Tulia
"Never
Again"
Rally
Draws
Hundreds,
Faith-Based
Activists
and
Drug
Reformers
Mix
and
Match
7/27/01
Drug reform and religious activists from across Texas and the country gathered in the Panhandle town of Tulia last weekend to commemorate the second anniversary of a drug raid that scooped up more than 10% of the tiny town's African-American population. Local residents have professed great weariness with and resentment at the national spotlight focused on their town since an undercover police officer of known disreputability managed to find 46 drug dealers -- 43 of them black -- in this town of 5,000 people. The Friends of Justice (http://www.drugsense.org/foj/), however, local organizers of the event, vow to keep on fighting until the wrong has been righted. "Some of the white people here feel abused by the wave after wave of publicity that have rolled over this town," Friends of Justice member Paul Bean told DRCNet, "and some of the coverage has been sensationalized. But we will live with that because we don't want people to forget." The "Never Again" rally organized by the Friends of Justice and supported by faith-based and drug reform organizations from as far away as New York should give townspeople something to remember. On Sunday, people gathered by the hundreds to eat hamburgers and hotdogs, hear music and poetry readings, and listen to speaker after speaker denounce the injustice of the Tulia bust, the war on drugs in general, and the racist way in which it operates. And Tulia has certainly never before seen a midnight march by hundreds of people to the Swisher County Courthouse for a drug war vigil. While local press accounts put attendance at somewhere between 225 and 350 people, organizers say those are low figures. Tracey Hayes of the Texas Network of Reform Groups helped organize two busloads of activists who journeyed from Austin to Tulia, with a stop at a Texas prison facility in Plainview on the way. "We brought 340 T-shirts with us," she told DRCNet, "and they were all gone by mid-afternoon. People were only taking one each. I know, I was watching." "We had well over 200 people even at midnight," said Bean. "We marched six or eight abreast, and the march stretched over two or three blocks," he said. At the Conner Park rally, Texas American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) head Will Harrell told the crowd: "We're here principally to show solidarity with the people in Tulia who've had the bravery to stand up in the face of discrimination. But we're also here to get out the larger message, which is that our current drug policy is a failure and must be changed," he said. "When the war comes to our community, we must stand and fight back. Tulia has become a symbol of what's wrong with our drug policy. It's got to be a collective effort, and every one of us counts." The "Never Again" rally was precisely that, as groups such as the NAACP and LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) joined forces with national drug or criminal justice reform groups such as Common Sense for Drug Policy, whose head, Kevin Zeese, addressed the rally, and the Kunstler Fund, which brought a delegation of New York state "Mothers of the Disappeared" to the event. They were joined by clergy and lay people from the Church of Christ, the Baptists and the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church of Memphis, led by Rev. Edwin Sanders under the umbrella of the group Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy. "We had a great mix of people," the Friends of Justice's Charles Kiker told DRCNet. "We probably had more than a hundred people from Tulia, 90% of them black, and we had a good turnout from the Hispanic community, and that's something new." But while the ethnically diverse turnout was pleasing, what struck drug reformers and religious activists alike was the shock of discovered mutual interest. "We are a faith-based organization," FOJ's Bean told DRCNet. "Many of our people are deeply religious people, and we arranged so it would have a strongly spiritual emphasis. We had powerful preachers speak, like Edwin Sanders from Memphis, Edward Waters of the Church of Christ, and Nancy Hastings Sehested, one of those unheard of woman Baptist preachers." This was something new for the drug reform crowd, said Bean. "I got lots of comments from the young people who came up from Austin who said they had never heard religion, especially Christian religion, and social justice themes merged into one message. They don't remember the civil rights movement, and this was very moving to them." FOJ's Kiker concurred. "Nancy Hastings Sehested was powerful. She didn't address prohibition directly, but came at it by comparing the 'we've got you covered' of the police to the need to say 'we've got you covered for health insurance, for decent pay, for non-discrimination, for social justice.' I heard one of the Austin participants come up to Nancy afterward and say he didn't know Baptist preachers preached like that," Kiker said. "It was something of a shock, but it was also an eye-opener. This is important. If we are to win this struggle against the war on drugs, it will require the involvement of people who are motivated by faith. People who take the Old Testament prophets and the message of Jesus seriously are natural allies in this struggle." Kiker and Bean were talking about the young drug reformers who came up on the Freedom Ride with Hayes' Texas Network of Reform Groups, folks who either belong to groups such as Austin NORML, the Cannabis Action Network, Hemp Advocates of Texas, the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, and Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, or work independently of any organization. "Meeting and working with these religious people was one of the most positive outcomes of the whole experience," Hayes told DRCNet, "because with that ability to work together, now we can make progress much more rapidly. I saw some activists who have traditionally had problems with faith-based preaching who were put in a position where they had to see how that can also be something that lends strength to a community, and that's a good thing," she said. "We've been forced to recognize that people in those communities are good people who are fully capable of seeing where drug policy is doing us wrong. Those folks don't get hung up on the fact that we aren't necessarily religious, and we don't get hung up on the fact that they are." "The young reformers are our natural allies in this struggle," said Kiker. "Many of them don't know it, but it's our job to let them know. This is the Old Testament prophetic religion and the New Testament Jesus religion; they all believed in social justice." The coming together of religious and frankly secular activists is more than merely a feel-good event, as FOJ's Alan Bean noted. "I was talking to the Rev. Sanders, and he told me how impressed he was with the amount of God talk. He said he usually bends over backwards to avoid overt references to religion when talking to drug reformers," Bean related. "But he told me he told national drug reformers that eliminating the spiritual element is a barrier for a lot of African-Americans." With 28 of the Tulia arrestees now behind bars, the battle will continue. The Friends of Justice are in a "coming down" phase right now, the happily exhausted Bean and Kiker explained, but will soon be back on the barricades. Tracey Hayes and the TNRG are setting their sights on the state legislature. "We want to have eight to ten bills ready for 2003, the next time the legislature is in session," Hayes said. "Some may have a real chance of passage, and others will perhaps only advance the dialogue, but there are a lot of people coming out of the woodwork in Texas, and I think people will be surprised with what happens in Texas in the next couple of years." TNRG and FOJ will have help: Mothers of the Disappeared announced this week they are opening up a Tulia chapter. Meanwhile, the Justice Department investigation of the Tulia incident is expected to be finished this fall, and the civil rights lawsuits against the sheriff, the undercover policeman, the prosecutor and the county remain pending. And Will Harrell and the Texas ACLU have just opened a new front: Last Friday, the group asked Texas Attorney General to investigate whether the events in Tulia are part of a larger pattern of racial profiling and civil rights abuses by Texas regional narcotics task forces. Using the Tulia bust as exhibit number one, the Texas ACLU argued in its filing that the task forces target poor minority communities to supply arrest numbers that will garner them greater grant funding. The behavior of the drug task forces suggests a "larger pattern of discrimination by Texas Regional Narcotics Task Forces across the state," said the ACLU. The Attorney General's office is reviewing the petition, officials said. The struggle continues, said FOJ's Kiker, but something has changed. "When you see representatives of the Hispanic community, the African-American community, the criminal justice community and the Texas ACLU in particular, and the religious community, when you see all of those people coming together to address the same concern, the racist dimension of the war on drugs, then you get a sense of something going on that's bigger than any individual group, any individual agenda," said Kiker. "We want a system that abused and violated our loved ones to change, not just to get them out of prison, but to ensure that it doesn't happen again. And when all these people come together around this, we are in the middle of something big." (Learn more about the Tulia situation from "Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War," a 23-minute documentary by the Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. Send your check or money order for $20 payable to The William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, to Tulia Video, c/o Sarah Kunstler, 103 16th St., Brooklyn, NY 11215. Proceeds will go to the Tulia 46 Relief Fund. For further information, call (212) 924-6980, visit http://www.kunstler.org or e-mail [email protected] or [email protected]. The video can also be previewed at http://www.soros.org:8080/ramgen/tlc/tulia.rm online.)
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