To some in Paris, sinister past is back

In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it 'a signal to black folks.'

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 12, 2007

PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.

There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.

Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the "black" side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she's begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself "the best small town in Texas."

"Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston," Cherry said. "They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s."

There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family.

There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.

And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.

The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year-old teacher's aide--was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.

Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation.

"All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?" said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. "It's like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated."

The Tribune generally does not identify criminal suspects younger than age 17, but is doing so in this case because the girl and her family have chosen to go public with their story.

None of the officials involved in Shaquanda's case, including the local prosecutor, the judge and Paris school district administrators, would agree to speak about their handling of it, citing a court appeal under way.

But the teen's defenders assert that long before the September 2005 shoving incident, Paris school officials targeted Shaquanda for scrutiny because her mother had frequently accused school officials of racism.

"Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved in a protest march in front of a school," said Sharon Reynerson, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, who has represented Shaquanda during challenges to several of the disciplinary citations she received. "Some of the write-ups weren't fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each one to get the whole story."

Among the write-ups Shaquanda received, according to Reynerson, were citations for wearing a skirt that was an inch too short, pouring too much paint into a cup during an art class and defacing a desk that school officials later conceded bore no signs of damage.

Shaquanda's mother, Creola Cotton, does not dispute that her daughter can behave impulsively and was sometimes guilty of tardiness or speaking out of turn at school--behaviors that she said were manifestations of Shaquanda's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which the teen was taking prescription medication.

Nor does Shaquanda herself deny that she pushed the hall monitor after the teacher's aide refused her permission to enter the school before the morning bell--although Shaquanda maintains that she was supposed to have been allowed to visit the school nurse to take her medication, and that the teacher's aide pushed her first.

But Cherry alleges that Shaquanda's frequent disciplinary write-ups, and the insistence of school officials at her trial that she deserved prison rather than probation for the shoving incident, fits in a larger pattern of systemic discrimination against black students in the Paris Independent School District.

In the past five years, black parents have filed at least a dozen discrimination complaints against the school district with the federal Education Department, asserting that their children, who constitute 40 percent of the district's nearly 4,000 students, were singled out for excessive discipline.

An attorney for the school district, Dennis Eichelbaum, said the Education Department had determined all of the complaints to be unfounded.

"The [department] has explained that the school district has not and does not discriminate, that the school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations, and that there was no validity to the allegations made by the complainants," Eichelbaum said.

But the federal investigations of the school district are not so clear-cut, and they are not finished. In one 2004 finding, Education Department officials determined that black students at a Paris middle school were being written up for disciplinary infractions more than twice as often as white students--and eight times as often in one category, "class disruption."

The Education Department asked the U.S. Justice Department to try to mediate disputes between black parents and the district, but school officials pulled out of the process last December before it was concluded.

And in April 2006, the Education Department notified Paris school officials that it was opening a new, comprehensive review to determine "whether the district discriminated against African-American students on the basis of race" between 2004 and 2006. Federal officials say that investigation is still in progress.

According to one veteran Paris teacher, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, such discrimination is widespread.

"There is a philosophy of giving white kids a break and coming down on black kids," said the teacher, who is white.

Not everyone in Paris agrees, however, that blacks are treated unfairly by the city's institutions.

"I've lived here all my life, and I don't see that," said Mary Ann Reed Fisher, one of two black members of the Paris City Council. "My kids went to Paris High School, and they never had one minute of a problem with the school system, the courts or the police."

Meanwhile, Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly inside the Texas Youth Commission prison system, where officials say 95 percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are chronic, serious offenders who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation and local treatment or detention.

"The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for those youth who are most violent or most habitual," said commission spokesman Tim Savoy. "The whole concept of commitment until your 21st birthday should be recognized as a severe penalty, and that's why it's typically the last resort of the juvenile system in Texas."

Inside the youth prison in Brownwood where she has been incarcerated for the past 10 months--a prison currently at the center of a state scandal involving a guard who allegedly sexually abused teenage inmates--Shaquanda, who is now 15, says she has not been doing well.

Three times she has tried to injure herself, first by scratching her face, then by cutting her arm. The last time, she said, she copied a method she saw another young inmate try, knotting a sweater around her neck and yanking it tight so she couldn't breathe. The guards noticed her sprawled inside her cell before it was too late.

She tried to harm herself, Shaquanda said, out of depression, desperation and fear of the hardened young thieves, robbers, sex offenders and parole violators all around her whom she must try to avoid each day.

"I get paranoid when I get around some of these girls," Shaquanda said. "Sometimes I feel like I just can't do this no more--that I can't survive this."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... ory?page=1

Fortunately, she is being released today:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... sto-relcon

Black folks in Texas need a signal?

Paris is the laughingstock of North Texas (one of them, at least), and there's no doubt that small-town Texas is racist, but the spin on these two linked stories is absolutely out of hand.

The homicide case mentioned is almost undoubtedly drunk driving and follows the typical retarded path of young first-time drunk offenders in Texas (including the light sentence given to my cousin, who totaled two cars plus her own and injured another person). And there's almost zero details given about the arson case - or the pushing case, for that matter.

That's not to take away from the idiocy of Paris, Texas. There's no doubt prejudice is still there, but the system isn't run by a bunch of white-cone wearing Nazis. If anything, people in any school system in Texas - including the small ones - are scared to death of the eye and hammer of the NAACP.

Merrill, please don't use facts to confuse vacate and B's latest attempts to educate us all on what life in Texas is really like.

i think what happened to that girl is pretty ridiculous but i don't think her mom is helping her that much. i mean they turned down probation even though they probably knew she was going to get sentenced.

does this not being a representation of the life of every texan mean that this case should have been ignored, and the girl left in jail?

Hey Laura, how about reporting on something good that happens in America. Just once.

i'm sure i can dig up something good that arnie's done for the environment in california

seriously though, i don't just post bad stuff about america. it's just that this forum is very yankee-centric; i'd rather be posting about stuff closer to home, but very few would listen. also just for the record, as much as i bash certain things in america, i personally think australia is far worse, because at least you make your own mistakes.

Oh Hell no. The juvie system is corrupt all the way around. Wichita Falls, my hometown, has one of the worst systems there ... BUT, that being said, I've hardly heard of a case from friends of mine in years back where they haven't placed the burden on anyone else but them.

It could quite possibly be that this was just an issue with stupidity (I call it the "Columbine treatment" - how everyone acting out in school is suddenly going to go Kleibold the teacher and all that bullshit). Texas is more frightened over school violence than anyone I've seen, heard, or read about - even Colorado.

While race may have (okay, very likely did) play at least a minor role, there's a huge chance other factors were at play. They aren't waiting with a rope at every chance one of the "darkies" take a wrong step.

You know I'd listen, Laura.

It always turns back to America! Even when talking about what we were talking about, an issue deep in the heart of the Republic of Texas, it's all America's fault. We're the bad guy! Hey audience, do you see this? Do you see what she's doing? You know what, cut her mik and go to commercial break. This is a disgrace to the memory of those who gave their lives on 9/11.

*pokes pen in a random, threatening direction and looks slightly beside your eyes*

I'd be semi-interested. Who doesn't want to know more about Australia?

Oh, and sorry Laura, but Scott beat you to these years ago:

http://forums.theskyiscrape.com/viewtopic.php?t=594

I'll keep this in mind.

um, no?

it was more a comment on the perspective that you and B seem to share regarding life in Texas and the South. i shouldn't have bothered but some times the shit just gets annoying, and the title of the post sort of pissed me off. nevermind.

that's fair enough. it wasn't an easy thread to title, to be honest.

You think that might be because every child owns a gun in Texas?

I spent 3 days in Houston. I fail to see how I am not qualified to make broad, sweeping generalizations about all Texans based on that research.

i spent 3 days in dallas and a couple in amarillo. between us we are clearly the world authorities on texas, B.

I hear Houston doesn't count as "real Texas". My Uncle's from Houston, and he's a normal fellow.