Final Call: There were some news reports that you had a relationship with one of the defendants, Bobby Brewster. Is this accurate?
Megan Williams: We were just friends. It was nothing like that.
FC: No dating relationship between you and defendant Bobby Brewster?
MW: No. They kicked me in the head with steel toed boots, they hit me in the head with several objects, I remember seeing a knife, and they tried to cut my foot off. They told me that is what they did to Kunta Kinte when they cut his foot off so he couldn’t run and that is what they were going to do to me.
I've been stewing on this moment in the Megan Williams interview ever since I posted about it. Stewing on it because I'm feeling uncomfortable with how it seems she might not be telling the truth about her past with one of the six Logan County, W. VA whites who tortured, raped and stabbed her.
It is on the record that Bobby Brewster was charged and jailed for domestic battery and assault against Megan Williams in July.
That suspect, Bobby R. Brewster, one of six arrested in the torture case, had a previous relationship with the victim and was charged in July with domestic battery and assault after a dispute between them, Sheriff Eddie Hunter said.
Court documents show that on July 18, officers responded to a 911 call concerning a domestic disturbance at the mobile home, where Mr. Brewster, 24, lives with his mother in far southwestern West Virginia. The documents do not make clear who called the police, but when they arrived, the papers say, they asked Mr. Brewster about the young woman, and he said he had not seen her in several days.
Upon searching the premises, though, the officers found her behind the trailer, and she told them she was hiding from Mr. Brewster and his mother. The complaint says the police determined that he had “verbally threatened and physically hit” her.
I can only speculate that Williams' lawyers have advised her to downplay her past with Brewster. Why? Because when people start talking about a possible past relationship, Williams' "poor judgment" or the fact that she passed some bad checks, they also start questioning whether this was really a hate crime and whether the fullest repertoire of charges ought to be brought against the scum of the earth perpetrators. Ellle, PhD summed up the problem in her post about white liberals who are hesitant to support the Jena 6 (via Amp) because of the
unspoken implication that African Americans had to be more than human, had to prove themselves worthy of fair treatment, of justice.
Similarly, when it came out that Williams may have been captive at the Brewsters' for over five weeks, even one of the bloggers who has argued most forcefully for treating the incident as a hate crime started to second guess herself.
So it now appears that what these people did to Williams may have been retaliation for her turning Bobby Brewster in to police for committing domestic battery against her. At least, maybe that’s what instigated it. That’s what’s causing me to believe that this may not have been a hate crime.
The immediate answer to this thinking is that we are talking about gang violence by a group of six whites against a Black woman. Even if it started as a domestic dispute, it stopped being one when the other five perpertrators got involved.
Furthermore a prior relationship and a possible domestic dispute do not disqualify the whites from hate crime charges or make Williams any less deserving of the fullest measure of justice possible. If anything, these possibilities only add to the racial dimensions of the case.
Southern whites have for centuries assumed that that they can violate Black women with impunity. Furthermore, the domestic sphere has long been a point of access to Black women. Writing about the early twentieth century, historian Jacqueline Jones explains:
White men's persistent violation of black women ... served as a backdrop for periodic lynchings throughout the South... A woman or girl found herself in danger of being attacked whenever she walked down a country road---"The poorest type of white man feels at liberty to accost her and follow, and force her." But her employer's home remained the source of her greatest fears. (Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, 150)
But we are talking about more than accosting and forcing. What made these whites go ape shit at Megan Williams? What made them behave with such sadistic brutality? What excited their blood lust?
Jones' history provides some possible answers. The deadly intimacy of whites with Black women is, in Jones' analysis, part of a broader system of political control.
The races remained largely segregated in public pursuits. Yet black women constantly worked in the presence of whites of both sexes and all ages. A black newspaper in Orangeburg, South Carolina, highlighted the irony in 1889. The blackest woman, it noted, can "cook the food for prejudiced throats" and hold "the whitest, cleanest baby," but the angry passions rise when a well-dressed, educated, refined negro pays his own fare and seats himself quietly in a public conveyance." In the end, de jure segregation was a move designed to limit the political power of blacks as a group, rather than to curtail personal contact between members of the two races. (150)
The offense to racist whites is not so much social proximity to Blacks as it is Black assertions of political power. Segregation was not born from aversion but as a means to a political end.
West Virginia's history illustrates the principle of segregation as a method of "limit[ing] political power of blacks as a group, rather than to curtail personal contact between members of the two races."
West Virginia's legal system enforced racial segregation until the start of the 1960s. Laws were passed to ban interracial marriage and the education of black children together with whites. There was even a law requiring birth, death and marriage records for blacks to be kept in separate registers.
But unlike some states, West Virginia's government took an active role in building an alternate society of black institutions. The first publicly funded black school below the Mason-Dixon line was founded in 1866 in West Virginia, and by the start of World War II, the state also had two public colleges, a hospital for the mentally ill, vocational training schools, an orphanage and a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients.
"To tell you the truth, black people were able to do things here they weren't always able to do in other places, particularly the deep South," said Cicero Fain, an assistant history professor at Marshall University.
"But blacks were always aware they were supposed to be second-class citizens," he said. "The state funded these institutions, assisted in establishing them, but never tried to integrate them into the prevailing white power structure."
The state funded institutions for Blacks were used by the state to set pre-defined limits on Black participation in society.
If Bobby Brewster was retaliating against Megan Williams because she filed domestic battery charges against him in July, that just supports Jones' analysis of segregationist attitudes. Part of what may have made the six Logan County whites go ape shit and act like a band of Klansmen was that Williams utilized the legal system to resist white dominance.
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The assertion that Bobby Brewster retaliated against Megan Williams because she used the political (Did you mean to write “legal?”)system to resist white dominance is absurd. Husbands and boy friends charged with domestic battery frequently retaliate against the women who brought the charges. It’s an everday occurence. With interracial marriage and dating on the rise, domestic violence more and more often involves interracial couples.
There are other controvrsial cases that have attracted little attention that seem more clear cut than the Megan Williams case.
Last January, two Knoxville Tennessee residents, college student Channon Christian 21, set to graduate this year and her boyfriend Chris Newsom 23 were minding their own business and going about their own lives when they were carjacked by two black males, Devall Davidson[5] and Letalvis Darnell Cobbins. Just taking Christian’s Toyota 4-Runner wasn’t all these two had in mind, they kidnapped the boyfriend/girlfriend pair and forced Christian and Newsom to accompany them back to their ‘seedy rental house,’ where they then enlisted the help of two others, including a black female named Vanessa Coleman and proceeded to sodomize Chris Newsom in front of Channon before they emasculated him and shot him in the head. He was then “bound and his body wrapped up in bedding and set afire,” prior to being “discarded like trash along nearby railroad tracks.”
A most horrific and unimaginable fate awaited Channon, after being traumatized by seeing her boyfriend raped and executed before her eyes, the three males, Davidson, Cobbins and George Thomas with the assistance of the female Coleman proceeded to subject Channon to a brutal and continuous series of rapes, including sodomy and God knows what else over a period of two days inside that house – they literally tortured her in ways that defy even the most jaded imagination for two days! Later her “battered body was found stuffed in a trash can.”
“Battered” in this case means that she was dismembered so that her corpse would fit neatly into several plastic bags. According to Vanessa Coleman, after they tired of torturing and raping Channon, the men urinated on her, and poured “cleaning chemicals” into her mouth and down her throat in an effort to destroy the physical evidence they had left behind. They then inexplicably cut off her breasts, dismembered her body and threw it in a trash can at the residence.
On September 21, 2007, to cite another case, a 12-year old white girl named Emily Haddock was home sick from school. Four black males broke into her home and shot her in the head numerous times. Her body was found later that same day by her grandfather. Initially the police described the murder scene as “brutal,” but didn’t elaborate. Almost immediately a shroud enveloped the case and any further details have been carefully suppressed.
Blair, I did mean legal. Thanks. I’ve corrected the text accordingly.
I can’t really tell what point you are trying to make by bringing up these other terrible stories of sexual violence, torture and murder.
Are you familiar with the details of the Megan Williams case? There were 6 perpetrators and the torture, stabbing, rape, threats of hanging, burning and more occurred over at least a one week, possibly more than 5 week, period.
My point was that what might have started out as retaliation by a lover escalated into something more or other than that.
I am making an argument about how recognizable misogynistic violence intersects with racist violence. The southern context is significant because of the power dynamics in interracial relationships that have always been a feature of southern society.
What are you trying to say is more or less clear cut about any of these cases??
Ben, ignore Blair. He/she is a non-thinking denalist who just goes from thread to thread reposting the same cut and past no matter what is highlighted.
You can see that same crap that I already buried here: http://www.blackperspective.net/index.php/megan-williams-invisible-black-women-pt2/#comments
Good synthesis on your part all the way around. Blair refuses to answer for how mere domestic violence or rataliation applies to the other 5 that she wasn’t in a relationship with.
Thanks, Yobachi. I’m on to Blair and have seen her/his cut and paste jobs around the blogs covering the Megan Williams story. I’ve got a little more to say about it, which I’ll save for a post coming up soon.
I just noticed you’ve done some first-hand writing about the Gulf Coast, including the MS Gulf Coast. I am going to check it out!
Well, that was a convincing post, this especially: “The immediate answer to this thinking is that we are talking about gang violence by a group of six whites against a Black woman. Even if it started as a domestic dispute, it stopped being one when the other five perpertrators got involved.” That, along with the extreme brutality and humiliation they put her through, is powerful evidence that this was a hate crime.
Initially I felt very strongly that this was a hate crime, then I started second guessing myself as more details trickled out. At this point, with everything I know now, I’m back to thinking that this was definitely a hate crime. I do still think that even though these people are already facing life in prison, hate crime charges should be filed (for all the reasons I’ve already discussed on my blog).
Thanks for this post and the discussion of the real aims of racial segregation. It has given me a lot to think about.
Thanks for your feedback, RR. I continue to think that your initial discussion of the hate crime question is about the best one out there.
I think you may be right that Williams’ lawyers have advised her to downplay her past with Brewster. Why? Because when people start talking about a possible past relationship, Williams’ “poor judgment” or the fact that she passed some bad checks, they also start questioning whether this was really a hate crime and whether the fullest repertoire of charges ought to be brought against the scum of the earth perpetrators. And not just because of the bias involved in the crime.
Unless I missed details elsewhere, the only evident bias – besides the race of each (which proves nada) is Megan’s words. If six defendants deny it, it comes down to hearsay.
And I don’t say this from anything but an observation of a different gangrape case. Because three guys said it was consensual, and she’d previously had a relationship with one of the men, the prosecutor ultimately decided to charge her with filing a false police report.
In that case, the gender bias was obvious in the initial outcome. The judge indicated inconsistencies existed in the stories of BOTH sides…. then ruled against the woman. Had it not been for the prior relationship, it would have been harder to make such a judgment, skewed as it was.
Of course, in Megan’s case, the brutal physical assaults add another major dimension. It obviously can’t be the motive of all 6 as retaliation, since the police were called on just one. So her attorney has to raise the question: if this was not bias, what other possible motivation exists?
People may back up their friends to bully someone, but how many cases can a jury think of where that bullying includes multiple rapes and stabbings?
I believe her, but would a jury or judge find it proven beyond a reasonable doubt?
Even if they don’t, with all the other charges, I should think convictions and maximum sentences are in order. It’s hard to see how the perps can avoid that, unless the bias of the judge and jury adds to her injuries.
Hi Kevin.
I think there actually is evidence of bias. On the most literal level, at least one of the defendants has confessed that racial epithets were used by the perpetrators.
Furthermore forensic evaluations for the sequelae of physical and psychological torture can provide further evidence for the prosecution.
If bias can be proven based on the confessions of some of the defendants, then I would say that the abuse can be judged as racially motivated.
It is also my opinion—though perhaps less likely to fly in court—that these acts of physical and psychological torture are themselves demonstrations of bias. Without a doubt, threats of hanging are no different than nooses. They cannot be separated from their historical meaning.
But I want to say even further that the reason why I am talking about whites going ape shit and white bloodlust for Blacks is that we have to recognize that racial violence has this dimension. I make this assertion from my perspective, as someone who studies the history of mid-twentieth century racial violence in the South. This kind of mind boggling violence against a Black person is eerily familiar to me.
Gang violence by whites against Blacks has often been extra-judicial punishment for perceived affronts to segregationist decorum: registering to vote, buying property, Black men’s interest (or perceived interest) in white women, a lack of adequate deference to whites, pressing charges against whites for their crimes against Blacks, etc. When extra-judicial mob violence rises to the level of execution, it is called lynching. Arguably, Megan Williams has survived a lynching.
Perceived violations, real or imagined, of segregationist decorum make some whites go ape shit. I am not talking about a literal motive (Bobby Brewster was angry at Megan Williams for filing charges against him) so much as I am talking about the psychology of the white torturers. While I think it is unlikely that the psychology of white-on-Black racist violence would be considered in a court of law, it is the best way I can explain why those six whites behaved with such blood thirsty abandon.
Oh, I agree that bias existed. That just one admitted to using ‘N’ and has confessed to the battery and sodomy pretty much wraps it up as a proveable hate crime.
Of course it may be hard to predict prosecutorial competence or jury bias, but on the surface, it looks like the additional charges should stick.