Tulia, Texas ten years on

By Alan Bean

It is hard to believe that ten years have passed since thirteen people were released from prison at the Swisher County courthouse after Judge Ron Chapman declared that undercover agent Tom Coleman was not credible under oath.  I address the amazing events leading up to this dramatic scene in my book, Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas.

This brief account from the AP appeared in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News (subscription required):

Ten years ago
Twelve people sent to prison as the result of a Tulia, Texas, drug bust were released on bail by a judge who said they’d been railroaded by an undercover agent. (A total of 35 people were later pardoned by Texas Gov. Rick Perry; 45 of the 46 who were arrested shared a $6 million settlement in a civil rights lawsuit.)

The price of a miracle: Medgar Evers remembered

Medgar Evers

Fifty years ago today, Medgar Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

This was hardly an isolated incident.

The Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, AL had reached a victorious conclusion a few weeks earlier.

Mass sit-ins had unfolded in Jackson, MS in the weeks leading up to Evers’ slaying.

Days earlier, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annelle Ponder and several other civil rights leaders were brutally beaten in the County Jail in Winona, Mississippi.

Hours before Evers died, George Wallace made his defiant doorway stand at the University of Alabama.

Later that night, in response to events in Birmingham, the Wallace grandstanding, and the Winona outrage, John F. Kennedy went on national television to deliver the most stirring endorsement of civil rights ever voiced by a sitting American president.

The tide was turning and Byron de la Beckwith, a white supremacist from nearby Greenwood, Mississippi, knew it.  That’s why he tossed a rifle into his car and headed for Jackson.

Whenever I lead civil rights tours in Mississippi, we always drop by Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where Evers was a salesman for T. R. M. Howard‘s Insurance Company.  Evers got his start in business selling poor Black people cheap insurance that would pay for a decent funeral and, most importantly, medical care dispensed by the Knights of Tabor hospital in the all-black town of Mound Bayou.  Fannie Lou Hamer died in that hospital in 1977.

Mound Bayou is only a pale shadow of its former glory.  Black business leaders had good reason to establish and maintain the economic and physical infrastructure of the community in the Jim Crow days.  Ironically, as soon as they were free to pursue opportunities in the wider world, Mound Bayou was abandoned by the people who once made it run.

I briefly thought of taking the sign–it didn’t seem to mean much to the people of Mound Bayou–but I decided to let it sit where it is; a sad and fading reminder of the town that gave Medgar Evers and many other civil rights leaders a start in business as well as activism.  Mound Bayou was one of the few places in the Mississippi Delta where African Americans could freely associate and organize in the 1950s, and thousands regularly descended on the vibrant little town to plot, pray and prepare.

We forget that the bold activism of the early 1960s had its roots in forgotten little towns like Mound Bayou a decade earlier.  When Bob Moses, Diane Nash and James Bevel arrived in the Mississippi Delta, they enjoyed the counsel and enthusiastic support of older men and women who were native to the region and had been in the civil rights fight a long time.  It was this intersection of youthful vision and native wisdom that paved the way for the Freedom Summer of 1964.

Medgar Evers had a foot in both these camps.  He was old enough to  be trusted by the old guard in the Mississippi civil rights movement, but young enough to relate to the brave young souls entering the Delta from exotic places like Nashville, Birmingham and New York City.

The only weapon the likes of Byron de la Beckwith had at their disposal was fear, and they wielded it effectively.  People like Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ed King and Diane Nash refused to be intimidated.  They all paid a dreadful price for their audacity; but they prevailed.

The civil rights movement depended on larger-than-life figures like Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers and couldn’t have succeeded without them.  But the contributions of a holy host of saints, most of them unknown to history, was just as crucial.  In the early summer of 1963, the combined impact of thousands of brave people across the South reached critical mass and the nation turned a corner.

Byron de la Beckwith knew he and his ilk were beaten and Medgar Evers felt the sting of his idiot rage.  But Evers didn’t die a meaningless death.  Fifty years later he is being remembered across the nation, an impressive airport in Jackson bears his name, and a civil rights leader is mayor elect of Mississippi’s leading city.

Miracles happen, but they don’t come quickly and they don’t come cheap.

Noted author tackles the Curtis Flowers story

Alan Bean

Paul Alexander is the accomplished author of eight books, numerous eBooks, and over 100 major articles written for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the New York Times.  When he stumbled across my blogging on the Curtis Flowers story, he was immediately interested.  A native of Birmingham, AL, Alexander knows how racial bias is infused into every facet of social life, including the criminal justice system.

Still, my conclusions were too damning to be taken at face value.  Alexander visited Winona, Mississippi, re-interviewed the folks I talked to several years ago, and dug up some fascinating (and disturbing) new information.

The result is Mistried, a gripping eBook released yesterday by RosettaBooks.  You can get the Kindle version for free at Amazon if you act quickly, (or pay $2.99 if you dawdle).  Most readers can digest the contents in less than two hours; the book is of very modest length because Alexander doesn’t waste a word.

If you like the book, please leave a comment and a five-star rating on the Amazon site.

Mistried

By Paul Alexander

Paul Alexander

Can a person be tried more than once for the same crime in the United States? Under usual circumstances, no. But in Mississippi, one man was tried six times for the same brutal crime-and his ordeal still hasn’t ended.

Aging Behind Bars

By Alan Bean

The American prison population is rapidly aging.  You can find a helpful infographic on the subject here (I have copied the basic information below if you’re in a hurry).

The most shocking statistic is that “between 1981 and 2010, the number of state and federal prisoners age 55 and over increased from 8,853 to 124,900.”  And consider this, if present trends continue “that number is projected to grow to 400,000 by 2030, an increase of 4,400 percent from 1981.”

When I think of prisoners aging behind bars I visualize Ramsey Muniz.  Ramsey was implicated in a marijuana importation conspiracy in the late 1970s.  He wasn’t charged with actively participating in the scheme; but since Ramsey was an attorney who represented many of the people on the suspect list, the feds concluded that he knew what his clients were up to, was indirectly benefiting from their activities, and didn’t turn them in.  Ramsey accepted a plea deal that put him in federal prison for five years.

Then, in 1994, Ramsey was victimized by a bizarre federal scam.  A major Mexican drug dealer was given a get-out-of-jail-free card in exchange for setting Muniz up.

After Ramsey was found guilty by a jury that was intentionally shielded from all the significant facts of the case, the government argued that his conviction in the 1970s should really count as two “strikes” because identical charges accusing the same people of the same crime had been filed in Corpus Christi in San Antonio.  Thus was Ramsey sentenced to life in prison under an old three-strikes provision.

After 20 years behind bars, Ramsey Muniz is an aging inmate who can no longer walk without assistance.  As the infographic makes clear, there are few provisions for compassionate release at either the state or federal level, and those that exist are rarely invoked.  Timorous politicians fear being labeled soft-on-crime.

I have argued that Ramsey Muniz is innocent of the charges filed against him in 1994.  He is an attorney and a civil rights leader who has never profited from the sale of illegal drugs.  But suppose I am wrong.  What it the purpose of keeping a man like Muniz behind bars?  He represents as much of a threat to the community as I do.  A deeply spiritual man with a strong sense of mission, he is capable of doing much good in the free world.

There are tens of thousands of untold stories like this across the nation.  Please give the infographic on aging behind bars your careful attention.

The elderly population in prison is rising at staggering rate. The consequence of mass incarceration and strict sentencing policies at the federal and state level, older prisoners require more expensive care at a time when their danger to society at large is waning. Most are likely to die in prison, as programs designed to release such prisoners on compassionate grounds are rarely invoked, and don’t have much potential to reduce the population of elderly prisoners. Continued high rates of long-term incarceration of the elderly are likely to add billions to state and federal criminal justice budgets.

How Texas became a welfare state

By Alan Bean

Mineral Wells is a Texas town of 17,000 a little over fifty miles due west of Fort Worth.  The Texas legislature passed a budget for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice that will require the closure of two prisons and the Mineral Wells Unit is on the list.  Local officials say they will fight to the last ditch and the last breath to keep their precious prison.

This isn’t about public safety–the state of Texas has decided it doesn’t need the prison–it’s about jobs.

All of which raises a disturbing question.  Was the prison boom that transformed Texas in the 1990s about pork barrel politics rather than public safety?

Back in the day, nobody wanted a prison in their back yard; but hard times in the hinterland changed “you’re not building a prison in my back yard,” to “we’ll provide generous subsidies if somebody–the state or a private prison company–is willing to build us a big house.”  In towns like Mineral Wells and Tulia, the war on drugs, tough on crime politics and prison construction were all about helping little towns survive an agricultural crisis that started in the mid-1970s and shows no signs of letting up.

In the process, small-government Texas became the nation’s biggest welfare state.

It is unwise and immoral to base public safety decisions on the economic needs of isolated farming communities, but that is precisely what we have done.  Listen to the public officials in the Star-Telegram article below lamenting the loss of their darling prison and you realize that our nation’s great prison boom spread a horrible case of welfare dependency across the American heartland.

Mineral Wells vows to fight devastating closure of prison

BY ANNA M. TINSLEY

atinsley@star-telegram.com

The uncertainty is troubling many in Mineral Wells.

The question that continues to linger is whether the Mineral Wells Pre-Parole Transfer Facility — a 2,100-bed, privately run minimum-security prison — will close.

Three amazing stories reveal the rich contradictions of Mississippi

Chockwe Lumumba

Will Campbell

Paul Alexander

By Alan Bean

Three Mississippi stories grabbed my attention this week.  Will Campbell, the white civil rights activist and renegade Baptist preacher from Mississippi, died this week after a long and painful decline.  Chockwe Lumumba, the erstwhile Black nationalist attorney, was elected as mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.  Finally, Paul Alexander, the former TIME reporter who has written for The New York Times, the Nation, Salon, the Daily Beast, Paris Match and the Guardian, will soon be releasing Mistried an eBook on the bizarre railroading of Curtis Flowers in Winona, Mississippi.

Taken together, these stories capture the rich contradictions of the Magnolia State.  Campbell and Lumumba represent opposite poles of the civil rights movement.  Lumumba ran for mayor of Jackson as a centrist candidate who cares about economic development and job creation as much as civil rights; but there was a time when the lawyer-politician was so disillusioned with White America that he advocated the creation of a separate, predominantly Black, nation in the Southeastern United States.

Campbell, by contrast, insisted that God’s grace was offered to the Klansman as well as the oppressed.  ”Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well,” he famously said.  Acting on this belief, Campbell regularly engaged with violent white segregationists over a glass of whiskey.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/6/civil_rights_veteran_chokwe_lumumba_elected

Love thy stranger as thyself: the evangelical coalition driving immigration reform

By Alan Bean

This is good stuff!  In a NYT op-ed, UNC history professor Molly Worthen draws attention to one of the primary forces driving the immigration debate in America–the counter-intuitive coalition between white and Latino evangelicals.

It is easy to regard this fragile network with skepticism.  When over 70% of Latino voters pulled the lever for the blue team, savvy Republicans knew they had to edit their immigration talking points.

True, but it goes deeper than that.

Worthen argues that Latino evangelicals don’t share the libertarian, small government leanings of their white counterparts.  Moreover, a large and influential cohort of educated young white evangelicals is embracing aspects of the old social gospel with its focus on social or systemic sin.  This is not a cosmetic shift from the old evangelicalism, Worthen insists; it represents a fundamental shift in theological focus:

For a Christian, the question of whether an undocumented immigrant is a criminal or a victim trapped in an unjust system depends on how one thinks about sin and human responsibility . . . There are signs that evangelicals’ softening on immigration reform reflects a changing theology of sin and Christian obligation: a growing appreciation of how unjust social and legal institutions and the brutality of global capitalism trap the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses. This may be particularly true of younger evangelicals who are disillusioned with their parents’ Christian right.

The fingerprints of the private prison industry are all over the immigration reform process

By Alan Bean

When the for-profit giant Geo Corp insisted a few months ago that they would stay out of the immigration reform debate I was suspicious.  These people are in the money-making business and real reform would have a disastrous impact on the bottom line.  The industry wants the US government to lock up as many people for as long as possible because that’s what a decent ROI demands.  The private prison people don’t care about the families that are ripped apart by the draconian policies they advocate or whether the punitive approach makes a lick of sense.  They aren’t in the making sense business; their in the money-making business.  Which is why they should not and must not influence the political process.  As this article from the Nation makes clear, the private prison industry is deeply invested in the political process because the shape of reform emerging from Washington is a make or break proposition.  It is particularly significant, as I have frequently noted, that the for-profit prison boys are big supporters of the the Gang of Eight (more on this below).

Disclosure Shows Private Prison Company Misled on Immigration Lobbying

Earlier this year, one of the largest private prison corporations in the country sent out a statement to reporters claiming that it would not lobby in any way over the immigration reform debate. A new disclosure shows that the company, the Boca Raton–based Geo Group, has in fact paid an “elite team of federal lobbyists” to influence the comprehensive immigration reform legislation making its way through Congress.

What the Bible really says about helping the poor

By Alan Bean

Jesus’ observation that the poor will be with us always may be the most abused passage in the Bible.  Fred Clark, the Slacktivist, thinks so anyway.

It always struck me as ironic that farmers in the Texas panhandle were death on welfare while feeling perfectly entitled to the farm subsidies that kept them afloat once farming was no longer a viable livelihood.  The biblical teaching on poverty is simple, straightforward, consistent, and invisible.  If you wonder what I mean by that, read on.

Dives will always be with us — and so will selfish rich jackwagons who misquote the Bible

May 30, 2013 By Fred Clark 

Southern Beale is not impressed with the exegetical skills of kleptocratic Tennessee Republican Stephen Fincher:

Rep. Stephen Fincher, you are a horrible person who uses the Bible to selectively justify your greedy, selfish ways. Woe unto you.

Repent, asshole.

This is not Sunday school language, and the Civility Police will no doubt be horrified that Southern Beale is stating truth so directly and so accurately. (When someone like Fincher extravagantly flaunts his bad faith arguments, the Civility Police always insist we must pretend he hasn’t done so. Pretending, euphemistic inaccuracy, and never, ever calling out self-serving liars are the hallmarks of their idea of “civility.”)

But those who fret about such blunt honesty should note that Southern Beale’s condemnation isn’t nearly half as harsh as the rebuke Jesus himself delivers in the Bible passage the congressman misquotes. Nor is it anywhere near as stiletto-sharp as the rebuke that Moses delivers in the passage from the Bible that Jesus is reciting there.

Fincher, you see, does not like Food Stamps. He wants to cut $21 billion from food aid for poor people.