Last night I heard Dr. Steve Langford, my Methodist pastor, talk about the God who answered Job “out of the whirlwind.”  Just when I thought I was too damn educated to learn anything from a preacher I ran into Langford.  This guy changes my thinking every time I listen to him–something I didn’t think was possible.

As I waited for the Bible Study to begin I was thinking about Scott Henson’s recent blog post on the Cameron Todd Willingham case.  Willingham’s ex-wife spent years telling reporters that Todd was an abusive husband, but no murderer.  But recently Stacy Kuykendall has been saying that her ex-husband confessed to the vile deed on the verge of his execution.  Henson (like the New Yorker’s David Grann)  thought this change of story was more than a little suspicious.

Then the Bible study began.  Pastor Steve had spent several weeks dissecting the tangled words of Job and his pious companions–tonight it was God’s turn to speak “out of the whirlwind”. 

“Who is this,” God asks, “who darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

Then the Creator takes Job on a whirlwind tour of creation.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its measurements–surely you know!”  God asks Job about the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; about the wind and the waves; about the great Behemoth and the fearsome Leviathan. 

Pastor Langform told us that “the sea” is often used as a symbol for chaos in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Horrifying beasts like the Behemoth (described as an alligator in Job) and Leviathan (described as a crocodile) were also mythological symbols of death and destruction.  Yet all are creatures of God.

This means that evil, death and chaos are God’s creatures.  God let them loose in the world and set strict bounds beyond which they dare not roam.  We don’t know why God created the forces of chaos and the Book of Job, by design, doesn’t shed much light on the subject.  That’s the whole point.  If we could understand God’s life and death struggle with chaos we would be God. 

“What if you were in my position?” Yahweh asks Job.  “Do you think you could handle it?  Are you are up for a wrestling match with death and hell?”

Job thinks about it, bows his head, and succumbs.  “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,” he says, “but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

All of which took me back to Scott Henson and Todd Cameron Willingham.  Scott hasn’t been arguing that the Corsicana native is innocent.  Perhaps Willingham did  intentionally set fire to the house in which his darling babies slept.  All Henson is saying (and all any of us can say) is that the folks with the best scientific tools don’t believe that, given the available evidence, a strong case can be made for arson. 

Rick Perry, the immaculately groomed governor of Texas, assures the electorate that Willingham is a guilty ‘monster’ (Leviathan?) the conclusions of pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals notwithstanding. 

But if Perry is so confident that Texas executed a guilty man why is he so intent on blocking an objective investigation?  And why did he eliminate several members of the commission tasked with evaluating the work of the state’s forensic experts?  Does the governor protest overmuch?

No one is deriding the good men and women who listened to all the expert and eye-witness testimony in the Willingham case and made their decision.  The issues were exceedingly complex.  So much depended on the inner workings of the defendant’s mind.  Was this guy a dysfunctional slob with a gift for poetry or was he every bit the Behemoth Mr. Perry believes him to be?

The comment section at the end of Henson’s post was bristling with indignation.  Some said Scott had it dead right; others decried the blogger’s obdurate refusal to admit a self-evident truth.  Some thought Willingham was guilty as hell; others were convinced the state of Texas executed an innocent man.

Might it be that the facts of the Willingham case are too much for mortals.  We are too prone to error, fancy and blind prejudice to evaluate the guilt or innocence of Todd Willingham or hundreds of other people who have been dragged before the bar of justice in recent years.

I’m not saying that all murder cases are too complex for a human jury, or even that most of them are.  But the recent parade of DNA exonerations must give us pause.  How could well-intentioned juries have been so thoroughly bamboozled?  Why have so many prosecutors pressed ahead with bogus cases and withheld exculpatory material from defense counsel?  And why have so many eyewitnesses testified so convincingly of things that never were?  What were these people thinking? 

Were they thinking at all? 

Yes and no.  Juries, judges, police officers and prosecutors are rational creatures . . . so far as human rationality goes.  But sometimes it doesn’t go very far.  David Brooks, the staid NYT columnist, wrote an interesting piece last week on recent advances in the field of neuroscience.  Here are his cursory conclusions:

The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.

The still-misty world of neuroscience should give us a renewed respect for the presumption of innocence.  The mere fact that a defendant has been arrested, indicted and formally charged should not be equated with guilt.  Yet how many jurors will vote “not guilty” just because the facts are fuzzy?  Not many.  What role does prejudice play in the courtroom?  What if we find that white and black jurors view the same facts in an entirely different light?  How often is sweet reason mugged by fear and anger?

And we haven’t even talked about blind ignorance.

Who are we who darken counsel with words without understanding?  When the criminal justice system casts mere mortals (jurors, prosecutors, judges) in the role of God, we have cause for worry.  Sure, somebody has to referee the game of life and death.  But when a frail human soul hangs in the balance, we must always err on the side of mercy.  Every few years we are called down to the courthouse to wrestle with chaos, death and hell.   Sometimes we’re just not up for the challenge.

A few days ago, the Dallas Morning News asked a number of priminent religious leaders from Texas to assess the morality of the death penalty.  Public discussion of criminal justice issues is rarely inspired by academic studies or cold statistics; discussion is prompted by specific stories.  In the last few weeks, especially in Texas, the newspapers have been filled with Cameron Todd Willingham stories crammed with quotations from both sides of the debate.  It’s a messy process, but we work things through in America one story at a time. 

Since the religious leaders selected for the DMN story were mostly selected from moderate-to-liberal “Mainline” denominations it comes as no surprise that most of them thought the death penalty was immoral.  But my eye was drawn to the only letter that eschewed complex theological arguments in favor of storytelling.  Cynthia Rigby (no relation to Eleanor), Professor of Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, began her resp0nse with a story about her preacher daddy who escorted condemned prisoners (some of whom he believed to be innocent) to their rendezvous with the Oklahoma hangman. 

Her second story hearkened back to strange story of Karla Faye Tucker, the drug-addled murderer whose broken life was redeemed by the grace of God.  Televangelist Pat Robertson thought Karla Faye’s contrition ought to buy her a pass from death row, but then-governor George W. Bush made cruel jokes about Karla Faye before giving the nod to the executioner.  Dr. Rigby’s story unfolds against that backdrop.

My second “scene” is from 11 years ago, shortly before the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. You might remember that the late ’90s was the time when the “WWJD?” (“What Would Jesus Do?”) movement was in full swing. In a class I was teaching, I asked my mainly-mainliner seminary students if they saw any value to “WWJD?,” and if they thought we should do what Jesus would do, if we were pretty clear on exactly what that was. Every student in the class (20+, as I recall) answered, emphatically, “yes!!”

Since the biggest issue in the news that week was that Tucker was asking for a stay of execution, I spontaneously asked: “Would JESUS execute Karla Faye Tucker?” “No!” all the students answered. Feeling like I was on a roll, I then asked, “Well, then: should WE execute Karla Faye Tucker?”

Silence in response to a question that I thought was a no-brainer, in light of the conversation. Suddenly, the mood of the class shifted. My students acted indignant; as though they had been betrayed. A senior student shot his hand in the air, declaring that he thought it would be “presumptuous for us to assume we could do what Jesus should do.” “We need a new question,” he said: “WWJWUTD?” “What would Jesus want us to do?” he asked, looking around at his classmates. And then he answered: “Jesus would want us to leave forgiveness to him, and to EXECUTE Karla Faye Tucker.”

We took another vote, and all but 2 of my students agreed with him.

Kinda makes your blood run cold, don’t it.

Landis Barrow went to prison back in 2000 on the twisted word of undercover agent Tom Coleman.  (In the mugshots to the left, Landis is #2; see if you can pick out his twin brother, Mandis.)  Now the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has granted Mr. Barrow a re-do of the revocation hearing that put him in prison.  Landis and his twin brother Mandis were implicated in an Amarillo robbery in 1996 and given ten-year probated sentences.  Tom Coleman claimed to have purchased drugs from “the twins” in 1998 but the state had a problem: since no one, even their mother, could tell the twins apart, how could Coleman know which twin handed him the dope?

There were other problems.  Eliga “Man” Kelly was with Coleman at the time of the alleged sale and Kelly wasn’t backing up Coleman’s story.  “Mandis asked me why was I still riding around with that police,” Kelly said in a signed affidavit. Coleman walked up “and asked me were those the twins? I told him yes and he asked Mandis where could he get some smoke? Mandis told him that he didn’t sell dope and he didn’t know where to get any and furthermore don’t ever approach him about any dope. Then the twins drove off very mad.”

The simple solution was to drop the drug charges and use Coleman’s allegations to revoke the Twins’ probation. 

So why are you just hearing about Landis and Mandis Barrow now? 

I wrote an article about the Twins for the Texas Observer  and the Amarillo Globe-News in 2004 , but that’s the only press they ever received.  When Governor Rick Perry pardoned 35 of Coleman’s victims a few months later, the “Tulia 46” were presented to the world as the innocent victims of a racist plot.  No one could go to bat for Landis and Mandis without addressing that inconvenient theft charge from 1996.  Attorneys associated with the Tulia defendants felt they couldn’t risk the negative publicity, so the Twins were left to languish in prison.

Here’s the real irony: Landis and Mandis received their share of a $6 million legal settlement but could only spend their money on tooth paste and chocolate bars in the prison commissary.

Here’s what I had to say five years ago:

[Judge] Emerson nodded patiently as officer Coleman entangled himself in a bizarre web of deception. Coleman said he bought drugs from Mandis Barrow on June 23, then remembered it never happened. Coleman testified he had no idea which of the Barrow twins sold him the dope on September 3, then remembered that Eliga Kelly had cleared up his identification problem. Coleman said he had been suspended from active duty in May of 1998, then remembered that the suspension didn’t go into effect until August. Finally, the Texas Law Officer of the Year alleged a criminal conspiracy hatched by a vindictive sheriff. Judge Don Emerson must have been convinced by Coleman’s grotesque performance because he ruled for the state and sentenced Mandis Barrow to 20 years in prison.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the judge’s decision. The June 23 indictment had obviously been “mistakenly filed” but “an honest mistake does not rise to the level of perjury,” the court declared. Coleman may not have been able to distinguish Landis from Mandis, but it was conceivable that Eliga Kelly “had identified which twin passed the controlled substance to Coleman.” Finally, the Appeals Court argued, if Judge Emerson was convinced by Coleman’s testimony, no perjury had been committed by definition.

Now, almost five years after Tom Coleman was found guilty of aggravated perjury, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided to change its mind.

I have stayed in touch with the Twins over the years.  They sent me a card every Father’s day and kept me apprised of their ongoing legal battle.  Mandis called me  when he was released from prison a few months ago.  Yesterday, I received the good news from Landis. 

Hopefully, we haven’t heard the end of this story.

Doug Evans, the prosecutor who will put Curtis Flowers on trial for a record sixth time in June of 2010, has close links to an organization that denounces the civil rights movement as a communist conspiracy and wishes it could reinstitute Jim Crow segregation. Don’t believe me? Read on.

The year was 1992. The place was the meeting room of the Regency Inn in Greenwood, Mississippi. The keynote speaker was Robert “Tut” Patterson, father of America’s White Citizens’ Council movement and a featured columnist with “The Informer”, a publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Patterson’s topic was the “historical background of the ‘civil rights’ movement.” Other speakers at the Council of Conservative Citizens seminar included District Attorney Doug Evans (D) of Grenada.

The Greenwood meeting wasn’t considered controversial. It was covered on the local ABC affiliate and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Greenwood Commonwealth provided coverage and, if the write-up in the Informer is anything to go by, “Reports were carried by the news media across the South.”

And why not: the keynote speakers for the gala banquet later that evening were Kirk Fordice, the newly elected Mississippi Governor, and Senator Trent Lott. “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy,” Lott told the gathering.

Ten years later, Senator Lott would be forced to resign his position as Senate leader after remarks he made at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. Lott reminded the gathering that Thurmond had run for president as a segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948 and recalled that Mississippi voters had supported his candidacy ”If the rest of the country had followed our lead,” Lott told the gathering, ”we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”

Lott insisted that he didn’t mean to endorse the politics of segregation, but it was difficult to understand what else he might have had in mind.

But that was 2002 and Doug Evans’ speech in Greenwood took place a decade earlier, just a few years after the Council of Conservative Citizens rose from the ashes of the old Citizens’ Councils. In 1991 the Citizen Informer reported that “Thirty of the thirty-nine candidates for state and district offices” had addressed the Council of Conservative Citizen’s Black Hawk Rally. You can’t get more mainstream than that?

A 1991 edition of the Informer proudly reported that Doug Evans, then a Justice Court Judge running for District Attorney, gave the keynote address at the Council of Conservative Citizen’s Webster County meeting. The CCC might have looked like a tawdry pack of racists to most Americans but to an insider like Doug Evans it just looked like normal.

When Mississippi politicians like Trent Lott, State Senator Lydia Chassaniol (R-Winona), State Representative Bobby Howell (R-Kilmichael) or District Attorney Doug Evans (D-Grenada) are asked about their cozy relationship with the racist CCC they give a standard response: “Everybody was doing it and, besides, I didn’t know I was addressing a racist organization.”

Why does it matter anyway? Who on earth is this Doug Evans character I keep mentioning and why should you care who he talked to back in the day?

Doug Evans is the prosecutor who has made five (5) failed attempts to sentence a young gospel singer named Curtis Flowers to death for murdering four people in a Winona, Mississippi furniture store in 1996. This is the case that has divided Winona along racial lines. The jury in trial number four (the only jury with a substantial number of black residents) split 7-5: all seven white jurors voting guilty and all five black jurors voting for acquittal. Trial number three ended in a unanimous guilty verdict after Doug Evans moved heaven and earth to produce an all-white jury in a county that is half black. (The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that Evans’ behavior in the jury selection process demonstrated clear racial bias.)

Recently, Doug Evans attempted to prosecute James Bibbs, a black juror who refused to find Curtis Flowers guilty. Judge Joey Loper accused Bibbs of lying to get on the jury. Last week the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office looked at the facts and dropped the charges.

What would happen if the Curtis Flowers case was dumped in the AG’s lap? What would happen if a fresh set of investigators went back to square one and re-interviewed all the witnesses and re-evaluated all the physical evidence? Would they proceed to a sixth trial, or would they drop the charges against Flowers for the same reason they refused to proceed against Bibbs?

It’s hard to say, but I think we need to find out. A man as racially biased as Doug Evans shouldn’t be in charge of a racially sensitive murder prosecution.

Moreover, a racially biased state senator and house representative shouldn’t be sponsoring legislation designed to get the racially biased Mr. Evans another all-white jury.

Return with me to the CCC event in 1992, four years before the tragic events in Winona. Doug Evans is sitting at the table of honor listening to Robert “Tut” Patterson place the “civil rights” movement in historical context. What did the founder of the White Citizens’ Councils have to say?

Fortunately, we don’t have to guess. In 2006, the CCC reprinted Patterson’s last column, written just a few months previously, in which, once again, he placed the civil rights movement in historical context. We might expect that the veteran segregationist, an old man weeks away from death, had little new to say on the subject and that his speech in 1992 closely resembled the column from 2006.

Patterson (pictured to the left in his prime) began his final column with a harrangue against the “liberal reporters” who covered the Emmett Till trial in 1955. Did they even once report that Louis Till, Emmett’s father, was executed by the US military following the second world war? According to Patterson, the media should have realized that the children of flawed parents can be murdered indiscriminately.

I suspect he made a similar case in 1992, with Doug Evans nodding his agreement.

Next, Patterson attacked George W. Bush for advocating the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act–at the Rosa Parks memorial, no less. Rosa, as every Southern conservative knows, was a communist agitator. According to Bob Patterson, the Voting Rights Act has carried nothing but woe and pestilence in its wake. “The liberal media help to keep the blacks stirred so they will vote, usually Democrat, on election day by rehashing events that may have happened fifty years ago. How many times has Mississippi Burning been shown on TV?”

Patterson didn’t mention that he was one of Mississippi’s fanatical never-in-a-thousand-years boys who engineered events like the killing in Neshoba County or the brutal beating of Annell Ponder and Fannie Lou Hamer in Winona. Sheriff Earl Wayne Patridge may have orchestrated the violence in Winona, but the likes of Robert Patterson and Senator James Eastland shaped the context. The Citizens’ Councils preferred to starve out the opposition, but the rope, shotgun and blackjack were always kept in the trunk just in case.

Patterson’s next target was ”Black Monday” and the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. “These civil rights bills have forced white people to flee from their neighborhoods all over our nation,” Patterson lamented. ”The only defense against forced integration and government-controlled schools in the North, West and South is white flight and private schools.”

This last comment is fitting considering that the CCC was created to raise money for all-white segregation academies.

Finally, lest anyone question his commitment to the fundamental principles of democracy, Patterson provided a brief disclaimer. ”We all expect healthy dissent in our form of government,” he said, ”and there must always be a loyal opposition. We should expect, however, a reliable impartial news media that will give both sides of all issues so that the voters can vote intelligently.”

Did Patterson believe in “healthy dissent” in 1954 when he formed the Citizens’ Council, or in 1964 when he opposed the Civil Rights Act, or in 1965 when he used all means necessary to keep black people from voting in Mississippi? Hardly. Those who disagreed with the Jim Crow regime, white or black, were systematically persecuted, beaten or deprived of an occupation. If that didn’t work they were beaten or disappeared.

Strangely, men like Patterson and Eastland remained active in mainstream politics when the civil rights era ended. Nobody held them accountable for their actions back in the day. For a brief period between 1998 and 2002 southerners with links to the Council of Conservative Citizens were anathema. Then old patterns reasserted themselves. A rehabilitated Trent Lott had risen to the position of Republican Senate whip by the time he retired in 2006.

Here’s the problem: You couldn’t condemn Lott and company without taking on a wide swath of mainstream southern culture. You can’t critique Doug Evans for the same reason.

We can assume that in 1992 Robert Patterson gave the folks in the Greenwood Regency Inn his standard anti-civil rights speech and that an appreciative audience rose in a loud and lusty ovation.

Did Doug Evans, the newly minted prosecutor from Grenada, stomp out of the room in angry protest? Was he sitting on his hands while others rose to applaud?

Not at all. The prosecutor stood and clapped along with everyone else as he patiently waited his turn at the microphone. Civil rights bashing was part of the political culture the District Attorney was raised in. It was the only style of politics he knew. It is the only style of politics he knows. The Council of Conservative Citizens preaches a gospel of civil rights resentment. In this culture, “conservative” is code language for “white”.

You have to pity a guy like Doug Evans–what are the chances that a boy raised in a civil rights hating culture could emerge with a stout commitment to equal justice? But when we see the man prosecuting an evidence-free case against a black defendant we have the responsiblity to raise questions. I don’t wish to be disagreeable, but a man’s life is on the line here.

In 1992, the Citizens Informer billed itself as “The Voice of the No Longer Silent Majority”. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it still is. Which may explain why Lydia Chassaniol’s recent address to the annual conference of the CCC drew a collective yawn from the Mississippi press. And this may explain why everyone assumes that the five black jurors who voted to acquit Curtis Flowers in trial #4 were just trying to protect one of their own.

Could it be that black jurors, because they didn’t grow up under the spell of men like Eastland and Patterson, are in a better position to see through a desperately weak case?

Has anyone in the Mississippi media stopped to examine the “evidence” Evans has scraped together in the Flowers case? It appears not. Doug Evans, the duly elected protector of the Peace and Dignity of Mississippi, grew up on a steady diet of black-bashing like the following:

Nearly a third of all black men in their twenties have criminal records and 8% of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars. Although blacks are only 13 percent of our overall population in the U.S. they account for more than half of all new HIV infections. Black women account for an astonishing 72% of all new cases among women. Over two thirds of all black children are born out of wedlock.

That’s a straight quote from Bob Patterson’s final column in the Informer. It’s the same garbage you can read today on the CCC’s website. Patterson didn’t want his lilly white children going to school with a bunch of black thugs and welfare queens.

When Doug Evans sees Curtis Flowers in the courtroom he doesn’t see a gospel singer, he sees a cold-hearted super predator–the kind of guy Bob Patterson (and a thousand speakers of the same ilk) warned him about. Nothing could be more natural than for a guy like that to blow away four innocent people in cold blood. That’s just the way those people are.I may have the Honorable Doug Evans all wrong. For all I know he may be be a card carrying member of the liberal ACLU. If I have misread the man I ask his friends to set me straight. Show me the evidence and I will issue a sincere apology. But from where I sit, Fannie Lou Hamer and Curtis Flowers have more in common than a love for gospel music.

I have been following a surprising development that fills me with hope and, I confess, a measure of trepidation.  Next year, Mississippi will become the first state in the nation to mandate the teaching of the civil rights movements in its public schools.  This story in the Christian Science Monitor  focuses on the town of McComb, one of a handful of communities selected for participation in a pilot program. 

If the McComb experience is anything to go by Mississippi’s civil rights curriculum could be front page news when it is introduced state-wide next fall.  White Mississippians don’t like being regarded as racists–an identity they have been fighting since Reconstruction.   Mainstream America has been conditioned to think of the civil rights movement as the triumph of good over evil.  White Mississippians have a different take.  They have no problem with black people celebrating the fact that they can now vote and eat at the restaurant of their choice, so long as they can do it without dwelling on the past. 

Unfortunately, you can’t teach children about the civil rights movement without making white people look really, really bad.  We don’t like looking bad.  We’re not used to it.   We’ve spent half a century changing the subject when the conversation gets awkward and we’re very good at it.

The white reaction to the new civil rights curriculum in McComb, MS hasn’t always been positive:

“They just don’t talk about it,” says Jacquelyn Martin, a black civil rights organizer. “People don’t understand that part of the healing begins when you talk about it, so they just keep it to themselves.”

Making it a subject in school is “a pretty drastic change,” says state curriculum specialist Chauncey Spears. “But how can you have a strong education program when you have high-achieving grads who have such little understanding of their own history?”

Mississippi Senate Bill 2718, passed in 2006, mandates all kindergartners to 12th-graders to be exposed to civil rights education. In the younger grades, students will read books such as “I Love My Hair!” as a way to discuss concepts like racial differences in skin complexion and hair texture. Later grades will delve more deeply into how ordinary citizens shaped the civil rights movement and the long-term effects those changes had upon the nation.

This section is downright pignant:

Some days there are tears. For Sarah Rowley, 17, the class has been a watershed. Initially she saw it as “an easy grade,” but quickly realized she was wrong. Much of the class centers on gathering oral narratives from residents who grew up in a radically different McComb, a place where inequality and violence was a part of life. In the middle of one interview at the home of Lillie Mae Cartstarphen, Sarah asked an innocent question about the role of law enforcement during that time.

Sarah’s grandfather had been a McComb policeman and, later, chief of police during the 1960s. In her family’s eyes, he was a hero. But, says Sarah, her voice trembling as she recounts the answer: “[Ms. Cartstarphen] said you couldn’t trust policemen, that they were just as involved as the KKK. Even now, it makes me want to cry. I thought, ‘I have to regain my composure. I can’t let this interfere with what I’m here to do.’ But I felt like I was in a tug of war. Here is this woman telling me this, but my family … they’re such good people. What do I do?”

She talked to Malone and to her father. She prayed. Eventually, Sarah says, she made peace with the legacy of a man struggling to keep his job, feed his family, and survive in a troubled era. She’s certain he’d make different choices if he were alive today.

It’s more difficult to talk about things with her boyfriend, who attends Parklane Academy, which is 99 percent white. When Sarah reads books like “The Mississippi Trials, 1955” she’s overwhelmed by sadness. But he doesn’t want to hear about it, she says. “He thinks it’s over with and in the past. He gets up and walks out…. He’s growing up in this mind-set that’s so sheltered. It breaks my heart.”

Malone’s emphasis on seeing all perspectives makes it easier for Sarah to cope. “I have to remember that if I was in his shoes, I’d be the same way,” Sarah says. “In the South, it’s a very, very touchy subject.”

Congratulations to the Mississippi Legislature for passing this legislation; lets hope most of the civil rights resenters in the Magnolia State are attending Segregation Academies (now referred to, in many cases, as “Christian Schools”).  In that case, they have nothing to fear.  What they don’t know can’t hurt them.

Can a three-day preaching event bring Dallas together?

Two years ago I would have been skeptical.  Friends of Justice was toying with a “Can we talk about race?” project designed to spark serious conversation across racial lines.  No one seemed interested.  Black and white pastors had the same reaction: “We tried that once and it didn’t work out.”

Dallas is a seriously divided city.  Relations between whites, blacks and Latinos are characterized by tension and mutual suspicion.  Wealthy North Dallas exists in splendid isolation from the poor folk in South Dallas.  The “white flight” phenomenon left a legacy of resentment in its wake.  Blacks vote Blue, whites vote Red and Latinos split the differernce  Even the Dallas Cowboys now play twenty miles to the west, in Arlington.

The city’s relational dysfunction has elicited little interest from scholars.  Michael Phillips’ White Metropolis notes that “Dallas does not merit  a single mention in Taylor Branch’s 1,064-page study of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters . . . Robert Weisbrot, in his 1990 monograph Freedom Bound, A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement, tells the Dallas story in a paragraph . . . A photo of the famous Dallas Skyline graces the cover of John Boles’ 569-page The South through Time: A History of an American Region, but the city appears nowhere in the index.”

Phillips suggests that the virtual invisibility of Dallas “represents amnesia by design . . . Rather than dealing with the messiness of the past, many opinion makers in Dallas chose to pretend the city had no history.”  Apart from the tragedy of November 22, 1963, Dallas has been virtually invisible.  And there is nothing as powerful as a historical legacy no one talks about. 

Which explains why attempts to reach across racial, ethnic, political and ideological lines have rarely succeeded in Dallas, Texas.

And then Jim Wallis and Sojourners selected “The White Metropolis” as the site of the second “Justice Revival.”

A few years back, Lydia Bean (pictured above) came up with the idea of an old timey revival meeting centered on God’s call to social righteousness.  A Harvard grad student in the sociology of religion, Lydia was doing a comparative study of Canadian and American evangelicals.  The two groups shared a common theology but parted company on the issue of social justice.  Canadian evangelicals generally believed that governments have a responsibility to build a  just society and that churches should build on this work.  By contrast, most American evangelicals were suspicious of any attempt to make the world a better place that wasn’t nurtured in a conservative reading of the Christian Bible.  Conservative Protestants south of the border weren’t opposed to social righteousness; they just didn’t believe secular governments could deliver the goods unless born again politicians were at the helm.

While Lydia ruminated, Jim Wallis was doing an intensive study of the Second Great Awakening and its primary architect, Charles Grandison Finney.  While the great evangelist called men and women to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, he resisted neat lines between the natural and the supernatural.  “There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature,” he once said.  “It consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature. It is just that, and nothing else. When mankind becomes truly religious, they are not enabled to put forth exertions which they were unable before to put forth. They only exert powers which they had before, in a different way, and use them for the glory of God.”

 “Back then,” Jim Wallis recently told an interviewer, Charles Finney, Lucy Stone, the Grimke sisters, Jonathan Blanchard — these preachers, revivalists were also abolitionists. They led the antislavery campaign. They fought for women’s suffrage. They fought for economic justice.  In fact, Charles Finney, who was the evangelist, the Billy Graham of to his day, really pioneered the altar call. And the reason he did was he wanted to sign his converts up for the antislavery campaign. So faith got directed right to justice.”

Wallis has been one of the few American evangelicals who believed that government and the religious community had complimentary roles to play in the common task of making justice roll down like the waters.”  I have been reading “Sojourners” (the magazine) ever since 1976 when Glen Stassen, then an ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, held up a copy in class and told us to subscribe. 

For decades, Wallis and his band of radical Christian zealots in Washington D.C. were an interesting anomaly.  Then a badly wounded politician named George W. Bush eked out a surprising electoral victory in 2004.  Everybody credited a resurgent Religious Right for the president’s political survival which elicited an obvious question: “If there is a Religious Right why isn’t there a Religious Left?” 

It turned out there was.  Nobody in the mainstream media was much interested in the usual suspects in liberal religion because (how do I say this gently?) while they had plenty of ideas about making the world a better place they didn’t have much to say about the intentions of a personal God.  Or, to put it another way, religious liberals are enamored of religious dialogue and reporters like to write about conflict. 

Then somebody said, “What about this Wallis fellow?  He’s a progressive evangelical.”

Disgruntled Democrats pricked up their ears and Jim Wallis suddenly had more big-time speaking invitations than he could handle. 

But Wallis wasn’t interested in being a shill for Blue America (the mirror image of the Religious Right); he wanted to introduce America to a God who, while neither a Red nor Blue, had big plans for the world and would work with everyone (preachers, politicians and pole vaulters) who believed in justice.

The Blue Team wasn’t hard to sell on this plan (what alternatives did they have?)  The Reds took a little more convincing.  Which explains Wallis’ description of Charles Finney as “the Billy Graham of his day.”  The founder of Sojourners was challenging mainstream American evangelicalism to stretch back behind the culture war to the roots of their movement.  “What about Wilberforce in England?” he asked, “didn’t he use his role as a Christian politician to outlaw the British slave trade?  And what about Finney?  Didn’t he call people to Jesus with one hand and sign them up for the prohibition movement with the other?”

As Wallis was reflecting on these things, he remembered meeting a Harvard graduate student the year before, who had earnestly pressed a “think-piece” into his hand.  Lydia Bean had cornered him during his year at Harvard, and handed him her five-page summary of what the “Religious Left” didn’t understand.  In short, they weren’t recognizably Christian, they were just dressing up progressive talking-points in flowery, religious language.  Wallis re-read this document, and called Bean up.  They discovered that both of them were thinking along the same lines: what America needed was not a “Christian Left,” but genuine revival.  Wallis asked her, “I want to read more–can you write me another think-piece?”    Bean wrote another think-piece called “New Wine in New Wineskins,” that laid out what it would mean to integrate justice into evangelism.   It was over fifty pages long.  Impressed, Wallis used this document to chart out the first Justice Revival, a pilot project held in Columbus, Ohio.  Bean flew out to observe and give some critical feedback.   “Talk more about the cross,” she told Wallis.  “This is for the church, we don’t have to be apologize for being explicitly Christian!”  The vision of “justice revival” was evolving.

I’m not sure why Sojourners selected Dallas for the second Justice Revival.  Maybe it’s because whether you’re white, black or Latino, evangelical religion rules this town.  We have plenty of Roman Catholics and a respectable sprinkling of Presbyterians and Episcopalians, of course, but the sheer size of the evangelical camp dwarfs the religious competition.  The revivalistic tradition with its fiery preaching and dramatic altar calls has shaped the religious culture of the community.  I have heard black preachers like Freddy Haynes at Friendship West Baptist Church issue a come-t0-Jesus invitation in one breath and a call to hop on the bus to Jena, Louisiana in the next.

A Justice Revival works in Dallas because it evokes a religious sensibility everyone is familiar with.  Even the liberals grew up evangelical.

Thus far, it appears to be working.  Jim Wallis and staffers like the indefatigable Aaron Graham were in town last week for a civic leaders luncheon (where the picture above was taken) and you could feel a distinct buzz in the room.  Leaders from every corner of the religious landscape were saying the same thing, “we’ve never come together like this before!”

Naturally, Wallis is conducting a delicate tight wire act in which a millimeter to the right or the left could spell disaster.  In an interview with the Dallas Morning News he laid out the game plan: “The idea is simple: Churches ought to get together around what Jesus said about ‘the least of these.’ We may disagree about abortion, church polity, all that. On this, we’re clear.”

Issues on which there is little consensus (like abortion, gay rights and the death penalty) have been pushed to the  back burner so we can talk about housing and educating the poor.  This has injected a measure of imprecision into the process but participants seem to be adjusting.  The key thing is to bring people together and we’re willing to sacrifice to make it happen.  Thus far, folks disinclined to cooperate are keeping their opinions to themselves.

Sojourners is used to living in the shell-scarred no-mans-land created by the culture war.   Last week Ryan Roderick Beiler, editor of Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, got tired of biting his tongue:  

Every now and then someone to our right or left posts an article excoriating Sojourners or Jim Wallis for not being _____ enough, infuriated that we still claim to be _____ even though we’re really just _____. You may want to play along with this Mad Libs game at home. The comments on this blog often do, filling in those blanks with terms like “conservative,” “liberal,” “evangelical,” “progressive,” “pro-life,” “pro-abortion,” “anti-abortion,” “pro-gay,” “anti-gay,” “radical socialist,” “closet conservative,” “Obama shill,” and “White House hijacker” respectively, depending on whether it’s the right or left wing that’s doing the flapping.

While we don’t shy away from honest debate, we generally prefer not to respond to attacks that are unfair, inaccurate, or ad hominem. However, I’ve always had a tremendous desire to introduce our critics on the left to our critics on the right. I would love to be a fly on the wall as they debate which one of them is wrong about our position on hot button issues, of which abortion is the easiest example: “He’s anti-choice!” “He’s certainly not pro-life!”

The result was predictable.  Folks on the right criticized Beiler for being too liberal while the liberals critiqued his unthinking conservatism.

God may not be Red or Blue but we humans like to pick sides. 

It isn’t easy being purple.

The Greenwood Commonwealth has a reasonably thorough article on the Attorney General’s decision to drop the perjury charges against James Bibbs.  

Rod McDuff, Mr. Bibbs’ attorney, told the Commonwealth that “There really wasn’t any evidence to support the charge of perjury.  The attorney general’s office examined this very carefully. They agreed to meet with me to discuss the evidence. They then took some additional time to thoroughly analyze the case, and they ended up making the right decision.”

One reader was incensed to learn that the fourth jury to hear the case against Curtis Flowers “divided along racial lines” and thus “could not reach a verdict”. 

“What a sad commentary,” the reader exclaimed, “that people may actually be protecting a murderer for no other reason than race.  Anyone who would turn a blind eye to the facts of a case, or deny justice based on race should be jailed themselves. It’s a shame that some folks are fine with having an “OJ” walking around free in Montgomery County. Those innocent people were brutally murdered, and there will come a day that God will hold not only the murderer accountable, but anyone who knowingly protected him afterward by ignoring their civic duty.”

This comment makes two logical errors that have made it possible for DA Doug Evans to sell a pathetically weak case to white jurors.  First, he assumes that all the ideological bias in Winona lives on the black side of the tracks.  It has never occurred to this person that the judgment of white folks might also be subjective.  Secondly, he jumps from the undeniable fact that “innocent people were brutally murdered” to the conclusion that Curtis Flowers pulled the trigger.

This error in reasoning is widespread and works powerfully to the advantage of prosecutors.  The more violent, senseless and repulsive the crime the more the human heart cries out of justice.  Believing that the authorities nailed the right guy feels good.  The thought that an innocent man may be convicted feels bad.  A pro-prosecution bias emerges from the simple fact that people like feeling good and hate feeling bad.  

It isn’t easy to care about due process and the sufficiency of the evidence when people are mourning a tragic loss.  Every time Curtis Flowers goes to trial ancient wounds are ripped open and the desire for revenge trumps concerns about fair and impartial justice.

It is easy to argue that if Curtis Flowers must be guilty because the authorities have taken him to trial so many times.  But why, if guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, has the state been unable to nail down a final conviction?

White folks think they know the answer–the niggers is just protecting one of their own. 

(By the way, I have never seen the point of filling in one or more letters in nasty words with asterisks or nonesense symbols, as in n*****s, or f*ck.  “Nigger” IS an ugly word, but I don’t see how plugging in a few asterisks softens the blow.  Nor am I sure the blow should be softened.)

The Flowers case has divided Winona along racial lines and the division appears to be growing.  Although I have accused Judge Joey Loper of pitching a hissy fit in the courtroom when he told Doug Evans to prosecute James Bibbs for perjury, there was some method to the jurist’s temporary madness.  The idea was to intimidate black residents into not showing up for jury duty or stating that they couldn’t be objective jurors.

A second comment at the end of the Greenwood Commonwealth article reflects the passion this case has evoked in the black community.

Anyone who would send a person to the death chamber based on race should also be jailed. Carroll and Montgomery County jurors have sent innocent people to death chairs and chambers based on race in the past. Research the history of the criminal justice system out there if you think that I am lying.  That community should exercise more caution before condemning a person to die.  By the way, what do the trumped up charges against Mr. Bibbs suggest to you? The man’s life that was otherwise honorable has been wrecked by a judge who wants nothing less than another Carroll County Massacre.

The “history of the criminal justice system,” is an important issue for black people in the Mississippi Delta.  It’s a history white folks are desperate to forget.

Alvin Clay will be staying in the free world while he appeals his conviction.  Since his federal trial on mortgage fraud charges in the summer of 2008, the Little Rock attorney has decisively proven that the government’s star witness perjured himself repeatedly under oath. 

The evidence suggests that Donny McCuien and Ray Nealy conducted a small-time real estate scam and that Alvin Clay was duped along with a list of buyers and a variety of title and mortgage companies.  (When all the dust settled, the buyers in these deals were defrauded of a grand total of $16,000).  Two facts are now beyond dispute: (1) the government’s case against Clay was entirely dependent upon the testimony of Donny McCuien and (2) Donny McCuien isn’t credible under oath.

The government’s vindictive motivation in this case was exposed when Donny McCuien’s credibility began to unravel.  Instead of moving to vacate Clay’s conviction, the government cut a sweetheart deal with yet-to-be-prosecuted Ray Nealy even though they had mountains of damning documentary evidence against the man and no meaningful evidence at all against Clay.  The government couldn’t afford to put the now-discredited Donny McCuien on the stand. 

All of this has placed federal judge Leon Holmes in a sticky position.  Holmes didn’t want to embarrass the US Attorneys Office; but he didn’t think anyone should go to prison on the word of a character like Donny McCuien.  What to do?

Judge Holmes has done everything he could do to minimize the damage without placing himself in an adversarial position with the long list of federal prosecutors associated with this case (he’s got to work with these people, after all).  First, Holmes sentenced Clay to five months of federal prison time (it could have been five years).  Second, he granted Clay’s motion for release pending appeal. 

But Holmes didn’t stop there.  Here is the text of yesterday’s release order:

Clay presents eight issues that he believes are close issues or issues that could go either way and which, if ruled upon by the court of appeals in his favor, could result in the reversal of the conviction or a new trial. See United States v. Powell, 761 F.2d 1227, 1230-31 (8th Cir. 1985). The Court agrees that some of the issues presented by Clay are close. The Court also agrees that if decided in favor of Clay, those issues could result in the reversal of the conviction or a new trial. (my emphasis)

This wording is reminiscent of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal’s ruling on the first round of habeas writs filed in the Tulia cases.  In effect, Holmes is signalling to the federal appeals court that they should give Alvin Clay’s case very careful attention.

Alvin Clay should be congratulated for his diligent pursuit of justice.  But all is not well.  As a convicted felon, Clay can no longer practice law.  Furthermore, he and his family have been forced to invest their scant resources in an expensive legal fight.

But if Judge Holmes had refused Clay’s motion, the Little Rock attorney would have been checking into a federal detention facility in Montgomery, Alabama early next week.  Now he is free to fight for his own freedom, and that’s very good news indeed!

(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.)

Perjury charges against James Bibbs have been dropped by the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office because “The State of Mississippi does not have sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.”

In other words, this case should never have been prosecuted.

Those wanting some background to the Bibbs prosecution can find it here, but I’ll give you a brief synopsis.  At the close of Curtis Flowers’ fourth murder trial, five black jurors voted for acquittal and seven white jurors voted to convict.  Things went better for the prosecution in trial five.  This time there were only three black jurors and the dynamics in the jury room changed considerably.  Two black jurors, realizing they weren’t going to win over their white counterparts, offered to vote guilty if the other side would take the death penalty off the table.

James Bibbs was having none of that.  The state hadn’t met it’s burden so Bibbs hung the jury.

Judge Joseph Loper was so incensed that he abandoned all pretence of judicial impartiality or common sense.  The man threw a hissy fit in the the courtroom in front of God and everybody.  First, Loper ordered DA Doug Evans to charge Bibbs with perjury.   Second, Loper told Evans to change the Mississippi law that bars the prosecution from asking for a change of venue.

Like they say, you can’t make this stuff up.

The evidence against Bibbs came from a note passed to Judge Loper by a white juror.  During voir dire, Bibbs claimed he didn’t know anything about the Flowers case apart from what was in the paper.  In the jury room, Bibbs reported that he was in the alley behind the murder scene on the morning of the murder.  This supposedly constituted inside knowledge of some kind and proved that Bibbs (in cahoots with the Flowers family) had lied his way onto the jury.

Hats off to attorney Rob McDuff for getting Loper and Evans recused from this case.  Cooler heads prevailed as the Attorney General’s Office gradually backed away from a garbage case.  Eventually, they stowed the garbage where it belonged.

What does this portend for Mr. Flowers’ sixth trial scheduled for June 7 of 2010?  For one thing, black residents will naturally be intimidated by Mr. Bibbs’ frightening scrape with the law.  This, of course, is precisely what the prosecution intended.  The more black citizens in the jurors box the less likely it is that Doug Evans and friends can post a conviction.   By now, they are royally sick of this case but can’t abide the political and social consequences of doing the right thing.

Hopefully, the Attorney General’s decision to punt on the Bibbs case will reassure Winona’s black residents that some folks in the great state of Mississippi aren’t still living in 1963.

(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.)

Remember the Daily Kos poll showing that 47% of southerners had doubts that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii?  What would the numbers look like if the question was posed to white southerners?

Fortunately, we aren’t left to idle speculation.  Del Ali of Research 2000 crunched the numbers and concluded that, if the Daily Kos figures are accurate, “the proportion of white Southern voters with doubts about their president’s citizenship may be higher than 70 percent.”

The Daily Kos study applied the “Southern” label to twelve states: Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.  Some of these states went blue in 2008 and others were in the swing state category.  So, if the 70% figure applies to white Southerners generally, what percentage of white voters in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama (where Obama took between 10 and 14% of the white vote) fear the President might be a closet foreigner?

Now, move to small-town Mississippi and ask the same question.  Is it possible that upwards of 85% of the white adults in Winona, MS (to choose a town at random) question the citizenship of our president?

And if this figure is inaccurate, is it too high or not high enough?

A couple of Sundays ago, Methodist pastor L. Charles Stovall and I attended a small but vital Missionary Baptist church in Winona.  According to the tradition of the black church, brother Stovall and I, as visiting pastors, were ushered to the front to sit at the right and left hand of the pastor and I was asked to lead the altar prayer.  Fortunately, I have attended enough traditional black worship services to know I was supposed to wait until the congregation had gathered at the front, joined hands, and sung a call-and-response hymn.  I didn’t start praying until the pastor gave me a gentle nudge.

I adapted my praying style to the black idiom as much as a white preacher can without sounding ridiculous.  This means breaking things up into bite-sized pieces, a few syllables at a time and waiting for the congregation to respond.  Toward the end of my prayer I prayed for “our president . . . and his wife . . . and his children.”

I might not have considered praying for the president but, the previous Sunday, I had worshipped with Priscilla Hutton (a Roman Catholic) at Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis.  Episcopalians always pray for the president using his Christian name, as in “. . . and for our president, Barack.”  So, on the fly, I adapted this custom to my black Baptist prayer.

When I was done and everyone had returned to their seats, the pastor said, “thank you so much, Reverend Bean, for that prayer.  You prayed for ‘our president’.  And he is  ‘our president’, just like George W. Bush was ‘our president’.  I was so surprised to hear you use that phrase and I was really moved and touched that you did.”

Why should it be considered amazing when a white preacher prays for “our president”?  Because in small town Mississippi, most white folks have a hard time embracing the idea that a black man, a black woman, and two black children are ensconced in the White House.

It is important that we not demonize Southern white folk.  Taken as individuals, some of their views and attitudes can be troubling, and in some instances, alarming.  But white people in Winona, Mississippi don’t have a lot of positive role models in the racial reconciliation department.  Resentment for the civil rights movement is so widespread in this culture that any other attitude is counterintuitive.   White residents of small Southern towns know it is wrong to discriminate, but the very mention of black leaders associated with the civil rights movement makes them bristle.

How do you reconcile a belief in racial equality with a deep-seated resentment for the movement that established, at least in a formal sense, that equality?

Reconciliation isn’t necessary because, as a practical matter, it is impossible.  White people can’t work through their feelings on these sensitive issues without revisiting the humiliation of the 1960s when their cultural heritage was exposed and ridiculed every evening on the nightly news.  White Southerners have adapted to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  If the black folks want a little state money for a civil rights library here and there, prominent white politicians are willing to cooperate–within reason.  But don’t ask these folks to celebrate Martin Luther King Day or to rejoice in the rich legacy of the civil rights movement.  Deep wounds have yet to heal.

It is generally considered bad form to beat up on Southern whites.  These people have been demeaned, stereotyped and condescended to for generations, the argument goes, so why not cut them some slack.  When I question the objectivity or the racial sensitivity of people like Doug Evans (the prosecutor in the Curtis Flowers case) or State Senator Lydia Chassaniol it isn’t because I believe they are fire-breathing, old school racists.  Doug and Lydia concern me because they are embedded in a deeply traumatized culture and it shows.  Chassaniol admits that she belongs to the Council of Conservative Citizens  (an organization with roots in the old White Citizens’ Councils) but doesn’t think that makes her racially insensitive.  She isn’t being the least bit disengenuous.  After attending all-white  public schools during the Jim Crow era, Chassaniol went to college and returned to Winona to teach in the community’s all-white segregation academy.  With all the best intentions in the world (and I firmly believe she is well-intentioned), she can’t extricate herself from her culture and it’s tortured history.

Having lived in a small, racially polarized Texas town, I know how hard it can be for folks on either side of the cultural divide to break ranks with the status quo.  The journey toward racial reconciliation must be taken in the company of others–few can make this arduous pilgrimage on their own.

But where do we start and who takes the first step?

The jury system is the best system we have; but when that system collides with the racial history of the South because a low-status black man is accused of killing a high-status white woman, things fall apart.  Investigators, prosecutors and potential jurors (on both sides of the color line) find it impossible to maintain the degree of objectivity our jury system demands.

The criminal justice is breaking down in cases of this nature all across the rural South, but I have never witnessed a more compelling demonstration of the phenomenon than I have encountered in Winona, Mississippi where a murder prosecution has dragged on for thirteen years, dividing a community along racial lines.  How can we bring closure and resolution to this story?  One thing is certain: It isn’t likely to happen in the courtroom.