Reason Magazine - Topics > Civil Rights

Property Rights are Civil Rights

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:08:00 EDT

reason contributors David Beito and Ilya Somin had a great op-ed in last Sunday's Kansas City Star explaining why eminent domain abuse should matter to civil rights activists:

Few policies have done more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World War II.

The fact is that eminent-domain abuse is a crucial constitutional rights issue.

Whole thing here.

Eminent Domain As a Civil Rights Issue

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:30:00 EDT

An event in Alabama tomorrow that looks like it'll be worth watching:

Few policies have done more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World War II....

On Tuesday, the Alabama Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public forum at Birmingham's historic Sixteenth Street Baptist church to address ongoing property seizures in the state. The church was not only a center of early civil rights action, but also, tragically, where four schoolgirls lost their lives in a bombing in 1963.

Whole article here. Event details here.

Big Love and Big Government

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:46:00 EDT

Lots of people in the comments have asked for a thread on the Texas polygamy case.

Here you are.

I haven't had the time to thoroughly read up on the case, so I don't yet have an opinion of the propriety of the police action. If Scott Henson's take is correct, I guess my opinion would be that given what we now know, the tactics seem excessive, the justification for the raid iffy at best, and the cult in question is unquestionably icky.

Ickiness alone isn't illegal, of course. And if Texas law says parents can marry their 15-year-old daughters off to 60-year-old men, perhaps we should talk about the wisdom of that law, not arrest the people who still manage to stay within it, repugnant as they may be.

I have seen other reports in which police do claim to have found evidence of girls on the compound being pregnant while as young as 13. So I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all shakes out.

In the meantime, here's something to mull over: Should we allow parents to give consent for a child under 18 to marry, or to have sexual relations? If 18 is that state's age of consent, I think I'd be inclined to argue that we shouldn't.

But it's an interesting question.

You Wait Right Here, I'll Go Get Warren

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Ilya Somin joins the ranks of Harding revisionists:

In Sunday's New York Times, Yale historian Beverly Gage has an interesting article suggesting that Harding may have been the first "black" president in the sense that it is possible that he had a remote black ancestor. Unfortunately, Gage's article about Harding and race relations completely ignores the fact that Harding made a well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out at the time, Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even worse). Indeed, no president went as far as Harding in advocating equal rights for southern blacks for several decades thereafter. Harding also lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the first post-Reconstruction president to do so (the bill passed the House, but died in the Senate due to the threat of Democratic filibusters). As DuBois pointed out in the linked article, Harding was not wholly free of the racism common among whites at the time. But he was a lot better than the vast majority of his contemporaries.

Nor were these Harding's only positive aspects. As Gene Healy discusses in his interesting recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, Harding is also notable for reversing the severe violations of civil and economic liberties that had proliferated under his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious "Palmer Raids"), abolition of wage and price controls, and the reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property.

I think the most palatable presidents of the 20th century were Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and I believe Wilson was the worst chief executive in U.S. history. So I'll nod in general agreement, though I think Somin understates Du Bois' criticisms of Harding.

An aside: Harding's alleged black ancestry is a plot point in one of my favorite novels, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.

Another aside: In the comment thread beneath Somin's post, some readers are talking up the merits of James K. Polk. Me, I don't believe that history can be reduced to simple "turning points," but if I did, I'd say the day everything went to hell came when that landgrabbing bastard beat Van Buren at the 1844 Democratic convention.

Oprah, Marilyn, Break Through Public-School Industrial Complex

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:09:00 EDT

This escaped my attention at the time, but through the L.A. Times' Tim Cavanaugh-tastic Opinion L.A. blog I see that USA Today recently asked high schoolers across these 50 United States to name the "most famous" non-president Americans since the time of the original illegal immigrant, and here's what they came up with:

1. Martin Luther King
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhardt
7. Oprah Winfrey
8. Marilyn Monroe
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein

Sounds like the exact list I would have made in 5th grade, if you subbed out Parks/Oprah/Marilyn with maybe Pete Rose, Farrah Fawcett and Peter Frampton. Harriet Tubman in particular was someone I idolized at age 9 (due to Runaway Slave being both required reading and totally awesome ... what 9-year-old wouldn't dig an Underground Railroad?), and then never heard about again in the three decades since. Ditto for Susan B. Anthony, minus actually knowing anything about her in the first place.

Though the list probably says far more about the public school system than anything else, it was largely spun as what survey-leader Sam Wineburg of Stanford called "a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story." My favorite part of the USA Today explainer:

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.
Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?
She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says.

Who would you have included at 17?

Training Mississippi's Kids

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:05:00 EST

The State of Mississippi is shutting down a juvenile prison called the Columbia Training School. Here are a few snapshots of life at Columbia, as compiled by investigators from the Southern Poverty Law Center [PDF]:

Youth reported that they had either observed or experienced having their arms and legs shackled to poles in public places. For instance, one young girl reported that her arms and legs were handcuffed and shackled around a utility pole because she was non-compliant during military exercises. The rest of the unit was forced to perform military drills around her. The youth was shackled for at least three hours, released for lunch, and briefly shackled again....Another girl reported that two weeks prior to our visit, she was shackled to a pole for talking in the cafeteria. Still another girl reported that she was shackled to a pole for approximately four hours because she did not say, "Yes, sir," on command....

Girls in the SIU at Columbia are punished for acting out or for being suicidal by being placed in a cell called the "dark room." The "dark room" is a locked, windowless isolation cell with lighting controlled by staff. When the lights are turned out, as the girls reported they are when the room is in use, the room is completely dark. The room is stripped of everything but a drain in the floor which serves as a toilet. Most girls are stripped naked when placed in the dark room....

In the girls' SIU at Columbia, staff reportedly have hit, choked, and slapped girls. For instance, girls reported that a ten-year-old girl was slapped by a male security guard. A young boy in the boys' SIU reported that before being taken to the SIU, security slapped him twice in the face and placed his neck in a sleeper hold....At Columbia, boys in the SIU reported that staff sprayed [pepper spray] under their locked cell doors and that staff sprayed boys in the face while they were hog-tied. Boys also told us that staff sprayed into the air while boys were doing exercises for punishment in the SIU. Incident reports make clear that suicidal youth are sprayed for their suicidal gestures and behaviors and that youth locked in isolation rooms who bang on the door of their cell are sprayed. A log entry for the SIU in May 2002 indicates that a suicidal girl was sprayed because she refused to remove her clothes before being placed in the dark room.

And who are these detainees?

The majority...are nonviolent offenders. For example, 75 percent of the girls at Columbia are committed for status offenses, probation violations, or contempt of court.

I should add that while I'm generally skeptical about the SPLC, for reasons laid out by Ken Silverstein in Harper's eight years ago, the group isn't alone here: The "training school" has been pilloried in the media and was targeted (obviously) by investigators elsewhere in the government. If anything, I'm happy to see the SPLC attack an actual threat to people's civil rights, as opposed to raising a panic about the bogeyman of the "extreme right." It wasn't a handful of doofuses in sheets who abused those kids at Columbia. It was prison staffers paid by Mississippi taxpayers.

Correction: The SPLC played an important role in closing the institution, but it did not, as I carelessly stated, write the report I quoted. The investigators who compiled it were employed by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Expecting Too Much

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:50:00 EST

The Obama-friendly conservative Dan Riehl writes:

electing the first black president would ultimately do more to pry away black and other minority voters from a decadent American liberalism, than would anything else....One could no longer make the argument that America is racist, or unfair. Not when a black man has risen to the highest office in the land.

I've heard this argument from many people -- sometimes even from libertarians, who you wouldn't expect to be so government-centric. While I'm not sure what it means to say that America (all of it? some of it?) "is" racist, the presence of a black man in the Oval Office would hardly mean that no American blacks face institutional barriers, any more than the presence of black officers on a police force means that blacks don't face racially driven police harrassment. Yes, a President Obama would be a symbol of progress in race relations. But it is an open question whether he would reverse the policies that helped produce the racial isolation of working-class blacks, the disproportionate number of blacks in prison, or the sorry state of the urban schools that so many blacks attend. It is even conceivable -- not necessarily likely, but conceivable -- that Obama, like many black mayors, would actually make life worse for African Americans.

For the record, I think Obama is the most palatable (or the least unpalatable) of the four frontrunners, mostly because of his stance on Iraq. I do not believe his election would usher in a new age where racism and unfairness have been banished, and where whites can confidently pat themselves on the back without worrying that some black man will interrupt with a complaint.

In Honor of MLK Day

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 07:00:00 EST

From a sermon delivered by Martin Luther King on April 30, 1967:

My third reason...grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years--especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action; for they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent.

Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they've applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, "We can't do it this way." They applauded us in the sit-in movement--we nonviolently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, "Be nonviolent toward Bull Connor"; when I was saying, "Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark." There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, "Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark," but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children."

Full text here. King had more than one worthy dream.

Father Obama and the Warrior Princess

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:55:00 EST

As the Clinton-Obama race tightens, it's a good time to dredge up this year-old column by Ronald Brownstein:

Obama's early support is following a pattern familiar from the campaigns of other brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. Like those predecessors, Obama is running strong with well-educated voters but demonstrating much less support among those without college degrees....

Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.

It's not much of an oversimplification to say that the blue-collar Democrats tend to see elections as an arena for defending their interests, and the upscale voters see them as an opportunity to affirm their values.

It's an interesting model. Obama does seem to fit that McCarthy/Hart/Bradley line of descent, though he can counteract that somewhat by pointing to his time as a community organizer. When I first read Brownstein's column last year, I had trouble picturing Hillary Clinton as a blue-collar hero, but exit polls from New Hampshire show her beating Obama (and Edwards) among union members and people without college degrees, while Obama took a (narrower) lead among college graduates. We'll see if that pattern holds in the primaries to come. (Obama recently picked up some major union endorsements in Nevada, which should eat into Clinton's working-class support in that state.)

More from Brownstein:

In modern times, the Democratic presidential race has usually pitted a warrior against a priest.

Warrior candidates stress their ability to deliver on kitchen table concerns and revel in political combat. They tout their experience and flout their scars. Their greatest strength is usually persistence, not eloquence; they don't so much inspire as reassure. Think of Harry Truman in 1948, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and, in a somewhat more diluted fashion, Walter Mondale in 1984 and John Kerry in 2004.

The priests, whose lineage runs back through McCarthy to Adlai Stevenson, present a very different face. They write books and sometimes verse. They observe the campaign's hurly-burly through a filter of cool, witty detachment. Their campaigns become crusades, fueled as much by inchoate longing for a "new politics" as tangible demands for new policies.

That pattern doesn't look good for Obama, given that the only priest on Brownstein's list who actually won the nomination was Stevenson, and he was nominated before the modern primary system took hold. (I suppose George McGovern qualifies as a priest as well. I'm not sure how Brownstein would classify Jimmy Carter.) Then again, as Brownstein notes, Obama's support among blacks -- much greater now than when the article originally appeared -- changes the dynamics of the campaign. In the past, black voters have tended to reject the upscale priests.

Speaking of blacks, here's Brownstein's conclusion:

Since Obama entered the campaign, the question he's faced most often is whether he is "black enough" to win votes from African Americans. But the more relevant issue may be whether Obama is "blue enough" to increase his support among blue-collar whites.

Now that Obama is polling well among African Americans, people don't talk as much about whether he's "really" black. Am I the only person who thinks that issue always had more to do with his ability to attract white votes than black votes? The nuances in Obama's ethnic identity might put off some black Democrats, but I suspect they also make him seem less threatening to those whites who dislike the idea of racism but still carry prejudices.

This too fits a historical pattern. It's telling that the only other potential black president to receive cross-ideological white support -- Colin Powell -- comes from Afro-Carribean stock rather than a conventional African-American background. For that matter, before Jesse Jackson spent the '80s as the candidate of the black (and white) left, it was a left-wing Afro-Carribean, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, who made the first serious black bid for a major party's presidential nomination.

Obama is not merely half-white: His black father came from Africa, not the U.S., and Obama himself was partly raised abroad. In other words, he is not primarily a product of black American culture. I don't think that makes him less black, but it probably persuades many whites that he's more "safe." Except, of course, among those voters who believe he's secretly a Muslim. If it's not one anxiety, it's another.

D.C. Government Protects "Brutalism" Over Religion

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:43:00 EST

One of reason's mighty contributing editors, Charles Paul Freund, is over at the American Spectator today, with an interesting story on the eternally shifting nature of what government force will preserve--so long, of course, as those preservers are making sure that the desires or needs of those who own or use the building don't matter.

It's a tale of efforts to preserve a "brutalist" (the actual term for the style) Christian Science church in D.C. An excerpt:

If at first you don't at first recognize the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, as a church at all, don't be embarrassed; most people probably mistake it for a fortress intended to protect the president's house against a tank assault. It's a largely windowless octagonal tower made of raw, weathered concrete, and it's surrounded by a sterile "plaza" that seems to have been emptied to keep the line of fire clear. The site inspires few people with a sense of spirituality.

That includes its own congregation, which has always disliked the building and dearly wants to be rid of its ugliness and its crushing costs, but which has been prevented from replacing the structure by Washington's local preservation authorities.

Not that the church is either old or historic. It was designed in 1971....the project misfired. It's uninviting to the community not only because it has the feel of a bunker, but because its front door is, by design, hidden. The cold plaza is generally avoided by the church's neighbors.

The sanctuary seats 400, though the active congregation has shrunk to some 50 worshippers. The building's concrete exterior is already deteriorating, and the maintenance costs are overwhelming. Money that would be better spent on the church's mission, members say, is eaten up by the building itself.

Historical irony: it's exactly the sort of building that the historical preservationists of the early '70s fought against in order to preserve the older stuff it was displacing.

Freund's extensive reason archives.

Not Our Fault

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:21:00 EST

Nevada's Public Safety Commission has set up a website that includes searchable maps of where the state's sex offenders live. The city of Las Vegas then decided to set up its own site, with a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The problem is that both websites populate their databases with information from sex offenders themselves, people who, as you might imagine, aren't terribly vigilant about keeping their addresses up to date with state authorities. This has led to neighbors harassing non-sex offenders who happened to have moved into residences formerly occupied by sex offenders.

The city says it isn't to blame because . . . it includes a disclaimer on the website stating it shouldn't be used to harass or intimidate sex offenders. Pitchfork-toting crowds, city police say, should be aware of the fact that sex offenders supply the state with it's information, and that they 100 percent accurate. Sounds . . . dubious.

When 71-year-old Harry Berlin, a non-sex offender who's been mistakenly harassed and threatened by neighbors, asked city officials to correct their records they told him he had to ask the people who run the state database. When he went to the state, they told him to go back to the city. So now he's suing. In the meantime, his neighbors will continue to periodically gather outside his door to taunt him.

Cop Talk

eve_tushnet@yahoo.com (Eve Tushnet) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:01:00 EST

"I crushed a dude's eye socket from repeatedly punching him in it and then I charged him with menacing and harassment (of me)."

"Seeing someone get Tasered is second only to pulling the trigger. That is money-puts a smile on your face."

Those are two of the statements posted by corrections deputy David B. Thompson of Multnomah County, Oregon to an Internet chat room. The inflammatory rhetoric sparked an ongoing investigation by the county sheriff's office, as well as reporting by the Portland Tribune and other local news outlets.

Thompson may also have filed a false police report to hide the eye-socket incident he brags about in his post. Although the sheriff's department can't comment on the investigation while it's still underway, he could be fired and prosecuted if he's found guilty.

Many police departments across the country have experienced similar bulletin board crises over the last few years, putting police officers' freedom of speech in conflict with the public's need to be protected from, well, cops who get off on using Tasers.

This March, the New York Observer reported that commenters on the "NYPD Rant" site were posting pictures of local bicycle activists from the group Transportation Alternatives with comments like, "These lawbreaking cycle pirates must be stopped!!" and "Someone please hammer these 2 turds this weekend" (at a Critical Mass event).

In June, St. George, MO resident Brett Darrow incurred online cop hostility when he posted a video of a disputed traffic stop. According to TheNewspaper.com, one poster at St. Louis CopTalk wrote, "I'm going to his house to check for parking violations." Another, using the pseudonym "STL_finest," went further: "I hope this little POS punk bastard tries his little video stunt with me when I pull him over alone-and I WILL pull him over-because I will see 'his gun' and place a hunk of hot lead right where it belongs."

Those posts were deleted, and discussion of Darrow has been banned from the boards. But these online threats have been accompanied by face-to-face death and arrest threats made at Darrow, including a second videotaped encounter with an officer who screamed at Darrow in a parking lot.

In September, a Columbus, OH officer resigned after the Columbus Dispatch revealed that she
and her sister had posted videos on YouTube blaming Jews, blacks, and immigrants for the country's
problems. Susan L. Purtee was neither on duty nor in uniform when she said Jews "started to tell us—the gentiles—how to live, because if we did, they'd make a lot of money" and black people use "mangled English, dirty and filthy"; but neither was she entirely anonymous, since the sisters' website
revealed that she was a law-enforcement officer. Purtee was reassigned to a desk job, and then
resigned.

Unsurprisingly, many of these conflicts have a racial component. In 2006, the Montgomery County, MD police chief got into a highly-publicized battle with the county's branch of the Fraternal Order of Police over postings on the police union's online forums. Some pseudonymous postings referred to Hispanic immigrants as "beaners," insulted another officer and threatened her husband—posting the officer's name, badge number, and station, and, in one case, threatening to attack her husband if he "scream[ed] profiling" after a traffic stop. The county responded by blocking access to the forums from county-owned computers.

"It was basically perceived as an attack from outside," says Walte Bader, who was the Montgomery County FOP president during the controversy. Bader adds that the union was working on civility rules
for the forum when the controversy went public, but "when the government, the police department, tried to interfere we saw that as a totally different matter of government interference with First Amendment rights. We would not shut that website down on the basis of [the government] calling for it or the Washington Post calling for it."

Bader has a point. "Courts have said that there are limits on what public employees can say because of the nature of their responsibilities. You could say that the government has more leeway to clamp down on the speech of employees to the extent that it's inconsistent with their duties," explains Paul Alan Levy, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group and a specialist on Internet speech and anonymity. But Levy notes that the Internet offers ways to "separate the position from the identity of the person" in a way that may allow government employees more room to rant.

Levy suggests that the Internet, with its possibilities of total anonymity, is an especially valuable free-speech forum: "People ought to be able to blow off steam. It's the marketplace of ideas—people ought to get it out there."

John Gilmore's classic line about the Internet is that it "interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." The Montgomery County FOP boards, for example, were shut down during the comments controversy, but a number of other boards maintained by individual cops sprung up to take their place.

Levy adds that the specifics of each case matter a lot: Personal threats can be treated differently from more general ugly comments. "Is it a true threat?" he asks. "The courts distinguish between vague 'this is outrageous, people ought to be up in arms' and 'watch out, I know where you live, this is your address, I'm coming to get you.' There's a continuum."

Levy argues, "If police officers are having these awful thoughts, it's nice to know about it so we can do something about it administratively." He has a list of questions to ask about incidents like these: "Are there morale problems here that need to be addressed? Are there community problems that need to be addressed? Simply by their intemperate speech, they reveal the existence of a problem."

Mary Shelton, the Californian proprietor of the weblog "Five Before Midnight", took a different view after she found herself targeted. In 2005 and 2006, the local activist (she started her blog to monitor how the police department would respond to the end of a court-ordered reform plan) got a spate of threatening and racist blog comments from people claiming to be police officers. "I felt really intimidated," Shelton says. "It makes you look at them differently—is it this police officer, that police officer? ...I think that's one of the most difficult things of all, that you can't put a face on it."

The threats escalated: Shelton recalls that one poster gave details of what she was wearing and what she was doing during the day. Finally, a comment—"The reason [cops] beat up the Mexicans is because it's a fiesta, you beat them and candy comes out"—led her to close comments.

Shelton doesn't know exactly what happened after the department investigated the threats. "The official word was discipline was given out," she says, but California confidentiality laws prevented her from learning more.

She acknowledges that the department's investigation raises free speech concerns: "That's a hard one for me, too." But she argues, "They have to operate under the understanding that they have rules to follow. They're police officers. They have a lot of authority. They have arresting power. They have this expectation that when they speak they will be truthful, because they have to testify in court. And they have to deal with different parts of the community."

Shelton is left wondering. "If they're going around saying these statements anywhere, how do you know that's where it's being left, and it's not impacting their job performance? They have a lot of privileges and rights that come with their position, and there are responsibilities that come with that as well."

Eve Tushnet is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. She blogs at http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com.

Craig Franklin and Jena

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:05:00 EDT

Alan Bean of the advocacy group Friends of Justice responds to Craig Franklin's article about the Jena 6 (blogged by Nick yesterday) here. I'm not sure why much of the blogosphere is pronouncing Franklin's take on the case to be definitive. Much of his piece consists of little more than denials from the public officials accused of wrongdoing in the first place. Hardly surprising. Franklin is also clearly a partisan for the town, the school, and the town officials, just as Bean is clearly a partisan for the Jena 6. I guess it boils down to which of the two you find more convincing.

Advocates for the Jena 6 did clearly make some mistakes. Not disclosing Mychal Ball's prior criminal record while holding him up as a victim of injustice was one big one. So was the ensuing effort to make the six black youths look like heroes, which I think a lot of critics rightly saw through.

But that doesn't mean there aren't problems in Jena, or that the town's black residents were wrong to see the case as confirmation of a two-tiered system of justice. Nor does it mean Franklin's account of events leading up to the lunchroom beating ought to be believed over Bean's (especially given that the latter's account has been corroborated by other journalists).

I should note that it was Bean who first introduced me to another case in Louisiana that I'll be writing about in a future issue of our magazine. Thus far, my reporting has confirmed most of what he told me about the case, with a couple of exceptions. It has also confirmed much of the sentiment bubbling over in Jena.

As for Franklin, I find his description of Jena a bit too idyllic to be believed. He writes:

Jena is a wonderful place to live for both whites and blacks. The media's distortion and outright lies concerning the case have given this rural Louisiana town a label it doesn't deserve.
[...]
As with the Duke Lacrosse case, the truth about Jena will eventually be known. But the town of Jena isn't expecting any apologies from the media. They will probably never admit their error and have already moved on to the next "big" story. Meanwhile in Jena, residents are getting back to their regular routines, where friends are friends regardless of race. Just as it has been all along.

"All along?" Really?

As recently as the early 1990s, LaSalle Parish (where Jena is located) voted for white supremacist and former Klan leader David Duke by a two-to-one margin. In fact, they gave him that margin twice—for governor, and for U.S. Senator. In 1996, the parish again gave Duke the majority of its votes for U.S. Senator.

The parish is reliably and overwhelmingly Republican, save for the odd anomaly of the 2003 gubernatorial election. In 2003, the parish gave Democrat Kathleen Blanco 60 percent of its vote over Republican Bobby Jindal. Jindal also happened to be the GOP's first non-white nominee for governor. The next year, the parish went 80 percent for George W. Bush in the presidential election. Curious, that.

Oh, and then there's the matter of the mayor of Jena sitting down for an interview with the leader of a white supremacist organization last month.

12 Media Myths about the Jena 6 Case

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:02:00 EDT

Craig Franklin, assistant editor of the Jena, Mississippi Times, has a piece in the Christian Science Monitor about how the national media got it all wrong when following the "Jena 6" case, in which black students were charged with beating a white student.

Snippets:

By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they've all heard the story of the "Jena 6." White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests - the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics.
There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.
I should know. I live in Jena. My wife has taught at Jena High School for many years. And most important, I am probably the only reporter who has covered these events from the very beginning....
These are just 12 of many myths that are portrayed as fact in the media concerning the Jena cases. (A more thorough review of all events can be found at http://www.thejenatimes.net/ - click on Chronological Order of Events.)
As with the Duke Lacrosse case, the truth about Jena will eventually be known. But the town of Jena isn't expecting any apologies from the media. They will probably never admit their error and have already moved on to the next "big" story. Meanwhile in Jena, residents are getting back to their regular routines, where friends are friends regardless of race. Just as it has been all along.

Whole thing is here.

In September, Katherine Mangu-Ward laid out "Five Facts about the Jena Six".

Hat tip: The Corner.

Tough Love Kills, Too

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:13:00 EDT

Appropos of Jacob's post below...

Omega Leach, the Philadelphia teen killed in June after the city sent him to a Tennessee treatment center, died of strangulation after a fight with a staff member there, according to the Tennessee medical examiner.
The death has been ruled a homicide, the autopsy report says.
Bruce P. Levy found that Leach had "multiple hemorrhages" of his neck muscles from a clash June 2 with two staffers at the Chad Youth Enhancement Center outside Nashville.
[...]
Philadelphia's Department of Human Services has been sending some of the most troubled kids in its care to Chad since at least 2001. In 2005, after a drumbeat of warnings about harsh treatment and the death of a 14-year-old girl, DHS and city courts continued to use Chad even as Tennessee and New York state pulled their youngsters from the facility.
While Leach's death prompted Philadelphia officials to start removing youngsters from Chad, eight city youths were still housed there, a city official said last night.
[...]
Tennessee repeatedly cited Chad for failing to tell regulators about children who had been injured there. In one case, the state learned only after the victim's mother called police that three residents had tried to strangle another, records show.
The Inquirer also reported that in early 2005, a man called the Philadelphia child-abuse hotline and warned that his coworkers were using "improper and illegal" force against city youngsters.
In response, DHS dispatched an investigator to Chad - three months later. The city concluded that while there had been no "illegal physical restraints," nonetheless "some residents were being harshly and improperly restrained."
In reply, Chad said it had a "nurturing and positive environment," but would hire more staff.

Link here.

To Cite a Mockingbird

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 09:28:00 EDT

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' autobiography is out. Titled My Grandfather's Son, the memoir goes over Thomas' hotly contested confirmation battle. A snippet from a Wash Post article:

In Thomas's eyes, he is both Richard Wright's tragic Bigger Thomas in "Native Son" and Harper Lee's doomed Tom Robinson in "To Kill a Mockingbird," two of the most powerful portrayals of racial division in American literature. Lee's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel is set in the Deep South of the 1930s and features a courageous white lawyer, Atticus Finch (played in real life by former Sen. John Danforth in Thomas's rendering), who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.

Post writer Kevin Merida cites Edith Efron's 1992 reason article about Thomas, "Native Son: Why a black supreme court justice has no rights a white man need respect," which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the industry's highest honor, and remains an indispensable key to understanding Thomas' mindset (Thomas himself has said as much).

Merida's Wash Post article is online here.

reason's 1987 interview with Thomas, then head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, here.

Why Thomas is the most interesting sitting justice here.

Thomas as one of reason's 35 Heroes of Freedom here.

Obligatory Long Dong Silver joke here.

And just to get things going: Am I the only one who thinks To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most overrated books in American literature? It's well-drawn and all that, but its message of racial tolerance was hardly path-breaking in the year of its publication (1960) and its final lapse into the old white trash cliche of incest is really lame.

Little Rock, 50 Years Later

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:01:00 EDT

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the day the "Little Rock Nine" integrated the city's best public high school. Elizabeth Eckford, the black woman pictured above, now works as a parole officer in Little Rock. I've always wondered what became of Hazel Bryan (now Massery), the sneering white girl in the famous photo. Google spit out this nice story from 1998 in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

Hazel Massery drove Elizabeth Eckford home from Central High School in Little Rock on Sunday afternoon. It was no big deal, because the two women have become good friends since September 1997 -- as unlikely as that might seem four decades after their teen-age faces were frozen in a famous photograph epitomizing racial hatred.
[...]
The British TV crew also interviewed Indiana University journalism Professor Emeritus Will Counts. He took the 1957 Arkansas Democrat photo of an expressionless Eckford walking away from Central, hounded by a crowd of whites that included Massery (then Hazel Bryan) shouting, her face twisted in anger.
Counts arranged the Sept. 22, 1997, meeting of Eckford and Massery. His photograph of the two women smiling together ran on the front page of the next day's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It came to symbolize the spirit of racial reconciliation that the 40th-anniversary Central desegregation commemoration was trying to project.

"It was the farthest thing from my mind that the photo shoot I set up would lead to a lasting friendship between Elizabeth and Hazel," Counts said Sunday. "I'd had a very difficult time persuading Elizabeth to even be photographed."
Massery, who lives in a rural area of east Pulaski County, said the relationship "wasn't something I ever expected to develop the way it has. I had called Elizabeth in 1962 and apologized for my hateful action. But that was the only contact we'd had until Will got us together."
The two women met for lunch in October 1997 and have seen each other regularly since then. They enrolled jointly in a 12-week course on race relations and have maintained contact with others who took part in that workshop.
"Both of us being mothers, it turned out we have a lot to talk about," Massery says. "We've gotten very comfortable with each other. Elizabeth doesn't have a car, so I'm her chauffeur when we go to things together."

MORE: Better, longer, more recent Vanity Fair article on the photo here. Apparently, the two did reconcile, then drifted apart again after a series of public spats, and haven't spoken in years. Not quite the redemptive story it first appeared to be.

Five Facts About the Jena Six

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:39:00 EDT

A careful look at the narrative of the Jena Six reveals a great deal of oversimplification on both sides. The story of "hangman's nooses dangling from a shade tree; a mysterious fire in the night; swift deliberations by a condemning, all-white jury" is all-too-familiar and easy to construct. But many of the key elements are not as they seem, according to one AP reporter:

* The so-called "white tree" at Jena High, often reported to be the domain of only white students, was nothing of the sort, according to teachers and school administrators; students of all races, they say, congregated under it at one time or another.
* Two nooses — not three[believed to be a code of the KKK] — were found dangling from the tree. Beyond being offensive to blacks, the nooses were cut down because black and white students "were playing with them, pulling on them, jump-swinging from them, and putting their heads through them," according to a black teacher who witnessed the scene.
* There was no connection between the September noose incident and December attack, according to Donald Washington, an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department in western Louisiana, who investigated claims that these events might be race-related hate crimes.
* The three youths accused of hanging the nooses were not suspended for just three days — they were isolated at an alternative school for about a month, and then given an in-school suspension for two weeks.
* The six-member jury that convicted Bell was, indeed, all white. However, only one in 10 people in LaSalle Parish is African American, and though black residents were selected randomly by computer and summoned for jury selection, none showed up.

Which isn't to say there's not a racist element in the town:

There are no black lawyers, no black doctors and one black employee in the town's half-dozen banks. (The employee is male, an accountant who works out of public view.)...

Here and across the "crossroads" of Louisiana, there are Klan supporters, to be sure; David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, carried LaSalle Parish in his 1991 run for state governor. And Jacqueline Hatcher, a 59-year-old African American, remembers when, as a ninth grader in 1962, she saw a large cross burning out front of the all-black Good Pine High School.

More of your thoughts on Jena here.

NYT on Kennedy Brewer

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:06:00 EDT

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Kennedy Brewer, the Mississippi man sentenced to death for raping and killing his girlfriend's daughter. The state's case against Brewer was based largely on the testimony of Dr. Michael West, a megalomaniacal "bite mark expert" who has since been suspended by several forensic professional organizations, and was forced to resign from another. Jurors believed West's assertion that bite marks on the little girl's chest matched Brewer's "upper plate," despite testimony from another expert who said the marks weren't bite marks at all.

Brewer's conviction was later thrown out when advanced DNA testing revealed that neither of two semen specimens in the rape kit taken from the little girl was his.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a good piece on the case. The Times points out that this is the first time DNA experts can ever recall prosecutors insisting on retrying a case even after DNA testing showed samples left at the crime scene didn't match the defendant. District Attorney Forrest Allgood initially maintained that Brewer acted alone. When the DNA testing showed the presence of two other men, he merely changed his theory so he could retry Brewer as an accessory. But the only evidence linking Brewer to the murdered body of the little girl is the testimony of the clownish Dr. West and, apparently, a jailhouse informer who says Brewer admitted to him in 2005 that assailants forced him to bite the girl at gunpoint (a strange tale that doesn't conform with any theory to date abut how the crime actually happened).

What's absolutely unforgivable is that despite the fact that two men who weren't Kennedy Brewer obviously raped this little girl, prosecutors and local law enforcement have made no effort whatsoever to identify or find them. They've been too busy trying to protect their conviction.

Allgood has since been ordered off the case, and a new prosecutor has taken over. He will still retry the case and still plans to use Dr. West, but he has at least dropped the death penalty. That means Brewer is out on bond while awaiting his next trial.

I'll have an article in the November issue of reason looking deeper into the problems with forensic analysis in Mississippi, including another case involving Mr. Allgood.

Cleaning out the Republican Closet

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:33:00 EDT

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Dale Carpenter ponders how the Republicans can stop worrying and start to openly love the many closeted gays in their ranks:

How to end [the GOP's private acceptance of gays and its public rejection of same]? The private acceptance will continue and, I predict, become even more prevalent as young conservatives comfortable around gay people take over. There will be no purging the party of gays. There is no practical way to purge them, and even if there were, most Republicans would be personally repulsed by such an effort.
These closeted politicians, staffers, and party functionaries will occasionally be found out one way or another and again will come the shock, the pledges to go into rehab, the investigations, the charges of hypocrisy, the schadenfreude from Democrats and libertines, the sense of betrayal from the party's religious conservatives....
The only practical way out of this for the GOP is to come to the point where its homosexuals no longer feel the need to hide. And that won't happen until the party's public philosophy is more closely aligned with its private one. That will be the day when the GOP greets its gay supporters the way Larry Craig, with unintended irony, greeted reporters yesterday at his news conference: "Thank you all very much for coming out today."

More here.

Going Back to Little Rock

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:00:00 EDT

USA Today has a moving story commemorating the 50th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas' Central High School:

Of all the images of the civil rights movement, one of the most chilling is a photo of a black teenager in a shirtwaist dress and sunglasses walking through a screaming white mob. Since it was taken Sept. 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford has been the face of the desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School.

Most of the story focuses on a less-publicized incident that took place months after the school was integrated. Fed up with continuing harassment from white students, 16-year-old Minnijean Brown, one of just nine blacks in the school, "accidentally on purpose" spilled chili on a white student and was eventually expelled from Central.

The schlamozzel in this racial drama, Dent Gitchel, tells USAT:

...the incident led him to consider his place in the "parallel universes" that whites and blacks inhabited. "All this stuff was swirling around me," he recalls. "I was bewildered by what was going on."
Gitchel, then a junior, wound up missing his senior year after Gov. Orval Faubus ordered Little Rock's four high schools closed for the 1958-59 school year rather than continue to integrate them. Gitchel never got his high school diploma but passed special entrance exams to attend college. He went on to teach law at the University of Arkansas.
The year 1957 was, he says, "the year I really started thinking."...
Through [the furor surrounding integration], Gitchel recalls, he did nothing. "I just wanted to get along with my life. I didn't say anything or do anything," he says.... "I wish today that I had had the insight or courage. I wish I had reached out and taken a stand."

Brown and Gitchel got back in touch with one another two years ago and will serve as judges for a charity chili cookoff of all things.

The article takes the measure of the progress (and limits) of race relations over the past half-century:

One of the nation's best public high schools -Newsweek ranks it 26th - Central still has problems: Advanced placement classes remain mostly white. Black students lag in test scores. And although interviews with students reveal more acceptance of other races and ethnic groups, Principal Nancy Rousseau says there's room for improvement. "Kids tend to gravitate" to kids like themselves, she says. "They do segregate themselves at lunch."

Whole thing here.

Luggage Tags for the Land of the Free

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:08:00 EDT

Including "Note to Security: Have Fun Rifling Through My Underwear." Collect them all!

[Via BoingBoing]

Some of My Heroes Do Appear on Stamps

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:07:00 EDT

In Saturday's New York Times, Peter Guralnick debunks the old rumor that Elvis Presley once said, "The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." If anything, he writes, Elvis was a hero of racial tolerance:

Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music -- "I don't sound like nobody." This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.

It was, of course, in his embrace of black music that Elvis came in for his fiercest criticism. On one day alone, [Billboard editor Paul] Ackerman wrote, he received calls from two Nashville music executives demanding in the strongest possible terms that Billboard stop listing Elvis's records on the best-selling country chart because he played black music. He was simply seen as too low class, or perhaps just too no-class, in his refusal to deny recognition to a segment of society that had been rendered invisible by the cultural mainstream.

The executives' reaction sounds strange today, not just because the country strains of Elvis' music are so obvious but because it's so easy to hear the black influence on the country stars who preceded him. (The purported father of country music, Jimmie Rodgers, was a bluesman as much as anything else.) But as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis' death, it's worthwhile to remember that he did as much as any other '50s figure to break down the walls between black and white. No, he didn't "appropriate" black people's music and make millions off other people's innovations. Like many performers of both races, he mixed America's black and white musical traditions, adding his own creative stamp to create something wonderful and new.

Nor did he stop playing that role after his first burst of popularity. Listen to From Elvis in Memphis, the staggering country-soul album he released in 1969. More than a decade after "Mystery Train," he was still attuned to contemporary country and rhythm & blues, and he switches between them so easily they seem like they're both ultimately the same sort of music. At one point he covers Hank Snow's old country hit "I'm Moving On," which Ray Charles had already transformed into a soul song. Elvis' arrangement manages to echo both earlier performances at once, shifting back and forth until it seems unnatural that anyone ever thought the black and white versions were all that different at all.

That's a powerful sort of alchemy, and it's bound to have social effects. Don't think for a moment that Presley didn't understand that.

Protecting Us to Death

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:38:00 EDT

Cato's Roger Pilon dissects the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision last week denying a right to potentially lifesaving drugs that are still under review by the FDA.

The Ninth Amendment makes a rare guest appearance.

Potatoes, Football, and Miscegenation

jblanks@reason.com (Jonathan Blanks) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 13:18:00 EDT

The more things change...:

The Boise State running back who scored the winning points in the Fiesta Bowl, then proposed to his cheerleader girlfriend on national television, says he has hired security for their wedding because of racial threats.

Ian Johnson, who is black, and Chrissy Popadics, who is white, are due to be married Saturday in Boise.

When I saw the proposal right after the game, the thought occurred to me that this may not go over well in a good chunk of America--but surprisingly it was treated as a non-issue and I was glad for that.

It's times like these that I really hate it when I'm right.