We look back on the race-baiting of a George Wallace or the Red-baiting of a Joe McCarthy with a mix of pity and disgust.   In retrospect, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy creates a feeling of dismay.  In 1970, the now-repentant Kevin Phillips described the logic of the Southern strategy this way in a New York Times interview:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

At least the guy was straightforward. (more…)

An alleged robbery in 1993 netted $11 in cash and two double-life sentences for Jamie and Gladys Scott of Forest, Mississippi.  An article in USA Today provides a concise summary of the crime as it was presented to the jury by prosecutor Ken Turner: 

“The Scott sisters were accused of orchestrating the armed robbery of two men on a rural road near Forest, Miss., on Christmas Eve 1993. According to court documents, the sisters enticed the two men to take them on a ride to a nearby nightclub. Witnesses testified that during the ride Jamie Scott complained of nausea. When the car pulled over three men in a following car robbed them at gunpoint. After the robbery, the victims testified the sisters left with the three men. Both the victims and the accused are black.” 

Seventeen years later, it is difficult to know if this an accurate depiction of events.  The Scott sisters were represented by an inept attorney who was disbarred two years later.  Neither sister testified and no witnesses were called on their behalf, so the state’s theory of the case went unchallenged.  (more…)

New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman argues that American schools are failing because students lack motivation.  It ain’t the parents and don’t blame the teachers–the problem is the kids. 

Friedman gets his information from Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson who says: “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

Want to know why America is on the downgrade?  It’s the damn kids! (more…)

Judge John Miller and County Attorney Val Varley are locked in a neck-and-neck race to see who qualifies as the most bizarre public official in the great state of Texas.  Since a subscription is required, I have copied the story from the Texarkana Gazette that updates an important story from Red River County. 

Miller is the judge who was recently recused after going to war with the state Attorney General’s Office.  Varley is the prosecutor who accused a Texas attorney and his wife of a heinous crime on the uncorroborated word of an emotionally disturbed woman with a checkered past.   Since the finish line in the Varley-Miller race is the lip of a yawning precipice (think of James Dean and “Buzz” in Rebel without a Cause), there can be no winner and Red River County justice is the clear loser. (more…)

Why is a woman with a 70 IQ on death row while the men who pulled the trigger are serving life sentences?   Novelist (and Baptist layman) John Grisham says the case of Teresa Lewis mocks “the idea that ours is a system grounded in equality before the law.”

Read Grisham’s op-ed in the Washington Post and see if you agree.

I’m up on the tightwire
One side’s ice and one is fire
It’s a circus game
With you and me

I’m up on the tightrope
One side’s hate and one is hope
But the top hat on my head
Is all you see

-Leon Russell

This thoughtful article in Politico portrays Barack Obama as a criminal justice tightrope walker.  He knows the system is in desperate need of reform.  He isn’t comfortable with Bill Clinton’s shortpsighted (and self-serving) policy of  out-toughing the Republicans on crime.  But as America’s first black president, Obama is fighting the not-so-subtle racism lurking just beneath the surface of the crime debate.  (more…)

Since a federal judge in Georgia characterized Troy Davis’s innocence claims as “smoke and mirrors” the mainstream media have given only passing attention to the case.  Jen Marlowe’s well-researched piece in The Nation is a welcome exception to the general rule.   Marlowe moves through the evidence witness-by-witness displaying a thorough familiarity with the case.  I have pasted an excerpt below.  After describing the scene at the June 23 hearing in Savannah, Marlowe lays out the evidence: (more…)

Taylor Branch believes Glenn Beck’s professed admiration for the non-violent philosophy of Martin Luther King is genuine.  Since Branch spent a quarter of a century immersed in the details of Dr. King’s legacy I am not inclined to reject his conclusions out of hand, even if they diverge from my own.  (more…)

Several weeks ago I read Leonard Pitts’ column regarding The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in The Amarillo Globe-News, a very conservative newspaper in a very conservative area. The AGN regularly gets letters to the editor demanding that the paper stop carrying the columns of Mr. Pitts, calling him a black racist, among other vile names. Thankfully, the AGN editorial board has not succumbed to those demands. After reading the Pitts column, I thought to myself, “I’ve got to read that book.”

Then on August 2, Dr. Alan Bean posted a review of the book on this website. Dr. Bean’s opening sentence said, “Michelle Alexander has produced the best book ever written on mass incarceration and the war on drugs.” He concluded his review with this bit of advice, “If you can only afford to buy one book this year, make it The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

I had already bought—and read—more books this year than I can really afford, but I immediately went on line and purchased this one. I was not disappointed. I don’t know whether this is the best book ever written on the subject, but it is the best I have ever read. (more…)