Marshall Ganz is a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  He played an instrumental, and largely anonymous, role in shaping Barack Obama’s recent campaign.  Most importantly, Dr. Ganz has served as mentor to my daughter (and Friends of Justice board member) Lydia Bean.  This understanding of story has helped Friends of Justice understand the power of our narrative strategy. I don’t have to tell you anything more because Marshall Ganz begins with his own story.  This article is taken from the current issue of Sojourners. 

Why Stories Matter
The art and craft of social change.

by Marshall Ganz

I grew up in Bakersfield, California, where my father was a rabbi and my mother was a teacher. I went to Harvard in 1960, in part because it was about as far as I could get from Bakersfield, which was the terminus of the dust bowl migration that John Steinbeck made famous in The Grapes of Wrath.

I got my real education, however, when I left Harvard to work in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. I went to Mississippi because, among other things, my father had served as an Army chaplain in Germany right after World War II. His work was with Holocaust survivors, and as a child the Holocaust became a reality in our home. The Holocaust was interpreted to me as a consequence of racism, that racism is an evil, that racism kills. I made a choice to go to Mississippi.

I also was raised on years of Passover Seders. There’s a part in the Passover Seder when they point to the kids and say, “You were a slave in Egypt.” I finally realized the point was to recognize that we were all slaves in Egypt and in our time that same struggle from slavery to freedom is always going on, that you have to choose where you stand in that. The civil rights movement was clearly about that struggle. It was in Mississippi that I learned to be an organizer and about movement-building.

I went to Mississippi because it was a movement of young people, and there’s something very particular about young people, not just that they have time. Walter Brueggemann writes in The Pro­phetic Imagination about the two elements of prophetic vision. One is criticality, recognition of the world’s pain. Second is hope, recognition of the world’s possibilities. Young people come of age with a critical eye and a hopeful heart. It’s that combination of critical eye and hopeful heart that brings change. That’s one reason why so many young people were and are involved in movements for social change. (more…)

This guest blog post appears on the God’s Politics Blog sponsored by Sojourners.  You may want to join the discussion there or share your thoughts below.

Alan Bean

Tulia and Jena: America in Miniature

I moved to Tulia, Texas, in the summer of 1998, a year before a massive drug bust decimated the black side of town. My wife Nancy’s parents, Charles and Patricia Kiker, had just retired to Tulia when the local newspaper rejoiced to see the “city streets cleared of garbage.”

Friends of Justice, a faith-based organization shaped by Micah’s injunction to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly came to life on New Year’s Eve, a few days after Joe Moore was sentenced to 90 years by a Tulia jury.

If you happened to see the PBS documentary “Tulia, Texas”, you will remember an old guy in the black baseball cap-that’s Charles Kiker, a retired Baptist minister who grew up on a farm outside of Tulia.

An unwieldy assemblage of preachers, teachers, farmers, prison guards, and meat packers, we held weekly worship services featuring prayers for justice, the singing of old spirituals and gospel hymns, the reading of letters from prison, and extemporary sermons rooted in the biblical call to justice.

This story is deeply personal for Nancy and me. Friends of Justice worshipped in our living room, and before the fight was over three “drug war orphans” had slept under our roof.

In Jena, Louisiana, shortly before we moved our headquarters from Tulia to Arlington, Texas, we helped organize biweekly meetings in a modest black Baptist church with prayers, preaching, and music.

It is commonly assumed that reporters and pro bono attorneys flock to places like Tulia and Jena because the injustice is too grave to be ignored. Friends of Justice rose to the defense of the defendants in Tulia because no one else would.

There was a vague awareness in progressive circles that something bad was going down in Jena, Louisiana, but the media didn’t know what to do with Jena until Friends of Justice connected the narrative dots. High profile legal firms weren’t willing to invest their precious resources until the Chicago Tribune and CNN transformed Jena into a cause celebre.

We didn’t want Jena to succeed Tulia as America’s most racist community, but it happened anyway. Is it possible to draw attention to small town injustice without polarizing a community along racial lines? (more…)

If you still believe poor defendants get a fair shake give this column from the New Orleansw Times-Picayune a guick glance.  I realize it’s a few months old, but it was just forwarded to me by a reader from Arkansas.  Two things to note in particular: 1) the Louisiana 5th circuit court of appeals trash canned every pro se writ of habeas corpus over a thirteen year period; 2) when the matter came to the attention of the state Supreme Court the justices asked the 5th circuit to give the writs a second look.  No penalties.  No indictments.  No prison time.  Just do-overs. 

The entire mess would still be shrouded in darkness if a guilty bureaucrat hadn’t left a suicide note.

In a suicide note, reflections on guilt

James Gill, Columnist, The Times-Picayune October 10, 2008 2:40AM

Convicts who can’t afford an attorney — and there aren’t many who can — know the odds are stacked against them if they file an appeal.

It is not unknown for inmates to have a legitimate grievance and for jailhouse lawyers to advance cogent and well-researched arguments on their behalf. But most “pro se” briefs are probably frivolous and nonsensical, and it is only natural that judges should tend to look askance as they buckle down to the task of reading them.

The judges weren’t looking askance over at the state Court of Appeal in Gretna, however, because they weren’t looking at all. For 13 years, the court ignored the lucubrations of all convicts who appealed on their own account.

This immoral and apparently illegal policy was in place until Jerrold Peterson, the staffer charged with implementing it, blew his brains out in May of last year. Peterson was driven to it in part, his suicide note suggested, by guilt over the nefarious tasks the judges made him perform.

In his note Peterson explained how the court gave indigent appellants the bum’s rush.

Although every criminal writ application is supposed to be reviewed by three judges, he was deputed to winnow out any that had been filed pro se and arrange for their automatic rejection.

Thus were an estimated 2,500 appeals deep-sixed without any judicial consideration whatsoever.

That was not the only aspect of life at the Fifth Circuit that stuck in Peterson’s craw. In his suicide note to the judges, he asked, “How many of you have called and asked me to ‘handle’ traffic tickets or to get someone out of jail without bond or to clear up contempt charges pending against friends? Never once have I declined to help someone you sent to me or refused to solve some problem you had.”

Maybe the Judiciary Commission will be interested in the answer to those questions. But such ethical violations are small beer compared with the systematic denial of due process revealed by Peterson. So the state Supreme Court, after receiving petitions from hundreds of appellants spurned by an idle and unprincipled Fifth Circuit, has stepped in. Kinda.

The solution, the Supreme Court has decided, can safely be entrusted to the idle and unprincipled Fifth Circuit, which kindly volunteered to take a belated look at the appeals once Peterson had blown the whistle.

The flaws of that arrangement might seem obvious, but only Justice John Weimer noticed.

In his dissent Weimer wrote that only another circuit or an ad-hoc panel could handle the review without an “appearance of impropriety.”

Edward Dufresne, Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit, took charge of pro se appeals in 1994. He then had Peterson prepare rulings denying writs for all of them and signed off “without so much as a glance, ” according to the suicide note. “No judge ever saw the writ application before the ruling was prepared by me, ” Peterson wrote in a second suicide note to the Judiciary Commission.

The rulings also bore the names, though not the signatures, of judges Marion Edwards and Wally Rothschild. Neither Edwards nor Rothschild had any clue as to what was in the applications, or even knew that they had been filed, according to Peterson.

Dufresne, Edwards and Rothschild will not participate in reviewing the old appeals, which will be left to three-judge panels drawn from their five colleagues.

But the arrangement must strike the public as fishy, if only because the Fifth Circuit may not be all that keen to uncover miscarriages of justice within its own walls.

Dufrense appears to be the villain of the piece, but it is hard to believe that not one of the other judges noticed they never saw a pro se appeal in 13 years. In his suicide note, Peterson seemed to blame them all, thus: “You completely ignore your own integrity in the handling of pro se criminal writ applications.”

He also noted the court charged local government $300 for each pro se appeal. When you can read not a single word and still charge about $75,000, you have a good racket going.

And all the while those poor suckers in the pen — some of whom must surely have gotten a raw deal at trial — were beavering away under the illusion that the Fifth Circuit was in the business of dispensing justice and upholding the Constitution.

. . . . . . .

James Gill is a staff writer. He can be reached at 504.826.3318 or at jgill@timespicayune.com.

James C. McKinley Jr. covers the state of Texas for The New York Times.  His recent piece on the racial tension in Paris, Texas is partially a re-write of Howard Witt’s reporting for the Chicago Tribune, but he has uncovered a few bits of fresh material.  I don’t know if Mr. McKinley attended the recent community forum in Paris, but if he didn’t he has seen video footage of the event.  (By the way, you can find a five-minute highlight reel on the Tribune website.)  

Watch the video, re-read Mr. Witt’s article and check out McKinley’s piece and you will get a reasonably thick description of the current controversy.  Black opinion isn’t monolithic, and I doubt white opinion is either. 

In the video clip, for instance, an NAACP representative from Dallas accuses the DA’s office of racial insensitivity; but the local NAACP pointman is more concerned about drug crime on the mean streets of Paris than with civil rights issues.  One middle aged black woman even accuses the New Black Panther Party and other “outsiders” of treating Paris unfairly.

But Brenda Cherry and the Reverend Fred Stovall aren’t the only Paris residents accusing the local power structure of racism.  The issue, in other words, hasn’t just divided the black and white communities in Paris, Texas; it has revealed deep divisions on both the white and black sides of town.

I have visited Paris, Texas on a few occasions–I even have relatives there–but I have never claimed a solid grasp on the facts. 

A few things can be said with confidence, however, even by ill-informed outsiders. Brandon McClelland’s mother, Jacqueline, argues that the initial investigation of her son’s death was sloppy.  It was.  To this day no one really knows what happened to Brandon McClelland and the inadequacy of the initial investigative work is largely to blame.  A bad investigation usually reflects indifference more than anything else. 

Maybe Brandon was run down by a gravel truck; the facts as presently known are highly ambiguous.  Hopefully, the defense attorneys assigned to represent the two white defendants in this case are working hard on an alternative theory of what went down that tragic night.  Until Shannon Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley have their day in court we all need to maintain open minds.  The due process protections guaranteed by the US and Texas constitutions must be honored.

I will have more to say on this story, possibly tomorrow.  In the meantime, read over the most recent story and let us know what you think.

Killing Stirs Racial Unease in Texas

 PARIS, Tex. – The killing of Brandon McClelland, though horrible, never fit the classic description of a lynching. The police say two friends ran him over with a pickup truck after an argument during a night of drinking.

His mother, Jacqueline, says the investigation into his death was shoddy.
But Mr. McClelland was black and the men accused of killing him are white, and his gruesome death has reignited ugly feelings between races that have plagued this small town for generations, going back to the days 100 years ago when it was the scene of brutal public lynchings. (more…)

The documentary “Tulia, Texas” has been garnering media coverage across the nation.  This review from the Chicago Tribune is typical.  Charles Kiker and Freddie Brookins, Sr., both founding members of Friends of Justice, are featured in the hour-long piece that aired last night on the PBS program Independent Lens.  Ultimately, it is the war on drugs, not the people of Tulia, that takes the biggest hit.  You can find another good article from the Houston Chronicle here.

If you want to learn more about Tulia, Independent Lens has a good list of sources here.

How the war on drugs went awry in Tulia, Texas

It’s appropriate that the excellent documentary “Tulia, Texas” (10 p.m. Tuesday, WTTW-Ch. 11; three and a half stars) has such a deliberate pace. If the documentary that told the painful story of this town had had a showy or loud style, the result would have been overkill.

As it was, what happened in Tulia was surreal. (For a video preview of the documentary and other information on the film, click here or here.)

In 1999, 46 Tulia residents, most of them African-American, were arrested in a drug raid. Many who were convicted early on were given sentences ranging from 20 to a staggering 90 years, and some of the frightened people who had been picked up in the drug bust pleaded guilty to avoid spending the rest of their lives in jail.

These men and women went to jail on the uncorroborated word of Tom Coleman, an undercover cop whose résumé and methods turned out to be problematic. A judge later called Coleman’s testimony in a Tulia-related case “extremely devious.”

But the most incredible part of the whole affair, which was exposed by a small band of concerned Tulia residents and by a crusading lawyer who spent years picking apart the prosecution’s cases, is that the sheriff who oversaw Coleman still believes in him. Sheriff Larry Stewart told the filmmakers that he thought of Coleman as a “credible” man, even after it emerged that some residents could prove they had been elsewhere when he allegedly bought cocaine from them.

In the middle of Coleman’s undercover activities, a warrant was issued for his arrest relating to crimes he’d been charged with in another county. But according to Stewart’s interview in “Tulia, Texas,” the sheriff determined that the “charges were not true” and he let Coleman keep working as he dealt with his own legal issues.

Filmmakers Cassandra Herrman and Kelly Whalen interviewed Coleman himself, who dismisses the charges that he faced after the Tulia cases began to fall apart as “vindictive.” They also talked to several of the men and women charged in the 1999 raid and to residents who still think those arrested were probably guilty of something. The picture that emerges is of a weary, hard-pressed town still grappling with issues of race and class that the 1999 arrests brought to the fore.

Charles Kiker and Gary Gardner, a retired farmer and a retired minister, respectively, were among the few local residents who were willing to speak out against the Tulia drug arrests and convictions.

“This is my home country,” Kiker told the filmmakers. “I was born here and I’ll be buried here. So I don’t want to put it down, but I want it to be fair.”

The hourlong film connects the events in Tulia to federally funded drug task forces, which have been around for two decades. In the film, Herman and Whalen, as well as Texas journalist Nate Blakeslee, make the case that these task forces are an important source of income, especially for cash-strapped rural police departments.

But in the words of attorney Jeff Blackburn, who helped free the Tulia defendants, “Task forces get money based on numbers” of people arrested.

Texas, the film tells us, has eliminated federally funded drug task forces, but there are still hundreds of them operating around the country. And as the final words of the documentary tell viewers, “There are no laws in the United States requiring corroboration of undercover narcotics agents.”

Another comment from our anonymous friend in Paris.   I am willing to post any responsible commentary; so if you have something to add please contact me.

Alan Bean

More happy news from Paris

 Because of my profession and circumstance, I probably know a few things I shouldn’t know and, because it is hard after a time to remember what’s in the public domain and what is private, I should keep my mouth shut. That’s hard because this is a sad problem and I really don’t know how it’s going to end. Everyone on this email distribution list is a “white” progressive Democrat–shame that I felt compelled to add “white”. Everyone of them worked hard to elect members of congress and other representatives with 80% plus NAACP ratings in place of members who scored in single digits. All of them believe in and promote civil rights and civil liberties. All of them supported Obama for President. And all of them are angry, frustrated and saddened over the current state of affairs. If Witt’s goal was to polarize the community he could not have done a better job.
Chuck Superville is not some hillbilly county judge. He’s a skilled attorney with an Ivy League education and a CPA on the side. He was not looking for an opportunity to send a young person to jail. Had he (or pretty much anyone else) known what was going on at TYC, he would not have sent either child. As you well know sometimes a judge has to play the hand he’s dealt and that’s what he did.

Witt’s argument about proportionality doesn’t hold water because the fact situations, circumstances and case studies were not similar–but it does hold emotional power. I cannot overstate that from the start these were legal matters with everyone involved–lawyers, judges and case workers–trying to do their jobs and reach the right results. In that regard, local constituencies, both black and white, generally believed that the conclusions were just. To that extent this is a manufactured controversy driven primarily by the Trib.

And what of Shaquanda? She has gone from being a very troubled child to a cause.

We have all had the experience of dealing with people–both adults and children–who have either been consistently told or come to believe nothing is their fault or their responsibility. It usually doesn’t work out very well. There is a quite limited market for that sort of person and, as the job of being George W. Bush is already taken, I’m not sure how it will work out for Shaquanda.

I can’t type fast enough to save the world–a function of age–but I’m more than willing to maintain this communication because I care and am very concerned about the outcome. Polarization tends to drown out the voices of reason on both sides so people like Witt become “Jesus killers” and those like me are part of a conspiracy of “town leaders” full of “falsehoods” and the teams are set. Nobody really wins. Progress loses. We’ll see how this game plays out.

The email from Paris [this refers to the initial post from a Paris resident criticizing the Chicago Tribune’s reporting] is a good example of whats wrong in Paris. Its full of lies. And those lies came straight for the D.A.s office, the judge who sentenced ShaQuanda Cotton and The Paris News. I know because I was there.While its true, ShaQuanda had numerous writeups, some were found to be untrue and some exaggerated. Thats why, since they are allowed to be used in court as absolute fact but are one sided and created, at least ShaQuanda Cottons case, by those who brought the charges against her, they should have both sides of the story on them. There should be a place where the student or parent can respond. After her arrest, ShaQunada’s writeups were tripled and most of those were minor such as “looking around”, messing with her sweater”.

School policy, at least at that time, stated a parent must fill out a complaint form in order to talk to the superintendent. You had to fill it out if you talked to the principal as well because if you failed to do that and wanted to talk to the superintendent or school board you were not allowed. But ShaQuanda Cotton was punished because of her mother following those rules.

In court, the D.A. went on and on about how she was always filing complaints. The incident with the hall monitor was not “the last straw”. It was the golden opportunity because they were tired of Creola Cotton and myself filing complaints. The hall monitor walked around the school laughing and talking for two hours before she was told by the principal and school police officer, who is also a teacher at the school, to go to the emergency room on a stretcher.

The incident was most likely captured on video.When Creola Cotton requested it be pulled and reviewed, at first she was told they would do that but a couple days later, she was told the equipment mal-functioned.

Superville went the TYC route because thats the route the school officials and D.A. wanted him to take. There was never any mention of giving up custody. There was never any mention of probation except when Gary Young questioned Creola Cotton regarding her going along with the terms of probation and she repeatedly said “Yes” and “Of Course I will”.

As we all know by now, sentencing a 14 year old to “Up to 7 years”, can be all of 7 years if you are given an extra pair of socks or a cup of water and you forget to throw away the cup. Superville had publicly claimed he only sentenced juveniles to TYC after he had exhausted all other options. In ShaQuanda Cottons case, he never exhausted anything. He never even concidered any other option.

I don’t know what “local black community” the email writer claims it was that supported the sentencing but the black community I live in certainly did not support it. Of course there were a few who believed anything they were spoonfed but in general, the black community was well aware that it could have just as easily be done to their child. Thats why to this day, they live in fear of openly complaining about racism. I know because they come to my organization, Concerned Citizens For Racial Equality with their complaints.

Many white citizens of Paris show great concern with the fact the white juvenile was placed in a facility where the guards were rapists and abusers but they fail to care that ShaQuanda Cotton was placed in the exact same facility in the care of those same rapists and abusers. They try to explain how she deserved it.

In the white Juvenile’s case, Superville stated, according to a Paris News article, that he didn’t want to send her to TYC because TYC was only for punishment and didn’t offer rehabilitation but in ShaQunada Cottons case, Superville said he had to send her there because it was the only place that offered rehabilitation.

Rickey Smiley came over from Dallas and held a large demonstration with some Black Panthers participating. Thats called exercising your rights. It did help by bringing more attention to ShaQuanda’s plight.

Brandon McClelland was dragged to his death by means of a pickup truck. I still haven’t figured out how anyone can claim a “friend” did it, especially when that “friend” shot another “friend” three times in the head.

Are Judge Superville and Gary Young racist? It depends on who you ask. White public officials and friends and family of the two say no but almost everyone I’ve talked to in the black community say yes.

Superville went on a local radio show in Paris the day after the last DOJ meeting and made claims that Brandon McClelland was not dragged and that we were just saying it in order to make it sound worse.

The statements he made in the Chicago Tribune regarding racism not being a reality in Paris but the real problem being illiteracy, drugs, and a lack of parenting and the blacks were just lashing out blaming white for our problems is just washed up. Its just not going to cut it. If most of the blacks are illiterate, that would mean theres an enormous problem in the schools since most blacks graduate in Paris. Drugs are an enormous problem in Paris but the problem is within the white community just as much as it is the black community and I haven’t seen a single public official try to come up with solutions to address that problem other than giving the black offenders 40 to life.

None of this explains why a white person with an equal criminal history can get “shock probation” for the same crime a black person gets 60 years for or why a white person gets a $3000 dollar bond for the same crime a black person gets a $50,000 bond. It doesn’t explain why its mainly black students sitting for days in ISS when white students misbehave at the same rate. Rather than trying to attack reporters for writing the articles you should be trying to address the issues. Otherwise, there will be much more racist incidents for reporters to write about.

Think host Krys Boyd

On February 6th I taped an interview for the program Think at the KERA studio (the DFW NPR and PBS affiliate) with Dallas judge Ron Chapman.  We talked about the excellent one-hour PBS documentary, “Tulia, Texas” that will air on the PBS program Independent Lens. 

In the Dallas Area, Tulia, Texas can be seen on February 10th at 9:00 pm.  If you don’t live in the DFW area you can look up the time in your zip code here.   The Think interview will also air on KERA Sunday morning at 11:30.   

Yesterday I posted an exchange between Chicago Tribune reporter Howard Witt and a resident of Paris, Texas who is critical of Mr. Witt’s reporting.  Witt’s letter, frequently referenced in the comments below, can be found here.

Back Atcha, Mr. Witt

Well, I guess I should thank Mr. Witt for the spelling instruction.  I’m also pleased to know he has no predisposition he is just “interested in the struggles of this east Texas town as it grapples with its troubles with race relations.”  What a relief. 

I’m sure Mr. Witt’s lack of agenda is why we had the opportunity to learn the critically important to the story information that the event he was covering was “held in a hall at the Paris Fairgrounds, the precise spot where, a century ago, thousands of white citizens gathered to cheer ritualized lynchings of blacks chaining them to a flagpole or lashing them to a scaffold before setting them on fire.”  No question about it, no agenda there.

I apologize for the following nit picking:

Mr. Witt dismisses Ms Cotton’s history of problems and claims he detailed them by pointing out that in one story he wrote, “Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved in a protest march in front of a school” according to an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, and, continuing, “some of the write-ups weren’t fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each one to get the whole story.” 

Mr. Witt then goes on to catalog three incidents that do, indeed, seem minor and, in one case, completely inaccurate.  What he doesn’t do is say how many in what period of time.  I understand — a lot over a short period — but maybe he knows better, possibly he could enlighten us. 

Her attorney says “some” weren’t fair — clearly “some” were. 

Mr Witt informs us through his response that the “hall monitor was examined at the emergency room and released” and that, “her medical records indicate (I have no idea how Mr. Witt got those) that she suffered no serious injury.”  Which is good. 

I’m not an expert on Mr Witt’s reporting but as, in this instance he did not quote himself or one of his stories, I would assume he has not reported that the hall monitor was transported from the scene in an ambulance and examined in an emergency room.  Why were these circumstances — that seem pretty important — totally ignored? 

I might suggest they don’t contribute to the non-existent agenda. 

Mr. Witt goes on to note that Ms. Cotton’s sentence was extended by TYC officials for minimal infractions.  If infraction is the TYC was run by neanderthals, he’s “preaching to the choir.”

Mr Witt claims that he has been accurate in his reporting of Ms. Cotton’s sentence because he reported it as “up to seven years.”  Again, I’m not an expert on Mr. Witt’s reporting but I don’t recall seeing “up to” in every story and I sure don’t recall seeing it in related stories. 

I also think his claim is a joke.  “Up to seven” means seven just like “up to life” means life and “could be death” means death.  It would be far more accurate, although considerably less inflammatory, to say “indeterminent” and explain what it means indeterminate I’m glad there’s no agenda.

Lastly, Mr. Witt claims the only reason that “the writer (that would be me) knows about what happened to the ‘white arsonist’  (that being that she did not make her probation and was assaulted while under TYC jurisdiction) is because I ( Mr. Witt) broke the story about what happened to her…”

Mr. Witt doesn’t have an agenda but he has an ego.   He is flatly wrong, his reporting made no contribution to my knowledge of either of these events, and he completely dodged the point — probably my fault for overwriting — which was three fold: First, the “white arsonist” attacked a house, the “black assaulter” attacked a person.  Even in Texas, for the most part, we rate people above property. 

Second, the “white arsonist” was a victim of domestic abuse and was acting out. 

Third, the psychologist and the advocates that reviewed the cases recommended the sentences that were handed out.

There’s more but we’ll save it for later.  Witt is not wrong but he is wrong directed.  He is correct that there are inequalities in the system — most of them have to do with who the victim is; after that, who the perpetrator is — but they aren’t limited to Paris, or limited to Texas, or limited to the South. 

He did come to Paris looking for a discrimination story and he has hopscotched through (or over and under emphasized) the facts.

You can find a rather unsavory update to this story here.

This brief excerpt captures the tone of the piece:

In November, a courthouse protest drew representatives of the New Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and the NAACP on one side and white, Bible-waving hecklers and a self-identified grand titan of the Ku Klux Klan on the other. Things have reached such a nadir that the Justice Department has deployed its Community Relations Service-a sort of civil-rights SWAT team -to mediate discussions among Paris residents. “This town is being forced to look at things they never wanted to look at before,” says Brenda Cherry, who lives in Paris and cofounded Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality.

Yet it’s not at all clear that race even played a role in McClelland’s death . . .

 The details of Brandon McClelland’s tragic demise remain fuzzy (see article) and it is that very ambiguity that makes the gap between black and white perception so significant.  Like Jena, this story serves as a Rorschach inkblot–you see what you want to see.

Black radicals see a hate crime and smell a cover-up.

White residents can’t figure out what all the fuss is about.

Much of the ambiguity may stem from an initial investigation that some Paris residents deride as sloppy and half-hearted.   

Gradually, the McClelland case is being viewed through the lens of the Shaquanda Cotton story.  Some white residents assert that if the Chicago Tribune hadn’t given Paris a reputation for racism the dragging death wouldn’t be a simple tragedy without racial significance.

Black residents suggest that Paris, Texas hasn’t outlived its tragic racial history.

In short, it’s a mess; a microcosm of America’s racial divide.  Read the Newsweek account and let me know what you think.

Problems in Paris, Texas

A brutal death has caused long-simmering racial tensions to flare anew.

By Gretel C. Kovach and Arian Campo-Flores |

To his loved ones in Paris, Texas, Brandon McClelland was affectionately known as “Big Boy,” a 284-pound gentle giant. He was a devoted family man-babysitting his little cousins, caring for his mother after she suffered a stroke and a heart attack, cooking up dishes of “Mexican spaghetti” for his disabled grandmother. He had a large circle of friends and regularly invited them over to play dominoes and to barbecue in the front yard. He always looked out for them, making sure the ones who had a little too much to drink got home safely. Though he was African-American, he didn’t pay much attention to race. He had acquaintances of all colors, and, in fact, his best friend was a white girl he met at church. (more…)