The cruel grip of history
October 27, 2008 at 7:05 pm (Uncategorized)
Richard Abshire of the Dallas Morning News offers a timely update to the racially-tinged death of Brandon McClelland in Paris, Texas. A companion piece chronicles the Northeast Texas community’s historical association with lynching.
This is the second time Paris officials have been accused of racial bias in recent history. Last year, Shaquanda Cotton was sentenced to a Texas Youth Commission holding facility for pushing a teacher’s aid.
Neither Shaquanda Cotton’s mother nor the mother of Brandon McClelland want to see the men responsible for this latest outrage put to death–both women are staunch opponents of the death penalty–but they want to see justice served.
It has been argued that the white men accused of killing McClelland couldn’t have committed a hate crime because they were good friends with their black victim.
Friends don’t drag friends to death.
That said, it is difficult to establish the motivation of any crime. Brandon McClelland paid the ultimate price for associating with violent individuals who were strangers to natural human affection. We need to know far more about the victim’s relationship to his murderers. According to Abshire:
The men were thought to be friends. Mr. McClelland was convicted of perjury for lying on Mr. Finley’s behalf in a manslaughter case. Mr. Finley went to prison from 2004 to 2007 for shooting a friend in a Paris park; Mr. McClelland was sentenced to a two-year term.
Did McLelland perjure himself to help out a buddy, because he was threatened with dire consequences if he told the truth, or are we dealing with a complicated mix of both factors? Is McLelland of normal intelligence, or were his white associates taking advantage of a man with a serious learning disability? More light needs to be shed on these questions.
Is it fair to bring up the close historical association between Paris and lynching?
It isn’t just fair; it is critically important.
Heinous crimes perpetrated by an entire community leave a psychic stain (ala Lady McBeth) that will not wash away. You don’t torture a man to death and then wander casually back to business as usual. Churches complicit in this kind of demonic rage remain crippled and scarred until confession is made and forgiveness is extended.
Across America, especially in the southern states, individuals, families, and congregations shoulder crushing emotional and spiritual burdens, often without realizing it. You see the consequences most clearly in the criminal justice system and in strained and tenuous relations between black and white communities.
I congratulate Mr. Abshire for noting that a monument to the Confederacy stands on the courthouse steps in Paris. I have noted the same phenomenon on the grounds of the state capitols in Little Rock, Arkansas and, last week, in Atlanta, Georgia.
The most soul-destroying example of this form of spiritual oppression can be found in Colfax, Louisiana.

source:

http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/the-cruel-grip-of-history/

Takes five weeks or so for the national news media to pick up the story of a man whose body was discovered torn apart by the side of a road. The man was Brandon McClelland, 24, of Paris, Texas.
That’s the same Paris where Shaquanda Cotton received a seven-year sentence for pushing a hall monitor in high school back in 2005. She’s since been released.
The McClelland death sounds a lot like James Byrd, Jr.’s, 10 years ago in Jasper, Texas, about five hours southeast of Paris. Both cases involved groups of drunk men, all white except for the one who ended up dragged or run over by a truck — allegedly, in the second case. McClelland, like Byrd, was black.
The broadest exposure to this previously seems to have been this story by Howard Witt in the Chicago Tribune three weeks ago. Witt had covered the Cotton story, filing this piece 19 months ago on her early release.
I’ve never been to Texas. It’s a big state and I’m sure there’s a lot to experience there. What I gather from afar is that 1) authorities are doing their level best to sweep Brandon McClelland’s death under the rug, and 2) racism was at play in the crime and is at play in the suppression of talk about it.
But Shannon Keith Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley have been charged with murder and jailed. By appearance at least the wheels of justice are turning.
The AP story I linked to in the opening paragraph plays up the conflict between the assertion of McClelland’s mother and others that his death resulted from “a racist attack” and prosecutors doubts about that characterization. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office calls comparisons with the Byrd case “preposterous.”
I’m not kidding.

Source:

http://varneer.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/brandon-mcclelland-and-hate-crime/

The District Attorney's office reports there is no evidence that this was a hate crime, but the victim's family and advocates from Paris, the county seat, and beyond, insist that it is indeed a hate crime and that prosecutors are either covering that up or are so insensitive to the issue that they are simply ignoring the fact that two white men killed a black man.
The district attorney and two of his assistants, the Paris city manager, local ministers, a co-chair of Paris' year-old Diversity Task Force, the president of the Lamar County Chamber of Commerce and the president and legal counsel of the Paris Chapter of the NAACP invited me to meet with them after I indicated on a blog that I was going to write about the situation.
Pike Burkhart, the chamber president, said the Shaquanda Cotton incident two years ago came as a surprise to many in the community. Ms. Cotton, a 14-year-old Paris High School student, was found delinquent in a jury trial on an assault charge for shoving a teacher's aide and was sent to the Texas Youth Commission. Many in the black community decried this as proof of bias, citing the case of a white teen who was given probation after burning down her family's home. Prosecutors insist they followed the law, but the case brought national media attention to Paris and most of it was negative.
Community advocates like Brenda Cherry and Creola Cotton, Shaquanda's mother, told me that white community leaders are in denial about racial problems. The whites point to the formation of the diversity task force and the city's finally finding funding for demolition of a dilapidated apartment block in a predominantly balck neighborhood as evidence of their good will.
A Houston-based blogger and an AP reporter have referred to Mr. McClelland's death as a "dragging death" and compared it to the murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper TX in 1998. They have suggested that, like two of the men convicted of that crime, Mr. Finley joined a white supremacist in prison, but that is almost certainly not the case.
Groups and bloggers from throughout the state and even out of state have been talking about the McClelland case and feelings are strong on both sides -- among people who feel it was a racist act that's being covered up and among others who claim that troublemakers are using it as an excuse to foment conflict.
In talking about race relations in Lamar County, the subject of the lynchings (especially one in 1920 that still resonates) almost always comes up, along with grievances about under-representaion of African-Americans in jobs at the courthouse and elsewhere. And then there is the Confederate statue. Black Parisians told me it casts a chill on them when they walk up to the courthouse and see that memorial to a past that they see as evil. White Parisians see it as a reminder to their history. The Confederate statue overshadows smaller stones raised in honor of the veterans of 20th century wars - WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam.

Source:

http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/10/paris-texas-death-stirs-racial.html