I met Ed Burns and Radley Balko at a summit on snitch testimony in Atlanta in March of last year.  A few months later, I spent a few days with Mr. Balko in the Lafayette area last year researching a story on the snitching crisis.  Radley is probably the best journalist on the drug war beat in America.  Check out his libertarian-leaning blog, The Agitator, here.

My wife and I get together with Ed Burns and company every free night to watch another episode of The Wire (delivered to our door by Netflix).  We are currently half way through the third season and we’re hooked.  A few days ago, Balko did a telephone interview with Burns that serves as a splendid companion piece to my Prison-shaped Communities rant and my Hard Times in Bunkie Louisiana narrative. 

If you don’t believe Alan Bean, then perhaps you’ll listen to a guy who has spent his life fighting in Viet Nam, the Baltimore school system and as a Baltimore cop.  Burns may sound burned-out and cynical, but pay particular attention to his glowing review of Geoff Canada’s work in Harlem near the end of Balko’s interview.  Burns is highly critical of most established non-profits working, ostensibly, for the poor and underprivileged.  His arguments are compelling and comport fully with my experience.

Alan Bean, Friends of Justice

Richard Cohen checked out the Pew report on mass incareration and has responded with a simple question: Why are all these young black males killing one another?

The Washington Post columnist isn’t a tuff-on-crime zealot–he’s asking an honest question.  The same question frequently surfaces at predominantly African American gatherings.

The Pew study, which I discussed in a recent post, doesn’t address black-on-black crime, so why is Cohen bringing it up?  Two reasons: (1) Americans don’t want to rescind the policy of mass incarceration if it’s going to put dangerous people back on the streets, and (2) unlike arrest and convictions statistics, homicide stats can’t be fudged.  The number of stiffs in the morgue is unaffected by the ideology of the person doing the counting.  We can argue that black males are in the joint on drug charges due to institutional racism, but how do we explain all the violence?  Are white racists responsible for that too?

The current criminal justice debate (to the extent there is one) bounces between liberals screaming about racism and conservatives waxing righteous on the personal responsibility theme.  Cohen, for his part, is willing to stipulate to high degrees of racism in the system (personal and institutional); he is merely suggesting that the cultural implosion of “the black underclass” is also part of the problem.

Richard Cohen poses a good question, but he is a bit short on answers.  Like most Americans, the man is confused.  We don’t like to be called “the incarceration nation”; but our public safety concerns and our commitment to the American virtues of hard work and personal responsibility make us uneasy about government-driven solutions.  If the problem is fundamentally spiritual and moral, what does Washington have to offer?

At root, mass incarceration isn’t about spirituality or morality; it’s about economics.

The political success of Barack Obama, Cohen suggests, gives the lie to the complaint that African Americans can’t make it in America.  A valid point.  Most black Americans have prospered since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.  We don’t have anything approaching economic or political parity, but amazing progress has been made . . . unless we are talking about poor black males who drop out of school.

In 1960, only 1.4% of black male dropouts was incarcerated; by 2000, the incarceration rate among this demographic had risen to a shocking 25%.  That’s right: one-in-four black male high school dropouts is currently locked up.  In 2004, 72% of black dropouts were out of work, compared to 34% of white and only 19% of Hispanic dropouts.

How do we account for this shocking free fall in employment among the most vulnerable members of the black community? 

In the late 1960s, just as the civil rights movement was beginning to bear fruit, a fundamental economic shift began in America.  We moved from an industrial-manufacturing economy desperate for cheap, unskilled labor to a post-industrial, service-based economy with a steadily declining demand for uneducated and unskilled workers.

The vast majority of drug dealers and prison inmates are high school dropouts who haven’t adapted to the new economy.  The erosion of conventional economic opportunity in poor black communities spawned an underground street economy. 

Most black-on-black crime is rooted in a lawless street environment where competition for turf and (far more frequently) mindless squabbles over girls and petty slights easily devolve into gun play.   

Mass incarceration is America’s public policy response to the street economy.  Unfortunately, the solution has encouraged the problems it was designed to alleviate.

A young, street level drug dealer goes to prison where he congregates with equally uneducated street punks.  Eventually, usually within a year or two, he is back on the streets dragging a felony conviction behind him like a ball and chain.  Felony status functions like a negative credential.  If a college degree translates into opportunity; a felony record slams doors wherever you turn.  You can’t get the kind of job that would allow you to support a family.  You can’t get a Pell grant.  You can’t get public assistance.  In some states, you can’t even vote.

Driven even further away from the conventional economy, the young man returns to the streets.  Soon he lives so far from the rhythms of the straight marketplace he becomes virtually unemployable–unless we’re talking drugs. 

A year after being released back to the streets, 75% of uneducated inmates are unemployed and 45% are back behind bars.  In time, a prison stretch becomes an expected part of the game.

Street punks make atrocious fathers, but that doesn’t stop them from begetting children.  Partners and children are negatively impacted by the dysfunction of absentee dads.  The children of incarcerated parents are six times as likely as more fortunate children to experience incarceration themselves.

But it doesn’t end there.  The stigma associated with young black males extends from unemployed ex-offenders to the hard-working and the ambitious.  Young black males are treated with suspicion by law enforcement.  Charged with a crime they often take a plea bargain even if they are innocent.  Studies show that the average employer is more likely to employ a white felon than a black applicant with a clean record. 

We are now dealing with entire communities shaped by incarceration in which young children grow up surrounded by unemployed grown-ups with little personal ambition.  The values and survival skills required for street survival are antithetical to the values and survival skills demanded in the mainstream working world. 

Eventually, a separate society emerges: a nation within a nation.  On HBO’s The Wire, police officers and gang bangers inhabit a world inhabited by two distinct groups of people: “niggas” and “citizens”.  For members of the prison-shaped community, the presumption of innocence is a polite fiction.  Convictions are obtained with ittle evidence or, as happened in Tulia, Texas, no real evidence at all. 

As a practical matter, participatory democracy is limited to citizens.  A we’re-all-in-this-thing-together spirit gives way to a hardboiled us-against-them sentiment.  A politics of fear stalks the land.  As prison-shaped communities grow, public safety erodes.  Everyone is affected.  Together we are being sucked into a tragic death spiral.

So, what’s the answer?  First, let’s stop the bleeding.  The war on drugs needs to be mothballed–the law of supply and demand insures that street punks will be peddling their wares no matter how much tax money we invest in stopping them.  Let’s take the incarceration rate back to where it was in 1980, before the madness began.

Finally, let’s realize that our problem is primarily economic.  We don’t have enough low-skilled jobs for all the low-skilled workers and we don’t have enough high-skill workers for the high-skill jobs.  Let’s send our best teachers to the worst schools and pay them accordingly.  Let’s find a new way to finance public education–a system limited by the local tax base will never bring good education to poor communities.

Thanks to mass incarceration, the social mores of the prison have become the central shaping reality in poor African American communities.  The almost universal failure of Americans to grasp this basic concept frustrates productive debate. 

Liberals have a solid grasp of the tail of racism and conservatives have a strangle hold on the trunk of personal responsibility.  But the elephant in the room is economic.  Our musical chairs economy leaves too many people standing when the music stops.  We’ve been sending the losers to prison when  the only workable solution is to find some more chairs.

Once we grasp the dynamics of the prison-shaped community (something conservatives and liberals should be able to agree on) we will be free to talk productively about race and responsibility.

The Pew Charitable Trusts believes that facts, figures, sidebar quotations and multi-colored graphs are the keys to policy change.  For years now, policy wonks have been crunching the numbers and concluding that America can’t afford its vast gulag.

But is anybody listening? 

If you are concerned about America’s addiction to mass incarceration you will want to give the Pew Center on the State’s report your careful attention.  There is nothing new here. 

You will learn that virtually one-in-one hundred American adults is currently locked up–a fact that has received headline attention in newspapers across the country. 

You will learn that the incarceration of women is exploding. 

You will learn that one-in-nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 is currently locked up. 

You will learn that some states (Louisiana, for instance) minimize the cost of incarceration by running prisons on the cheap, while other states (like California) are in deep financial trouble because they pay prison personnel inflated salaries.

The Pew report is riddled with common sense, smart-on-crime quotations from the nations governors–an indication that lock-’em-up political rhetoric may be on the decline.

None of this explains why America locks up between five and ten times as many of her citizens as do other Western democracies.  Nor is there any serious attempt to grapple with the bizarre over-incarceration of young black males.  The one-in-nine statistic suggests that something is terribly wrong–but the precise malady is never diagnosed. 

I would like to see a report focusing on the incarceration of poor black people.  What percentage of young black males in America’s poorest neighborhoods are currently locked up?  One-in-three?  One-in-two?  What percentage of this group is “in the system”: that is, in prison, jail, on probation or on parole? 

In Bunkie, Louisiana, for instance, I am told, few young black males have a clean record.  Why is that?

The two simple answers are, (a) because black people commit far more crimes than white people, and (b)because of racist law enforcement.  The Pew study sheds no light on this issue.

The report authors realize that Americans care as much about their taxes as they care about their safety.  Argue that safety comes with a steep price tag and you might get some defections from the tuff-on-crime consortium.

I doubt this approach will be any more effective this time than it has been in the past. 

True, big states like California and Texas are having a hard time paying for their bloated prison systems.  Minor adjustments are being made.  The cancerous growth is slowing and a few state prison systems have actually declined by a percentage point or two.  But though America is experiencing a measure of sticker shock, our love affair with mass incarceration continues unabated.

Why are we willing to spend billions of dollars on prisons and prison guards?  For the same reason we are willing to mortgage our children’s futures to military adventures in places like Viet Nam and Iraq; it makes us feel better.  If we believe that a big army and a big prison system make us safer, no price tag will be too high. 

Like all empires, America is obsessed with safety.  We spend far more on loss-prevention strategies than other nations because we have far more to lose.

Nothing will change until we focus on the direct relationship between poverty, crime and incarceration.  Politicians pass draconian laws which, if enforced, are guaranteed to fill up the prisons.  Law enforcement makes the most of these laws because it keeps the tax dollars flowing coming. 

Policy wonks understand that, althugh Americans are paying for security, they aren’t getting the goods.  Unfortunately, it is in no ones best interest (excepting a few policy wonks paid by major foundations) to make this simple point.

The war on drugs is the elephant in the room.  Our prisons are overflowing with felons because, back in the early 80s, we decided to incarcerate our way to a drug-free America.  The message wasn’t “Just say No”, the message was, “if you say Yes we will lock you up for a very, very long time.  Moreover, we will make it impossible for you to go to college or get a good job as long as you draw breath.

 Inmates go to crime school for a few years.  We dump them back on the streets without training, counseling or guidance.  There is nothing “ex” about being an ex-offender; you drag the felony designation behind you like a ball and chain. 

Desperate and disillusioned, most felons return to whatever it was that got them in trouble in the first place. Usually that involves using or selling drugs; frequently it means both.  In poor neighborhoods, it’s the only gig that pays.

The Pew study is a helpful repository of useful information, but it will have no effect on public policy.  As George H.W. Bush’s use of the Willy Horton episode made explicit, public policy is driven by narrative, by story.  As Barack Obama’s electoral success suggests, most white Americans are willing to embrace educated, articulate, upwardly mobile African Americans as fellow citizens.  But most white Americans (and a good chunk of black America) remain convinced that poor black males possess a pathological propensity for violence and crime so strong that mass incarceration is the only practical response.

Unfortunately, commercial Hip Hop music reinforces this impression. 

The civil rights generation wants to bury the n-word, but the popularity of the term on the streets is instructive.  If HBO’s The Wire is anything to go by, the n-word is the flip side of the word “citizen”.  People who embrace the n-word see themselves as existing in a world apart from the benefits and obligations of American citizenship.  Incarceration merely enhances this impression.  People who think this way are a danger to themselves and others, but what is the solution?

I’m not knocking the Pew report.  These folks know their audience, and I will probably use some of their charts in my PowerPoint presentations.  But Friends of Justice is about narrative-based advocacy: telling real-life stories as they unfold.  Change the race-and-poverty story and you change public policy.

I haven’t said much about developments in the Jena 6 story because there hasn’t been much to say.  Last week I paid a visit to Jena and have remained in conversation with defense counsel and the Jena 6 families.   Sherell Stewart of Black America Web called District Attorney Reed Walter’s office this week.  She was told that Mr. Walters would like to settle these cases through plea agreements or jury trials in March and April. 

This comes as a surprise to defense counsel.  They have heard nothing from Mr. Walters.  Attorneys making special trips to Jena hoping for a word with the District Attorney have been stonewalled.

My thoughts on the subject can be found in the second half of Ms. Stewart’s article.  The media is still calling, but journalists, naturally, are waiting for a break in the legal log jam. 

Alan Bean

Jena Six Attorneys, D.A. Reed Walters Both Want Case Settled Before Remaining Trials

Date: Thursday, February 28, 2008
By: Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, BlackAmericaWeb.com

The six black teens were locked up after a December 2006 school fight where a white student, Justin Barker, was beaten at Jena High School. The prosecutor in the case has said that the beating of Barker warranted strict punishment.

Activists say Jena has two separate systems of justice for blacks and whites. Whites who hung nooses at the school in August 2006 were suspended for several days. Walters has said there were no hate crime laws in Louisiana that would apply to the hanging of the nooses by the high school students.
 
The amount of the Jena Six’s bonds ranged as high as $135,000, and the potential sentences on the felony charges for those being treated as adults could have ranged as high as 75 years, attorneys have said. Charges have since been reduced.

Last summer, Bell was found guilty, but on appeal, the court said that because he was a juvenile at the time of the incident, his matter should have been handled in juvenile court. Bell agreed to a plea deal in December, accepting a juvenile sentence of 18 months.

Bell was the first to be convicted in the case that brought national attention to the tiny Louisiana town.

More than 20,000 people descended on Jena on Sept. 20 in one of the nation’s largest civil rights marches in recent years. For months, internet blogs and activists called for freedom for the Jena Six.

Hickman said his client Bryant Purvis should not be required to serve additional time.

“We maintain that he was not involved,” Hickman said. Purvis was locked up about two days in December 2006 in connection with the incident.

In recent weeks, Purvis has had problems in Texas, where he is now attending high school. He confronted another youth who was said to have vandalized his vehicle. He was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault.

The Jena trial for Purvis is scheduled to start on March 24, but Hickman said he will file for a change of venue on Friday, which will delay the trial. The local judge has to rule first on the request, and the attorney said if that ruling is not acceptable, he can appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Purvis has been a standout on the basketball team this season at Hebron High School in Carrollton, Texas. Hickman said some colleges were looking at Purvis last year, and he is planning to attend after completing high school.

Hickman said the Texas incident should not impact the Jena trial, but it may affect the way the district attorney perceives his client.

Attorneys for the Jena Six have said their clients can not get a fair trial LaSalle Parish because of the history with the district attorney and with Judge J.P. Mauffrey.

Alan Bean of the Texas-based Friends of Justice said it would be in the best interest of the town and the young men to settle the cases instead of going to trial.

“I get the impression that Walters doesn’t want to appear weak, but he does not want his own involvement in these cases to receive additional scrutiny,“ Bean told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “I don’t think he wants it to go to trial because the media would descend on the town again.“

Bean began more than a year ago contacting media and advocacy groups across the country to make them aware of the plight of the Jena Six, youths he said were not getting the justice to which they are entitled.

“They want to get on with their lives, but sometimes it’s difficult with something like this hanging over your head,” he said.

Shaw and Bailey have relocated to Georgia temporarily where they are attending school, according to published reports.

Beard, who was a juvenile at the time of the incident, has returned to Jena High School.

Jones, who was a senior at the time of the incident, has completed his requirements, and landed a job working in the oil industry, his father told BlackAmericaWeb.com last year.

Still, Bean said, the young men, their families and their town can move on once the cases are settled.

“No one who is involved on either side can really breathe easy and return to normal life until this is settled,” he said. “The time has come for that to happen.”

An update to this post can be found here.

At a glance, Bunkie looks like any other cash-strapped central Louisiana town.  It’s a jumble of crumbling shacks, modest bungalos and a clutch of picturesque mansions straight out of Gone with the Wind.   Bunkie used to be a predominantly white community, but as one old timer told me, “the old whites are dying and the young whites are movin’ out–pretty soon you got yourself a black majority.  Used to be the east side was black and the west side was white, with Highway 71 as the divider.  But now a lot of black folks are buying homes on the west side.  That causes conflict; a lot of whites don’t want to live around blacks.”

I first visited Bunkie on February 22, 2007; exactly one year ago.  I had been organizing the families of the Jena 6 and Tony Brown, a radio personality in nearby Alexandria, had interviewed me on his morning talk show. 

“You’ve got to come down to Bunkie,” Denise Atkins told me, “we got it real bad down here.”

Denise arranged a public meeting in an old restaurant that was in the process of renovation.  A crowd of thirty showed up for fried chicken and conversation.  Everyone wanted to talk about Chad Jeansonne, a detective with the Bunkie Police Department who had learned every trick in the drug war manual. 

Moments into the meeting, several participants noticed a shadowy figure lurking in a darkened corner of the room.  A middle aged black woman in the uniform of the Bunkie Police Department emerged from her hiding spot and confronted her accusers.

“What you doin’ spying on us?” somebody asked.  “I’ve seen you on those raids where the cops come busting in without no warrant.  You know how they do us!”

The officer was unrepentant.  “If ya’ll would quit doing drugs and hanging out on the street corner you wouldn’t have nothing to worry about!”

 “We all work hard for our money,” a young woman shot back.  It was a familiar conversation: Mos Def meets Bill Cosby.  The disgruntled officer sauntered out of the room.

A few days later, I got a phone call from an officer with the Louisiana State Police.  “Hello Dr. Bean,” a pleasant voice said.  “I hear you’ve been down to Bunkie talking to some folks and I was just curious about your business.”

“I was invited to Bunkie by some concerned citizens,” I replied.

“What were they concerned about?”

“Oh, the usual,” I replied.  “Racial profiling, warrantless searches, and coerced testimony and plea agreements.  But the conversation kept coming around to one officer in particular: a fellow named Jeansonne; Chad Jeansonne.”

“Well, I’m sure your investigation will lead you to the conclusion that Mr. Jeansonne is a fine officer doing really good work for us down there in Bunkie.”

This prophecy has gone unfulfilled.  After chatting with four ex-Bunkie police officers who had worked with Jeansonne I started taking the complaints emerging from Bunkie’s poor black community much more seriously.  Unsubstantiated rumors make the rounds in little towns and I have learned to suspend judgment.  But as one attorney who has defended dozens of clients in Avoyelles Parish recently told me: “When you got one defendant saying the cops are planting evidence and faking drug cases, you brush it off.  But when every guy you represent has the same story, you start to see a pattern.  All these little towns have bad cops; but this Jeansonne fellow is totally out of control.”

I haven’t been able to do much with the horror stories emerging from Bunkie, Louisiana.  The allegations are serious, but most of it ends in a he-said-she-said standoff.  The story of Larry Bazile is different.

Larry Bazile is a big man with a drug conviction on his record–par for the course for black males in towns like Bunkie.  Bazile took a plea offer for a probated sentence when the prosecutor told him he didn’t stand a chance in court.  The evidence against him was sketchy at best; but Larry knew what happened when black males roll the dice with a jury in Avoyelles Parish.  Now, twenty years later, he spends most of his time caring for Pearly Bazile, his seventy-six year-old mother.  

On December 1, 2006, at six in the morning, officers from the Bunkie Police Department, assisted by two FBI agents, knocked on Larry Bazile’s door.  When Bazile didn’t open immediately, an officer began kicking the door impatiently.  “Hold on,” Larry called out as he opened the door.

In seconds, Bazile had been knocked to the floor.  He was asking to see a search warrant while they handcuffed his hands behind his back.  He asked for a warrant three more times during the raid, but the papers were never produced.

Officers rousted Pearly Bazile out of bed even after being informed that she was an invalid.  Young children were crying (over a year later, they are still afraid of the police).  Several relatives from out of town, in their early-to-mid twenties, had been staying the night.  They too were handcuffed.  

An officer called one of the young men into the bathroom.  He was holding a bottle of prescription pain medication in his hand.  “I’m gonna charge you with this,” the officer said, “unless you tell me what the big guy’s been doing.”  The big guy in question was Larry Bazile.

Larry and his young friends were hauled down to the Police Department shed, then transported to the lock-up in neaby Marksville.  Larry was charged with conspiracy.  A relative visiting from Dallas was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia (the pill bottle). 

Over a year later, Larry Bazile is still awaiting his day in court.  When I first talked to him he had no idea where the conspiracy charge came from.        

Unlike most poor black defendants, Larry Bazile isn’t alone.  Jerriel Bazile, a Dallas real estate man, and Gaythell Smith, a Dallas police officer (pictured above) have taken a passionate interest in their brother’s case.  For months, their persistant questions went unanswered.  Finally, Jerriel filed a freedom of information request for the complete records surrounding the case and prosecutor Charles Riddle turned over the pertinent materials.

The changes against Larry Bazile can be traced back to November 16, 2006, the day an FBI officer allegedly purchased $40 of crack cocaine from the defendant.  Detective Chad Jeansonne filed several different reports over a period of three months, all supposedly based on the testimony of an unnamed FBI agent. 

But there’s a problem: three irreconcilable accounts of the alleged drug buy emerge from these documents.  In one version, the FBI agent came to Bazile’s residence alone.  In version two, the agent is accompanied by an unnamed confidential informant.  In yet a third version, the agent came to Bazile’s home with a second defendant, Lloyd Robinson.

Is Jeansonne a busy cop with a faulty memory, or is there some method in this madness?  To understand the glaring inconsistencies in Jeansonne’s reports you have to understand that less than 5% of narcotics cases ever go to trial.  Generally, the government drops the charges or, more frequently, the case is settled by a plea bargain.  Jeansonne wrote three irreconcilable versions of the alleged drug buy to fit three separate prosecutorial strategies.

Bazile could be charged with participating in a conspiracy with Lloyed Robinson-hence, it would be convenient if Robinson participated in the buy.  If Robinson refused to cooperate, the state could produce a confidential informant to testify that he had accompanied the FBI agent to Bazile’s home.  Failing that, the case could be made simply on the uncorroborated word of the FBI agent (the least appealing of the three options since there was no marked money and no video, audio or photographic evidence). 

The legal mystery was partially solved a few weeks ago when the prosecution placed Lloyd Robinson on the stand in the course of a short-lived pre-trial hearing.  Robinson admitted that he had called Larry Bazile on the day in question, but adamantly denied accompanying the FBI agent to Bazile’s home.  When Robinson started talking about going with the agent to the home of a third party (who was never charged) he was silenced. 

“The deal is off,” an enraged prosecutor bellowed.  “It’s off.”

The prosecution knows the Bazile family is in possession of Chad Jeansonne’s creative writing assignments, but they don’t appear to be worried.  If the judge rules the reports inadmissible in court it’s as if they didn’t exist.

With the conspiracy strategy off the table, how will the state proceed? 

They could produce a confidential informant willing to verify the alleged transaction.  This would be relatively easy.  Jeansonne, my sources tell me, has a covey of troubled young men in the drug underworld willing to offer assistance when necessary.  Jeansonne, they say, believes his informants implicitly.  You offer an informant a sum of money to tell the story your way, or you threaten to send him off to prison if he gets his testimony wrong, or perhaps you work it both ways.  It’s easy to produce witnesses in narcotics cases and, so long as they are singing in harmony with police officers, juries believe every word that falls from their lying lips.

Or maybe the State of Louisiana will produce an FBI agent willing to testify under oath that he purchased drugs from Larry Bazile unaccompanied by either Lloyd Robinson or an informant.  But how would our hypothetical agent feel about being associated with so many discrepant versions of a simple story?

Normally, he wouldn’t have to worry because no one but the prosecutor would be aware of the discrepancies.  But now, thanks to the tenacious detective work of Jerriel Bazile, the truth is out.

The government wants this thing to go away.  If Larry will admit to selling drugs the state would be happy to give him five years probation.  But Larry doesn’t want to be “on paper” for a crime he didn’t commit.  He’s been down that road and has no appetite for a repeat performance.

You may be wondering how Chad Jeansonne has been able to hide his low down ways from his superiors in Avoyelles Parish. 

He hasn’t. 

Over the past year I have made six separate trips to Bunkie and have spoken to dozens of residents, including four former colleagues of Mr. Jeansonne.  I have spoken with defense attorneys who have tried cases based on Jeansonne’s handiwork.  Everyone knows that Mr. Jeansonne isn’t what they call “real police”.  He’s the kind of officer that gives the profession a bad name.

 So why doesn’t anybody deal with this guy?

There are so many reasons why Chad Jeansonne remains free to work his dreadful magic.  First of all, he restricts his malice to the poor end of the black side of town.  Secondly, he produces results that make his superiors look good–lots of drug convictions.  Third, I am told that he is always professional when in the company of state police officers. 

But there is a fourth reason: it is in no one’s best interest to take Mr. Jeansonne down.

Suppose you take a public stand against a dirty cop and nobody backs you up?  The mayor and the DA and the judge all stand by their man.  Suppose you are a defense attorney.  If you anger the local constabulary (or the prosecutor, or the judge) you will suddenly be out of work in that Parish. 

So everybody yields to the status quo and hundreds of poor people on the black end of town remain locked in a nightmare.  This scenario is playing out in hundreds of little towns across America.  Bunkie is a particularly egregious case of normal.

We had another community meeting in Bunkie this past Monday.  About 40 concerned residents crowded a tiny livingroom, each one desperate to tell their story.  People spoke of sleepless nights, ulcers, high blood pressure and deep depression.  Looking into those faces I decided the time for silence was over.  The world needs to learn about Chad Jeansonne and the public officials who cover for him.

An update to this post can be found here.

In a recent post on his excellent Grits for Breakfast site, Scott “Grits” Henson has some intriguing thoughts on the upcoming Texas primary.  If you’re a single issue voter with a passion for criminal justice reform, Grits says, Obama and Huckabee are your candidates. 

“I don’t like to talk about ‘at-risk’ kids,” the man was saying.  “We need to start holding people responsible for their actions.  It’s time to stop making excuses.”

The remark was made in the fellowship hall of a Dallas church during a well-attended presentation by the Children’s Defense Fund on ”dismantling the cradle to prison pipeline.

“A lot of us rode the buses down to Jena, Louisiana a few months ago,” the man continued, “to speak up for the Jena 6.  And then we read that one of these kids just got picked up for attacking a fellow student right here in Dallas.  Imagine that, after thousands of people sacrifice so much to stand up for him, he goes and lets us down.”

As Charlotte Allen would say, the remark was “irresistable”.  It was the elephant in the room; somebody had to say it.

I am often asked if, given the manifest imperfections of the Jena 6, I regret bringing their story to the attention of the world.  What about the money-in-the-mouth stunt on YouTube, or the “thuggin’ for the cameras” episode in Atlanta?  What about the disclosure of Mychal Bell’s juvenile record?  And now Bryant Purvis slams the head of a fellow student into a desk for allegedly deflating the tires of his car.  If we’re going to defend victims of injustice, people ask, shouldn’t we be looking for a latter day Rosa Parks?

No, we shouldn’t.  There may be instances in which paragons like sister Rosa are railroaded by the system, but they are aberrations.  A good justice narrative captures a localized and specific example of a national phenomenon–we focus on the rule, not the exception.

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first African American to go to jail in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to yield her seat to a white person.  Months earlier, a young woman named Claudette Colvin had experienced precisely the same indignity.  But Claudette had issues.  She didn’t leave the bus with quiet dignity and she was carrying a child conceived outside of marriage.  Civil rights leaders (wisely) decided to pass on Ms. Colvin.

But that was 1955.  The spiritual heirs of Rosa Parks aren’t going to jail; these days, prison space is reserved for kids like Claudette Colvin.

Claudette Colvin possessed many redeeming qualities.  So does Bryant Purvis.  Bryant is a big kid; six-foot-six and still growing.  He’s intelligent.  He’s unusually good looking.  The kid has potential.  Although he stands accused of assaulting Justin Barker, eye witness statements suggest he wasn’t present at the scene.

Reed Walters would eventually have dropped all charges against Bryant Purvis if events had been allowed to play out naturally.  Now, all bets are off.

Friends of Justice is dedicated to the non-violent teaching of Jesus; the philosophy that inspired Gandhi and King.  But we also stand with little kids and adolescents victimized by the foolish and short-sighted decisions of adults.  In her address to the New Baptist Covenant gathering in Atlanta, Marian Wright Edelman told us that she is often asked “what’s wrong with the children.”  “There’s nothing wrong with the children,” she replies; “the problem is with the grown-ups”.

By “grown-ups,” Ms. Wright Edelman isn’t just talking about out-of-control mothers and fathers who abnegate their parental responsibilities (although they are part of the picture).  The grown-ups most responsible for the plight of our children are policy makers whose callous decisions have placed innocent children in harm’s way.

To employ a biblical image, Jena is about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children.  A year ago, I spoke to over 100 members of Jena’s black community at a public meeting at a local Baptist church.

“Our children have tried to work things out the way things are worked out in the schoolyard,” I said, ”through intimidation, violence and revenge.  But it was not their job to work things out—it was not their job to say yes and no—that is a job for adults.  Had the adults said no in September, had they said it loud, and had they said it proud, had they said it like they meant it, there would have been no fight at the Fair Barn because there would have been nothing to fight about.  And without a fight at the Fair Barn there would have been no need for retaliation in the school yard.”

The events of the past year have done nothing to alter my perspective.

Shortly after speaking in Jena last year, I flew to Atlanta for a summit on the misuse of confidential informants.  During a breakout session I had an informative chat with Ed Burns, co-writer of HBO’s The Wire.  Ed told me he had worked as both a school teacher and a police officer in Baltimore, experiences which allowed him to see the social catastrophe playing out in that city from both sides. The Wire focuses on young, black inner city men caught up in the drug trade.  Some of these guys are cold-blooded killers: the kind of people who need to be in prison.  But most of the characters are normal kids living in the middle of a toxic environment.  They try to break free, but they can’t.  Eventually, they all find their way into the morgue or the criminal justice system.

Ed Burns provides an insider’s different perspective on police work; his officers are more sinner than saint.  Internecine power struggles abound.  Rogue cops beat helpless suspects and pocket money seized in drug raids.  The line between “real police” who go by the book and bad cops on the make is drawn in shades of gray.    No one faults Ed Burns and David Simon, his co-writer, for glorifying the thug life or for demonizing law enforcement–the portrait is too stark and unsentimental to be denied.  Burns and Simon are like the inner city poets celebrated by Bruce Springsteen who “just stand back and let it all be.”

Rosa Parks was the perfect symbol for the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s; her story drove the Old Jim Crow regime to its knees.  But the New Jim Crow gives Rosa Parks a pass.

In 2008, the heirs of Claudette Colvin are caught in the crosshairs and somebody needs to tell their story.  We can no longer afford to deal in hagiography (stories of the saints); by definition, the children in the cradle to prison pipeline are deeply troubled. Criminal justice reformers have two options: we can eschew the narrative strategy altogether in favor of statistics-laden policy papers, or we can tell real-life, Bruce Springsteen, Ed Burns, Claudette Colvin-type stories that just ”stand back and let it all be.”

Friends of Justice will continue to tell Claudette’s story.  It ain’t always pretty, but it’s the truth.

Rev. Bean has graciously offered me an opportunity to write a critique of his critique of my Jan. 21 article for the Weekly Standard, “Jena: the Amazing Disappearing Hate Crime,” so I am herewith taking him up on his offer.            

First, Rev. Bean accuses me and the Weekly Standard of subscribing to an ideology centered around a “white, Judeo-Christian culture.” It hardly bears pointing out that both Judaism and Christianity are historically rooted in the Middle East, that is, Asia. As the religious historian Philip Jenkins, author of “The Next Christendom” (2002), never tires of pointing out, Christianity is in fact moribund in “white” Western Europe, while it is growing exponentially in the Global South—Africa, Asia, and South America, where they actually believe what the Bible says, including all that stuff about Christ sitting “at the right hand of God,” in contrast to being eaten by wild dogs after his crucifixion as the Jesus Seminar people claim. Indeed, as Jenkins notes, “Africa may soon be home to the world’s largest Christian populations.” So I don’t get what Rev. Bean means about Christian culture being “white” or anti-“diversity.” Even in America, the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics are Christians.            

Second, Rev. Bean argues that because I am a Roman Catholic (my response: guilty as charged), and I believe in the teaching authority of my church as not only the “human institution” (I’d call it an all-too-human institution) that Rev. Bean describes but also as an institution divinely guided by the Holy Spirit, I take at face value all truth-claims made by secular authority figures, in particular the secular authority figures in Jena, Louisiana.            

This charge, as well as the leap of logic that it entails, is absurd. The “official documents” that I consulted for my story consisted of transcripts made by the court reporter and photocopies of handwritten witness statements made by members of the Jena Six and also by the students, teachers, and school administrators who witnessed the attack on Justin Barker on Dec. 4, 2006. Those documents recorded what people said, not officials’ spin on what they said. I also read the thorough, almost daily, contemporaneous reporting on the noose-hangings and the Barker assault in the Alexandria, La., Town Talk, a non-Jena newspaper whose coverage was criticized by some Jena whites I interviewed for being overly sympathetic to the Jena Six and for supposedly blowing the noose incident out of proportion.            

In none of those sources did I find any corroboration for three assertions made by Rev. Bean in his narrative, presumably on the basis of his interviews with members of the the Jena Six and their relatives: 1) that black students at Jena High School, whether including or excluding Jena Six member Robert Bailey Jr., had staged a protest under the noose tree (I’m not saying they didn’t, but merely that no one, including the black parents outraged by the nooses themselves, mentioned any protest); 2) that LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters was specifically addressing (and hence threatening) the protesting black students, or any black students at Jena High, when he made his “stroke of the pen” speech at the school assembly; and 3) that Bailey was hit over the head by whites wielding beer bottles—or even by a single white wielding a single beer bottle—during the Fair Barn altercation on Dec. 1, 2006, necessitating a trip by Bailey to a hospital emergency room for stitches. For example, Bailey’s own victim-impact statement, part of the court record in the criminal case brought against his assailant, Justin Sloan, did not mention bottles, other weapons, or medical treatment of any kind.            

The rubber hit the road regarding corroboration for all three incidents at a hearing on June 13, 2007, on an unsuccessful motion by Bailey’s lawyer, Samuel Thomas, to have Walters recused as prosecutor for having a personal interest in the case that hindered the fair and impartial administration of justice. A transcript of that hearing lies on my desk as I write this. That hearing was Thomas’s big chance to offer evidence concerning the alleged protest under the tree, the alleged threat by Walters at the assembly, and Bailey’s alleged  hospitalization, all of which Thomas had made part of the grounds in his motion to get Walters off the case. Thomas in fact presented not a shred of evidence at the hearing supporting the proposition that any of those three incidents had actually occurred: not a word of testimony from Fair Barn partygoers or Jena High students, teachers, or administrators who had been present at the assembly, not a single emergency-room or other medical record. 

Indeed, Thomas did not even ask the then-principal of Jena High, Scott Windham, who had been in the auditorium at the assembly and whom Thomas called as a witness at the hearing, whether he had perceived Walters’s “stroke of the pen” statement as having been addressed only to black students. So for me the question was: Do you believe Rev. Bean’s narrative (and its various permutations as its contents filtered into news reports and blogs) or your own lying eyes reading this transcript? 

Finally, there is the matter of Mychal Bell’s supposedly incompetent respresentation at his adult trial by the black public defender Blane Williams, I’d like to know exactly what else Williams could have done at that trial, beyond what he did do: cross-examine the students who had witnessed the assault on Barker and preserve a number of legal issues for appeal. Had Williams called his client to the stand, he would not only have waived Bell’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination but subjected him to impeachment by his own witness statement and the improbable chain of events it recorded, plus undoubtedly a string of rebuttal witnesses. Whom else could Williams have put on the stand? Other members of the Jena Six? Good luck. Bell’s mother? What could she have said—”My son, he’s a good boy”? The problem Williams faced was that, as Bell’s subsequent guilty plea indicated, his client didn’t have much of a case. I don’t see how Bell’s high-power new team of lawyers from Monroe did any better a job of representing him than Williams had. Arguably they made things worse by exposing Bell’s prior criminal record to public scrutiny. 

I’m not saying that “original sin,” as Rev. Bell so Augustinian-ly puts it, didn’t play a role in the racial black eye that Jena received over the noose and Barker incidents. As I wrote in my article, the LaSalle Parish school board failed to communicate adequately to the black residents of Jena and to the world at large that hanging nooses on a schoolyard tree was intolerable. Public officials and white Jena citizens who could have spoken to the press early and forthrightly about the various incidents chose not to do so. As I also said in my article, Walters’s original charge of attempted second-degree murder against the Jena Six was probably excessive, although it was certainly not improper, given that repeated kicks to the head can be fatal and the attack on Barker ended only after teachers and other students at Jena High pulled his assailants off his unconscious body. But none of the evidence I looked at persuaded me that systemic racial injustice, whether peculiar to Jena or symptomatic of America as a whole, played any role in the prosecution of the Jena Six. 

As an irresistible footnote, I might add that the Jena Six would come off as more sympathetic and credible if they didn’t get involved in incidents like this one. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0207082jena1.html

I came across Charlotte Allen’s Jena story in a bookstore in Atlanta’s Peachtree Mall.  I was killing time while my wife, Nancy, tried on shoes at the Naturalizers store.  Glancing at the magazine rack, my attention was captured by the upper lefthand corner of the Weekly Standard: “Jena: the Amazing Disappearing Hate Crime.”

I plopped down $3.95 and gave Ms. Allen’s article a quick read.  Gradually, it all came back to me.  Allen called me up a few months ago, just as the furor over Jena was begining to fade.  At the time, I was getting three or four calls from journalists every day and the conversations blur together.  But Allen stuck out because her tone was unusually combative and . . . I think “dismissive” would be the word. 

The Weekly Standard story is predicated on the now-familiar notion that Alan Bean twisted the facts to create a news story ex nihilo, out of nothing. 

I hesitate to give Ms. Allen’s article more attention than it deserves.  The piece doesn’t turn up readily in a Google search, and it is in my best interest to let it pass unnoticed.  I bring it to your attention because it is makes explicit ideas that are often merely implied.

William Kristol’s Weekly Standard published Ms. Allen’s tortured prose because it reinforces the magazines editorial stance.  Kristol (a newly minted New York Times columnist) is a neoconservative icon, a dreamer of dreams.  The Standard helped create the moral and philosophical environment that gave us the Iraq War.  Create a democratic eden in Iraq, the reasoning went, and corrupt Islamic regimes would topple like dominos all over the Middle East.

Kristol’s Standard sees America as an exceptional and potentially heroic nation.  America is great because she nurtures virtues like integrity, honesty, fidelity, and perseverance.  These admirable qualities are rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and would collapse without it.  We cannot afford to embrace diversity too enthusiastically, neo-cons believe, because America’s greatness is a product of western, white, Judeo-Christian culture.  We are all equal, but some of us are more equal than others.

This way of seeing the world necessitates faith in the wisdom and virtue of public institutions and public officials.  These folks aren’t perfect, but in a rough and ready way they reflect the genius of America and are therefore worthy of trust and, yes, reverence. 

Charlotte Allen is a professional debunker, adept at poking holes in liberal baloons.  Her most ambitious efforts to date have been devoted to lampooning members of “the Jesus seminar” and their renewed quest for the historical Jesus.  Allen is an orthodox, traditional Roman Catholic, thoroughly steeped in the wisdom of church fathers like Augustine and the authority of Mother Church. 

Yesterday I introduced you to Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.  Patterson believes in a flawless Bible; Allen believes in a flawless tradition.  Like Patterson, she has made common cause with traditionalists like Bill Kristol and Patterson’s Southern Baptist Convention . . . any port in a storm.

This explains why my take on Jena is so distasteful to people like Kristol and Allen.  I have presented the public officials of Jena, Louisiana as self-serving, small-minded, dull-witted bureaucrats.  I have repeatedly asserted that Jena is America.  I contend that the American criminal justice system is corrupt, inefficient, unspeakably expensive, cruel, unusual, and counter-productive.  I see the dream of American exceptionalism as an unqualified nightmare.

What is more, I say these things as a Baptist minister.  My wife is also an ordained Baptist Minister, and she agrees with me.  So does my father-in-law, Charles Kiker . . . you guessed it, Charles is also an ordained Baptist with a doctoral degree in Old Testament. 

Ultimately, we are critical of public officials because we are disciples of Jesus Christ.  Charlotte Allen worships the Christ of Church tradition who sitteth at the right hand of God; the Christ who turned over his mission to a human institution which now represents his interests.  The Friends of Justice follow the historical Jesus (the one Allen says we will never find) who preached good news to the poor and who was crucified by religious and political luminaries.

Like Charlotte Allen, I believe in original sin (a good Augustinian doctrine if ever there was one).  For evidence, I point to well-intentioned religionists like Reed Walters, while Allen references troubled black males like Mychal Bell. 

I appreciate the efforts of police officers, prosecutors, judges and juries–they provide an invaluable service and are worthy of our prayers and our respect.  Unfortunately, public officials are flesh and blood mortals who repeatedly fall prey to ignorance, self-delusion, hubris and blind ambition.  These failings are particularly evident when the powerful confront the people Jesus called “the least of these”. 

Allen’s version of the Jena story is copied, almost verbatim, from the annals of the Jena Times.  Documents created by public officials like DA Reed Walters, local law enforcement, Sammy and Craig Franklin at the Times, the Alexandria TownTalk, and US Attorney Don Washington are swallowed whole and trusted implicitly.  Information gleaned from poor black folks in Jena is dismissed out of hand.

My great sin was to accept the word of street punks like Robert Bailey over the word of public officials in good standing like Reed Walters.

I assured Charlotte Allen that I carefully perused every relevant issue of the Alexandria and Jena papers before I released a word about Jena to the national media.  This meant long days in the local library and, at a quarter a page, a hefty photocopying bill. 

In addition, I worshipped with the prominent white congregation Allen references in her article and spent an hour and a half discussing the issues with the town’s most prominent white pastor (who doubles as a reserve police officer).   

Next, I made an appointment with Craig and Sammy Franklin at the Jena Times.   I shared my take on the story with the Franklins and asked them to rebut my central contentions.  Then, as Allen reports, I told them how the national media would handle the story.

Following that, I spent the better part of a day at the courthouse pouring over legal documents and eye witness statements.  I photocopied this material and spent a full day pouring over it.

I talked to members of the local school board and got their side of the story with the proviso that I not mention them by name.

In addition, I talked to the only people who lived close enough to the salient events to know what actually went down–the young men now known as the Jena 6.  I interviewed Robert Bailey for two hours in the lock-up on the second floor of the LaSalle Parish courthouse. 

I didn’t accept the word of anyone involved in this story uncritically–original sin applies to every aspect of every person.  Folks lie; they spin the truth; they pass over inconvenient details.  My job was to learn everything a person could learn and then ask which version of the story made the most sense.

Ms. Allen’s essay has many low points (her faith in public officials is both touching and troubling), but the nadir comes with her treatment of Mychal Bell’s trial.  Could a sentient being really consult the transcript of that unseemly affair and conclude that Blane Williams represented his client to the best of his ability?  Does Ms. Allen have any idea what competent legal counsel looks like?  This helps explain how court appointed attorneys can roll over and play dead in the courtroom and no one (apart from the defendant and his family) appears to notice.  

Toward the end of my conversation with Ms. Allen I suggested that events in Jena unfolded with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.  The sins of the fathers were visited upon the children (black and white).  If public officials in Jena had taken the noose incident seriously and confronted it boldly, a world of hurt would have been avoided and Jena, at long last, could have transcended her Jim Crow legacy.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.  It didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen.  To her credit, Charlotte Allen quotes Eddie Thompson, a Pentecostal pastor who lives close enough to the poor and blue collar folk in Jena to know what’s going on. 

“It’s an unconscious racism,” Thompson told Allen, “something that most white people here aren’t even aware of. You see it in income disparities, the fact that blacks live in a lesser part of town and are a lower socioeconomic group. For the black community, there’s been a lack of ownership, a feeling that they weren’t part of the town.”

And this is why public officials were unable to respond to the message conveyed by the nooses hanging from the tree at the white end of the school courtyard–nobody was willing to bell the cat, to reference to the elephant in the room, to acknowledge that vestiges of Jim Crow segregation clung to the community like moss clings to the trees along Highway 8. 

Unable to confront reality, people like Roy Breithaupt and Reed Walters decided to sweep the incident under the rug.  I didn’t invent the unrest at the high school in the wake of the disciplinary committee’s refusal to attach any racial meaning to the noose hanging.  The Jena Times reported that parents were coming to school to pick up their kids.  White-on-black fights were breaking out all over the campus.  All of this is a matter of public record.

I didn’t make up the incident that sparked a school assembly.  Robert Bailey and his friends stook defiantly under the tree on the white end of the school ground.  Why is there no documentary evidence of this event?  Because it wasn’t in the interest of public officials to mention it.  Instead, they called an unscheduled assembly at which Reed Walters made his infamous “stroke of my pen” comment.

I didn’t make that up either; Walters has admitted in open court that he made the remark.  But what did it mean?  According to Craig Franklin (whose version Walters’ remark departs considerably from the DA’s courtroom testimony), the words meant nothing at all.  Or almost nothing.  He was trying to silence the room.  If the little chatterboxes didn’t shut up, so this version goes, Walters was willing to use the power of his office to make their lives disappear.  Is that what he said?  Is that what he meant?

No, his comments were directed at the black students whose legitimate protest had sparked the campus unrest the assembly was designed to quash.  This is the only version of the facts that makes any sense whatsoever, a point Charlotte Allen would be forced to acknowledge if she gave the matter any thought.

Allen suggests that I invented a series of black-white confrontations involving Robert Bailey et al and the circle of friends surrounding the noose boys.  If these violent altercations took place the way Robert Bailey claims they did, we have clear evidence that the hostility unleashed by the noose incident was alive and well in late November of 2006.

Unfortunately, the fights are not documented.  By the time the police arrived on the scene, the participants had scattered and there was nothing to report. 

Fortunately, private investigators have thoroughly researched my version of events and, on the basis of numerous interviews in Jena’s black and white communities, have confirmed my story.  Should any of these cases proceed to trial, the truth will emerge.

I could walk you through Ms. Allen’s article paragraph-by-paragraph and reduce her claims to rubble, but what’s the point?  The issue here is epistemological: how do we know what we know?  Allen thinks you get at the truth by reading official documents produced by public officials.  That’s a good place to start, but if that’s where you end up the full truth will remain illusive.  Experience has taught me to distrust stories (be they ever so official) that don’t make sense.

Original sin dictates that, in her role as professional debunker, Charlotte Allen will always have plenty of material to work with whether she’s skewering the Jesus Seminar people or civil rights luminaries like Al Sharpton.  When Jena went national an unholy host of saints and fools rushed to the fires of celebrity.  Silly things were said and done.  Am I responsible? 

Did I oversimplify the story as some have alleged?  Actually, I took a simple tale about black thugs beating up an innocent white kid and added several layers of inconvenient complexity–the truth is always more complicated than the newspapers (or the news magazines) would have us believe. 

The New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta was Jimmy Carter’s baby.  Among Baptists, only the beloved ex-President has the name recognition and the hard-won credability to pull off an event of this magnitude.  For the first time in living memory, Baptists from North and South, and Baptists from Black and White denominations came together in Atlanta.

True, by the time Carter and Bill Clinton spoke on Friday night most of the people in attendance were white refugees from the Southern Baptist Convention.  More than anything else, Carter’s New Baptist Covenant framed with these folks in mind.

On Friday night, Jimmy Carter paid the ultimate tribute to the SBC of his youth.  He told us how Southern Baptist mission trips pulled him out of a crisis of faith he in the mid-1960s as he watched unlettered men share their simple faith with strangers.  These stories ended with a period; there was no semi-colon followed by a diatribe against the current leaders of the SBC.

The best reporting from the New Baptist Covenant appeared in a Los Angeles Times article by Richard Fausset.  The focus is on Carter the man, the meeting he inspired in Atlanta remains in the background, but Fausset addresses all the important issues.

On the opening night, former Southern Baptist President Jimmy Allen asked if the Atlanta gathering would be a movement or simply a moment.  One thing is clear, a movement sparked by an octogenarian can’t remain a cult of the personality.  Carter’s active years are numbered; he knows it, and so do the folks who flocked to Atlanta.  This poignant fact added a sense of urgency to the meeting.

Richard Fausset plucked a telling quote from Bill Leonard, currently dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest.  “The curse and the genius of the Southern Baptist Convention for Carter’s generation is that it inculcated a sense of Baptist identity that is so deep in people that it was hard to give up.  It shaped your spirituality — but also your own sense of who you were.”

Leonard was a newly minted church history professor when I enrolled at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1975.  He was still there when I returned for doctoral work in 1989.  I served briefly as Leonard’s grader before he yielded to the inevitable and left Southern for a more hospitable academic climate.  Southern boasted one of the best church history faculties in America in 1990; three years later, all four professors had left the fold.

Bill Leonard grew up in Texas, attending Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth (20 miles west of where I currently live).   For men like Leonard and Carter, the rift in the Southern Baptist Convention meant exile.  It was like being disowned by your own mother.

As a Canadian Baptist ordained by the American (Northern) Baptist Churches, I had a hard time relating to all of this.  I suspect many of the Black and northern white Baptists who attended the Atlanta gathering wearied of all the nostalgic references to what had been. 

From the beginning, Southern Baptist leaders have regarded Mr. Carter’s religious experiment with suspicion.  Paige Patterson, currently President of Southwestern Seminary, said the rift in the ranks boiled down to epistemology: how you know what you know.  “We believe that we know what we know because God has flawlessly revealed to us in the Bible what his will and thought and purpose is; they do not believe that.”

Here we come to “the curse” of Southern Baptist life professor Leonard mentions.   Growing up Baptist in the South created such a strong connection between person, place and piety that most believers would sacrifice anything to hold onto it.  The myth of the perfect Bible proved to be a wonderful debating ploy against “liberal” opponents–no Baptist wants to be defined as anti-Bible.

But there has been a profound and tragic downside.  Almost by definition, a flawless Bible is a “flat Bible” free of internal contradiction.  If a teaching (stone the adulter) appears in any part of Scripture it is God’s own truth.  In fact, since Jesus is the Son of God, all Scripture can be read as the very word of the Savior. 

Unfortunately, Jesus self-consciously set himself against many of the legalistic traditions in the Hebrew Scriptures; other prophetic teachings were radicalized and expanded.  In the fifth chapter of Mathew, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment; But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment . . . You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’  But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Jesus’ moral teaching flies in the face of conservative American ideology.  In a desperate attempt to preserve a culture, Baptist leaders in the South allied themselves with cold warriors and free market capitalists (hardly natural allies for followers of Jesus; but you gotta do what you gotta do).

Which brings us to the ultimate irony: Southern Baptists leaders accusing a pious Baptist deacon of embracing “the religion of secular humanism” while they embrace a politician who rarely attended church and his horoscope-consulting wife.  It was neither pretty nor logical, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The Atlanta event was organized around the incendiary words of Isaiah, amplified by the teaching of Jesus in the fourth chapter of Luke: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

I was drawn to Atlanta because (a) the American Baptists invited me to participate and (b) all this talk about “good news to the poor” squared perfectly with my criminal justice reform work with Friends of Justice.

Southern Baptist leaders have charged that the New Baptist Covenant is a not-so-subtle smokescreen for liberal politics.  The involvement of Bill Clinton and Al Gore did little to counter this impression.

I didn’t attend Gore’s Climate Change luncheon (the $35 fee stuck in my craw), but I did hear Mr. Clinton on Friday evening.  I have been critical of some of Clinton’s racially polarizing remarks during the current election campaign, but I was pleased with the tone of his comments in Atlanta.  He talked about his attempts to find common ground with Southern Baptist leaders.  He urged the audience to be gentle with their co-religionists because, after all, we might all be wrong.

Throughout his address (delivered without notes) Mr. Clinton demonstrated an impressive familiarity with the Scriptures.  He gave particular attention to a phrase from the King James rendering of 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see as through a glass darkly, but then, face to face.”

Unlike Paige Patterson, who, thanks to his flawless Bible, already sees face-to-face, we must be humble and respectful of diversity because we are all stumbling about it a dimly lit room.

Good thoughts; but can you build a movement on shadows?

In his interview with Richard Fausset, Jimmy Carter worked hard to temper his criticism of the estranged members of his religious family.  “The Southern Baptist Convention has become increasingly narrow in its definition of who is welcome,” Carter began.  “They now have decided that women can’t teach men, and that women can’t be deacons, and women can’t be pastors, and women can’t be missionaries and so forth.”

The ex-president paused.  “Which–I’m not criticizing them.  That’s their prerogative.” 

Richard Fausset was irritated by Carter’s reserve.  “It is the kind of staement that doesn’t help matters,” he observed.

Fausset is right.  The glorious thing about the New Baptist Covenant was the opporunity to bridge the North-South and Black-White divides that have haunted Baptist life for generations.  For ex-Southern Baptists, the grieving process will never end.  We understand that.  We sympathize. 

But a new world of opportunity awaits.  We are now free to take Jesus’ radical teaching at face value without ignoring or explaining away the clear import of his teaching.  To follow the Jesus of the Gospels is to work for the poor.  That means undermining a criminal justice system that preaches bad news to the poor.  It means seeing the defendant and the prisoner not just as American citizens but as the very face of Jesus–Christ in his distressing disguise (to borrow a phrase from Mother Theresa).

The time has come for Mr. Carter, Mr. Clinton and their spiritual kinfolks to let go of the Southern Bapist Convention so their hands can be free to enthusiastically embrace their American Baptist and Black Baptist brothers and sisters.  It’s tough, I know; but we all gotta do what we gotta do.

Alan Bean

Executive Director

Friends of Justice