TULIA: RACE, COCAINE, AND CORRUPTION IN A SMALL TEXAS TOWN
By Nate Blakeslee
Public Affairs, $26.95, 464 pages
REVIEWED BY MURIEL DOBBIN
It was only six years ago that it happened, but it could have been 60. Decades after the gains of the civil rights movement in the battle against discrimination, this book warns that it isn't over. This is the disturbing chronicle of what happened in the bleak little west Texas town of Tulia when a rogue cop ran amok and organized a drug sweep that put a substantial number of the black population in jail for allegedly dealing powdered cocaine.
Tom Coleman, the police officer who was a son of one of the revered Texas Rangers, was later named Lawman of the Year for a case in which, despite virtually no evidence, most of the defendants were convicted and one was sentenced to 99 years in jail. If you think this is shocking, you should. It took until 2003 for a reversal of most of the convictions and a reformation of some Texas laws. In a final irony, lawman Coleman got 10 years' probation for perjury.
Vanita Gupta, a Philadelphia lawyer and Yale graduate who was a child of middle class Indian immigrants, was a leader of the post-conviction representation of the Tulia defendants. She saw the case as a window into another century. Watching a television filming of blacks lined up by burly white guards in Tulia, she listened to a black teenager tell reporters, "The only difference between 1920 and now is they can't take us out and hang us on a tree. They can just send us to prison for life. It's the same thing. We'll never be free."
This book is dark evidence of the kind of racism that still lingers in America, from corrupt cops and judges to an indifference to justice most commonly associated with the deep south of the 1930s. Mr. Blakeslee, a Texan journalist, has done a superb job of investigative reporting of a scandal whose ramifications went far beyond a drug bust. He tracks the history of a town that was a prism of the problems that beset the settlement of the West.
In Swisher County where Tulia is located, there was a history of battles between ranchers and the farmers infringing on the range, of choking dust storms, freezing winters, blazing hot summers and no water. The story is told of a cattleman who said if the region only had water, it would be paradise. His foreman was said to have responded, "So would hell." Yet Tulia had its day in the post-war 1950s when the Texas panhandle was called the "golden spread" in the state's last big cattle boom.
