Elle, PhD is has ventured to answer Langston’s still prescient question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
If you know about small communities in the South, you know that Jena is not an aberration of racial progress but rather a manifestation of festering tensions that have never gone away. What’s amazing about Elle’s blog post is that it provides outsiders with a chance to hear something about how things are going in one locale, about 100 miles from Jena.
It occurs to me that I am cataloguing, watching, and waiting for shit to explode in my little corner of the world.
Something is going on here in my home region, something created by the nature of race, gender, and class relations here. Everyone is whispering, but no one is talking.
To date:
Precious “Petey” Story, an 18-year old white woman, was murdered in August. The suspected murderers are young black men, one of whom Petey had previously dated.
Shortly thereafter, when the family of a local white girl decided that she was missing, they went to the home of her black ex-boyfriend and demanded entry. She was not there (was later found on her family’s property), but that did not stop her parents from withdrawing her from the local, primarily black high school. They were careful to state that they were not racist, but did not believe in interracial dating.
Over the next couple of days, at least seven other white students withdrew (fewer than 30 were enrolled). When my offended best friend asked one of the white boys about it, he said that his sister confessed to being “afraid” to attend school with so many black boys now. “If one of them tries to date her and she refuses, she’s scared of what he might do to her.”
Really. He said that.
In a neighboring town, four black boys and one white girl checked out of school one day. They “went to one of the boys’ house, located close to the school, where sex occurred between one of the boys and the girl.” They returned to after-school activities and during that time, the girl said she had been raped.
The 14-year-old girl was taken to a local hospital, treated for possible rape, and released to her parents.
A 16-year-old male [was charged] with forcible rape… and placed… in an undisclosed juvenile detention center. He was later released.
…The school district conducted a thorough investigation of the incident and determined that sex occurred, but there was no evidence of a rape. No staff members were notified that a rape had occurred during the school day.
The girl’s parents have removed her from the parish school district.
When Ouachita Christian (you know what “Christian” typically means in the name of a southern school right? k, thx) played the majority black Madison High School in football in September, some parents reported hearing gunshots. Some time later, OCS played the (majority black) high school where my best friend is cheerleading advisor. She sent her girls over to introduce themselves, but the OCS cheerleaders were not allowed to come to their side. The gist of the OCS cheerleading advisor’s explanation? While it was safe for the black cheerleaders to face their crowd, they couldn’t trust the black crowd not to shoot at their cheerleaders.
Believe it or not, this is just half of it. You should go read the whole thing. This isn’t just Louisiana or even just the South. America’s been pretending pretty hard that we’re all done with our race problem.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 5, 2007 at 9:06 am
I have not had a chance to blog about the important AP interview with Megan Williams. Go read it, but also check out the video excerpts from it, below. Megan Williams is articulate and composed. She does not seem at all like she is mentally challenged or “slow,” as has been reported.
No time for further comment just now, so I’ll hand it over to David Neiwert.
I couldn’t help reading this and feeling a chill. It reminded me of the stories people would tell from the lynching era, of anonymous black bodies floating by on local rivers, just so many more uncounted corpses atop the already considerable toll that mounted during those years. And you have to wonder how many cases like this have occurred in which the perpetrators have simply gone uncaught, because the disappearances were simply shrugged off.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 25, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I want to thank pdxWoman for exposing the falsehoods of Blair, who commented on my recent post on Megan Williams as well as on one of pdxWoman’s. pdxWoman was writing about underreporting of the Megan Williams case and of other cases of violence against and abductions of Black women; I was writing about the history white violence against Black women in domestic settings and why whites sometimes go ape shit and show blood lust for Blacks.
To pdxWoman, Blair wrote:
Now that interracial dating and marraige [sic] is not uncommon, more and more spousal abuse cases involve interracial couples. It appears that the Megan Williams case is turning out to be a case of domestic violence rather than a hate crime.
Bobby R. Brewster, one of six arrested in the case, had a relationship with the victin, He was charged in July with domestic battery and assault after a dispute between them. It appears that this is the motivation for the subsequent attack on Williams. All too often, husbands and boyfriends arrested for battering their spouses or girl friends often retaliate with the victims call the police.
Blair wrote a very similar passage on my blog, using many of the same phrases and formulations as above. As supporting evidence, on both pdxWoman and Hungry Blues, Blair made a lengthy, detailed description of Black violence against whites in the murders of Chanon Christian and Chris Newsom. I also heard from Yobachi that Blair made a similar comment on one of his Megan Williams posts.
Problem is that Blair’s version of what happened to Christian and Newsom rehearses white supremacist distortions of the case, to suggest it was an example of racially motivated, Black-on-white crime. pdxWoman found an SPLC article that explains:
On the night of Jan. 6, Knoxville, Tenn., couple Christopher Newsom, 23, and Channon Christian, 21, drove to a friend’s house to watch a movie after a dinner date. When they reached the friend’s apartment complex, they were carjacked at gunpoint by three men and a woman who forced them to drive to an abandoned house where the assailants raped and murdered the young couple. The next day, police discovered Newsom’s body shot and burned along city train tracks. Three days after that, officers discovered the body of Christian in an unoccupied house. She had been strangled and crammed into a garbage can.
Knoxville-area television stations and newspapers have covered the story heavily since the bodies were found. On the national media level, The Associated Press and MSNBC reported on the murders shortly after they occurred. But starting in April, a loud and growing throng of white supremacists began protesting what they call a conspiratorial media blackout, owing, they claim, to the fact that Newsom and Christian were white and their alleged killers black….
Attempting to capitalize on the propaganda value of a gruesome crime, white supremacists have flooded the Internet and radio waves with false details concerning the purported sexual mutilation of the victims and held a rally in Knoxville to protest “black crime.” Their lies – that the murders were a race-based attack and that the victims were horribly mutilated -are gaining traction. Without acknowledging the source, some mainstream conservative commentators in recent months have been parroting the key white supremacist talking point, characterizing the Christian-Newsom murders as a black-on-white “hate crime.”
It’s an old pattern with the Klan and these other extremist types. The get themselves and others all into a frenzy with their fantasies about dangerous Blacks, when in fact there are whites really doing the stuff they imagine Blacks might be doing.
Think back to the Klan’s 1964 torture and murder of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, two Black teens from Franklin County, MS. James Ford Seale, who in June was convicted for his involvement in the murders, and the other Klansmen involved, tortured Dee and Moore to extract information about supposed Black Muslim gun runners who, some feared, were bringing weapons into Franklin County. Though there were Blacks who defended themselves with guns and other means, Dee and Moore do not seem to have been involved, and there has yet to be any evidence of Blacks moving weapons into the county.
But the right wing rumor mill had been long at work. Since at least 1961 white supremacist government officials from throughout the South and beyond had been spreading rumors of a Black Muslim threat to the Southern way of life.
On June 4, 1961 Garland Lyell, Assistant Attorney General of Mississippi; Gwin Cole, Assistant Director of the Bureau of Identification, Mississippi Highway Patrol; Investigator DB Crockett, Identification Bureau, Mississippi Highway Patrol; and AL Hopkins, Investigator, MS Sovereignty Commission went to Atlanta, GA “for the purposes of attending a confidential meeting of state officials from several southern and western states.”
The purpose of this meeting was to establish better communications between the various states and to familiarize those present with past and current activities of Communistic, Socialistic, Subversive and Agitative individuals.
According to AL Hopkins, 11 states were represented at this meeting.
The delegates from Mississippi and the other states were welcomed by Major Harold Burson of the Georgia Dept of Public Safety and Lt. Col. Lowell Conner of the same dept.; Major Delmar Jones, Director of the Georgia Bureau of Identification; Captain BG Ragsdale, Asst. Dir. of GBI; and Special Agent Arthur L. Hutchins, GBI.
Presiding over the meeting was Lt. HA Poole, Security Division, GBI.
Lt. Poole stated that the purpose of the meeting was not to discuss the racial issue alone but to work out the best method of combatting any subversive acts and especially to discuss “The Muslim Cult,” “Communism,” and the “Freedom Riders.”
This is undoubtedly the most vicious organization in existence today and a real threat to the sovereignty of all states. They advocate violence and it is well known that they will unhesitatingly kill a suspected informant and that a great number of the members of have criminal records.
I can’t say whether Blair is like the government propagandists or like the Klansmen whose anxieties they cultivated—whether s/he is playing or being played. But either way, trading in these kinds of racist fantasies is trading in methods of inciting violence against Blacks and others. Blair, consider yourself banned from this site.
For more analysis on how these right wing distortions of Black-on-white violence confuse discussions of hate crimes, see David Neiwert’s post, Hate crimes: Muddying the waters.
For all interested parties Blair’s IP info; it appears s/he is a Netscape employee:
OrgName: Netscape Communications Corp.
OrgID: NSCP
Address: 501 E. Middlefield
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: USNetRange: 207.200.64.0 - 207.200.127.255
CIDR: 207.200.64.0/18
NetName: NETSCAPE-CIDR
NetHandle: NET-207-200-64-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.NETSCAPE.COM
NameServer: NS2.NETSCAPE.COM
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1996-09-06
Updated: 2001-03-28RTechHandle: AOL-NOC-ARIN
RTechName: America Online, Inc.
RTechPhone: +1-703-265-4670
RTechEmail: domains@aol.net
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 24, 2007 at 6:22 pm
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.
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.
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.
Megan Williams (MW): When I first went up there, a girl I knew named Christa, she took me up there, she said we were going to a party.
FC: When Christa took you there (the trailer home in Big Creek in Logan County) what did she do?
MW: She said she had to make a run and she would be right back. She didn’t come back.
FC: Do you believe Christa was involved in arranging this?
MW: (Nodding.)
Carmen Williams (CW): Yes, it was a setup, she left her there. When Megan was in the hospital, Christa called and I answered the phone. Christa was asking, ‘how is my friend?’ I told her that she wasn’t a friend of Megan’s because she left her. Christa then hung up the phone. We have not seen or heard from Christa since that time.
The police investigators say they are trying to locate her for an interview, but have not been able to find her.
Megan Williams also insists that she did not have a romantic relationship with Bobby Brewster, despite the many allusions to a “prior relationship” in news reports.
FC: There were some news reports that you had a relationship with one of the defendants, Bobby Brewster. Is this accurate?
MW: 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.
FC: When exactly was this?
MW: It was like in August. When she (Christa) dropped me off up there, that’s when they started beating on me, and calling me names. When they were hitting me and stabbing me, they called me n—-r, they said ‘this is what we do to n—-rs up here’ and they said they were going to kill me.
Throughout the interview, Megan Williams makes numerous references to the 6 whites’ use of racial epithets that did not come out in her original statement to the police. She also describes a scene in which she it seems she was being treated purposely like a slave.
They made me pick green beans out of the garden, they made these switches into a braid and they were whipping me as I was picking the greens. They made me pick weeds out of the garden and they were calling me n—-r and said they were going to take me out to a creek and cut my throat and throw me in a river. All I was saying is I wanted to get back to my mom, and they were like, ‘you ain’t ever going to see your mom ever, ever again, never.’ I wanted to get back home so bad.
Similarly, Ms. Williams says the 6 whites made her sleep in the shed outside the trailer home because she is Black.
They told me there were no n—-rs allowed in the trailer.
And she describes the threats of hanging more vividly than before.
I just wanted to get away. I asked one of them if they could let me go, they said no because ‘ain’t no n—-rs allowed up here,’ and they were going to kill me. One day, I was asleep in the room, one of them came in and was kicking me and said ‘hey n—-r, we got a noose out there for you, want to come look at it? We’re going to hang you, come on.’ I got really scared. I just wanted to get out of there. I was fighting for my life.
Do we still think this wasn’t a hate crime? The state government, and, if possible, the federal government must address the racial dimensions of this case.
In the comments, Cherise asked “Does anyone know if there has been any funding put into place to help with her medical bills, or therapy needs she may have?” Universalwriter replied that Chase Bank has set up a trust fund for Megan Williams. Universalwriter has set up a website providing ongoing coverage of the Megan Williams case and has posted the info on how to donate:
A TRUST FUND has been set up by Chase Bank for Megan Williams
A spokeswoman for Chase Bank said that donations to the trust fund
for Megan can be made at any Chase Bank.
The donations can also be mailed to:
Welana Megan Williams Trust Fund Donation Account
707 Virginia St. E.
Charleston, WV 25301.
Imagine, if you could even think of the horrific situation, where a 20 year old “pretty white woman” was abducted by six black men and women, raped, stabbed, made to eat rat droppings, drink from a toilet, threatened with death if she tried to escape and tortured for around a week.Imagine, not only what living hell that poor woman went through, but also the fact that she was still undergoing treatment for her injuries around a month later. Imagine the 24 hour outrage on the cable news, the papers, every caring human being, not to mention the outrage by the racist people who would be decrying this, “the culture that promotes animals like this”, how this was a hate crime and the potential revenge for these horrific acts.
Imagine that the suspects all had prior arrests and records for prior crimes, including one who was arrested for murder of an 84 year old woman but pled to a lesser charge of manslaughter. We would hear about this for months, and we would all know her name, the suspects names, backgrounds and every little development in her treatment, the case and the potential blowback to the community….
When was the last time that a missing “non-white” woman was reported as missing for more than a few minute segment? What kind of coverage would a story like this get if Ms. Williams was a “pretty white woman”? And whose family has lots of money?
The mainstream media doesn’t cover disappearances of Black women, but Deidre does. She has started a blog devoted to the subject: Black and Missing But Not Forgotten.
And yes, that appears to be the same George from All About George and the ever classy and much valued NEGROPhile. George found one of the displays in Oakland, CA.
There is alotofunderstandableoutrage over the decisions of the both the US Attorney and the state prosecutor to not bring hate crime charges against the 6 whites accused of kidnapping, torturing and raping Megan Williams in Logan County, West Virginia.
There seems to be a prevailing assumption that if there is racial bias involved, we are talking hate crime. But “hate crime” is a legal classification with specific criteria. Federal prosecution of hate crimes is under 18 U.S.C. § 245, which
makes it unlawful to willfully injure, intimidate or interfere with any person, or to attempt to do so, by force or threat of force, because of that other person’s race, color, religion or national origin and because of his/her activity as one of the following:
A student at or applicant for admission to a public school or public college
A participant in a benefit, service, privilege, program, facility or activity provided or administered by a state or local government
An applicant for private or state employment; a private or state employee; a member or applicant for membership in a labor organization or hiring hall; or an applicant for employment through an employment agency, labor organization or hiring hall
A juror or prospective juror in state court
A traveler or user of a facility of interstate commerce or common carrier
A patron of a public accommodation or place of exhibition or entertainment, including hotels, motels, restaurants, lunchrooms, bars, gas stations, theaters, concert halls, sports arenas or stadiums.
Federal prosecution for hate crimes requires two key ingredients: bias as a motive and federally protected activities. In my book, the racial motive of the perpetrators is undeniable—but the crimes against Megan Williams do not involve any of the federally protected activities, so federal hate crimes prosecution is not possible.
But at the state level hate crime charges are a different matter. West Virginia’s hate crime statute, W. Va. Code §61-6-21, has three criteria. Raging Red explains:
To decide whether or not to charge the six defendants under the hate crime statute, the prosecutor will look at the elements of the crime, which can be broken down as follows:
willful use of force or threat of force
that attempts to or does injure, intimidate, interfere with, oppress, or threaten a person’s free exercise or enjoyment of a secured right or privilege
motivated by the person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, or sex
The first element is straightforward and is clearly present in the case of Megan Williams.
The second element requires that the force or threat of force was used in an attempt to prevent someone from exercising a right or privilege guaranteed to them by state law, federal law, the West Virginia Constitution, or the U.S. Constitution. This element is simple to meet, because the hate crime statute itself is a state law that guarantees people the right to be free from violence or threats of violence because of their race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, or sex.
The third element is the bias element. Nothing in the statute indicates that the crime must be solely motivated by bias or even primarily motivated by bias, just that the crime was committed against that person “because of” one of the listed characteristics. (Note that sexual orientation is not included in that list.)
Were the crimes against Megan Williams motivated at least in part by her race? In my opinion, there’s plenty of evidence from which a jury could conclude that yes, what those six people did to Williams was done at least in part because of her race.
So at the state level the prosecutor absolutely should charge the 6 alleged perpetrators with hate crimes. Raging Red tears down the common rationales for not charging the defendants with hate crimes.
[W]hat’s the point of having a hate crime statute if you’re not going to use it? The maximum penalty under WV’s hate crime law is ten years, so does that mean a prosecutor would never charge someone with a hate crime if they were already charged with a crime that carries a stiffer penalty? The purpose of charging someone with a hate crime isn’t just the penalty imposed — it has symbolic value.
In our criminal justice system, it’s very common for people to be charged with multiple crimes that carry sentences of varying lengths, even when one or more of those crimes already carries a life sentence. Courts sometimes impose consecutive life sentences, which is merely symbolic — a person can’t actually serve more than one life sentence. But courts do it because the community wants to impose a punishment for every act a person commits and every victim he harms. (There are practical reasons to do it too — if a conviction is overturned or a sentence is reduced on appeal, the other convictions and sentences are still in place.)
In the past couple of days, I have heard various reasons that hate crime charges may not be appropriate in this case:
She apparently knew at least one of the six people before this crime occurred.
I don’t find any of those reasons compelling. I’ve covered the third one already. As for the others, the fact that the victim knows the perpetrator does not negate the possibility that it’s a hate crime. I can see how it might be a factor that a prosecutor would consider in determining whether to file hate crime charges, but it alone doesn’t rule out the possibility. Whether she went to the mobile home of her own free will or not is irrelevant.
I’m with Raging Red: you have to call it what it is. The legal system can and should use the tools that it has to advance public understanding of race and gender in this case. The Megan Williams story, like the Jena story, exposes old-style racism that Americans like to pretend is a thing of the past. The two stories are not so much anomalies as they are evidence that the past is still very much with us—and is not even past.
In my next post on the Megan Williams case, I will discuss race and gender issues from cultural and historical perspectives that are unlikely to be addressed in court, even under the best of circumstances. I will also address some of the reservations that some people, including Raging Red, have been having hate crime charges since it came out that Williams was on the Brewster premises for over four weeks and may not have been there against her will—at first.
When I was reading Daisy’s post about Pfc. LaVena Johnson, I got stuck on one of the details. The indications of possible rape and other physical violence and murder all were troubling enough. But then there was this one detail (originally posted by Anne):
Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire
I immediately hear Billy Holiday:
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
I wouldn’t necessarily think I should share this association as something for public consideration, except that I am also remembering something I first learned about on David Neiwert’s blog: the military has become infested with Neo-Nazis.
According to a devastating Southern Poverty Law Center report (echoed in the New York Times), it’s happening at an alarming rate. And it’s happening because of the way the military is being handled at the very top:
Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel — a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division — large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world’s best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.Neo-Nazis “stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they’re inside, and they are hard-core,” Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. “We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” he added. “That’s a problem.”The armed forces are supposed to be a model of racial equality. American soldiers are supposed to be defenders of democracy. Neo-Nazis represent the opposite of these ideals. They dream of race war and revolution, and their motivations for enlisting are often quite different than serving their country.”Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture,” Fain said. “We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes.”
The problem, as the report explains, is the extreme pressure military recruiters are now under to fill their recruitment quotas:
Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority. “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members,” said Department of Defense investigator Barfield.”Last year, for the first time, they didn’t make their recruiting goals. They don’t want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists.”Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. “Only two have been discharged,” he said. Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states — Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Ga.; and Camp Pendleton, Calif. “They’re communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military,” Barfield said. “Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq.”
Okay, now back to Billy Holiday.The “sudden smell of burning flesh” ought to be as evocative of lynching as the nooses in Jena, LA. Lynching, after all, is extra-judicial execution of an accused person, usually Black, and it often involved burning the victims and otherwise mutilating them. Lynching does not need to involve a noose at all. In some cases, the lynch rope was only a means of displaying an already dead body. A google images search on “lynching” will get you a number of infamous photos of burning or burnt Black bodies (I’m not linking them).I am not claiming that LaVena Johnson was lynched. But indications that someone attempted to set her body on fire should raise our suspicion levels about the nature of this crime, just as we would be further alarmed if there had been a noose involved.Should I be connecting the dots this way? I don’t know, but it is a possibility that will beg investigation until the military stops stonewalling LaVena Johnson’s father and makes a commitment to uncover the truth and seek justice.Back to David Neiwert:
To what extent, really, does the spread of white-supremacist attitudes in the military bring about atrocities like the recent murder of a 14-year-old girl and her family, or the Haditha massacre? It isn’t hard to see, after all, attitudes about the disposability of nonwhite races rearing their ugly head in those incidents.The larger political question, however, is a matter of accountability — the avoidance of which has proven to be the Bush administration’s most remarkable skill. Yet at some point, both the public and the military are going to have to ask: What is this administration doing to our armed forces?
Thus, the fact that I didn’t know, makes me instantly suspicious.
Private First Class LaVena Johnson, died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005. The first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq, she was only nineteen years old.
Dr. John Johnson, Lavena’s father, was initially told by an Army representative, that his daughter “died of self-inflicted, noncombat injuries,” but initially added that it was not a suicide. The subsequent Army investigation reversed this finding and declared LaVena’s death a suicide, a finding refuted by the soldier’s family. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dr. Johnson pointed to indications that his daughter had endured a physical struggle before she died – two loose front teeth, a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home – suggesting that “someone might have punched her in the mouth.”
News 4’s Matt Sczesny took a close look at the evidence gathered by the military and asks the question, “was it murder or suicide?”
Among the thousands of graves at Jefferson Barracks cemetery there are stories of bravery, heroism, and proud service.
Among the thousands is the grave of Private Lavena Johnson, whose story is clouded in mystery and according to her parents, marred by murder and cover-up.
Lavena’s father, Dr. John Johnson, has waged his own personal crusade to find out what really happened to his daughter in Iraq on July 19, 2005.
The army ruled her death a suicide, the victim of a gunshot wound to the head.
In documents and autopsy photos obtained by the Johnson family and shared with News 4, more questions are raised than answered.
One strange fact was that Lavena was apparently abused, physically, and the autopsy didn’t address the physical trauma to her body.
Military documents also show no apparent indication of suicide, her company commander wrote that Johnson was clearly happy and healthy physically and emotionally, something her mother knew by a phone conversation the day before she died.
Johnson’s parents also question how their daughter at 5’1”, could handle a 40 inch M-16 to kill herself while sitting.
In fact, a military laboratory even concluded that based on a gunshot residue test, Johnson may not have even handled the weapon.
Additionally, Johnson’s military debit card was never found, even though she used it two hours before her death to buy candy.
No bullet was ever found where she died, and a trail of blood is seen in photos outside the tent. Even stranger, it appears as if someone tried to set her body on fire.
So if it wasn’t a suicide as the Army maintains, then how did Lavena Johnson die?
Based on the autopsy photos, her father believes that she was raped.
The military is unconvinced and consider the case closed.
A Pentagon spokesman says that the case was investigated thoroughly and that there is no evidence to reopen.
News 4 tried for weeks to get the Army to say more about the death of Private Johnson, but they’re only response is that the investigation is closed.
Certainly the documents military investigators have gathered seem to say a lot more.
Johnson’s father is now trying to have her body exhumed at Jefferson Barracks to have an independent autopsy performed.”
[Official]documents provided elements of another scenario altogether:
* Indications of physical abuse that went unremarked by the autopsy
* The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death
* Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her
* A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found
* Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire
The Army has resisted calls by Dr. Johnson and by KMOV to reopen its investigation.
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! Why haven’t we heard about LaVena?
… it takes moral outrage, family vocalization, and community involvement to the government, to bring to bear upon the Army to find the truth, to tell the truth, to honor the men and women who put on the uniform to serve their country, says alot about the callousness of this country which saw fit to send these young women and men into a war with a country which has done no aggression against America. No huge outcry has yet come to bear in the case of LaVena. There are no loud chorus of voices demanding that the military be held accountable for their actions, or lack thereof in the mishandling of this young woman’s case. Anyone, and everyone, can and should, speak for her. It may seem that the comparision between the cases of LaVena Johnson and Pat Tillman may seem unrelated, but both cases are the same. In both cases, the death of a young soldier in a dangerous place, in an unjustly declared rogue war, was not explained to the families they left behind, the families that gave them up to go halfway around the world to fight a war for oil, to put their lives on the line for those of us here in America. The Army should not be so cold and heartless in how it disregards its soldiers. It is not too much to ask that the Army take into consideration all evidence of this young woman’s death. (The attempt to set her body on fire; the trail of blood found outside of her living area.) That her family has many unanswered questions surrounding her death, and the inept handling of Lavena’s case (judging by the evidence left at the scene of her death )by the military, speaks volumes to military injustice in how it treats, or rather, mistreats its soldiers.
Please do not let this young soldier’s death be in vain. She took it upon herself to serve her country, with honor. Let her be honored by not letting her story fall into silence.
1. Sign the online petition to the Armed Services Committees in Congress asking them to direct the Army to reinvestigate the death of LaVena Johnson.
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
From the blog 
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