Who was it that said when there is no money there is no justice? Thank god some bleeding hearts got together and scrounged up money for some decent lawyers.Kizzie White was still fast asleep when the police came knocking on her door in the early hours on 23 July, 1999. She had no idea what they could possibly want. After all, she was an ordinary 24-year-old mother of two small children living in Tulia, a small, dusty farming town of 5,000 souls in northern Texas. She had never been in trouble for anything in her life.
They told her, to her astonishment, that she was under arrest on drugs charges and ordered her out of the house. She asked if she could at least put her clothes on, but they said no. "I had on boxers and a T-shirt with no underclothes on. With no shoes on," she recounts much later. "Basically, they took me out half-naked."
When the squad car reached the Swisher County courthouse in the centre of town, she saw that dozens of others had been arrested just like her. Men were being paraded across the courthouse lawn in their underwear, their hair uncombed and their faces lost in bewilderment. Every last detainee, as far as she could see, was black, while the arresting officers were uniformly white. To add to the humiliation, local photographers, tipped off in advance, were now busy capturing the bizarre scene for the next day's front pages.
The town's now-defunct newspaper, The Tulia Sentinel, ran a headline on the affair announcing: "Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage". An editorial on the inside pages lavished praise on the police for rounding up the town's drug-dealing "scumbags". The racist undertone of the coverage could not have been more clearly signalled; whether or not the police had actually arrested a single drug-dealer, it was incontrovertible fact that they had hauled in more than 10 per cent of Tulia's black population, including one in every two adult males. Six non-blacks were also arrested, but all of these either lived in the black neighbourhood in Tulia – a shanty area of tenements and trailer homes officially known as the Sunset Addition but popularly referred to by white folks as "Niggertown" – or were closely tied to black families.
In all, 46 people were caught up in the police dragnet, although not quite all of them were arrested that morning. They included Kizzie's husband, a white man named William "Cash" Love, her brothers Donnie and Kareem, her sister Tonya, an uncle and five cousins. To believe the indictments subsequently handed down by the district attorney's office, these impoverished farming people were running a high-class racket in powder cocaine. Each of them, prosecutors maintained, had been caught selling the stuff to an undercover narcotics agent called Tom Coleman. Kizzie White, for example, was accused of selling to Coleman no fewer than seven times.
The accusations seemed beyond a joke. After all, none of the 46 people arrested showed the slightest outward sign of material gain that would surely come from the heady lifestyle of a cocaine dealer. When they were arrested, police found no money, no weapons and no trace of illicit drugs of any kind at their houses. There were no fingerprints on the drugs that had been seized. The authorities subsequently failed to produce any photographs, tape-recordings or other concrete evidence that the alleged drug trades had taken place at all.
By now – with the issue finally commanding national attention, including a recent series of hard-hitting op-ed pieces in The New York Times and a clutch of high-society fundraising events on the East Coast to keep the legal defence battle going – it is clear the accusations were a joke. And yet their cases proceeded through the court system, often with terrifying efficiency. Kizzie was sent away for 25 years. Her brother Kareem got 60. Her brother Donnie, who admitted a history of crack cocaine use but insisted he was not a dealer, went down for 12 years. The man fingered as the alleged ring-leader of the cocaine racket, a 57-year-old pig farmer called Joe Moore, was given 99 years even though he was charged with just two counts of selling an eight-ball (about 3.5 grams, or $200 worth) to Agent Coleman. Even worse off than him was Cash Love, Kizzie's husband and the only defendant accused of making any sizeable sale. Accused by Coleman of selling a whole ounce of cocaine, on top of a number of smaller deliveries, he was sentenced to 434 years in state prison. (Could he have been treated with such mercilessness because his inter-racial marriage was abhorrent to mainstream opinion in Tulia? His family certainly thinks so.)
Everyone involved in prosecuting these cases should be the ones in prison.
