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3 TOWNS: THE PAST, THE PRESENT, THE FUTURE
No black-and-white answers
Several months after racial injustices were exposed, some wounds have begun to heal. And some have festered.
By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
December 26, 2007
Plotted on a map, the towns of Paris, Linden and Jena line up neatly along a 300-mile diagonal that falls across the Texas-Louisiana border.
But to many African-Americans, that line looks more like a gash across the beneficent face that the New South tries to present to the rest of the nation.
In each of those three mostly white towns, local incidents of perceived discrimination against blacks drew national outrage and civil rights protests after the Tribune wrote stories about them, thrusting their long-obscured racial tensions into the open during a tumultuous year.
Now, Tribune senior correspondent Howard Witt has returned to discover whether the fundamental racial dynamics of Linden, Paris and Jena were altered in any meaningful way after the TV cameras departed and the headlines faded away.
The answer in Linden appears to be yes. In Paris, not much. And in Jena, it’s too soon to tell.
As spotlight dims, shadows remain
The stories read to many like harrowing echoes from the worst days of the Jim Crow South.
In the east Texas town of Paris, amid allegations from black parents that the local schools and courts systematically discriminate against their children, a white judge sentenced a 14-year-old black girl to up to 7 years in a juvenile prison for pushing a hall monitor at her high school. The same judge sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down a house, to probation.
In Linden, Texas, four young white men lured a mentally retarded black man to a party, made him dance for their amusement while calling him vile names and then knocked him unconscious and left him for dead by a trash dump. The black man survived a brain hemorrhage but suffered permanent disabilities; the white men got a slap on the wrist from local juries that regarded them as “good old boys” who made a youthful mistake.
And in Jena, La., a local prosecutor initially charged six black high school students with attempted murder after they allegedly jumped a white schoolmate and kicked him while he lay unconscious. The attack followed months of racial violence set off after three white students hung nooses from a tree in the high school courtyard in what black students saw as a threat directed at them.
Once those hidden stories became public and started ricocheting across the Internet, civil rights leaders, bloggers and the rest of the media trained their sights on the three towns. Activists organized national petition drives, letter-writing campaigns, fundraising efforts and protests.
And the short-term effects of that intense outside scrutiny were profound.
Texas youth officials released the Paris girl, Shaquanda Cotton, from prison in a matter of weeks. Civil rights lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Linden man, Billy Ray Johnson, and won a $9 million judgment against his attackers. And more than 20,000 demonstrators from across the nation journeyed to Jena to stage the largest civil rights march in years.
Long term, however, a question still lingers: For all of the national ferment, are the relations between blacks and whites in these three towns any better?
Linden, Texas The triumph of tolerance
The white mayor who casually referred to black men as “boys” is gone.
An African-American doctor was recently elected to the town council. And Linden officials contributed $10,000 to a new community center built by a black philanthropic group.
Even a controversial mural inside the local post office depicting barefoot black fieldworkers picking cotton — a painting many black residents found offensive — has a new brochure posted beneath it explaining the historical and artistic context of the Depression-era work.
In many ways, Linden no longer resembles the starkly divided town where many white residents once closed ranks around the four white youths who in 2003 assaulted a mentally retarded black man and dropped him beside a garbage dump, unconscious and bleeding in his brain.
Instead, many here say that over the last year a new spirit of interracial cooperation has infused the town of nearly 2,300 people, 78 percent of whom are white and 20 percent black.
But it took the Billy Ray Johnson beating case — and the harsh portrayal of the town in the national media as a racist backwater — to bring that change about.
“The attack on Billy Ray Johnson not only wrecked the life of Mr. Johnson but disrupted the entire town,” said Linden’s new mayor, Kenny Hamilton, a branch manager at a local bank. “But it did make us step back and look at how we are portrayed, and we found it to be undesirable. So we resolved to do some things about that.”
One thing Linden’s voters did this year was turn out of office the local district attorney, whose 2005 prosecution of Johnson’s attackers was regarded by many black residents as half-hearted and ineffective.
Local juries declined to convict the four white youths of any serious felonies, instead finding them guilty of a few misdemeanors. Although Johnson suffered permanent brain damage in the attack, none of the attackers served more than 60 days in the county jail.
Last April, however, another jury hearing the Johnson case reached a far different conclusion. Acting in a civil suit brought on Johnson’s behalf by the Southern Poverty Law Center, local jurors awarded Johnson $9 million in damages against his four assailants.
“At one point in the trial, one of the defendants said that ‘we put it in the back of the truck,’ referring to Billy Ray,” recalled Judi Howell, one of the jurors who heard the civil case. “I can remember cold chills running through me. As far as I’m concerned, that was a $9 million ‘it.’ We wanted to send a message that this was not acceptable in our community.”
The civil jury’s verdict redeemed Linden, many believe.
“That civil verdict was very cleansing for the community, to see that he received justice for what was done to him,” said Rev. David Keener, pastor of the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church. “There was an admission of wrongdoing on behalf of the judicial system.”
Thomas Northcutt, president of the Fairview alumni association, a group of graduates of the segregated school that used to serve blacks before Linden schools were integrated in 1970, is even more optimistic.
When Northcutt approached Linden’s Economic Development Corp. with a request to help the Fairview association build a new community center, the town officials instantly offered a large donation.
“As tragic as it was, the Billy Ray Johnson case united this town,” said Northcutt, a carpenter whose family owns the Linden farm where his ancestors once toiled as slaves. “People are talking to each other more.”
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Update: Billy Ray Johnson
A family dispute over the custody of Billy Ray Johnson erupted after he was awarded the $9 million civil verdict in April. A lawyer and a man claiming to be Johnson’s legal guardian, who are seeking control over the damages award, recently removed Johnson from the Texarkana nursing home where he was receiving therapy and brought him back to Linden to live with his ailing mother and an ex-convict brother. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is investigating the situation.
Paris, Texas False starts, dashed hopes
Springtime in Paris this year looked to offer a new beginning — at least for a moment.
March was rocky, as protesters, civil rights activists and TV cameras crisscrossed the streets amid bitter accusations that this east Texas town of nearly 26,000 systematically discriminates against the 22 percent of its citizens who are black. Paris officials angrily replied that outsiders were twisting perceptions of their town.
But by April, some Paris leaders were counseling reconciliation. The editor of the local newspaper suggested a plaque at the Paris fairgrounds to commemorate the painful history of black lynchings that took place there in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Meanwhile, the Paris branch of the NAACP asked the City Council to convene a special diversity task force to investigate the state of racial relations in the town. Others called for a series of town hall meetings where residents could air their grievances.
By May, however, the outsiders and their unwanted attention had moved on from Paris. And the racial reconciliation proposals were dead.
“The City Council didn’t think that was the function of the city” to establish a diversity committee, said Dr. Joann Ondrovik, a white psychologist who is president of the Paris NAACP chapter. “They thought it’s unnecessary.”
Little has changed in Paris in the nine months since the town was thrust onto the national stage over the case of Shaquanda Cotton, the 14-year-old black girl sent to youth prison for shoving a hall monitor at Paris High School.
Although state authorities released Cotton from prison on March 31, just three weeks after her story became public, and she has been living quietly at home with her mother ever since, her case remains a divisive totem for the town.
Many blacks regard the teenager as a victim of what they perceive as unequal justice and disproportionately harsh discipline meted out to blacks in Paris schools and the local courts — and a symbol of broader economic discrimination that they say afflicts the town. There are no black employees, for example, in the Paris Fire Department and few in other local government jobs.
Racism “is as prevalent today in Paris as it was 50 years ago,” said Nadine Ausbie, a paralegal and former clerk for a local judge who said that for many years she was the only black employee at the county courthouse. “It has never been OK here. It’s still not OK. And it never will be OK.”
Yet many whites see Cotton as representative of nothing more than a troublemaking student who got the punishment she deserved.
“To be honest with you, I don’t see [racial tensions] in Paris,” said Mayor Jesse James Freelen. “It’s outsiders coming in to our community, and they don’t know all the facts.”
Even some black residents who say they agree with Freelen seem conflicted about the issue.
Joe McCarthy, a prominent African-American leader, joined a recent lunch with several white businessmen who called on him to endorse their view that there is no racial discrimination in Paris. And to a point, McCarthy agreed.
But then the discussion turned toward allegations of racial profiling by the Paris police. And McCarthy, a middle-age man who drives a luxury car and served on the City Council from 2001 to 2004, suddenly volunteered how he was pulled over while driving through downtown Paris early one morning.
“I was the only one out at that time of morning, there was only one way you could turn, but the police officer said I had failed to use my turn signal,” McCarthy recounted. “It just rubbed me wrong. Do I look suspicious? He only stopped me because I was black.”
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Update: Shaquanda Cotton
Shaquanda Cotton, now 16, has been living at home in Paris since being freed from a Texas youth prison on March 31. She is not enrolled in school, but her mother says she intends to begin home-schooling so Shaquanda can earn a GED certificate.
Jena, La. The jury is still out
At one end of Oak Street in downtown Jena sits Doughty’s Westside Barber Shop, where proprietor Frankie Morris matter-of-factly explains that he will never cut a black man’s hair because that would soil his combs and clippers and offend the white customers who fill his chairs.
At the other end of Oak Street sits Southern Heritage Bank, where Vice President Thomas Watkins says he would gladly hire an African-American to join his exclusively white staff of 35 if only he could find one who was qualified.
Smack in between the whites-only barber shop and the all-white bank sits Jena’s white mayor, Murphy McMillin, behind his desk at City Hall. Yet the retired oil industry executive says he’s baffled at why tens of thousands of African-Americans journeyed here in September to protest alleged racial discrimination in the town he’s always known as quiet and contented.
“There seems to be harmony among all the races here, so you can see why I’ve been surprised that the nation doesn’t seem to think that’s true,” McMillin said. “There’s a story being told by the national media that says we are very racist. I don’t believe that. But I also don’t believe we are perfect.”
Jena may not think it has a problem. But much of the rest of the nation appears to have made up its mind.
In fact, if there is a ground zero for the Internet-powered civil rights movement of the 21st Century, Jena would have to be it.
The central Louisiana lumber town, with its infamous nooses hung from a tree and its controversial prosecution of six black high school students for beating up a white classmate, seems destined to join Selma and Birmingham in the rarefied lexicon of Southern cities whose very names stand as shorthand for the struggles of black Americans to be treated equally.
Many of the black residents here — they constitute 12 percent of the town’s population of about 3,000 people and live mostly clustered in blighted neighborhoods — say they long ago learned to keep their heads low and not ask for much from Jena’s dominant whites.
“If you walk into a bank in Jena, you don’t see but one black face behind the counter — and we have five banks here,” said Rev. Brian Moran, whose Antioch Baptist Church was vandalized, allegedly by two white men, a few hours after an NAACP meeting was held there in July. “And in any type of business, black customers are treated differently than whites.”
Now, after a measure of introspection forced on the town by all the national attention, a few whites in Jena say they are coming to understand why blacks feel discriminated against.
“There’s a lot of white people who have not genuinely seen the issue,” said Eddie Thompson, a local Pentecostal pastor. “If you’re living in the majority, then everything looks fine to you.”
For his part, McMillin says he’s determined to discover what, if anything, is wrong in his town. In November, the mayor convened a seven-member multiracial “community relations panel” and directed it to closely examine the state of race relations in Jena — a topic the town has never before openly broached.
McMillin said he started with a list of nearly 40 potential committee members.
“We asked, ‘If you find out something you didn’t know before, are you willing to change your mind?’” McMillin said. “Only the ones who said yes were selected.”
The new committee has its work cut out for it. Most of the Jena 6 defendants face court proceedings in coming months, ensuring fresh waves of scrutiny focused on the town. And white supremacists have announced plans to stage a pro-white march through Jena on Jan. 21 — the national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.
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Update: The Jena 6
One of the Jena 6 defendants, Mychal Bell, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree battery for the attack on a white student at Jena High School and was sentenced to 18 months in juvenile detention. The others — Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theo Shaw and an unnamed juvenile — have yet to stand trial. The Jena district attorney has opened plea bargain negotiations with each of them.
hwitt@tribune.com
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
