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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Charles Kiker

Charter Member of Friends of Justice

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The charge: angry while black.

And this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The South is different; just ask the Birthers.

  

    Strom Thurmond                Trent Lott                  Lydia Chassaniol

(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.)

We have been asking how a Mississippi State Senator can be a proud member of the most racist organization in America without drawing comment from the regional media.  Even when Lydia Chassaniol addressed the annual gathering of the resegregationist Council of Conservative Citizens, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger declined comment.

I realize that my repeated references to a faithful Methodist and loyal Republican makes me look mean, cheap and petty.  What has Lydia Chassanoil ever done to me?

Nothing personal, but Senator Chassaniol happens to be the walking embodiment of a question: How far has small town Mississippi traveled down the civil rights highway?

Mississippi, like every state in the Union, is a complex tangle of individuals and interests.  In a controversail article in Look, Hodding Carter II, a Mississippi Delta newspaper editor, challenged the White Citizens Councils.   Retribution came swiftly.  A member of the Mississippi House of Representatives called the article a “Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor” and the  House put the question to a vote.

Carter responded in a front-page editorial:

By vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true, it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by a vote of one to nothing that there are eighty-nine liars in the state legislature.

The 0utcome of the vote suggests that Carter was swimming against a strong tide.

More representative of mainstream opinion in the state is Strom Thurmond, the man who ran for President on the segregationist State’s Rights ticket in 1948.  Harry Truman had recently integrated the US Army and Thurmond didn’t like it.

Strom Thurmond stood for the same resegregationist policies the Council of Conservative Citizens currently endorses, but Thurmond took his stand back when segregation was cool.  For the most part, Dixiecrats like Thurmond never changed their stripes.  Speaking in the Dirkson Senate Office Building on the occasion of his political mentor’s 100th birthday, Lott raised eyebrows across the nation.

“I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”

Lott later suggested that he had been quoted out of context.  But consider this.  When Thurmond spoke at a Ronald Reagan rally in Mississippi in 1980, Lott expressed the same views in public: “You know, if we had elected that man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”

The unavoidable import of these remarks is that if the Jim Crow segregation had remained in force America would be a better country.

Lydia Chassaniol agrees with this sentiment–or so it seems.  When Jesse Jackson remarked that he would like to castrate Barack Obama for talking down to black folks, Chassaniol was surprised by the muted response from the media:

The calm with which this has been reported pales in comparison to the coverage of the innocuous remark made by then Sen. Trent Lott several years ago at the 100th birthday party of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.  Sen. Lott didn’t threaten anyone, but merely wished an elder statesman a happy birthday and said things might not have been so bad if he, Thurmond, had been elected President over half a century ago. While we’ll never know if Sen. Lott was right about Strom Thurmond being elected President, we do know that no one was physically threatened by what he said, and yet, there was a maelstrom of media coverage condemning Lott.

Chassaniol can’t prove that a segregated America would have been a better America, but she is certainly open to the possibility.

In 1960, when Lydia Chassaniol was attending elementary school, Mrs. Claudia Hill Minga of Winona, MS wrote an anguished letter to the Jackson Daily News.  The letter caught the attention of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a nefarious arm of state government formed to snoop on civil rights activists.  Between 1960 and 1964, the Sovereignty Commission secretly funded the White Citizens Council (the forerunner to the Chassaniol’s Council of Conservative Citizens).

After closely observing both the Democratic and Republican conservations on television, with a deep resentment of the insults to our Southern delegations; and especially noting the obsequious deference and the glad-hand extended by the Kennedy-Johnson duo to the Negro representatives of the NAACP as they enthusiastically assured them of their support and the enforcement of their demands, I a sixth generation Democrat, realized that I was a woman without a party.

In my opinion, any Southerner with respect for himself, the future generations and his Caucasion blood, could not possibly accept the infamous civil rights planks of either party.

However, Mississippians have received new hope and optimism from the recent organization of the state of Independent Electors headed by Governor Ross Barnett and loyal state officials and citizens who refuse to forfeit our state’s rights and personal freedom or yield to the domination of Negroes and white “liberals”.  We shall fight valiantly and fearlessly and though we should be defeated we shall under no circumstances be found “on a longely island, waving a white flag” in cowardly surrender, according to the jeering, sneering prophesy of Bidwell Adam.

Mrs. Claudia Hill Minga,

Winona, Miss.

The reference to Bidwell Adam may give the impression that somebody in Mississippi (besides Hodding Carter) was questioning the fight for segregation.  Not so.  Adam, a former Mississippi Lt. Governor (pictured at the left), was state chair of the MS Democratic Party when Ross Barnett took up residence in the governor’s mansion in 1960.  According to a Time  article in 1959, Barnett won the election by employing the most appalling rhetoric the South has ever heard: “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him. His forehead slants back. His nose is different. His lips are different, and his color is sure different.”

Barnett’s first act as Governor was to arrange a conference of Southern governors to stand four-square for segregation. “I am going to put forth every effort,” Barnett promised, “to organize Southern Governors to create and crystallize public opinion throughout the nation with reference to our traditions and Southern way of life.”

Bidwell Adam was delighted with this development: “I want to say I’m thankful to God that Ross Barnett has saved Mississippi,” he told the press.

In 1963 when 200,000 people marched to the Lincoln Memorial to demand “jobs and freedom” for African American, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger gave the rally a passing mention.   The next day’s headline was more direct: WASHINGTON IS CLEAN AGAIN WITH NEGRO TRASH REMOVED.

This was a time when nothing good could be said about Negroes or civil rights. When Lydia Chassaniol was a school girl, an ugly synergy between hate and resentment controlled Mississippi politics, spilling over into the criminal justice system.

James. P. Coleman, the man Ross Barnett succeeded as Governor, called in the FBI in 1959 when a crowd in the southern Mississippi town of Poplarville tried to break into the local jail to lynch a black man accused of raping a white woman.  The move won warm praise from Roy Wilkens of the NAACP, but Bidwell Adam was unimpressed.  “Wilkins gave Coleman a nice bouquet of roses wrapped in gold foil,” Adam charged, “to sew up the 25,000 Negro votes.”

Were there 25,000 black voters in the state of Mississippi in 1959.  According to Randall Kennedy, “In many rural areas, black voters were virtually non-existent; in Mississippi in 1955, fourteen rural counties with large black populations had no black registered voters.”

When a band of civil rights workers passed through Winona in 1963 all hell broke loose.

But that’s the next chapter of this story.

Now that all the relevant tapes and manuscripts have been released some folks are growing weary of the Gates-Crowley affair.  When one side in a dispute says the issue has been overblown and it’s time to move on, you know the facts aren’t sliding their way.

So it is with the Cambridge controversy.

We now know that the the Cambridge Police Department had no solid grounds to suspect a break-in.  The woman who reported the incident surmised that the men at the front door might live there.  She reported that the men had suitcases with them (as opposed to the backpacks Sgt. James Crowley cited in his report), which suggests their intentions were innocent (you might bring a duffel bag to a burglary, but a suitcase?)

 In fact, Lucia Whalen told police that the presence of suitcases suggested that the two men she had seen lived in the home.  Whalen said nothing about the race of the men she observed on the porch, yet, if Sgt. Crowley’s incident report is accurate, he entered the home with two black men on his mind.  This suggests that racial profiling was a bigger part of the picture than some of us initially suspected.

The point may be subtle but it is important.  Crowley remembers being told that two black men with backbacks were in the home; where did he get that idea?  He didn’t get it from Whalen?  Perhaps the fact that Gates is black “colored” his memory.   It is also possible, even likely, that a reference to two men with suitcases automatically triggered a mental image in Crowley’s mind of two black guys with backpacks. 

You can disagree with my explanation, but Crowley is clearly the victim of false memory (a subject I am currently researching) and something triggered the two-black-men scenario.

The released tapes also tell us that Sgt. Crowley asked for backup from the Cambridge PD and Harvard campus police after Dr. Gates had clearly identified himself.  Was the strapping young cop really that afraid of a short middle-aged man with a cane?  Obviously not.  So why did he need the backup? 

As I suggested in an earlier post, college professors and police officers are accustomed to deference and sometimes behave badly when they don’t get it.  Hopefully, a beer with the biggest cheese of all will help put things in perspective for both men.

Has the Cambridge stand-off been exaggerated by the media?

I don’t think so.  When was the last time Americans have enjoyed so much good conversation about race, racial profiling, homeowner’s rights, and the proper role of law enforcement? 

Juan Williams, a familiar face on Fox News and a familiar voice on NPR, has developed a reputation as a black herald of a post-racial society.  This morning, Williams was on Morning Edition arguing that the Gates affair has nothing to do with racial profiling.  Williams developed that opinion before the tapes were released and he’s sticking to it. 

President Obama hopes the Gates incident will become “a teachable moment” in America.  Juan Williams doesn’t think the Gates-Crowley encounter has nothing to teach.

Gates has been criticized for whining about a mean cop while poor blacks experience far more egregious treatment at the hands of officers who make Crowley look like Dudley Dooright.  Why hasn’t professor Gates, the man with posh accommodations in Cambridge, Martha’s Vineyard and Manhattan, been talking about the plight of poor blacks all along.  And why has President Obama gone to bat for his friend Skip while refunding the notorious Byrne Grant system so still more black guys can go to prison?

These are very good questions.  But here’s the point: because of what happened in Cambridge people are asking questions, making comments, sharing insights and expressing opinions of every conceivable sort.  Attorney General Eric Holder was right on the money when he called America “a nation of cowards” on the race issue.  Back in February, Holder admitted that the workplaces of America are much more integrated than they once were, but he noted that “Certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one’s character.” 

Well, thanks to Gates and Crowley we’re all talking now.  We’re not all making sense, but we’re talking. 

Like the Jena 6 story or the Tulia drug sting, the Gates affair was fraught with moral ambiguity.  This wasn’t a story pitting a dastardly villain and a virtuous hero–real life doesn’t work that way.  People don’t talk much about hero-villain stories where the moral issues are obvious.  These stories flash across the evening news, we all say “ain’t it awful” and then we move on to the next story about an explosion, a wildfire or a trainwreck. 

But stories like the Gates-Crowley stand-off spark controversy and endless conversation precisely because the issues are subtle and open to a range of interpretation.  Juan Williams is talking about professor Gates and officer Crowley even though, as always, he takes the moderate white position that there’s nothing to it.  Williams is talking about Gates-Crowley because it’s what people are talking about–you can’t avoid the issue if you’re a black commentator paid the big bucks to tell white folks how far they’ve come on the race issue.

Robert Jenson is a white University of Texas professor who tells white people they haven’t come as far on the race issue as they like to think.  Here’s Jenson’s take on the Gates-Crowley brouhaha (highly recommended).

And then, contra Williams, we have the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers decrying racial profiling and siding with professor Gates.

Thousands of articles, hundreds of thousands of blog commentaries and millions of comments have flowed from a single incident.  Maybe Professor Gates doesn’t have much to complain about compared to most poor black victims of racial profiling, but people can identify with Gates precisely because of his academic attainments and lofty social position.  We say, “If it could happen to him . . .”  

Many white homeowners are thinking about the paramaters of police authority because of my-home-is-my-castle concerns. 

Moral ambiguity drives controversy, controversy drives conversation and conversation sometimes produces genuine insight.

You couldn’t dismiss the Jena 6 case by preaching that violence is not the answer (although people certainly tried).  You couldn’t erase the damage done in Tulia by surmising that some of the 46 people arrested were guilty as charged.  And you can’t dismiss the Gates-Crowley stand-off with snide references to professorial arrogance. 

If there weren’t valid points to me made on both sides of these national narratives they wouldn’t inspire so much ardent debate. 

Friends of Justice uses narrative campaigns to pose hard questions about the issues Eric Holder thinks America needs to be talking about: history, race and the criminal justice system.  Our stories aren’t “ripped from the headlines”; we focus on anonymous narratives that would pass unnoticed if we didn’t put the facts together and ask the questions legal professionals aren’t allowed to ask. 

Friends of Justice gives defendants, lawyers, reporters and advocacy groups something to work with.

Statistics and studies don’t inspire debate; stories do. 

So hats off to Sgt. James Crowley and Dr. “Skip” Gates.  Because you weren’t “at your best” our minds and hearts have been stretched.

(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.)

James Bibbs’ perjury trial has been postponed.  Jury selection was originally scheduled to begin on Tuesday, July 28th.  (You can find background material for this post here.)

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger may be ignoring state senator Lydia Chassaniol’s intimate ties to one America’s most racist organizations, but the paper has been faithfully following the Bibbs case.  Earlier this year, Chassaniol sponsored legislation designed to expand the jury pool in the Curtis Flowers case to a five-county district (Flowers is pictured to the left).  Current law stipulates that a defendant has a constitutional right to stand trial in his or her county of residence.

Because Montgomery County is over 50% black, it will inevitably produce more black jurors than most Mississippi counties.  Moreover, the Flowers family has a reputation in the African American community as stable, religious and friendly.  As a result, most black jurors are open to the possibility that Curtis Flowers might be innocent.  After five murder trials and three convictions, it is difficult to find a white resident of socially segregated Winona who doesn’t think the case against Flowers is overwhelming.

This racial perception gap is evident in the comments section at the end of the Clarion-Ledger article.  Those who think Flowers murdered Bertha Tardy and three other innocent people in 1996 also tend to believe that juror James Bibbs is guilty of perjury.  Readers who think the case against Flowers is weak see Bibbs as the victim of a vindictive prosecutor.

“It’s a shame race has been used to prohibit justice in this case,” one reader writes.  “This is about a violent animal with no compassion for anyone that took the lives of innocent people. Everyone (black and white) should be united in bringing these animals to justice not matter the race. This could happen to any of us as long as thugs like Flowers are allowed to walk free. With the overwhelming evidence in this case and the fact that he has already been tried and convicted three times should be enough for anyone. Instead we continue to waste taxpayer money on technicalities. What a farce.”

Another reader disagrees:

NO, that is NOT the way the justice system is supposed to work. You do not base your decision or vote on past trials and juries. I don’t know if he is guilty or not. However I do know the verdict should be based on evidence presented during this trial alone.

A third person thinks DA Doug Evans prosecuted juror Bibbs as tactic of intimidation:

It appears to me that they are trying to send a message to the next group that serve on the jury that if you don’t find Flowers guilty you could be charged with the same charges as Bibbs! It won’t work! People will vote the way they see it! I agree when you prosecute someone on the thin evidence here, it could send an unfortunate message that people are being prosecuted because of the way they vote on the jury. That is completely improper.  Only in Mississippi! It’s time for the Feds to come in and clean this up!

Did Curtis Flowers casually massacre four innocent people in a furniture store and then go about his business as if nothing had happened?  If so, he defintely fits the “violent animal” profile.

But what if the “violent animal” shoe doesn’t fit?

Prior to the Tardy murders, Curtis was known as a goodnatured gospel singer.  Since being locked up in 1996, Flowers has been a model prisoner best known for leading the singing at worship services.

I recently talked to a prison guard who has been watching Flowers carefully for several years and is convinced the man isn’t capable of committing such a heinous crime.

“He ’bout one of the finest young men I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” the guard told me.  “He’s one of the nicest people ever put on a pair of pants.  He goes to church, he’s free-hearted, he’d give you his last dime.  He doesn’t look like somebody who did the crime.  He sleeps sound.  If you puttin’ on, there’ll be a time when you slip up.”

According to the guard, other prisoners frequently remark that Curtis doesn’t fit the killer profile.

But I digress.

You may be wondering why the perjury trial of James Bibbs was postponed at the eleventh hour?

When Judge Joseph Loper hauled Mr. Bibbs into court and pronounced him guilty of perjury, the case should have been turned over to the Attorney General’s office.  Bibbs had just robbed prosecutor Doug Evans of a long-sought conviction and Evans could hardly be seen as objective.  Moreover, Evans was a potential fact witness at trial.  Eventually, the case was turned over the Mississippi AG’s office and handed down to the first prosecutor with the time to take it.

Unlike DA Evans, the new prosecutor has nothing personal against the defendant; he’s just doing his job.  Defense attorney Rob McDuff suggested that the AG’s office should take a good hard look at this case before proceeding.  The special prosecutor agreed to do that.

That’s all we know at present and I’m not inclined to read any deeper meaning into the postponement.  I will be writing more about the background of the Flowers case in the near future.  In addition to the post cited earlier, you can find more information about the deep social cleavage in Winona  here, here and here.