BBC correspondent, Tom Mangold was the first reporter to build an in-depth television story around Jena, Louisiana.  Now the British journalist has the distinction of being the first reporter in any medium to address the social currents swirling around the case of Curtis Flowers.  I have pasted the brief article that appears on the BBC website below, but  the twenty-eight minute audio version of the story that played on BBC Radio goes into much greater depth.

Tom Mangold first contacted me seven years ago when he developed an interest in the Tulia drug bust.  At the time, the credibility of undercover agent Tom Coleman’s was still more or less intact, but that didn’t seem to bother Mangold.  He was more interested in the social context of the story and what it said about George W. Bush’s America.  The guilt-innocence issue was of strictly secondary importance.

You can see the same broad focus in Mangold’s treatment of the Flowers story.  As with Tulia and Jena, the sheer ambiguity of the facts elicit strongly divergent reactions that break along racial and ideological lines. 

In my blogging thus far, I have had little to say about the legal case against Flowers (that will change as the June 2010 trial approaches).   I provided some background assistance in the production of the BBC story but I made no attempt to affect the content and had no idea what Mr. Mangold would do with the Flowers case.  Friends of Justice doesn’t tell reporters how to do their job; we simply make obscure stories accessible to journalists and advocacy groups by placing the facts in their historical and social context.

If you listen to the extended audio version of this story you will hear Mangold ask Curtis Flowers if he killed Bertha Tardy and three of her employees.  “No, sir,” Flowers replies, “I did not.” 

The BBC correspondent asks Flowers if he believes he will one day be exonerated.  “Yes, sir, I do” Flowers says.

Mangold asks if Flowers believes this because he has confidence in “the Lord” or because he has confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system.  Flowers says his conviction is religious.  Asked if he believes in the criminal justice system, Flowers answers without hesitation: “No, sir, I do not.”

Roxanne Ballard, Bertha Tardy’s daughter, isn’t sure that justice will be served in this case.  She is convinced that Flowers is 100% guilty, but she has no idea how the legal process will play out and wonders what will happen if Mississippi is unable to secure a final conviction.

Mangold’s interview with members of the Council of Conservative Citizens on the audio version is a real eye-opener.  The CCC folks come off as pleasant and polite, but they would clearly return to the social mores of 1960 if they had the option.

You can find a link to the audio version of this story at the conclusion of the text version.  Read, listen, and tell us what you think.

Facing a sixth trial for the same crime

By Tom Mangold

Radio 4, Crossing Continents

Curtis Flowers, a 39-year-old African American is to stand trial for an unprecedented sixth time for murder of four people in Mississippi in 1996. So far, two of his trials have resulted in mistrials and three in convictions that were later overturned.

James Bibbs, also an African American, was a juror in Mr Flowers’ 2008 trial, which ended in a mistrial. He was the only one of the 12 to vote against a conviction.

At the end of the trial, Mr Bibbs was hauled in front of the judge, harangued, threatened, arrested in court, led away in handcuffs, charged with perjury and spent the night in prison.

Mr Bibbs is in his early 60s. He’s a retired school teacher, a Vietnam veteran, a local football referee – a patently decent man who was shocked by what had happened.

“The judge got real loud, and he said ‘you are lying, you committed perjury’. I was disappointed, all these years you do all these things for the community, then you are called a liar like that out in the public, it was degrading.”

The judge’s outburst (the perjury charge has since been quietly dropped) came in a case that is extraordinary for many reasons.

Unprecedented

The prosecution of Curtis Flowers casts a sharp light on racial attitudes in America’s South one year after the election of the nation’s first black President.

He has been sentenced to death three times, only for each trial to be overturned on appeal because of what the Mississippi Supreme Court described as prosecutorial misconduct. In one further trial, the jury failed to agree after dividing broadly on racial lines.

In the fifth trial, James Bibbs voted for acquittal, and a unanimous verdict was required.

Mr Flowers has spent 13 years on remand in prison.

The local district attorney, desperate to score a conviction in such a high-profile case, has played it dirty to win.

One of his tricks, exposed by a refreshingly impartial Mississippi Supreme Court, was to fiddle the jury selection to exclude black jurors.

Paradoxically, the DA is not generally held to be a racist himself.

Just to complicate matters even further, Curtis Flowers does have a strong case to answer.

He had a motive.

Mr Flowers had been employed by the owner of a furniture store who sacked him. There was a dispute about money owing.

Subsequently someone walked into the store, shot the owner and then coldly massacred three other employees. Mr Flowers has never produced an alibi for that terrible morning.

For his defence, the scientific forensic evidence against him is wafer thin, and some witness evidence is contentious.

Post-racial society

The murders took place in the small town of Winona, in the heart of a state with the worst civil rights record in the US.

Winona is not far from Philadelphia, MS, where three white civil rights workers were infamously murdered in the early 60s – a story captured in the film Mississippi Burning.

The lynchings, the cross burnings, the overt violence and discrimination have long since disappeared.

But even one year after Obama and the dream of a post-racial society, the Flowers case shows how short the march away from old attitudes has been.

The local state senator, Lydia Chassaniol has won few African-American hearts by introducing a bill that would widen the jury pool in such a way that critics say would make it easier to select an all-white jury.

She has joined a local chapter of the right-wing Council for Conservative Citizens and addressed their annual conference.

“I’ll talk to anyone who wants me to talk to them,” the senator told me, stressing her role as official tourist booster for the state.

But meet members of the council, as I did, in a modest motel outside Winona, and the nature of this rump of the red-neck, good ‘ole white boys, confederate-flag-wavers is striking.

Their hatred of inter-racial marriage, homosexuals, liberals (aka communists) identifies an atavistic streak that still remains 150 years after slavery.

As one of them told me: “It’s alright for them (non-whites) to practise their culture but they should not take ours away from us. We are probably the most discriminated race in the country.”

Mr Flowers faces a sixth trial next June. In Britain, natural justice would have made it likely that the prosecution would be dropped after the second mistrial.

But this is Winona Mississippi and a black man accused of a quadruple murder will not be allowed to walk away.

Black president or not, the state and its judicial servants are not ready for that yet.

Crossing Continents: Mississippi Smouldering is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday, 26 November 2009 at 1100 GMT and repeated on Monday, at 2030 GMT.

If Adam Liptak is right, liberals, conservatives and libertarians have come to distrust our criminal justice system.  Liberals think it’s unfair; conservatives think it’s too expensive; libertarians think it’s too intrusive. 

Liptak was in Tulia, Texas for the evendentiary hearings that exposed Tom Coleman’s racist brand of idiocy back in 2003.  Does the meeting of the minds Liptak describes in the New York Times portend an end to the drug war?  Will the Tom Coleman’s of this world soon be looking for legitimate employment?

Don’t hold your breath.  True, we didn’t hear much tough-on-crime rhetoric during the last general election.  And mass incarceration certainly carries a stiff price tag.  According to Dr. Glen Loury of Brown University and Dr. Bruce Western of Harvard, “Spending on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government now totals roughly a fifth of a trillion dollars per year. In constant dollars, this spending has more than quadrupled over the last quarter century.”  Spending has quadrupled because the prison population has quadrupled.  And perhaps, as Liptak’s piece suggests, even Republican incarceration buffs like former AG Edwin Meese are undergoing a change of heart.

But there are two problems with this argument.  For one thing, conservative hand-wringing over the justice system has been prompted primarily by federal laws impinging on white collar criminals.  As Liptak acknowledges, “So-called overcriminalization is at the heart of the conservative critique of crime policy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the point in a recent friend-of-the-court brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of ‘honest services,’ is, the brief said, both ‘unintelligible’ and “used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”

That’s not going to help Tulia victims like Joe Moore and Freddie Brookins Jr. 

Secondly, as I have noted elsewhere, mass incarceration is far more than the consequence of tough-on-crime demagoguery; it was America’s response to a surplus population created by the neo-liberal economic policies of the late 1970s.  Sure, politicians demagogued the crime issue to win election; but the real issue was economic.  When you put the squeeze on the middle and working classes, the folks in the hood don’t stand a chance.  The war on drugs and mass incarceration should be understood as a policy response to the disappearance of meaningful work in poor, economically isolated neighborhoods. 

Until we create decent jobs for poor people, mass incarceration will remain a fact of American life.  If we back away from the war on drugs we will have to find other ways to transfer poor folks from the hood to the prison and back again.  We simply don’t have enough good jobs to go around, and that means that between 15% of the population (in good times) and 30% (in bad times) will find it painfully difficult to (a) find a job, (b) maintain a marriage or (c) finance a college education.  The standard of life in poor, economically isolated neighborhoods will continue to deteriorate, law enforcement will clamp down on the resulting chaos and the prisons will remain full-to-overflowing.

Can America afford to shut down half its prisons?  Only if we are serious about creating jobs.  The free market cannot produce enough work to employ every able-bodied American and give every family a decent standard of living.  Therefore, the government must pay people to rebuild their own blighted neighborhoods.  A crazy idea, you say.  No crazier (and far less expensive)  than incarcerating over two million Americans.

We don’t like whiners, do we?  And with good reason.  The belief that the cards are intentionally stacked against you can be a one-way ticket to professional disaster . . . even if it’s true.  The Washington Post recently looked at unemployment statistics and, if you’re young, black and male, it ain’t a pretty picture.  The unemployment rate for this group is currently worse than it was for American workers at the heart of the Great Depression. 

Consider this excerpt:

“Increased involvement in the underground economy, criminal activity, increased poverty, homelessness and teen pregnancy are the things I worry about if we continue to see more years of high unemployment,” said Algernon Austin, a sociologist and director of the race, ethnicity and economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, which studies issues involving low- and middle-income wage earners.

Earlier this month, District officials said they will use $3.9 million in federal stimulus funds to provide 19 weeks of on-the-job training to 500 18-to-24-year-olds. But even those who receive training often don’t get jobs.

The problem, I contend, is that the US economy, by design, has little to offer the 20% of the population at the bottom of the economic and educational ladder.  In the late 1970s, the captains of interest, with ungrudging approval from the political establishment (Democrat and Republican) intentionally created a surplus population as a way of placing downward pressure on wages.  Globalization is best understood as part of this process.  Between 1930 and 1980 wages for the folks at the bottom rose faster than any other income group; since 1980 the rich have been getting richer and . . .

This being the case, the employment prospects of high school dropouts is bound to be tough at the best of times.  In the midst of a brutal recession you get 30% unemployment. 

But there is more to it than an economy with few jobs for the unskilled.  “Some studies examining how employers review black and white job applicants,” the Post article points out, ”suggest that discrimination may be at play.”

“Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men,” said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. “Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison.”

Delonta Spriggs, a 24 year-old reformed drug dealer looking for legitimate employment enrolled in a jobs training program but it wasn’t enough:

“I thought after I finished the [training] program, I’d be working. I only had three jobs with the union and only one of them was longer than a week,” Spriggs, a tall slender man wearing a black Nationals cap, said one afternoon while sitting at the table in the living room/dining room in his mother’s apartment. “It has you wanting to go out and find other ways to make money. . . . [Lack of jobs is why] people go out hustling and doing what they can to get by.”

Does that sound like whining?  It’s certainly a message Middle America doesn’t want to hear.  We like to believe that anyone who wants a decent job can get one if they try hard enough.  For most job hunters this is true (although in the present economy it can take half or year or longer to snag a job).  But for young uneducated black males living in bad neighborhoods, work is desperately hard to find.  After a year-or-so of fruitless job hunting, the lure of the streets takes over.  America has a place for young men in this predicament . . . it’s called prison.

Jesse Ray Beard, the youngest Jena 6 defendants, was featured on CBS Evening News on Friday evening.  It was a human interest piece about a young man making the most of dramatically altered circumstances.   The crux of the story is that Alan Howard (a pro bono attorney involved in the Jena 6 legal fight) and his wife Patti agreed to serve as  guardians for the young man from Jena.  Here’s the heart of the matter:

Attorney Alan Howard, of the New York firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, represented Jody for free. “I saw a lot of resilience there,” he said. “Passion, charm, and I liked him right away.”

Howard wanted to give him an opportunity. So he turned to the people he trusted most – his family.

“I remember saying that he should come and live with us, Howard’s daughter Jesse said. “I was totally for it, but I never thought it would happen.”

Jody recalls Howard made him a promise:

“That if I stay out of trouble, that he would get me out of Jena.”

Howard made good on that promise, when he and other defense lawyers got the original judge in the case removed because of bias.

Howard thinks that if Jody had remained in Jena, “they would have found a reason to lock him up.”

CBS reporter Harold Dow wonders why an apparently humble, appreciative and intelligent young man is considered a thug in his home town.  Several dozen white Americans answered this question in the comments section.  Jesse Ray is considered a thug, they say, because he beat up a white kid.  End of story.  Although the article specified that only 2 of the 50 eye witness accounts make any mention of Beard’s involvement, the anonymous folks voicing their opinions have no doubt that Jesse Ray was guilty and that he should be spending several decades in prison.

I suspect that many of the comments come from the good citizens of Jena, Louisiana who can be forgiven for holding unusually vociferous opinions.  But many of the folks making the nasty remarks identify themselves as moderate-to-progressive voters who are just sick and tired of black thugs messing with their America. 

Just as troubling is the absence of positive comments. 

I have worked with these young men and, believe me, they ain’t no thugs. 

Why do so many white Americans find it so hard to identify with young black males who protested the hanging of nooses at their high school only to be told that (a) the incident in question was an innocent, non-racial prank and that (b) if they persisted in voicing their displeasure they would face criminal charges? 

To be more precise, DA Reed Walters reminded the young men that “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.”

Those who doubt a prosecutor would make such a bizarre statement to black students in the aftermath of a hate crime should know that, confronted with his alleged remark at a pre-trial hearing, Walters admitted to saying precisely that, explaining that he thought the students should “work things out on their own.”

Well, they did.  They worked things out the way adolescent males work things out: with trash talk and physical violence.  These cases were ultimately settled in a reasonable manner because, had they gone to trial, the truth of my original narrative (and much more besides) would have been revealed in open court.  In particular, it would have become clear that, by their refusal to confront an obvious hate crime, Superintendent Roy Breithaupt and DA Walters set black and white male students on a collision course.

When I googled “Jena 6″ the other night, I found 13.5 million documents.  That is not necessarily a measure of positive impact, but it demonstrates that the Jena story captured the attention of the nation as few stories have.  The most positive and practical result thus far is that school administrators across the nation are using the story as a cautionary tale about what happens when school officialsrefuse to confront bold expressions of bigotry and intolerance in a school environment.

Check out the comments section on the CBS website and let us know what you think.

This post is from Charles Kiker, a retired minister (and founding member of Friends of Justice) living in Tulia, Texas.

There’s an excellent article in the current (December 1) issue of The Christian Century, in their occasional “How my mind has changed” series. Nicholas Wolterstorff writes on “The Way to Justice.” Wolterstorff insists that he has not had any dramatic reversals in his thought. He describes himself as a Dutch Reformed Calvinist in the mode of Abraham Kuyper. That was his orientation from his days as a student at Calvin College, and that orientation remains.

While his mind may not have changed, his outlook has expanded in the matter of justice. In 1976 he participated in a conference at the University of Potchefstroom in South Africa. At that conference, he writes, “There were quite a few Dutch scholars present . . . , a few of us from Canada and the U. S., both blacks and whites from other parts of Africa, and Afrikaners from South Africa along with blacks and so-called coloreds.”

He reports that the Dutch were angry with the Afrikaners over apartheid, the Afrikaners were angry with the Dutch for being angry about apartheid. Then the blacks and coloreds began to speak up, more quietly than the Dutch and Afrikaners, about how they were daily humiliated and demeaned under apartheid. The Afrikaners did not disagree about the injustice, but they argued that justice was not a relevant category. The relevant category, they insisted, was “love, charity, benevolence.” And then they told of how they were benevolent to the blacks and coloreds: Christmas gifts, used clothing for the children, etc. And they (Afrikaners) were hurt that blacks and coloreds so seldom expressed gratitude for that benevolence.

Here, to me, in one short paragraph, is the heart of Wolterstorff’s article:

Scales fell off my eyes. What I saw, as I had never seen before, was benevolence being used as an instrument of oppression. I felt called by God, in the classical Protestant sense of call, to speak up for these wronged and suffering people and to speak up for justice.

My goodness! Benevolence as an instrument of oppression! One could chase all sorts of rabbits along all sorts of side trails with this thought. Much of our benevolence toward the poor may be a malformed love excusing or overlooking injustice.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Wolterstorff argues that the dichotomy between love and justice is a false dichotomy. “Malformed love,” he writes, “does indeed come into conflict with justice. But well-formed love incorporates doing justice. To delete justice from the Bible is to have very little lift; that holds for the New Testament as well as the Old.”

One final quote with which Wolterstorff ends his article:

“Justice is upfront in scripture. In the thinking and doing of many of my fellow Christians today, it is nowhere to be found. Love and justice weep.”

Amen, Brother Wolterstorff. Amen!

Twelve members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rallied at yesterday’s game between Ole Miss and LSU in Oxford.  For years the Ole Miss band has played “Dixie” during football games.  In 1962, then-governor Ross Barnett got so choked up listening to the song at halftime that he nearly reneged on a deal he had made with John and Bobby Kennedy to allow James Meredith enroll at the University.  The playing of Dixie was recently discontinued because students refused to stop chanting “The South’s gonna rise again,” at the conclusion of the piece.

This tradition gave the White Knights the impression that Old Miss students shared their hankering for the good ole days of Jim Crow segregation. 

Not so much, it appears.  Two hundred and fifty protestors showed up in Oxford to shout down the Klan.  While white students at Ole Miss enjoy shouting racist slogans at football games it’s more of a sentimental journey than a serious statement of intent.  At any rate, no one in Oxford was willing to stand with the beleaguered Klansmen. 

Saturday’s cold reception likely left the White Knights more than a little confused.  If the student body loves to chant “The South’s gonna rise again,” at the conclusion of Dixie, why didn’t they support the brave men-in-sheets fighting for their freedom of speech? 

But there’s a big difference between chanting provocative slogans designed to goose the Yankees and pushing hard-core Klan racism.   Few in Mississippi care to take their racism straight these days.  Semi-racist hints and insinuations are cool and all that, but who wants to be associated with the KKK? 

Of course, the same was true back in ‘62.  The Citizen’s Councils were formed because the redneck Klan was giving the state a bad name. 

I’ve always wondered how the black football players on the Ole Miss squad felt when they heard the band playing Dixie and thousands of fans calling for a reprise of Jim Crow glory.  The administration didn’t want to eliminate “Dixie” from the band’s repertoire but when fans refused to quit shouting the offensive slogan the song had to go.

It is very difficult for folks who don’t live in Mississippi to make sense of all this.  I suspect it’s just as hard for native Mississippians to sort it all out.  Maybe it all boils down to what feels good at the time.  Chanting about the rebirth of the Confederacy feels good; being associated with over-the-top racists doesn’t.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County Mississippi in 1917, the last of Jim and Ella Townsend’s twenty children.  At the age of two, her parents moved to a plantation outside of Ruleville in Sunflower County.  The price of cotton was rising rapidly after the First World War and the thickly wooded land across Sunflower County was being cleared for new farms.  From the age of six, Fannie Lou, like her parents and grandparents before her, worked as a sharecropper.  Her father once came close to buying a few acres of his own, but a white neighbor poisoned his mule, an economic blow from which the family would never recover. 

Plantation life was hard even during the best of years; in hard times families waged a relentless war with starvation.  Hamer remembered her mother wrapping her feet in old rags so she and her sisters could salvage the cotton the pickers had missed. 

Mississippi sharecroppers owed their souls to the company store.  Wages were kept low, prices at the plantation store were artificially high and the money loaned to sharecroppers at planting time sometimes exceeded the profits accrued at harvest.  Entire families labored in the fields from “can-to-can’t”: from first light until it was too dark to work.  Cotton season covered nine or ten months of the year and field workers used the layoff between seasons to recover physically and emotionally.  Schools for African-American children were poorly equipped and understaffed.  Classes were suspended when students were needed in the fields.  Fannie Lou Hamer ended her school days barely able to read and write, but that was more than could be said for most of her peers.  Although Fannie Lou could pick almost as much cotton as a man, childhood polio made the work increasingly difficult.  At the age of 16, impressed with her intelligence, plantation owner W.D. Marlow gave Fannie Lou a job as timekeeper.

In 1945, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer.  The couple had no children because Fannie Lou had been sterilized (without her knowledge or permission) in accordance with a Mississippi policy designed to reduce the number of indigent children in the state.

Hamer was introduced to the fledgling civil rights movement in the early 1950s when she attended annual conferences of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) sponsored by T.R.M. Howard, a wealthy African-American physician.   The RCNL had a top-down organizing strategy designed to empower educated African-American leaders, but the annual meetings in the all-black town of Mound Bayou frequently drew 10,000 people from across Mississippi.  In the early 50’s the focus was on making the “equal” in “separate but equal” mean something; full integration wasn’t considered a realistic (or safe) goal at that point.  But the RCNL conferences drew speakers like Thurgood Marshall and performers like Mahalia Jackson and nurtured young leaders like Aaron Henry and Medgar Evers who would lead the fight for civil rights in Mississippi when Dr. Howard, intimidated by death threats, packed his bags and headed for Chicago. 

Fannie Lou Hamer was still working as W.D. Marlow’s timekeeper on August 23, 1962 when she attended a civil rights meeting in Ruleville featuring the Rev. James Bevel.  An associate of Martin Luther King Jr., Bevel was working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  When Bevel called for volunteer’s to register to vote at the county courthouse in Indianola, Hamer’s hand shot into the air. 

A week later, Hamer and a small group of volunteers drove from Ruleville to Indianola in a rented bus.  Black people who attempted to register in the Mississippi Delta could expect to lose their jobs and possibly their lives.  “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared,” she said years later,  “but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”  Hamer encouraged the group by breaking into well-known church songs like “This Little Light of Mine” and “Go Tell it On the Mountain.”  As Fannie Lou’s powerful voice filled the bus, her companions joined in.

Hamer’s experience at the Indianola courthouse was life-changing.  Only a handful of the people were allowed to enter the courthouse, the rest were turned away.  Once inside, the fortunate few were shown a portion of the state constitution and asked to interpret it for the registrar.  Until that moment, Hamer didn’t know that Mississippi had a constitution.  Informed that she had failed the test, Hamer announced her intention to return to Indianola every month until she passed.  On the way back to Ruleville, the group was intimidated by state troopers who claimed their bus was ”too yellow”. 

Back on the plantation, Hamer learned that Mr. Marlow was looking for her.  The cotton planter informed his timekeeper that Mississippi wasn’t ready for voting Negroes.  Therefore, if she didn’t go back to Indianola and withdraw her application she and her family would have to leave his farm.  Marlow’s threats were understandable.  No cotton man who allowed his Negroes to vote could maintain a place in white Delta society. 

To Marlow’s amazement, Hamer quit her job on the spot.  She and Pap stayed with friends for a few days, but when their location was discovered the home was strafed with bullets.  Still Hamer refused to back down.  It wasn’t long before civil rights leader Bob Moses was looking for “the lady who sings the hymns.”  Hamer started attending classes led by Annelle Ponder, a twenty-six year-old school teacher from Atlanta who had recently joined the freedom struggle in Sunflower County.  Under Ponder’s tutelage, Hamer learned the Mississippi Constitution well enough to pass the registration test.  Soon, Hamer was being invited to sing at rallies and fundraising events across the country.

Fannie Lou Hamer’s hymn singing and natural eloquence were a boon to the civil rights movement, especially in Mississippi.  Bookish leaders like Moses and Bevel were more comfortable debating the fine points of Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology or the tenets of Gandhian pacifism than they were connecting with semi-illiterate Mississippi sharecroppers.  Fannie Lou Hamer’s melodious voice bridged the cultural gap between movement leaders and their intended audience.

But Hamer had far more to offer the movement than a powerful singing voice and a folksy manner; she was a prophet in the full biblical sense of the word.  Hamer’s religion was personal, emotional and supernatural.  She took her Bible straight, unmediated by the ”chicken-eating” black preachers she endured on Sunday mornings or the learned theologians who informed movement intellectuals.  Hamer was convinced that God was working through the civil rights movement to usher in the Kingdom of God Jesus talked about.  Her favorite Bible passage was from the 4th chapter of Luke’s Gospel:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

Fannie Lou Hamer made this mission her own and was never comfortable with more realistic goals.  “If Christ were here today,” she said, ”he would be branded a radical, a militant, and would probably be branded as ‘red’. They have even painted me as Communist, although I wouldn’t know a Communist if I saw one.”

 Hamer cooperated with every phase of the civil rights movement, from the conservative NAACP to the Black Panthers.  But when the SNCC began evicting white members from leadership positions, Hamer mounted a powerful protest.  “Jesus wasn’t talking about black people, or about white people,” she said, “he was talking about people. There’s no difference in people, for in the 17th chapter of the Book of Acts, the 26th verse, Paul says, ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.’  That means that whether we’re white, black, red, yellow, or polka dot, we’re made from the same blood.”

Hamer transcended petty politics by interpreting the freedom struggle in supernatural and cosmological terms.  When the going was tough and emotions within the movement ran high, Hamer would quote Ephesians 6:11-12: “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

The language of spiritual warfare allowed Hamer to interpret the cruelty of her opponents as an unavoidable aspect of a God-driven transformational drama that she saw sweeping over the nation.  This blending of biblical piety and revolutionary spirit helped Hamer and her companions stand firm in the face of bestial cruelty.   In June of 1963, less than a year after she won the right to vote, Fannie Lou Hamer found herself in the Montgomery County Jail in Winona, Mississippi.  What happened in that dark place would stretch her soul to the breaking point and change America forever.

Wesley Pruden (and practically every other conservative pundit) thinks Barack Obama is a wimp for bowing to Japanese emperor Akihito.   The world is supposed to grovel before the American Imperium; real Americans bow to no one. 

Pruden, the editor emeritus of the conservative Washington Times, is being excoriated by liberal bloggers as an arch-racist.  I doubt he minds.  Pruden has made a career out of pushing the racial envelope.  His readers (real Americans all) cheer wildly each time Pruden oversteps the bounds of civility.  Even better, when liberals rant and rage about racism, the value of the Pruden brand name grows.

Here’s the quote that’s got everybody in Leftyland stirred up:

It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

He no doubt wants to “do the right thing” by his lights, but the lights that illumine the Obama path are not necessarily the lights that illuminate the way for most of the rest of us. This is good news only for Jimmy Carter, who may yet have to give up his distinction as our most ineffective and embarrassing president.

Who does Pruden mean by “most of the rest of us”? 

White people, of course.  You know, “real Americans”. 

If Wes Pruden lived in Middle America he would keep his sentimental hankering for the halcyon days of white supremacy to himself.  But when you live with both feet firmly planted in the world of American conservatism you can pretty much say whatever you like without embarrassment.  Birthers, tea baggers and Fox News devotees are not embarrassed by crude racism; they find it exhilarating.

American conservatism has not always been overtly racist.  The folks who like small governments, fiscal responsibility and traditional values like honesty and hard work haven’t always understood the non-white world.  Old school conservatives could be insensitive and patronizing; but they weren’t mad or mean-spirited about it.

The conservative movement that took shape in the late 1960s was driven by civil rights resentment.  Men like Wesley Pruden want the world to bow and scrape before America in precisely the way black southerners once deferred to white folks.   And for much the same reason.  This is a political philosophy driven by racial resentment.  I’m not suggesting that everybody associated with the conservative movement is bigoted.  It’s not that simple.  But politicians like Richard Nixon (cautiously) and Ronald Reagan (enthusiastically) embraced the sworn enemies of the civil rights movement as natural allies.  Not everyone in the conservative camp was happy with this development, but they all learned to live with it.  You couldn’t survive as a white son or daughter of Mississippi in the early 1960s unless you backed segregation; and you can’t survive within the conservative movement today without embracing white supremacy.  You don’t have to be gross about it, but you must never criticize those who are.

Republican strategy in the South is predicated on the conviction that you can alienate non-white voters and still win elections.  You can’t win every election this way because white voters don’t predominate in every precinct.  But civil rights resentment is so prevalent in the South that an unapologetically pro-white political agenda, even if it comes wrapped in the confederate flag, will push you over the top when it matters. 

Sometimes you have to subtle; often you don’t.

Which brings me back (yet again) to Lydia Chassaniol, the Mississippi Senator who freelyacknowledges her ties to a white supremacy organization.  Were people outraged?  Two or three.  But civil rights resentment runs so deep in Mississippi that not a single mainstream voice was raised in protest.  What good would it have done?  Racism is only racism when it appeals to a small lunatic fringe, right?  If most people are nodding along in agreement you can’t be a racist no matter how egregious your opinions.  The Council of Conservative Citizens is so mainstream in rural Mississippi it is practically invisible.   

Contemporary southern racists are generally nice people.  They go to church, they pay their taxes, they tuck their kids in at night and they vote.  When they see their neighbors on the street they give a great big wave.  They have no beef with black people because blacks and whites rarely interact.  African American adults have the vote but they can’t win (or even influence) the big political races.  African American children attend public schools–in fact, they often have the schools all to themselves. 

Things aren’t ideal outside the South either, of course.  But you can’t win elections in urban America without tossing a bone or two to moderate white and minority voters.  The South is the only region where you can build a career by banging the drum of civil rights resentment. 

How many white southerners feel any real remorse when they reflect on the tragic history of Jim Crow?  Or is this kind of reflection even an option?  Suppose a white southerner were to suddenly “come under conviction” (as we Baptists like to put it).  To whom would he confess?  Who would be willing to listen?  And who would hold her feet to the fires of history in the first place?  It isn’t unusual for white people who renounce white supremacy in clear and unambiguous terms to find themselves disowned by their families.  I can’t imagine a public school teacher or a Sunday school teacher broaching the subject in most white southern settings.  Even in Arlington, Texas the subject is largely taboo in white churches.  White children growing up in segregation academies (now called “Christian schools”) learn nothing about the civil rights movement or the social sins that made it necessary.

Lou Dobbs continued his misinformed rant against the undocumented for years before CNN finally pulled the plug.  But if Mr. Dobbs schleps over to Fox News he will have carte blanche.  The folks at Fox can’t say, “I hate niggers” or “only white folks are real Americans”.  But they are free to speak of an America that only white conservatives could relate to or would want to live in.  That kind of discourse is considered acceptable.

Wesley Pruden doesn’t care if American presidents bow to foreign dignitaries, but he will take any opportunity to take a cheap shot at president Obama.  In the real America presidents have the good sense to be white.  African Americans, Asians and Hispanics are allowed to occupy the occasional place of honor so long as the position is ceremonial or several giant steps from the real corridors of power.  But the big cheese is supposed to a white male.  By being black and having a foreign dad Mr. Obama’s shows he just doesn’t get what the real America is all about.

I repeat, there is no necessary connection between conservatism and bigotry.  Therefore, I am waiting patiently for the first principled conservative to say ‘yes’ to the civil rights tradition and a resounding ‘no’ to the monochrome Real America extolled by pundits like Wes Pruden.

Laws.com has an article featuring the fifty best Justice blogs.  Friends of Justice comes in at number 11, although I have no idea how the rating order was determined or what consitutes a ”justice blog”.   Still, if you want to know who else is writing about justice issues this article is a good place to start.