can find a thorough and well-written account of Marilyn’s work for racial justice and health care reform at the Health Care Now! website.

 

 

While other pundits are searching for the ball in the rough, Frank Rich of the New York Times can be counted on to knock the ball straight down the middle of the fairway.  Though usually identified as a liberal, Rich is actually an independent thinker who challenges the Left when he thinks they’re pandering to a safe constituency, avoiding inconvenient facts. 

Intellectual independence allows the Times’ Sunday columnist to cut to the heart of the issue.

This piece on the Gates-Crowley affair is a case in point.  Rich takes a swipe at rightwing commentators who blather on about reverse racism, but he doesn’t stop there. 

You can’t blame Obama if he’s perplexed about the recent events. He answers a single, legitimate race-based question at the end of a news conference and is roundly condemned for “stepping on his own message” about health care. It was the noisiest sector of the news media that did much of the stepping.

Frank Rich has the guts to part ways with well-established media orthodoxy.  The national media, right, left and center, embraced the Iraq war as a holy crusade and never acknowledged the mistake.   Frank Rich didn’t chase the crowd on Iraq and he never forgave those who did.  Now he is accusing the white punditocracy of jumping to the unwarranted conclusion that Henry Louis Gates was an elitist whiner and that President Obama committed an unpardonable gaffe when he called the arrest stupid. 

Obama, Rich argues, didn’t have to have “all the facts” to see the obvious injustice in the Gates arrest.  So why were so many white commentators (and a few conformist blacks like Juan Williams) so willing to believe Crowley and condescend to Gates?

Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can’t adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white counterparts do.

The Gates business has returned our attention to the deep perception gap between black and white Americans.  If you want the standard take on Gates-Crowley in Black America, consider this scorching column from Bob Herbert.

If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.

The charge: angry while black.

And this:

The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.

Herbert can bash the black underclass with the best of them, but genuine injustice stokes his inner fire.  When the Times columnist saw Sarah and Emily Kunstler’s “Scenes from the drug war” documentary on Tulia he fired off a dozen columns that hooked the indignation of prominent politicians and placed tremendous pressure on the legal establishment in Texas.  True, Herbert waited until the Tulia fight had attracted the attention of the Texas ACLU and the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, but he was willing to take sides in a highly ambiguous case that, prior to his entry into the fray, only lefties like Amy Goodman and Arriana Huffington would touch.

In an era when investigative reporting is rapidly being defunded and mainstream opinion leaders celebrate a post-racial America it is critical that people like Rich and Herbert are willing to stand apart.

I have long argued that Southerners are distinctly more punitive than other Americans.  In an experimental post called “The Religious Roots of Southern Punitiveness,” I noted that rates of incarceration in the cluster of states just to the east of Texas are twice as high as the national average and that 82% of the executions administered since the death penalty was ressurrected in 1976 have been in the South.  Recently, when I expressed surprise that the Cambridge Police Department would arrest a distinguished black professor for disturbing the peace of an irritated officer,  several readers commented that folks in the Northeast are every bit as racist as the folks down south.

To an extent, I agree.  But civil rights resentment still runs strong in states like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, states where the first African American president fared very poorly with white voters.   And now comes the Birther movement.  A hot-0ff-the-presses poll by The Daily Kos finds that, nationwide, when asked if Barack Obama was born in America, 77% said yes, 11% said no, and 12% weren’t sure. 

Considering that there is no evidence supporting the Birther position the 77% figure is a bit distressing.  But you ain’t seen nothin’.

Broken down by region, a disturbing trend emerges.  In the Northeast,  93% said yes, a tiny 4% said no, and 3% said they weren’t sure.  The “yes” vote in the Midwest was 90% and it was 87% in the West.  In the South, however, fully 47% of respondents thought Obama was born in the United States, 23% said he wasn’t and a whopping 30% said they weren’t sure. 

When you break the numbers down by party affiliation, Democrats and Independents answered the question much like folks in the Northeast, Midwest and West, but only 43% of Republicans nationwide believed the President is a citizen, while 28% said he wasn’t a citizen and 30% claimed they didn’t know.  That means that 58% of Republicans refuse to affirm that the President was born on American soil.

I would like to see the figures for white Republicans in states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas.  If 58% of Republicans nationally aren’t convinced that Barack Obama was born in the United States what do the numbers look like in Jena, Louisiana where 80% of the electorate voted for David Duke, or in Winona Mississippi where a state senator can freely admit membership in the most racist organization in America without raising a ripple of  concern in white Republican circles?

It could be argued that we are talking about an irrational position.  For those in the reality-based community, the President’s place of birth was settled long ago.  But this isn’t about evidence; it is about the refusal of a large percentage of southern whites to see a black president as one of us.  It’s about the perceived otherness of black America.

The Daily Kos poll determined that 69% of Birthers live in Southern states, 12% live in the Midwest, 12% in the West, and 6% in the Northeast.

What does all of this say about the objectivity of your typical all-white jury in rural Mississippi or Alabama when the victim is white and the defendant is black?  Do the majority of the people sitting on such a jury truly believe that the defendant is a genuine member of the community.  In such a situation does the phrase “a jury of one’s peers” have any meaning?

Sure, the current Gates vs. Crowley debate suggests that most white coastal moderates have a hard time identifying with the black American experience.  But the birther phenomenon goes much deeper than that.  It is a psychosis akin to the anti-civil rights rage we witnessed fifty years ago. 

The South is different; just ask the Birthers.