Top Quotes: “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” — Carol Anderson
The 19th Century
“Lincoln had shown his hand early in the war. Heavily influenced by two of his intellectual heroes — Thomas Jefferson, who advocated expulsion of blacks from the United States in order to save the nation; and Kentuckian Henry Clay, who had established the American Colonization Society, which had moved thousands of free blacks into what is now Liberia — Lincoln soon laid out his own resettlement plans. He had selected Chiriquí, a resource-poor area in what is now Panama, to be the new home for millions of African Americans. Lincoln just had to convince them to leave. In August 1862, he lectured five black leaders whom he had summoned to the White House that it was their duty, given what their people had done to the United States, to accept the exodus to South America, telling them, “But for your race among us there could not be war.” As to just how and why “your race” came to be “among us,” Lincoln conveniently ignored. His framing of the issue not only absolved plantation owners and their political allies of responsibility for launching this war, but it also signaled the power of racism over patriotism. Lincoln’s anger in 1862 was directed at blacks who fully supported the Union and did not want to leave the United States of America. Many, indeed, would exclaim that, despite slavery and enforced poverty, “We will work, pray, live, and, if need be, die for the Union.” Nevertheless, he cast them as the enemy for wickedly dividing “us.””
“Johnson’s rash of pardons had the desired eftect. The new congressional delegations looked hauntingly like those from the old South: CSA vice president Stephens and cabinet officers, as well as ten Confederate generals, a number of colonels, and nearly sixty Confederate Congress representatives, were ready to be ensconced, once again, in the nation’s capital. The reigning leaders of the Confederacy, who had rightfully expected to be tried and hung as traitors, now were not only poised to sail back into power in the federal government but also, given Johnson’s amnesty, allowed to regain control of their states and, as a consequence, of the millions of newly emancipated and landless black people there. As he welcomed one “niggers will catch hell” state after the next back into the Union with no mention whatsoever of black voting rights and, thus, no political protection, he effectively laid the groundwork for mass murder.”
“Mississippi showed the way. In the fall of 1865, the state passed a series of laws targeted and applicable only to African Americans (free and newly emancipated) that undercut any chance or hope for civil rights, economic independence, or even the reestablishment of families that had been ripped apart by slavery. As noted by Du Bois, the notorious Black Codes “were an astonishing affront to emancipation” and made “plain and indisputable” the”attempt on the part of the Southern states to make Negroes slaves in everything but name.” The codes required that blacks sign annual labor contracts with plantation, mill, or mine owners. If African Americans refused or could show no proof of gainful employment, they would be charged with vagrancy and put on the auction block, with their labor sold to the highest bidder. The supposed contract was beyond binding; it was more like a shackle, for African Americans were forbidden to seek better wages and working conditions with another employer. No matter how intolerable the working conditions, if they left the plantation, lumber camp, or mine, they would be jailed and auctioned off. They were trapped. Self-sufficiency itself was illegal, as blacks couldn’t hold any other employment besides laborer or domestic (unless they had the written consent of the mayor or judge) and were also banned from hunting and fishing, and thus denied the means even to stave off hunger. More galling yet was a provision whereby black children who had been sold before the war and hadn’t yet reunited with their parents were to be apprenticed off, with the former masters having the first right to their labor. Finally, the penalty for defiance, insulting gestures, and inappropriate behavior, the Black Codes made clear, was a no-holds-barred whipping.
Mississippi’s success in reinscribing slavery by another name was undeniable. Nine of the other former Confederate States quickly copied the Black Codes, sometimes verbatim.”
The Early 20th Century
“Previously, there had been an uneasy truce between the white community and the relatively small number of African Americans in Detroit. But during the exodus, in just eighteen months, the African American population in the Motor City quadrupled, as the automobile industry provided job opportunities and possibilities for advancement almost unimaginable to those who had dealt with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Employees at Ford, with an industry-setting pay scale of five dollars a day, could make in a single week what it took a prosperous sharecropper some two months or more to earn. And so they kept coming. By the mid-1920s, there were ten times as many blacks in Detroit as there had been in 1915. And then the tenuous truce shattered.
While the Great Migration had led to nearly exponential growth in the number of African Americans who called Detroit home, the area where they were supposed to live, Black Bottom, had never expanded. Realtors, insurance agents, banks, and landlords had devised a witches’ brew of schemes and machinations, such as redlining and restrictive covenants, to cordon off wide swaths of Detroit’s housing stock from African Americans and carve a color line through the city. And so, the small stretch of land called Black Bottom became engorged with ten times the number of people it once held. Less than half the homes in this ghetto-in-the-making had indoor plumbing, although in the urban north a bathroom was the norm. More than 15 percent of families were forced to live in one-room apartments. Nearly one third of all black families were crammed into four-room homes. But despite the clearly debilitating and disastrous effects of this brutal reality, Michigan’s Supreme Court, relying on the precedents of Cruikshank, the Civil Rights Cases, and Plessy, upheld racially restrictive housing policies as constitutional in Parmalee v. Morris (1922).
Tired of the cramped living conditions and exasperated with paying exorbitant rents for ramshackle housing that the landlords refused to repair, black professionals sought to move away from Black Bottom. That aspiration, however, was fraught with danger. While a few managed to find homes in white neighborhoods, others faced the wrath of mobs and homeowners’ associations. In the summer of 1925, for example, Dr. Alexander Turner, Dunbar Hospital’s co-founder and head of surgery, tried to move into the home he had purchased in an all-white part of town, Tireman. Within five hours of his unpacking his first box, bricks and rocks rained down as a mob a thousand strong moved in to drive him out. With Detroit police officers watching, “he was compelled to sign a deed and relinquish ownership of the property at gunpoint.” The police then escorted Turner and his family back to the black side of town.”
The Civil Rights Movement
“In Georgia, beating back a 1949 challenge from black parents to equalize the schools, Governor Herman Talmadge had already proposed a constitutional amendment that would authorize the state legislature to scrap the public school system altogether and “channel state funds into tuition grants for [white| students attending private schools.” In other words, while threatening to scuttle public education and m provide state-funded tuition for whites to attend segregated private academies, Talmadge, who had vowed, “as long as I am Governor, … Negroes will not be admitted to white schools,” never contemplated any educational alternatives for the 321,255 African American children in the state in 1950.
Similarly, Mississippi’s legislature crafted a constitutional amendment to abolish public schools and, in case that didn’t pass, a pupil-placement law using race-neutral language- “ability,” “whether a good fit or not” — to give school boards inordinate power to prevent more than 325,000 black children from gaining access to better-resourced white schools. In South Carolina, Byrnes, who had been a congressman, a U.S. senator, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and then secretary of state before becoming governor, “added dignity and a sense of solemn purpose to the segregationist cause.” The aura of respectability he lent to a slew of legislative proposals — selling public school property to private individuals, pupil-placement laws, and “a constitutional amendment relieving South Carolina of its obligation to provide a free public school system” — made them seem the work of reasonable, learned statesmen. “Of only one thing can we be certain,” he swore. “South Carolina will not now, nor for some years to come, mix white and colored children in our schools” even if, he continued, that meant shutting down the entire education system. Similar reaction spread throughout the South, and threatened to erupt more seriously in the event that the Supreme Court ruled Plessy, and therefore Jim Crow, unconstitutional.
That day of reckoning came. After nearly sixty years of racial purgatory, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown that Jim Crow schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and, in the D.C. case, the due process requirement of the Fifth Amendment.”
“As difficult as voter registration had been before Brown, it became much more so after the ruling. Mississippi reinforced an amendment requiring superior literacy and an ability to “understand” and interpret the state’s constitution. Given that nearly 53 percent of Mississippi’s adult African American population had fewer than five years of education, compared with only 10 percent of whites of voting age, the emphasis on literacy and interpretation of a complicated legal document, while appearing race-neutral, was, in fact, targeted directly at black Mississippians. Even more, state authorities required already registered African Americans to go through the gauntlet of literacy tests, understanding clauses, and the whims of registrar scrutiny once again to reregister. That move alone caused the number of black registered voters in Mississippi to plummet by two thirds. Moreover, the ever-present threat of violence was pervasive, with the full support, and sometimes participation, of law enforcement. As J. W. Milam, the Mississippian who tortured and murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till only to be found “not guilty” in 1955 by a jury of his peers, remarked, “Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids.” The same sentiment animated officials 110 miles away in the capital of Jackson, who worked tirelessly to reduce the power of the black vote until in many counties not a single African American was on the voter rolls. Even as late as 1960, more than 98 percent of Mississippi’s black adults were not registered to vote.
Similarly, in 1953, in Alabama’s so-called Black Belt, “where the black population equaled or exceeded that of whites,” only 1.3 percent of eligible African Americans were registered. Two counties had no black voters whatsoever. In 1954, the year of Brown, the Alabama legislature modified the state’s constitution to raise significantly the threshold on access to the polls by adding comprehensive-understanding and good-character clauses. Just as in Mississippi, in Alabama the disparity between white and black adults with five years or less of education was so wide (16.3 percent versus 54.1 percent, respectively) that a requirement to read and interpret the state’s constitution could yield only one result.
Within five years, black defiance, courage, and sheer will in the face of such impediments pushed that 1.3 percent registration percentage to a little over 5 percent. Yet, by 1960, Wilcox and Lowndes Counties, with more than 11,000 voting-age African Americans, still had no registered black voters, while in Bullock County a mere 5 blacks had registered out of a total of 4,450 (or 0.1 percent). In Dallas County, with Selma as the major city, just 0.9 percent of eligible African Americans were registered to cast a ballot. On the other hand, six Alabama counties in the Black Belt actually listed more than 100 percent of eligible whites registered to vote, with Lowndes County topping the list at 117.9 percent.
States relied as well upon another mechanism of insidious discrimination to silence blacks and ensure that the rule of a few would shape the course of the South and the nation for years to come: Legislative apportionment gave overwhelming and disproportionate power to rural counties, especially those that held the most ardent white segregationists and the largest black populations outside the urban areas. For example, Alabama, up to the 1960s, used the census from 1900, when the state was overwhelmingly rural, to determine the number of representatives each county sent to the state legislature. The result was that growing urban centers like Birmingham were underrepresented while Black Belt counties generally had twice as many legislators as their populations warranted.”
“School closures spread now to besieged Prince Edward County. This time, black children were in the crosshairs, where they would remain for nearly a generation. With Brown looming over their heads, Virginia’s political officials passed a series of laws to close the public schools, siphon tax dollars into private academies, and pay tuition for white students, while ensuring that there was nothing in place for African American children to continue their education. On November 11, 1955, the Gray Commission (named after State Senator Garland Gray) rolled out a phalanx of recommendations to keep Virginia’s schools separate and unequal. Gray first cherry-picked the commission’s members, providing disproportionate representation to those in Black Belt counties, and then narrowed discussion even further by tapping only the most ardent segregationists to sit on the all-important executive council. Another, more “moderate” alternative, the Perrow Plan (named for State Senator Mosby Perrow, would have at least saved the public schools, but just barely. This plan developed a formula to divert the lion’s share of tax dollars into a private school system while cutting public schools’ funding and operational abilities to the bone. The governor shelved that one and eventually chose Gray’s. The state of Virginia was hurtling toward an educational apocalypse. Since 1954, nearly 20 percent of the state’s public schools had closed in response to Brown. Moreover the Gray Plan required Virginia to spend one million dollars for every 1 percent of the student population that chose the private school system. Savoring this Pyrrhic victory, State Senator Gray proudly boasted, “I guess we won the Civil War.”
The Gray Commission’s plan was put into action after a 1959 Fourth Circuit decision reversed a district court ruling that had given Prince Edward County a full seven years to comply with Brown. With the Fourth Circuit now ordering the schools to integrate by the fall of 1959, county supervisors immediately abolished the property tax that funded public schools and diverted the money into a cache for tuition grants to support the all-white Prince Edward Academy. The supervisors added their county funds to grants offered by the state to ensure that the costs for this private education were covered with public dollars. In addition, sixty-seven of the sixty-nine teachers at Prince Edward Academy were all from the now-closed public schools.
While white children were educated, 2,700 black children were locked out. The defiance of Prince Edward County was singular — no other school system in the nation remained closed for five years (1959 to 1964) rather than comply with Brown. The impoverished but determined African American community managed to send some children away to relatives, but only thirty-five black students were able to attend those out-of-state schools on a full-time basis. During those five long years, critical in terms of child development, most African American students spent their formative education time in activity centers that the black community cobbled together.”
“The knowledge-based economy was primed for those who had had the benefit of years of good schools and, in particular, for whites who had a well-funded public school system that went all the way through the twelfth grade and graduated the lion’s share of them as college-ready. By contrast, an entire generation of black children who had fought long and hard to receive a quality education was now forced to face this cold, hard new economy with neither the necessary education nor work skills. It was not just black America, however, that suffered the cost of this waste of human lives and talent. The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine — tactics that went on for at least four decades — left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy. This, in turn, left the United States lagging far behind other developed countries and placed the nation at enormous economic risk.”
“Southern governments also went after the Association where it hurt, demanding that the organization either hand over or publicly post its membership lists. Louisiana, in a rather unsavory twist, resurrected an old anti-Klan law and used it against the NAACP, which was now required to file membership lists with the state. That would have meant putting a bull’s-eye on every dues-paying member, inviting, at bare minimum, economic extortion as credit was cut off, mortgages called in, and jobs suddenly withdrawn. Indeed, in five states, NAACP members were banned from holding public employment. Moreover, identifying who paid dues to the Association meant that NAACP members would also be targeted for violence. Fully comprehending that black people’s lives and livelihoods hung in the balance, the Association refused to comply. That noncompliance led to a series of injunctions and fines, some totaling one hundred thousand dollars, that effectively crippled the NAACP below the Mason-Dixon Line. For eight years, at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, which had been spurred on by Brown, the Association was severely hampered in the South. Not until 1964 could the NAACP resume operations in Alabama.”
The 80s
“Reagan’s budget proposals targeted very specifically those programs in which blacks were overrepresented even as he protected the other portions of the “social safety net,” such as social security, where African Americans were but a small fraction of the recipients. For example, almost five times as many black college-bound high school seniors as white came from families with incomes below twelve thousand dollars. The administration reconfigured various grants and loan packages so that “the needier the student, the harder he or she would be hit by Reagan’s student-aid cuts.” Not surprisingly, nationwide black enrollment in college plummeted from 34 percent to 26 percent. Thus, just at the moment when the postindustrial economy made an undergraduate degree more important than ever, fifteen thousand fewer African Americans were in college during the early 1980s than had been enrolled in the mid-1970s (although the high school graduation numbers were by now significantly higher). Nor had the fallout happened only at the baccalaureate level; the plunge in undergraduate enrollment — which no other racial or ethnic group suffered during this time — cascaded into a substantial decline in the number of African Americans in graduate programs as well.”
“From the 1960s to the 1970s, the black unemployment rate had declined, and the gap between black and white unemployment rates had actually narrowed. By the time Reagan’s policies had taken effect, however, not only had the black unemployment rate increased, but also the unemployment gap between blacks and whites had widened to unprecedented levels. During the early 1980s, the overall black unemployment rate stood at 15.5 percent — “an all time high” since the Great Depression — while unemployment among African American youth was a staggering 45.7 percent. At this point Reagan chose to slash the training, employment, and labor services budget by 70 percent — a cut of $3.805 billion. The only ‘urban’ program that survived the cuts was federal aid for highways — which primarily benefited suburbs, not cities. In keeping with Lee Atwater’s mantra that “blacks get hurt worse than whites,” Reagan gutted aid to cities so extensively that federal dollars were reduced from 22 percent of a city’s budget to 6 percent. Cities responded with sharp austerity measures that shut down libraries, closed municipal hospitals, and cut back on garbage pickup. Some cities even dismantled their police and fire departments.
Reagan further destabilized the economic foundation for African Americans by ordering massive layoffs in federal jobs while deliberately weakening the enforcement of civil rights laws in the workplace.”
“In 1979, after a coalition of moderate and Marxist Nicaraguans overthrew longtime U.S. ally and ruthless dictator Anastasio Somoza, communist Sandinistas came to power in Managua. Reagan did not see this as a homegrown revolution borne out of intolerable conditions of greed, torture, and human rights violations. Instead, he was sure that the Sandinistas were no more than Soviet stooges ensconced by Moscow to foment revolution in America’s backyard.The president was, therefore, obsessed with eliminating the Sandinistas.
Shortly after taking office, Reagan ordered CIA director William Casey to do whatever was necessary to support a small band of anti-Sandinista guerrillas, known as the Contras, most of whom were strays from Somoza’s feared and hated National Guard. Reagan followed up on November 23, 1981, with a directive to funnel $19.3 million through the CIA to the Contras. But that was not enough, argued Enrique Bermúdez, the founder of the guerrilla group. They needed much more.Then, in December 1981, “Reagan signed a secret order authorizing Contra aid for the purpose of deposing the Sandinistas.” The only question was where to get those funds; there was simply a limit to the depths that the CIA Land National Security Council budgets could tap into to finance the Contras. Congress, meanwhile, already stung by the debacle in Vietnam, was not about to loosen the purse strings.
And so, at a December 1981 meeting, Contra leaders, whom Reagan referred to as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” floated the idea that trafficking cocaine into California would provide enough profits to arm and train the anti-Sandinista guerrillas. With most of the network already established, the plan was rather straightforward: There were the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia; the airports and money laundering in Panama run by President Manuel Noriega; the well-known lack of radar detection that made landing strips in Costa Rica prime transport depots; and weapons and drug warehouses at llopango air base outside San Salvador. The problem had been U.S. law enforcement guarding key entry points into a lucrative market. But with the CIA and the National Security Council now ready to run interference and keep the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in check, the once formidable line of defense had dwindled to a porous nuisance. Reagan’s “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” was now ready to saturate the United States with cocaine.
Initially, Nicaraguan exiles Oscar Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, whose nickname was El Rey de las Drogas (the King of Drugs), set up their wholesale operations in San Francisco. But although they had the product, they didn’t yet have the distribution network to move the initial shipment of cocaine into the retail markets. That came only when they managed to link up with Rick Ross, an illiterate yet entrepreneurial black man who became the conduit between the Contra drug runners and the Crips and Bloods gangs in L..A.
The result was nothing less than explosive. From the Contra wholesalers, top-quality cocaine was then packaged and sold in little rocks of crack that reaped more than $230,000 per kilo in retail profit. Now, drug money, and all its attendant violence, pounded on a population with double-digit unemployment and declining real wages. The logistical strength of the Bloods and Crips, with an estimated fifty thousand gang members, spread the pain as they set up drug franchises throughout the United States to sell crack like it was on the dollar menu. Soon crack was everywhere, kicking the legs out from under black neighborhoods.
While the new self-created drug crisis threatened the security of millions of African Americans, the administration focused its efforts on facilitating greater access to weapons for the rebels purchased with off-the-books money. In 1982, Vice President George H. W. Bush (the former director of the CIA) and his national security adviser, Donald Gregg (a former CIA agent), worked with William Casey to run a program named Black Eagle, which was designed to circumvent Congress and funnel weapons to the Contras. As the logistical pipelines solidified, it became clear that Manuel Noriega would be essential to this operation. Through a series of top-secret negotiations, U.S. officials worked out landing rights at Panamanian airfields for the Black Eagle planes to transport weapons to the Contras and the use of Panamanian companies to launder money.
Noriega, who was already in a four-hundred-million-dollar partnership with the Medellín cartel, seized on the profitability of this deal with the White House and began to divert Black Eagle planes and pilots for drug-running flights to the southern United States. The Reagan administration’s response to what should have been seen as a diplomatic affront — especially since the president had tapped George H. W. Bush to lead the drug interdiction activities in South Florida — was telling and disturbing. The administration simply required the Panamanian president to use a percentage of his drug profits to buy additional weapons for the Contras.
Thus, although Reagan bragged to the American public about using U.S. military resources “to cut off drugs before they left other countries’ borders,” his staff’s shielding of Noriega and the Colombian traffickers in fact actively allowed cocaine imports to the United States to skyrocket by 50 percent within three years. The Medellín cartel’s cut alone was ten billion dollars a year in sales. The Reagan administration’s protection of drug traffickers escalated further when the CIA received approval from the Department of Justice in 1982 to remain silent about any key agency “assets” that were involved in the manufacturing, transportation, or sale of narcotics.
This network of White House protection for major drug traffickers swung into full gear once Congress, through a series of amendments in 1982 and 1984, shut off all funds to the Contras and banned U.S. material and financial support for the overthrow of the government in Nicaragua. Undeterred by the law, the Reagan administration simply ramped up the alternate and illegal streams of revenue it had already devised: drug profits and arms sales to Iran. At this point Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, deputy director of the National Security Council, stepped in to create the larger, more dynamic operation that would soon replace Bush’s Black Eagle.
North brought to the work both a military efficiency and a truly amoral focus. Years later, even when under congressional klieg lights, he seemed to imply that the breaking of laws was appropriate. “I remain convinced that what we tried to accomplish was worth the risk,” he said.
North understood that his role, working with his CIA counterpart Duane Clarridge, was to ensure that the Contras had weapons. Congress had cut off all funding, so profits from cocaine would have to become an alternate source. That warped framing of the Contras’ needs led North to facilitate the trafficking of cocaine into the United States, which included working with the CIA to transport 1,500 kilos of Bolivian paste; diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars in “humanitarian aid” to indicted narcotics traffickers; and refusing to pass the names of known drug runners on to the appropriate authorities. He also saw to it that the millions of dollars in profits from the sale of narcotics were then funneled safely out of the U.S, and that those funds went to arms dealers, especially in El Salvador and Honduras, who could equip the Contras with everything from boots to grenades. The FBI learned that North’s NSC, brandishing the pretext of “the interest of national security,” routinely intimidated Customs and DEA officials to back off from making good narcotics cases. Moreover, Blandón and Meneses, who trafficked at least five tons of cocaine, or the equivalent of 16.2 million rocks of crack, into California, “led a charmed life” as the NSC and CIA blocked police, sheriffs, and the DEA from stopping the flow of drugs and money. Similarly, in the summer of 1986 North was Manuel Noriega’s champion in the halls of power. The New York Times had run a series of articles citing well-placed sources and a Defense Intelligence Agency report that the Panamanian president had “tight control of drug and money-laundering activities” in and out of the country and, therefore, although making only $1,200 a month, had a personal fortune of several hundred million dollars. It was too much even for Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), an ultra-right-wing senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, who then went on Meet the Press and branded Noriega “head of the biggest drug trafficking operation in the Western Hemisphere.” The barrage hit too close to the truth and North’s attempt at damage control swung into action. He confided to his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, “You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega in Panama and I have developed a fairly good relationship” and now, given the media onslaught, the dictator needed the Reagan administration’s help in cleaning up his image. North was eager but, he continued, it was going to cost. The dictator’s terms were simple. In exchange for one million dollars and a PR blitz from the White House, Noriega offered to destabilize the Sandinista government. At first, Poindexter wobbled. Was this a setup “so that he can blackmail us to lay off?” Reagan’s National Security Advisor, however, quickly set aside those initial qualms and authorized North to open negotiations with Noriega noting “I have nothing against him other than his illegal activities.””
Conclusion
“Taken together, those rulings allowed, indeed encouraged, the criminal justice system to run racially amok. And that’s exactly what happened on July 23, 1999, in Tulia, Texas. In the dead of night, local police launched a massive raid and busted a major cocaine trafficking ring. At least that’s how it was billed by the local media, which, after having been tipped off, lined up to get the best, most humiliating photographs of forty-six of the town’s five thousand residents, handcuffed, in pajamas, underwear, and uncombed bed hair, being paraded into the jail for booking. The local newspaper, the Tulia Sentinel, ran the headline TULIA’S STREETS CLEARED OF GARBAGE. The editorial praised law enforcement for ridding Tulia of “drug-dealing scumbags.”
The raid was the result of an eighteen-month investigation by a man who would be named by Texas’s attorney general as “Outstanding Lawman of the Year.” Attached to the federally funded Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force, based in Amarillo, about fifty miles away from Tulia, Tom Coleman didn’t lead a team of investigators; instead, he singlehandedly identified each member of this massive cocaine operation and made more than one hundred undercover drug purchases. He was hailed as a hero, and his testimony immediately led to thirty-eight of the forty-six being convicted, with the other cases just waiting to get into the clogged court system. Joe Moore, a pig farmer, was sentenced to 99 years for selling two hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine to the undercover narcotics agent. Kizzie White received twenty-five years, while her husband, William “Cash” Love, landed 434 years for possessing an ounce of cocaine.
The case began to unravel, however, when Kizzie’s sister, Tonya, went to trial. Coleman swore that she had sold him drugs. Tonya, however, had video proof that she was at a bank in Oklahoma City, three hundred miles away, cashing a check at the very moment he claimed to have bought cocaine from her. Then another defendant, Billy Don Wafer, had timesheets and his boss’s eyewitness testimony that Wafer was at work and not out selling drugs to Coleman. And when the Outstanding Lawman of the Year swore under oath that he had purchased cocaine from Yul Bryant, a tall bushy-haired man, only to have Bryant — bald and five feet six-appear in court, it finally became very clear that something was awry.
Coleman, in fact, had no proof whatsoever that any of the alleged drug deals had taken place. There were no audiotapes. No photographs. No witnesses. No other police officers present. No fingerprints but his on the bags of drugs. No records. Over the span of an eighteen-month investigation, he never wore a wire. He claimed to have written each drug transaction on his leg but to have washed away the evidence accidentally when he showered. Additional investigation led to no corroborating proof of his allegations, and when the police arrested those forty-six people and vigorously searched their homes and possessions, no drugs were found, nor were weapons, money, paraphernalia, or any other indications at all that the housewife, pig farmer, or anyone else arrested were actually drug kingpins.
What was discovered, however, was judicial misconduct running rampant in the war on drugs in Tulia, Texas, with a clear racial bias. Coleman perjured himself on the stand when he claimed to be an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. In fact, he was under indictment for theft in his previous position as a deputy sheriff in another county. The prosecutor, Terry McEachern, knew about this but failed to disclose it to the defense attorneys. The district attorney also ensured that there were no African Americans on the jury in each trial. Moreover, Judge Edward Self, who presided over the lion’s share of the trials, publicly expressed his support for the prosecutors and sealed Coleman’s employment records, including the charge of embezzlement as a deputy sheriff.
The judicial malfeasance immediately took on racial undertones. Coleman, a white man who routinely referred to African Americans as “niggers,” had accused 10 percent of Tulia’s black population of dealing in cocaine.Based on his word alone, 50 percent of all the black men in the town were indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison. Of the six whites and Latinos who were arrested in the raid, all had relations — familial or friendly — with Tulia’s black community. Although the white community consistently denied that race played any role in this, the speed and efficiency in which the criminal justice system worked to sentence black defendants and their white and Latino friends to decades in prison, based solely on the unsubstantiated testimony of a man under indictment, suggests otherwise. Randy Credico of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, called Tulia “a mass lynching … Taking down 50 percent of the male black adult population like that, it’s outrageous. It’s like being accused of raping someone in Indiana in the 1930s. You didn’t do it, but it doesn’t matter because a bunch of Klansmen on the jury are going to string you up anyway.”
“How the court arrived at that decision is a testament to twisted facts and ignored evidence. Roberts, for example, contended that the VRA placed burdens on jurisdictions because of past misdeeds that could not be justified by “current needs.” The so-called burdens he alluded to, however, were borne only by those jurisdictions with a long, well-documented history of discrimination and a systematic pattern, after the initial passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, of trying to craft laws that violated the basic right to vote for all citizens. Locales that required Department of Justice scrutiny had a nearly fifty-year history after the VRA of continued attempts to discriminate. In fact, the act contains a “bail out” provision, wherein the federal government no longer needs to monitor what a jurisdiction does; indeed, the bar to achieve “bail out” status is not all that high, requiring a jurisdiction to abide by the law for an appreciable length of time, following which the extra scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act no longer applies. Numerous counties in Virginia, as well as North Carolina’s Wake County, Georgia’s Sandy Springs, Texas’s North Austin, and Alabama’s Pinson, having met the standard, have been thus “bailed out.” The fact that the majority of other locales in the old Confederacy, in the heart of what is now GOP country, have not says more about the tenuousness of the right to vote than it does about the rigors of the Voting Rights Act.”
“The real assist came from the Republican Party. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Trump adviser, had spent nearly a decade developing a database, Crosscheck, that ostensibly prevented electoral fraud by identifying individuals registered to vote in multiple states. The program, used in more than half the nation, however, fails miserably at its stated purpose but has proved remarkably adept at flagging racially identifiable surnames to launch a purge of minorities from voter rolls. Indeed, up to one million black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters were subject to disfranchisement without any viable notice based solely on a flawed database and the lie of rampant voter fraud. Moreover, 43 percent of counties in the United States previously covered by the Voting Rights Act, now freed from preclearance requirements because of the Shelby County v. Holder decision, closed 868 polling locations before the 2016 election. In other words, while the U.S. population grew, especially as minority communities became a larger share of the voting age electorate, Republican regimes cut nearly 900 polling places where American citizens could cast a ballot. This was a particularly “pernicious tactic for disenfranchising voters of color” because it was “often done quietly, late in the election season, making pre-election intervention or litigation virtually impossible.”
“Some 20 percent of Trump supporters believed the Emancipation Proclamation had been bad public policy and that the enslaved should have never been freed.”
