Mississippi judge delivers powerful speech on state's history of race violence

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/mississippi-judge-carlton-reeves-speech-racial-violence

Version 0 of 1.

An “infatuation with lynchings” continues to haunt and torment America’s deep south, a Mississippi judge declared in an emotional courtroom speech that placed the crimes of three young white men in context for a nation preoccupied with racial issues and the flaws of the justice system.

Related: Nine white Mississippi teenagers plotted race attacks that led to murder

District judge Carlton Reeves, one of only two African American federal judges in Mississippi’s history, read a lengthy speech last week that wove the 2011 murder of James Craig Anderson for which the three men were being sentenced into a story of what he said amounted to a 21st-century “version of the nigger hunts” that terrorized black people throughout the Jim Crow era of segregation.

Delivered within a week of an FBI investigation into a 1946 mass lynching, FBI director James Comey’s remarks that racism is the “cultural inheritance” of Americans, and a nonprofit report that found lynchings were far more widespread than originally thought, Reeves’s speech has found a second life online.

The judge spoke of a “savagery” in the deep south’s past that scarred the US first through slavery and then the “carnival-like” lynchings that became “public events” after the civil war and well into the 20th century.

“How could hate, fear or whatever it was transform genteel, God-fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and sadistic torturers?” Reeves asked.

Hate comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and from this case, we know it comes in different sexes and ages. A toxic mix of alcohol, foolishness and unadulterated hatred caused these young people to resurrect the nightmarish specter of lynchings and lynch mobs from the Mississippi we long to forget.

Like the marauders of ages past, these young folk conspired, planned and coordinated a plan of attack on certain neighborhoods in the city of Jackson for the sole purpose of harassing, terrorizing, physically assaulting and causing bodily injury to black folk. They punched and kicked them about their bodies – their heads, their faces. They prowled. They came ready to hurt. They used dangerous weapons, they targeted the weak, they recruited and encouraged others to join in the coordinated chaos, and they boasted about their shameful activity.

Reeves was unsparing about the defendants’ actions in the death of James Craig Anderson, which were captured by a security camera from a building overlooking the Jackson parking lot. A gang of seven beat the 49-year-old on to the pavement, shouted “White power!” and then ran him over with a pickup truck, killing him.

During the trial, prosecutors said the 10 young people from a nearby suburban area drove into the poorer, predominantly black town of Jackson to assault black people late at night, often targeting the homeless or the intoxicated in the hopes that such people would be less likely to report crimes to the police. Prosecutors said the teens not only beat victims but also used beer bottles and metal projectiles flung from slingshots.

Related: FBI investigates claim suspects in 1946 Georgia mass lynching may be alive

Nor was Anderson the only victim of a band of white people such as the one that raided the town of Jackson in 2011. In addition to the 10 white teenagers who have confessed to that raid, Reeves mentioned a black man attacked and beaten on a golf course so severely that he begged for his life, and a third unidentified victim attacked at a service station.

“Like a lynching, for these young folk going out to ‘Jafrica’” – the teens’ nickname for Jackson – “was like a carnival outing. It was funny to them: an excursion which culminated in the death of innocent,” Reeves said.

Most appalling to the judge was the youth and ordinariness of the attackers.

What is so disturbing, so shocking, so numbing, is that these nigger hunts were perpetrated by our children – students who live among us, educated in our public schools, in our private academies, students who played football lined up on the same side of scrimmage line with black teammates, average students and honor students ... No doubt, they all had loving parents and loving families.

I asked the question earlier, but what could transform these young adults into the violent creatures their victims saw? It was nothing the victims did: they were not championing any cause, political, social, economic – nothing they did, not a wolf whistle, not a supposed crime – nothing they did.

Reeves found cause for hope in the decades of change in a criminal justice system that from police to judges and juries who were once complicit in racially motivated crimes, “operated in ruthless efficiency in upholding what these defendants would call white power”.

Now justice is capable of acting blindly, he said, and “methodically, patiently and deliberately”. But “the sadness of this day also has an element of irony to it,” he said, noting that the justice system now includes African Americans at all levels, working equally with other races: the US marshal, the assistant US attorney working with the prosecutors, the US attorney general, the district judge, even the chief of the federal bureau of prisons.

Related: FBI director says racism not epidemic in police but is 'cultural inheritance' of US

“Today we take another step away from Mississippi’s tortured past. We move farther away from the abyss,” Reeves said. “And those who think they know about her people and her past will also understand that her story has not been completely written. Mississippi has a present and a future. That present and future has promise.”

Reeves sentenced three of the seven defendants last week, and will sentence three more on 25 February.

Deryl Paul Dedmon, who ran over Anderson, was sentenced to 50 years in prison; John Aaron Rice to 18 and a half years; and Dylan Wade Butler to seven years.

Dedmon also received life sentences to two state charges related to the crime in 2012. Anderson’s family asked that Dedmon be spared the death penalty, which they oppose for religious reasons.