Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson makes two major claims in this stimulating op-ed piece in the New York Times. First, he suggests that racism has changed its shape without losing its power.  This means that a black president must never address the race issue directly.

Patterson understands the historical roots of American racism as well as any living American scholar.  Here’s his mini-lecture on the subject:

We became this way because of the peculiar tragedies and triumphs of our past. Race and racism scar all advanced nations, but America is peculiar because slavery thrived internally and race became a defining feature of personal identity.

Slavery was quintessentially an institution of exclusion: the slave first and foremost was someone who did not belong to and had no claims on the public order, nor any legitimate private existence, since both were appropriated by the slaveholder. The Act of Emancipation abolished only the first part of slavery, the master’s ownership; far from removing the concept of the ex-slave as someone who did not belong, it reinforced it. The nightmare of the Jim Crow era then extended and reinforced the public slavery of black Americans right up through the middle of the 20th century.

At the same time, the status of blacks as permanent outsiders made whiteness a treasured personal attribute in a manner inconceivable to Europeans. Whiteness had no real meaning to pre-immigration Swedes or Irishmen because they were all white. But it became meaningful the moment they landed in America, where it was eagerly embraced as a free cultural resource in assimilating to the white republic. In America race had the same significance as gender and age as defining qualities of personhood.

The civil rights movement opened up new opportunities for educated people of color by abolishing “the lingering public culture of slavery”, but while black people have made great strides in the entertainment, athletic and political fields, the social segregation in America has actually deepened.  African Americans are still perceived to be “culturally different”, Patterson writes, and ”In the disciplined cultural spaces of marriages, homes, neighborhoods, schools and churches, these same differences become the source of Apollonian dread.”

Social isolation means that white Americans have a hard time grasping the individuality of black Americans.  As a result, the pathologies of the few are attributed to the many.  Although the relationship between social pathology and bad public policy is simply assumed in the academic community, a black president must never appear to be making excuses for absentee dads and street-hardened thugs if he wants white votes.

I’m not sure if Patterson is trying to describe the president’s thinking in this op-ed, or if he is telling Obama how he ought to think.  Maybe he’s doing both.  Obama, Patterson suggests, must never lecture white America about race.  In the wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama had to speak out to keep the race issue from derailing his candidacy.  But since entering the White House, he has made only one foray into racial politics (his remarks about the Gates-Crowley affair) and Patterson sees that as an unmitigated disaster. 

Therefore, the professor says, America’s first black president ”will not be leading any national conversations on race, convinced as he must be that they exacerbate rather than illuminate.” 

Patterson seems to agree with this stark assessment.

Are white Americans so ignorant and reflexively defensive that they can’t engage in an intelligent give-and-take on the subject of race?

So progressive analysts seem to believe.  So it has always been.  The NAACP was horrified by Martin Luther King’s practice of non-violent direct action because the strategy invited a violent white backlash.  King persisted because he knew the sheer pathology of the typical white reaction to marches, buoycotts and sit-ins exposed the irrational hatred at the heart of racist public policy. 

Similarly, the Freedom Rides of 1961 received negative reviews from the mainstream press.  It was generally assumed that anyone foolish enough to sit in the front section of a bus in Alabama or Mississippi had only themselves to blame if they received a brutal beating.  But every Freedom Rider sent from Jackson to the notorious Parchman prison in the Mississippi Delta weakened the position of Southern politicians.  Ultimately, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy pressured the Interstate Commerce Commission into changing the law.

Only after non-violent and inter-racial strategies were abandoned did a conservative backlash against civil rights take hold in America.   For an entire decade, the conflict between civil rights and states rights shaped the way Americans thought about the past and the present.  The living narratives unleashed by non-violent direct action seized white America by the throat.  The strategy was daring, dangerous and uniquely effective.  Civil rights activists created a social crisis in America and waited for the truth to surface.

The narrative strategy Friends of Justice employs is rooted in the early civil rights movement.  By taking hold of the narrative surrounding actual criminal cases we spark an intense conversation about race and justice.  Initially, public officials ignore us.  When that doesn’t work they attempt try to spin the story in their own favor.  In the resulting clash of narratives the truth ultimately rises to the surface.  Not everybody sees it, of course.  Some folks remain convinced that Tom Coleman made good cases in Tulia or that the nooses hanging from a tree in Jena held no racial significance.  But Jena changed the way school administrators think across America, Tulia led to widespread reforms and the Colomb case (though it gained less publicity than Jena and Tulia) exposed fundamental flaws in federal conspiracy law. 

Orlando Patterson hopes Barack Obama can “quietly” reform the criminal justice system.  Not by himself, he can’t.  Our punitive justice system was shaped by tough-on-crime politicians exploiting and feeding public fears at the top of their lungs.  There was nothing subtle or “quiet” about this process.  Divisive and damaging narratives about crack babies and inner city thugs built the present system and only healing justice narratives can take it apart.  

Conservative politicians could afford to be speak loudly because they reflected the zeitgeist.  White people were angry, afraid and in the majority.  Progressive leaders must wait for somebody else to change the tenor of the conversation, but if everyone is quiet nothing will change.

White skin is no barrier to reflection and repentance.  Given the right environment, all people can learn.  But there will be nothing quiet about the process.  “You shall know the truth,” Jesus tells us, “and the truth shall set you free.”  Politically nuanced fudge phrases are good for winning elections but they will never reveal truth or expose lies. 

Orlando Patterson is right about one thing: a sitting president can’t be the standard-bearer for a twenty-first century civil rights movement.  Barack Obama shouldn’t take the lead in the conversation about race and justice–but he has already changed the context in which that conversation unfolds.  It’s up to the rest of us to speak the loud truth without apology.

Terry Harrington (pictured at the left) and Curtis McGhee served a quarter century of prison time for another man’s crime.  In 1977, an all-white jury found the two men guilty of killing John Schweer, a recently retired Council Bluffs (Iowa) police officer who was working security at a used car lot.  This week, the Supreme Court of the United States will decide if Harrington and McGhee can sue the prosecutors who framed them.

According to an article at Law.com, then-County Attorney David Richter and Assistant County Attorney Joseph Hrvol ”shifted their attention from a suspect who was white and had been seen in the area carrying a shotgun, toward a group of blacks.”  Paul Clement, the attorney representing Herrington and McGhee, claims “a witness was coerced to pinpoint Harrington and McGhee, and jailhouse informants were recruited to make false statements about them.”

A recent Washington Post editorial claims that ”The prosecutors allegedly coaxed a witness to offer a version of events that implicated two African American men, Curtis W. McGhee Jr. and Terry J. Harrington; the witness gave several different statements over time and had trouble keeping his facts straight. Prosecutors also allegedly coerced other witnesses to lie and withheld evidence that pointed to a different culprit.” 

When the star witness couldn’t produce a credible story that would stand up in court, prosecutors showed him statements made by other inmates.

None of this would have come to light if prison barber Anne Danaher hadn’t struck up a casual conversation with member’s of Terry Harrington’s family.  The enterprising Danaher thought the case sounded fishy, and filed freedom of information requests on Harrington’s behalf.   The inmate had exhausted the appeals process by that time, but clear evidence of prosecutorial misconduct compelled the Iowa Supreme Court to vacate the conviction.  

In another odd twist, Harrington and McGhee are being represented before the Supreme Court by former Bush Administration Solicitor General, Paul Clement, a staunch defender of prosecutorial immunity.  Asked to explain his sudden shift in emphasis, Clement said, “What it signifies is that I’m no longer working for the government.”

Radley Balko, a Senior Editor at Reason.com and a leading critic of prosecutorial and judicial immunity, sums up the key issue this way:

Hrvol and Richter contend that prosecutorial immunity gives government officials the right to coerce witnesses to lie, withhold evidence pointing to a suspect’s innocence, and work with police to manufacture false evidence of guilt, then use that evidence to win false convictions that send two men to prison for 25 years. Their motivation for making this argument is obvious; they’d rather not pay for their misconduct. But they’re supported in amicus briefs filed by the U.S. Solicitor General, the National District Attorneys Association, and the attorneys general of 27 states and the District of Columbia. Notably, Cook County, Illinois, home to a number of wrongful convictions, also filed its own brief in support of the prosecutors.

A brief filed in support of Hrvol and Richter by Iowa prosecutors cuts to the heart of the matter: “There is no freestanding constitutional ‘right not to be framed’.”

Maybe not, but there should be.  The Washington Post’s editorial board says good prosecutors have little to fear if Harrington and McGhee prevail:

Prosecutors need to be able carry out their duties without fear that they’ll become the targets of personal lawsuits if defendants are found not guilty or charges are dropped. But such lawsuits face high hurdles. The Supreme Court has recently — and correctly — made it even more difficult for plaintiffs to make officials personally liable unless there’s convincing evidence that they were directly involved in knowingly violating a clearly established constitutional right. Mr. McGhee and Mr. Harrington have shouldered that burden and should be allowed to proceed with their case.

Here at Friends of Justice we are following Pottawattamie County v. McGhee and Harrington with great interest.  A similar species of prosecutorial misconduct is evident in the case of Curtis Flowers (and every other case in which we have intervened).  There is strong evidence, for instance, that potential witnesses in Winona were bribed with promises of a $30,000 reward and, in some cases, threatened with prosecution if they didn’t cooperate.  The major difference is that witnesses in the Flowers case clearly were not exposed to the testimony of other witnesses.  If they had been, their physical descriptions of Flowers would have overlapped at least a little. 

The Washington Post assures us that most Hrvol and Richter are just a couple of bad apples; but there is nothing unusual about prosecutors pressuring vulnerable people into perjured testimony.  Hrvol and Richter represent an egregious instance of a common phenomenon.  They knew their star witness was lying; in most cases, prosecutors merely suspect that the men and women they browbeat into cooperation might be lying–they don’t know for sure . . . and they don’t care.

The Dallas Justice Revival kicks off two weeks from tomorrow at the Dallas Market Hall.  This three-day event will feature the preaching of Zan Holmes, Samuel Rodriguez and Sojourners founder, Jim Wallis (find bios here), and some of the best Christian music you will ever hear.  But the revival doesn’t end with final altar call; event participants are committed to long-term goals like advocating for the construction of 700 low-income homes and the creation of twenty-five partnerships between schools and area churches. 

In addition, IGNITE Greater Works, “A Best Practices Community Transformation Gathering” will feature practical social ministry workshops the morning and afternoon of Wednesday, November 11th and the morning of Thursday, November 12th.  Friends of Justice will have a booth in the Exhibit Hall beginning on Tuesday evening, so drop by and introduce yourself. 

This event is uniting Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Evangelical and Mainline Protestant churches around the theme of Christian compassion and the call to put feet to our faith.  If you can get to Dallas for this event please make your plans now.  This is a free event, but participants are encouraged to register (it just takes a few seconds).

Last night Priscilla Hutton was telling the youth group at her Catholic church about her work in the prisons.  In the course of her presentation, Priscilla shared this letter from Donna Stites, an inmate at the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis.  A few weeks ago I introduced you to Donna’s amazing story after I visited her in prison.  Below, Donna tells her own story. 

Priscilla Hutton with Donna Stites

To All Who Listen:

My name is Donna Kaye Stites and I have been incarcerated in the Indiana Department of corrections for over 25 years. I want to talk to you about my experience with going to school and the importance of getting an education.

When I was in grade school, I was considered a bully and I hated school. I acted out, for the most part, because I was ashamed of my being poor. I felt like I was not good enough. That hurt me and my anger came from those feelings. I was living with my father and his wife on a farm.

When I got to middle school, my financial circumstances changed. I was living with my mother and step-father, who was a wealthy business owner. However, I still hated school. I thought it was a waste of time. I had better things to do with my life, like selling drugs for my mother and hanging out with the older crowds.

I was doing drugs and drinking heavily by the time I entered high school. I was having sex and doing things like shoplifting and credit card theft throughout my high school years. I simply thought that school was not for me. I was in Girls’ School twice, did prison time and was in a work release center before being sent back prison for the final time. I have now been in prison, continuously, since I turned 21.

When I turned 30 years old, I decided things in my life needed to change. I made a list of six changes that I thought would help me. They are as follows:

• Stop doing drugs

• Stop smoking

• Resolve the issues between my mother and me

• Resolve a dysfunctional relationship

• Take better care of my health (I am a brittle diabetic)

• Go to college

I started my first year of college when I was 32 years old. I felt very intimidated and stupid. I felt like I was going to quit at least a hundred times, however, I stuck with it and at the end of my first semester, I had gotten all A’s and B’s on my report card. My GPA was 3.5. I was one point from making the Dean’s List and I couldn’t have been prouder of myself.   Even now I am smiling just thinking about it.

After that experience, I decided to make the Dean’s list (my seventh goal) every semester. I received an Associates Degree with academic distinction and I got my Bachelor’s degree with honors. I finished Ball State with having been on the Dean’s List every semester after the first.

I want to encourage you to do the best you can in school now and to continue your education after high school. I am not an old person, I am not someone’s mom, and I am not getting paid to tell you about getting educated. I am someone who has had their life changed for the better as a result of getting educated. Education opened doors for me that had never been opened before. I found out who I was. I don’t believe I could make the sound decisions that I make now without having been educated. I believe that formal education with a solid scriptural foundation is the best way for you to not get caught up in the distractions, like I was. I have a lot of regrets, but getting my college degrees is not one of them.

There’s nothing more important than you taking care of you: your mind, your body and your spirit. It is all you have in the end.

Let God bless you with all that has your name on it. Don’t cheat yourself out of what’s yours and what’s you.

Peace,

Donna Kaye Stites

Inmate at Indiana Women’s Prison

Indianapolis, Indiana

A guest post by Friend of Justice, Charles Kiker 

“[God] has broken down the dividing wall.” St. Paul

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Robert Frost

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” Ronald Reagan

On the weekend of October 3-4, I was in El Paso attending my final meeting of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. Due to some health difficulties and to the increasing challenge of reaching meeting venues from my home in the Panhandle, I had been contemplating resigning my post for quite some time. My term was to expire in April 2010, so I decided to hold on through the October ’09 quarterly meeting, and get a chance for a brief visit to El Paso as part of the deal. I’m glad I did.

On Saturday afternoon we sat through the usual processes of approval of minutes of the former meeting and various reports, we loaded up in cars and went to Annunciation House, a shelter for undocumented people which operates openly and with at least tacit ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) approval. In fact, from time to time ICE refers people to Annunciation House rather than putting them in detention.

People at Annunciation House come into direct contact with immigrants, both documented and undocumented. One documented worker in Colorado died with his surviving spouse living in Mexico. In order to get her Social Security survivor’s benefits she has to be legally in the United States for a thirty day period once every six months. We were told that this requirement does not apply to survivors in Europe or Canada, but I have not been able to verify this claim.

The situation at the border near El Paso is extremely serious due to the activities of the drug cartels. People with no involvement with the cartels are routinely slaughtered for no offense but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police, and increasingly the Mexican army, look the other way. Family member on the wrong side of a dispute are routinely threatened and frequently murdered. People whose lives are threatened are routinely denied asylum by ICE.

I asked the question there, I will ask it again in these paragraphs: ”What would happen to the drug cartels if we read in the morning paper that cannabis had been legalized or decriminalized in the United States?” The history of prohibition and repeal suggests it would deal a major body blow to the Mexican cartels and thus eliminate much of the suffering and violence associated with the drug trade between our countries.

Later in the day we visited the border fence between New Mexico and Mexico. When we got out of the van and approached the fence, children from the other side began flocking toward us. While I do not speak Spanish, I could understand that they were asking for “una dollare.”

What would Jesus do? I wondered if he recognizes that dividing wall of partition between us. I didn’t wonder long. My faith tells me emphatically that he does not!

That evening we dined sumptuously (and expensively) at a restaurant near the wall, bringing into stark contrast our abundance with the poverty of the children on the other side.

What would Jesus do?

Mr. Obama, tear down that wall!

Charles Kiker

October, 2009

Charles Kiker is a Baptist minister living in retirement in Tulia, Texas.  As charter members of Friends of Justice, Charles and Patricia Kiker were instrumental in the fight for justice in their home town.

Last night I heard Dr. Steve Langford, my Methodist pastor, talk about the God who answered Job “out of the whirlwind.”  Just when I thought I was too damn educated to learn anything from a preacher I ran into Langford.  This guy changes my thinking every time I listen to him–something I didn’t think was possible.

As I waited for the Bible Study to begin I was thinking about Scott Henson’s recent blog post on the Cameron Todd Willingham case.  Willingham’s ex-wife spent years telling reporters that Todd was an abusive husband, but no murderer.  But recently Stacy Kuykendall has been saying that her ex-husband confessed to the vile deed on the verge of his execution.  Henson (like the New Yorker’s David Grann)  thought this change of story was more than a little suspicious.

Then the Bible study began.  Pastor Steve had spent several weeks dissecting the tangled words of Job and his pious companions–tonight it was God’s turn to speak “out of the whirlwind”. 

“Who is this,” God asks, “who darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

Then the Creator takes Job on a whirlwind tour of creation.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its measurements–surely you know!”  God asks Job about the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; about the wind and the waves; about the great Behemoth and the fearsome Leviathan. 

Pastor Langform told us that “the sea” is often used as a symbol for chaos in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Horrifying beasts like the Behemoth (described as an alligator in Job) and Leviathan (described as a crocodile) were also mythological symbols of death and destruction.  Yet all are creatures of God.

This means that evil, death and chaos are God’s creatures.  God let them loose in the world and set strict bounds beyond which they dare not roam.  We don’t know why God created the forces of chaos and the Book of Job, by design, doesn’t shed much light on the subject.  That’s the whole point.  If we could understand God’s life and death struggle with chaos we would be God. 

“What if you were in my position?” Yahweh asks Job.  “Do you think you could handle it?  Are you are up for a wrestling match with death and hell?”

Job thinks about it, bows his head, and succumbs.  “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,” he says, “but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

All of which took me back to Scott Henson and Todd Cameron Willingham.  Scott hasn’t been arguing that the Corsicana native is innocent.  Perhaps Willingham did  intentionally set fire to the house in which his darling babies slept.  All Henson is saying (and all any of us can say) is that the folks with the best scientific tools don’t believe that, given the available evidence, a strong case can be made for arson. 

Rick Perry, the immaculately groomed governor of Texas, assures the electorate that Willingham is a guilty ‘monster’ (Leviathan?) the conclusions of pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals notwithstanding. 

But if Perry is so confident that Texas executed a guilty man why is he so intent on blocking an objective investigation?  And why did he eliminate several members of the commission tasked with evaluating the work of the state’s forensic experts?  Does the governor protest overmuch?

No one is deriding the good men and women who listened to all the expert and eye-witness testimony in the Willingham case and made their decision.  The issues were exceedingly complex.  So much depended on the inner workings of the defendant’s mind.  Was this guy a dysfunctional slob with a gift for poetry or was he every bit the Behemoth Mr. Perry believes him to be?

The comment section at the end of Henson’s post was bristling with indignation.  Some said Scott had it dead right; others decried the blogger’s obdurate refusal to admit a self-evident truth.  Some thought Willingham was guilty as hell; others were convinced the state of Texas executed an innocent man.

Might it be that the facts of the Willingham case are too much for mortals.  We are too prone to error, fancy and blind prejudice to evaluate the guilt or innocence of Todd Willingham or hundreds of other people who have been dragged before the bar of justice in recent years.

I’m not saying that all murder cases are too complex for a human jury, or even that most of them are.  But the recent parade of DNA exonerations must give us pause.  How could well-intentioned juries have been so thoroughly bamboozled?  Why have so many prosecutors pressed ahead with bogus cases and withheld exculpatory material from defense counsel?  And why have so many eyewitnesses testified so convincingly of things that never were?  What were these people thinking? 

Were they thinking at all? 

Yes and no.  Juries, judges, police officers and prosecutors are rational creatures . . . so far as human rationality goes.  But sometimes it doesn’t go very far.  David Brooks, the staid NYT columnist, wrote an interesting piece last week on recent advances in the field of neuroscience.  Here are his cursory conclusions:

The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.

The still-misty world of neuroscience should give us a renewed respect for the presumption of innocence.  The mere fact that a defendant has been arrested, indicted and formally charged should not be equated with guilt.  Yet how many jurors will vote “not guilty” just because the facts are fuzzy?  Not many.  What role does prejudice play in the courtroom?  What if we find that white and black jurors view the same facts in an entirely different light?  How often is sweet reason mugged by fear and anger?

And we haven’t even talked about blind ignorance.

Who are we who darken counsel with words without understanding?  When the criminal justice system casts mere mortals (jurors, prosecutors, judges) in the role of God, we have cause for worry.  Sure, somebody has to referee the game of life and death.  But when a frail human soul hangs in the balance, we must always err on the side of mercy.  Every few years we are called down to the courthouse to wrestle with chaos, death and hell.   Sometimes we’re just not up for the challenge.

A few days ago, the Dallas Morning News asked a number of priminent religious leaders from Texas to assess the morality of the death penalty.  Public discussion of criminal justice issues is rarely inspired by academic studies or cold statistics; discussion is prompted by specific stories.  In the last few weeks, especially in Texas, the newspapers have been filled with Cameron Todd Willingham stories crammed with quotations from both sides of the debate.  It’s a messy process, but we work things through in America one story at a time. 

Since the religious leaders selected for the DMN story were mostly selected from moderate-to-liberal “Mainline” denominations it comes as no surprise that most of them thought the death penalty was immoral.  But my eye was drawn to the only letter that eschewed complex theological arguments in favor of storytelling.  Cynthia Rigby (no relation to Eleanor), Professor of Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, began her resp0nse with a story about her preacher daddy who escorted condemned prisoners (some of whom he believed to be innocent) to their rendezvous with the Oklahoma hangman. 

Her second story hearkened back to strange story of Karla Faye Tucker, the drug-addled murderer whose broken life was redeemed by the grace of God.  Televangelist Pat Robertson thought Karla Faye’s contrition ought to buy her a pass from death row, but then-governor George W. Bush made cruel jokes about Karla Faye before giving the nod to the executioner.  Dr. Rigby’s story unfolds against that backdrop.

My second “scene” is from 11 years ago, shortly before the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. You might remember that the late ’90s was the time when the “WWJD?” (“What Would Jesus Do?”) movement was in full swing. In a class I was teaching, I asked my mainly-mainliner seminary students if they saw any value to “WWJD?,” and if they thought we should do what Jesus would do, if we were pretty clear on exactly what that was. Every student in the class (20+, as I recall) answered, emphatically, “yes!!”

Since the biggest issue in the news that week was that Tucker was asking for a stay of execution, I spontaneously asked: “Would JESUS execute Karla Faye Tucker?” “No!” all the students answered. Feeling like I was on a roll, I then asked, “Well, then: should WE execute Karla Faye Tucker?”

Silence in response to a question that I thought was a no-brainer, in light of the conversation. Suddenly, the mood of the class shifted. My students acted indignant; as though they had been betrayed. A senior student shot his hand in the air, declaring that he thought it would be “presumptuous for us to assume we could do what Jesus should do.” “We need a new question,” he said: “WWJWUTD?” “What would Jesus want us to do?” he asked, looking around at his classmates. And then he answered: “Jesus would want us to leave forgiveness to him, and to EXECUTE Karla Faye Tucker.”

We took another vote, and all but 2 of my students agreed with him.

Kinda makes your blood run cold, don’t it.

Landis Barrow went to prison back in 2000 on the twisted word of undercover agent Tom Coleman.  (In the mugshots to the left, Landis is #2; see if you can pick out his twin brother, Mandis.)  Now the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has granted Mr. Barrow a re-do of the revocation hearing that put him in prison.  Landis and his twin brother Mandis were implicated in an Amarillo robbery in 1996 and given ten-year probated sentences.  Tom Coleman claimed to have purchased drugs from “the twins” in 1998 but the state had a problem: since no one, even their mother, could tell the twins apart, how could Coleman know which twin handed him the dope?

There were other problems.  Eliga “Man” Kelly was with Coleman at the time of the alleged sale and Kelly wasn’t backing up Coleman’s story.  “Mandis asked me why was I still riding around with that police,” Kelly said in a signed affidavit. Coleman walked up “and asked me were those the twins? I told him yes and he asked Mandis where could he get some smoke? Mandis told him that he didn’t sell dope and he didn’t know where to get any and furthermore don’t ever approach him about any dope. Then the twins drove off very mad.”

The simple solution was to drop the drug charges and use Coleman’s allegations to revoke the Twins’ probation. 

So why are you just hearing about Landis and Mandis Barrow now? 

I wrote an article about the Twins for the Texas Observer  and the Amarillo Globe-News in 2004 , but that’s the only press they ever received.  When Governor Rick Perry pardoned 35 of Coleman’s victims a few months later, the “Tulia 46″ were presented to the world as the innocent victims of a racist plot.  No one could go to bat for Landis and Mandis without addressing that inconvenient theft charge from 1996.  Attorneys associated with the Tulia defendants felt they couldn’t risk the negative publicity, so the Twins were left to languish in prison.

Here’s the real irony: Landis and Mandis received their share of a $6 million legal settlement but could only spend their money on tooth paste and chocolate bars in the prison commissary.

Here’s what I had to say five years ago:

[Judge] Emerson nodded patiently as officer Coleman entangled himself in a bizarre web of deception. Coleman said he bought drugs from Mandis Barrow on June 23, then remembered it never happened. Coleman testified he had no idea which of the Barrow twins sold him the dope on September 3, then remembered that Eliga Kelly had cleared up his identification problem. Coleman said he had been suspended from active duty in May of 1998, then remembered that the suspension didn’t go into effect until August. Finally, the Texas Law Officer of the Year alleged a criminal conspiracy hatched by a vindictive sheriff. Judge Don Emerson must have been convinced by Coleman’s grotesque performance because he ruled for the state and sentenced Mandis Barrow to 20 years in prison.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the judge’s decision. The June 23 indictment had obviously been “mistakenly filed” but “an honest mistake does not rise to the level of perjury,” the court declared. Coleman may not have been able to distinguish Landis from Mandis, but it was conceivable that Eliga Kelly “had identified which twin passed the controlled substance to Coleman.” Finally, the Appeals Court argued, if Judge Emerson was convinced by Coleman’s testimony, no perjury had been committed by definition.

Now, almost five years after Tom Coleman was found guilty of aggravated perjury, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided to change its mind.

I have stayed in touch with the Twins over the years.  They sent me a card every Father’s day and kept me apprised of their ongoing legal battle.  Mandis called me  when he was released from prison a few months ago.  Yesterday, I received the good news from Landis. 

Hopefully, we haven’t heard the end of this story.

Doug Evans, the prosecutor who will put Curtis Flowers on trial for a record sixth time in June of 2010, has close links to an organization that denounces the civil rights movement as a communist conspiracy and wishes it could reinstitute Jim Crow segregation. Don’t believe me? Read on.

The year was 1992. The place was the meeting room of the Regency Inn in Greenwood, Mississippi. The keynote speaker was Robert “Tut” Patterson, father of America’s White Citizens’ Council movement and a featured columnist with “The Informer”, a publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Patterson’s topic was the “historical background of the ‘civil rights’ movement.” Other speakers at the Council of Conservative Citizens seminar included District Attorney Doug Evans (D) of Grenada.

The Greenwood meeting wasn’t considered controversial. It was covered on the local ABC affiliate and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Greenwood Commonwealth provided coverage and, if the write-up in the Informer is anything to go by, “Reports were carried by the news media across the South.”

And why not: the keynote speakers for the gala banquet later that evening were Kirk Fordice, the newly elected Mississippi Governor, and Senator Trent Lott. “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy,” Lott told the gathering.

Ten years later, Senator Lott would be forced to resign his position as Senate leader after remarks he made at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. Lott reminded the gathering that Thurmond had run for president as a segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948 and recalled that Mississippi voters had supported his candidacy ”If the rest of the country had followed our lead,” Lott told the gathering, ”we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”

Lott insisted that he didn’t mean to endorse the politics of segregation, but it was difficult to understand what else he might have had in mind.

But that was 2002 and Doug Evans’ speech in Greenwood took place a decade earlier, just a few years after the Council of Conservative Citizens rose from the ashes of the old Citizens’ Councils. In 1991 the Citizen Informer reported that “Thirty of the thirty-nine candidates for state and district offices” had addressed the Council of Conservative Citizen’s Black Hawk Rally. You can’t get more mainstream than that?

A 1991 edition of the Informer proudly reported that Doug Evans, then a Justice Court Judge running for District Attorney, gave the keynote address at the Council of Conservative Citizen’s Webster County meeting. The CCC might have looked like a tawdry pack of racists to most Americans but to an insider like Doug Evans it just looked like normal.

When Mississippi politicians like Trent Lott, State Senator Lydia Chassaniol (R-Winona), State Representative Bobby Howell (R-Kilmichael) or District Attorney Doug Evans (D-Grenada) are asked about their cozy relationship with the racist CCC they give a standard response: “Everybody was doing it and, besides, I didn’t know I was addressing a racist organization.”

Why does it matter anyway? Who on earth is this Doug Evans character I keep mentioning and why should you care who he talked to back in the day?

Doug Evans is the prosecutor who has made five (5) failed attempts to sentence a young gospel singer named Curtis Flowers to death for murdering four people in a Winona, Mississippi furniture store in 1996. This is the case that has divided Winona along racial lines. The jury in trial number four (the only jury with a substantial number of black residents) split 7-5: all seven white jurors voting guilty and all five black jurors voting for acquittal. Trial number three ended in a unanimous guilty verdict after Doug Evans moved heaven and earth to produce an all-white jury in a county that is half black. (The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that Evans’ behavior in the jury selection process demonstrated clear racial bias.)

Recently, Doug Evans attempted to prosecute James Bibbs, a black juror who refused to find Curtis Flowers guilty. Judge Joey Loper accused Bibbs of lying to get on the jury. Last week the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office looked at the facts and dropped the charges.

What would happen if the Curtis Flowers case was dumped in the AG’s lap? What would happen if a fresh set of investigators went back to square one and re-interviewed all the witnesses and re-evaluated all the physical evidence? Would they proceed to a sixth trial, or would they drop the charges against Flowers for the same reason they refused to proceed against Bibbs?

It’s hard to say, but I think we need to find out. A man as racially biased as Doug Evans shouldn’t be in charge of a racially sensitive murder prosecution.

Moreover, a racially biased state senator and house representative shouldn’t be sponsoring legislation designed to get the racially biased Mr. Evans another all-white jury.

Return with me to the CCC event in 1992, four years before the tragic events in Winona. Doug Evans is sitting at the table of honor listening to Robert “Tut” Patterson place the “civil rights” movement in historical context. What did the founder of the White Citizens’ Councils have to say?

Fortunately, we don’t have to guess. In 2006, the CCC reprinted Patterson’s last column, written just a few months previously, in which, once again, he placed the civil rights movement in historical context. We might expect that the veteran segregationist, an old man weeks away from death, had little new to say on the subject and that his speech in 1992 closely resembled the column from 2006.

Patterson (pictured to the left in his prime) began his final column with a harrangue against the “liberal reporters” who covered the Emmett Till trial in 1955. Did they even once report that Louis Till, Emmett’s father, was executed by the US military following the second world war? According to Patterson, the media should have realized that the children of flawed parents can be murdered indiscriminately.

I suspect he made a similar case in 1992, with Doug Evans nodding his agreement.

Next, Patterson attacked George W. Bush for advocating the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act–at the Rosa Parks memorial, no less. Rosa, as every Southern conservative knows, was a communist agitator. According to Bob Patterson, the Voting Rights Act has carried nothing but woe and pestilence in its wake. “The liberal media help to keep the blacks stirred so they will vote, usually Democrat, on election day by rehashing events that may have happened fifty years ago. How many times has Mississippi Burning been shown on TV?”

Patterson didn’t mention that he was one of Mississippi’s fanatical never-in-a-thousand-years boys who engineered events like the killing in Neshoba County or the brutal beating of Annell Ponder and Fannie Lou Hamer in Winona. Sheriff Earl Wayne Patridge may have orchestrated the violence in Winona, but the likes of Robert Patterson and Senator James Eastland shaped the context. The Citizens’ Councils preferred to starve out the opposition, but the rope, shotgun and blackjack were always kept in the trunk just in case.

Patterson’s next target was ”Black Monday” and the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. “These civil rights bills have forced white people to flee from their neighborhoods all over our nation,” Patterson lamented. ”The only defense against forced integration and government-controlled schools in the North, West and South is white flight and private schools.”

This last comment is fitting considering that the CCC was created to raise money for all-white segregation academies.

Finally, lest anyone question his commitment to the fundamental principles of democracy, Patterson provided a brief disclaimer. ”We all expect healthy dissent in our form of government,” he said, ”and there must always be a loyal opposition. We should expect, however, a reliable impartial news media that will give both sides of all issues so that the voters can vote intelligently.”

Did Patterson believe in “healthy dissent” in 1954 when he formed the Citizens’ Council, or in 1964 when he opposed the Civil Rights Act, or in 1965 when he used all means necessary to keep black people from voting in Mississippi? Hardly. Those who disagreed with the Jim Crow regime, white or black, were systematically persecuted, beaten or deprived of an occupation. If that didn’t work they were beaten or disappeared.

Strangely, men like Patterson and Eastland remained active in mainstream politics when the civil rights era ended. Nobody held them accountable for their actions back in the day. For a brief period between 1998 and 2002 southerners with links to the Council of Conservative Citizens were anathema. Then old patterns reasserted themselves. A rehabilitated Trent Lott had risen to the position of Republican Senate whip by the time he retired in 2006.

Here’s the problem: You couldn’t condemn Lott and company without taking on a wide swath of mainstream southern culture. You can’t critique Doug Evans for the same reason.

We can assume that in 1992 Robert Patterson gave the folks in the Greenwood Regency Inn his standard anti-civil rights speech and that an appreciative audience rose in a loud and lusty ovation.

Did Doug Evans, the newly minted prosecutor from Grenada, stomp out of the room in angry protest? Was he sitting on his hands while others rose to applaud?

Not at all. The prosecutor stood and clapped along with everyone else as he patiently waited his turn at the microphone. Civil rights bashing was part of the political culture the District Attorney was raised in. It was the only style of politics he knew. It is the only style of politics he knows. The Council of Conservative Citizens preaches a gospel of civil rights resentment. In this culture, “conservative” is code language for “white”.

You have to pity a guy like Doug Evans–what are the chances that a boy raised in a civil rights hating culture could emerge with a stout commitment to equal justice? But when we see the man prosecuting an evidence-free case against a black defendant we have the responsiblity to raise questions. I don’t wish to be disagreeable, but a man’s life is on the line here.

In 1992, the Citizens Informer billed itself as “The Voice of the No Longer Silent Majority”. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it still is. Which may explain why Lydia Chassaniol’s recent address to the annual conference of the CCC drew a collective yawn from the Mississippi press. And this may explain why everyone assumes that the five black jurors who voted to acquit Curtis Flowers in trial #4 were just trying to protect one of their own.

Could it be that black jurors, because they didn’t grow up under the spell of men like Eastland and Patterson, are in a better position to see through a desperately weak case?

Has anyone in the Mississippi media stopped to examine the “evidence” Evans has scraped together in the Flowers case? It appears not. Doug Evans, the duly elected protector of the Peace and Dignity of Mississippi, grew up on a steady diet of black-bashing like the following:

Nearly a third of all black men in their twenties have criminal records and 8% of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars. Although blacks are only 13 percent of our overall population in the U.S. they account for more than half of all new HIV infections. Black women account for an astonishing 72% of all new cases among women. Over two thirds of all black children are born out of wedlock.

That’s a straight quote from Bob Patterson’s final column in the Informer. It’s the same garbage you can read today on the CCC’s website. Patterson didn’t want his lilly white children going to school with a bunch of black thugs and welfare queens.

When Doug Evans sees Curtis Flowers in the courtroom he doesn’t see a gospel singer, he sees a cold-hearted super predator–the kind of guy Bob Patterson (and a thousand speakers of the same ilk) warned him about. Nothing could be more natural than for a guy like that to blow away four innocent people in cold blood. That’s just the way those people are.I may have the Honorable Doug Evans all wrong. For all I know he may be be a card carrying member of the liberal ACLU. If I have misread the man I ask his friends to set me straight. Show me the evidence and I will issue a sincere apology. But from where I sit, Fannie Lou Hamer and Curtis Flowers have more in common than a love for gospel music.

I have been following a surprising development that fills me with hope and, I confess, a measure of trepidation.  Next year, Mississippi will become the first state in the nation to mandate the teaching of the civil rights movements in its public schools.  This story in the Christian Science Monitor  focuses on the town of McComb, one of a handful of communities selected for participation in a pilot program. 

If the McComb experience is anything to go by Mississippi’s civil rights curriculum could be front page news when it is introduced state-wide next fall.  White Mississippians don’t like being regarded as racists–an identity they have been fighting since Reconstruction.   Mainstream America has been conditioned to think of the civil rights movement as the triumph of good over evil.  White Mississippians have a different take.  They have no problem with black people celebrating the fact that they can now vote and eat at the restaurant of their choice, so long as they can do it without dwelling on the past. 

Unfortunately, you can’t teach children about the civil rights movement without making white people look really, really bad.  We don’t like looking bad.  We’re not used to it.   We’ve spent half a century changing the subject when the conversation gets awkward and we’re very good at it.

The white reaction to the new civil rights curriculum in McComb, MS hasn’t always been positive:

“They just don’t talk about it,” says Jacquelyn Martin, a black civil rights organizer. “People don’t understand that part of the healing begins when you talk about it, so they just keep it to themselves.”

Making it a subject in school is “a pretty drastic change,” says state curriculum specialist Chauncey Spears. “But how can you have a strong education program when you have high-achieving grads who have such little understanding of their own history?”

Mississippi Senate Bill 2718, passed in 2006, mandates all kindergartners to 12th-graders to be exposed to civil rights education. In the younger grades, students will read books such as “I Love My Hair!” as a way to discuss concepts like racial differences in skin complexion and hair texture. Later grades will delve more deeply into how ordinary citizens shaped the civil rights movement and the long-term effects those changes had upon the nation.

This section is downright pignant:

Some days there are tears. For Sarah Rowley, 17, the class has been a watershed. Initially she saw it as “an easy grade,” but quickly realized she was wrong. Much of the class centers on gathering oral narratives from residents who grew up in a radically different McComb, a place where inequality and violence was a part of life. In the middle of one interview at the home of Lillie Mae Cartstarphen, Sarah asked an innocent question about the role of law enforcement during that time.

Sarah’s grandfather had been a McComb policeman and, later, chief of police during the 1960s. In her family’s eyes, he was a hero. But, says Sarah, her voice trembling as she recounts the answer: “[Ms. Cartstarphen] said you couldn’t trust policemen, that they were just as involved as the KKK. Even now, it makes me want to cry. I thought, ‘I have to regain my composure. I can’t let this interfere with what I’m here to do.’ But I felt like I was in a tug of war. Here is this woman telling me this, but my family … they’re such good people. What do I do?”

She talked to Malone and to her father. She prayed. Eventually, Sarah says, she made peace with the legacy of a man struggling to keep his job, feed his family, and survive in a troubled era. She’s certain he’d make different choices if he were alive today.

It’s more difficult to talk about things with her boyfriend, who attends Parklane Academy, which is 99 percent white. When Sarah reads books like “The Mississippi Trials, 1955″ she’s overwhelmed by sadness. But he doesn’t want to hear about it, she says. “He thinks it’s over with and in the past. He gets up and walks out…. He’s growing up in this mind-set that’s so sheltered. It breaks my heart.”

Malone’s emphasis on seeing all perspectives makes it easier for Sarah to cope. “I have to remember that if I was in his shoes, I’d be the same way,” Sarah says. “In the South, it’s a very, very touchy subject.”

Congratulations to the Mississippi Legislature for passing this legislation; lets hope most of the civil rights resenters in the Magnolia State are attending Segregation Academies (now referred to, in many cases, as “Christian Schools”).  In that case, they have nothing to fear.  What they don’t know can’t hurt them.