By: Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
To the long, stained list of American cities and towns whose names evoke incidents of injustice from the nation's shameful racial past, you can now add one from the present era: Tulia, Texas.
That is the unavoidable conclusion one has to draw from the riveting, and horrifying, series of columns Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist, has been writing the last three weeks about the war the white law enforcement establishment of this small Texas Panhandle town of 5,000 has waged against its African-American citizens and some whites who are their friends.
The story of the travesty of justice that has occurred-and is continuing-there reads like a tale out of the worst days of America's Jim Crow era, that not-so-long-ago time when the law was used in many places to oppress, not protect, citizens of African descent.
As Herbert describes it, in the early morning of July 23, 1999, Tulia law enforcement officers stormed the homes of nearly 50 people, most of them black, arresting them for supposedly being part of a major drug-trafficking scheme. The black people arrested and charged constituted more than ten percent of Tulia's small black population. The few whites who were arrested were friends of the blacks.
"The humiliating roundup was intensely covered by the local media, which had been tipped off in advance,"Herbert wrote in a July 29th column. "Men and women, bewildered and unkempt (most of those arrested had not been allowed to change out of their sleeping clothes) were paraded before TV cameras and featured prominently on the evening news."
Herbert added that, if"these were major cocaine dealers, they were among the oddest in the U.S. None of them had any money to speak of. And when they were arrested, they didn't have any cocaine. No drugs, no money or weapons were recovered during the surprise roundup."
Nor was any contraband subsequently found.
What Tulia's law enforcement authorities did have-and all they had-was the word of a white"undercover operative"named Tom Coleman, a man with a distinctly checkered legal past and a well-known penchant for publicly referring to any African American as"nigger,"because, he declared, the word was no longer"as profane"as it once was.
Despite the lack of evidence and Coleman's confused and in some cases mis-proven allegations, injustice was swiftly and harshly meted out by Tulia's white juries and judges.
A white defendant, who happened to have a mixed-race child, was quickly convicted and sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. A black man in his 50s, a hog farmer who lived in an exceedingly modest house of"crumbling concrete and rotting wood,"drew a sentence of 90 years. A younger black man of 24 was sentenced to 60 years.
Some defendants escaped this legalized mob violence because they could prove, via a cashed check in one case, and employee time sheets and an employer's testimony in another, that they were innocent of Coleman's claims.
But most of the other defendants had no such airtight protection against what Herbert described as"the nightmarish blend of incompetence and malevolence"that has marked not only the actions of the rogue undercover cop, but also the entire criminal justice establishment of the town. They were victimized, Herbert writes, by"subsequent assembly-line trials in which guilty verdicts were a foregone conclusion."
And, Herbert notes, they have been victimized by the apparent indifference of the top law enforcement officials of the state of Texas and by the Department of Justice in Washington, who have mouthed platitudes and made empty gestures, but otherwise done nothing to investigate what really happened in Tulia.
Meanwhile, a few valiant lawyers from the area and from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have mustered their resources to reverse this travesty, and they've had some successes.
But they know, and we agree, that all of these so-called convictions have been irredeemably tainted and should be vacated immediately. If law enforcement officials have some real evidence against these defendants, then bring them to trial again.
And this time let it be done with the Texas State Attorney General's Office and the Department of Justice-and the entire nation-watching, too, so that justice and decency and honor and an allegiance to what America is supposed to stand for can be restored to Tulia, Texas.
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