Killing Stirs Racial Unease in Texas

[Brett]

February 15, 2009
Killing Stirs Racial Unease in Texas

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
PARIS, Tex. — The killing of Brandon McClelland, though horrible,
never fit the classic description of a lynching. The police say two
friends ran him over with a pickup truck after an argument during a
night of drinking.

But Mr. McClelland was black and the men accused of killing him are
white, and his gruesome death has reignited ugly feelings between
races that have plagued this small town for generations, going back to
the days 100 years ago when it was the scene of brutal public
lynchings.

Blacks complain that the justice system is tilted against them; whites
complain about the crime, teenage pregnancy and drug use ravaging
black neighborhoods.

“I think we are probably stuck in 1930 right about now,” said Brenda
Cherry, who is black and is the founder of Concerned Citizens for
Racial Equality. “If you complain about anything, you are going to be
punished.”

Paris is an agricultural town 100 miles northeast of Dallas that was
built on cotton and grain in a part of Texas that shares more with the
Deep South than with the West. In 1850, there were 4,000 residents, a
quarter of them slaves. A large monument to the Confederate dead
stands outside the courthouse, a bronze soldier standing guard, while
at the Paris Fairgrounds, no plaques mark the spot where thousands of
white spectators watched as black men were burned alive or hanged in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Today, 26,000 people live here, about 5,700 of them black. They are
concentrated in public housing projects and run-down neighborhoods
near the center of town. They send their children to Paris High
School, where nearly half the students are black and test scores are
low. The best school, North Lamar High School, is 86 percent white,
and some blacks complain that the district lines are drawn to keep it
that way.

Lamar County’s highest elected official, Judge M. C. Superville, says
Ms. Cherry and others who are unhappy with the justice system have
exaggerated the role of race in recent events.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding in the community between blacks
and whites,” he said. “I do not believe there is systematic racial
discrimination in Lamar County. I do believe there is a misperception
that that is going on.”

Still, the suspicions and ill will have grown so strong that the
federal Department of Justice has dispatched a team of mediators to
get residents to begin talking about the problem and to propose
possible resolutions.

Last month, about 100 people of all races went to a building on the
fairgrounds to vent their frustrations, while federal mediators took
notes and tried to keep the peace. The speakers ran the gamut from
young members of the New Black Panther Party in Dallas, who accused
the local authorities of racism, to older black residents of Paris who
chided younger blacks for comparing the problems of today with those
of the Jim Crow era.

The few whites who spoke said they were sympathetic to the complaints
of some black residents.

Mr. McClelland’s death, on Sept. 16, attracted attention beyond the
confines of Lamar County, because, on the surface, it resembled the
racially motivated murder in 1998 of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Tex.
Three white supremacists hunted Mr. Byrd down and dragged him behind a
truck until he died.

Mr. McClelland, 24, was run over and dragged 40 feet by the pickup
truck. His mutilated body was found on the side of a road, his skull
smashed.

There the similarities to the Byrd killing end, however. Mr.
McClelland, an affable young man who worked as a garbage collector and
wanted to become a long-haul trucker, had a longstanding friendship
with the two men in the truck. They had spent the previous day hanging
wallboard and then had gone out drinking after the job.

The men — Shannon Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley, both 27 — fled the
scene of the killing, the police said. Later that night, they turned
up at Mr. McClelland’s ramshackle home in Paris and told his mother
that they had left him walking on the side of the road after they had
argued about who should drive.

State troopers at first accepted the men’s story and considered the
case a hit and run, but they changed their minds after discovering Mr.
McClelland’s blood and tissue on the underside of the truck. Mr.
Finley and Mr. Crostley are awaiting trial on murder charges; they
have denied running Mr. McClelland down.

A special prosecutor from Dallas was appointed in November. The Lamar
County district attorney, Gary Young, had declined to handle the case
because as a private lawyer he represented Mr. Finley against a
manslaughter charge in 2003.

In that case, Mr. Finley shot another friend, who was white, as they
were sitting in a pickup. He claimed he had grabbed his friend’s gun
and was trying to shoot two armed men who were trying to rob them.
Instead, his friend was hit three times in the head by accident, he
said.

The district attorney agreed to a plea bargain on the reduced
manslaughter charge. Mr. Finley served three years in prison; the
robbers were never found.

Mr. Finley’s manslaughter conviction ensnared Mr. McClelland as well.
Mr. McClelland was convicted of lying to a grand jury about Mr.
Finley’s whereabouts to provide him with an alibi. He served more than
a year in prison.

It was this friendship between the men that led the police to conclude
that Mr. Finley’s motive in the killing of Mr. McClelland was
something other than race, the state police said.

The victim’s mother, Jacqueline McClelland, said that the initial
investigation into her son’s death was shoddy and incomplete. The
investigators left evidence scattered at the scene: freshly opened
beer cans near the body, loose change covered with blood, skull
fragments and tissue on the pavement.

Ms. McClelland said it was pressure from civil rights advocates, who
held several protests in Paris last fall, that led to the arrest of
Mr. Finley and Mr. Crostley. “They would have swept it under the rug,
if I hadn’t gotten other people involved,” she said.

Mr. McClelland’s death comes a year after another incident stirred up
accusations of racism here. Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black
girl, was sentenced by Judge Superville to juvenile prison after she
shoved a hall monitor into a wall. Three months earlier, Judge
Superville had sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to probation for
burning down her family’s house.

National civil rights groups protested what they called the unequal
and harsh treatment of Miss Cotton, who spent a year in a West Texas
juvenile prison.

Judge Superville denied that race played a role in Miss Cotton’s
sentence. He said she had a history of disciplinary problems, and her
mother, Creola Cotton, had refused to cooperate with the state’s
efforts to change her daughter’s behavior.

But Creola Cotton contends that her daughter was singled out and
railroaded. She said she had complained several times to the school
district about what she saw as unequal punishments for black and white
students. That angered officials, so they retaliated against her
daughter, she said.

“We live under a good-old-boy system here: the schools, the
courthouse, the housing department,” Ms. Cotton said at the recent
meeting. “Everybody is relatives or good friends.”

The mayor of Paris, Jesse James Freelen, who is white, dismissed such
complaints as the result of “a lack of communication.” He pointed out
that the town previously elected a black mayor and now had a black
mayor pro tem.

“Once we start communicating,” Mr. Freelen said, “I believe we will
find out the problems we believe we have are not as big as we think.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/us/15paris.html?_r=2&ref=us&pagewanted=print