Pubdate: Thu, 5 Feb 2009
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2009 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/bc7El3Yo
Website: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Howard Witt, Reporting from Paris, Texas

RACISM COMES OUT OF THE SHADOWS IN TEXAS TOWN

Residents of Paris, Texas, Come Together to Talk Candidly About an 
Issue That Has Long Divided the Community. There Was No Holding Back.

Ten days into a new American era, 100 white and black citizens of 
this polarized east Texas town tried their hand at the kind of racial 
reconciliation heralded by the inauguration of President Obama, 
gathering for a frank community talk on the long-taboo topic of race.

Things didn't go so well.

The black speakers at last week's meeting, led by two conciliation 
specialists from the Justice Department, mostly talked about 
incidents of discrimination, prejudice and unfairness they said they 
routinely suffered in Paris.

Their white listeners mostly glared back, their arms crossed.

The four-hour session ended with some participants screaming about 
the presence of three police cars outside the meeting hall and who 
had ordered them and why.

"We are not going to end on a note like that!" said Carmelita 
Pope-Freeman, the regional director of the Justice Department's 
community relations service. "I'm getting tired of it!"

Yet the mayor of the town, which became a national focus after the 
Chicago Tribune revealed several cases of alleged racial injustice in 
recent years, pronounced himself optimistic.

At least, he said, black and white citizens were talking to each 
other -- something that rarely happened before.

"Every city should have a dialogue like this," said Mayor Jesse James 
Freelen, whose town of 26,000 is 68% white and 22% black. "We didn't 
like all the negative publicity about our town. . . . But if the end 
result is that our community grows together, then it will all have 
been worth it."

First, the community had to vent, which was the purpose of the 
meeting. It was an early stage of a mediation program that the 
Justice Department has offered to other troubled towns -- in an echo 
of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- to help 
close deep racial fissures.

"I'm here to talk about racism. I don't see any sense in playing 
games, pretending it doesn't exist," said Brenda Cherry, the African 
American leader of a local civil rights group. "When you go in the 
schools and see mostly black kids sitting in detention, it's racism. 
In court, we get high bonds, we get longer sentences. If that's not 
racism, what is it?"

Jason Rogers, the youth pastor of a local black church, reminded the 
audience of the monument honoring fallen Confederate soldiers that 
sits on the front lawn of the county courthouse.

"When I take my 5-year-old son up to the courthouse and he says, 
'Daddy, what's that?' the history I'm going to tell him is that those 
people fought to keep me a slave," Rogers said, as black members of 
the audience nodded in agreement. "It bothers my family that there's 
a large Confederate soldier outside the courthouse. I don't see the 
difference between a Confederate soldier and a Nazi soldier."

Paris' bloody racial history hung over the meeting like a toxic 
cloud. The gathering was held in a hall at the Paris Fairgrounds, the 
precise spot where, a century ago, thousands of white citizens 
gathered to cheer the ritualized lynchings of blacks, chaining them 
to a flagpole or lashing them to a scaffold before tearing them to 
pieces and setting them on fire.

But memories of more recent black victims also filled the room as 
Paris resident Jacqueline McClelland approached the microphone.

McClelland's 24-year-old son, Brandon, was killed last year, 
allegedly by two white men who authorities say dragged him beneath a 
pickup until his body was nearly dismembered. The accused killers are 
awaiting trial for murder, although McClelland's family and civil 
rights leaders want hate crime charges added as well.

"Any crime that is done the way my son was done, I think hate played 
a part in it," McClelland said as the room fell silent. "I'm just 
hoping and praying that justice will be served on this."

Then Creola Cotton stood up to speak.

In 2006, Cotton's daughter, Shaquanda, then 14, was sentenced to up 
to seven years in a youth prison for shoving a hall monitor at Paris 
High School. Three months earlier, the same judge had sentenced a 
14-year-old white girl to probation for arson.

Less than a month after a March 12, 2007, Tribune article contrasting 
the two cases triggered national protests and petition drives, Texas 
authorities ordered Shaquanda's early release.

"Justice in Paris does have a color," Creola Cotton said. "I know 
this from personal experience."

At the back of the room, Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville -- the 
white man who ordered Shaquanda to prison -- listened and shook his 
head in disagreement.

Racial discrimination in Paris, he insisted, is a problem of 
perception, not reality.

"I think the black community in this town is suffering a great deal 
from poverty, broken homes, drugs," Superville said. "Because a 
larger percentage of the black population is caught up in that, in 
their anguish they are perceiving they are the victims of discrimination.

"But white people are not the enemy. Poverty, illiteracy, drugs, 
absentee fathers -- that's the enemy. That's not racism. That's the 
breakdown of a community." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake