Speaking candidly about race

Shirley Sherrod, God bless her, got into trouble because a lot of antsy people – from President Obama on down in his administration – don’t understand context. They don’t understand nuance. Well, there is a heck of a lot they do not understand, but let me stick with these two.

I believe I know Ms. Sherrod; but I do recall her husband, Charles, from my days as a law student doing anti-death penalty work in rural Georgia and then returning to the area as a national correspondent for The New York Times some years later. He was a founder of SNCC.

As a Columbia University law student assigned as a summer intern to work with the Atlanta-based Team Defense, I was part of a group of mostly Ivy League and mostly white Northerners sent to Dawson, Ga., to try to save the lives of five young black men that even a blind person could see were being railroaded with charges of murdering a white man in a rural general store. We filed all sorts of motions in preparation for hearings and then, if need be, trials. Because Jimmy Carter was president and was making a big deal about human rights, and because Dawson in Terrell County was one of the areas he represented as a state legislator and, arguably, as governor of Georgia, this story went, as would be said today, viral. Literally. Reporters from big news organizations across the U. S. and media from Europe came to look into this human rights abuse in 1977 United States.

Focusing our attentions beyond the hearings that would have to be had, we began researching the names on the list of potential jurors we had been able to obtain. One student and I met a man who had been recommended to us as someone who knew just about everybody in the area. He was a true Southerner; my student colleague was a true Northern fish out of water who just presumed that we had a typical redneck on our hands. But I engaged. I began to talk Southern – about the crops and such. My colleague thought I was nuts. But then came the good stuff.

Our “redneck” went over the list with us and gave us the 411. Then he told a story about learning how to treat black folks. As a boy growing up on a farm, many of his playmates were black kids on the farm. One day, feeling his oats, he called one of them “nigga.” His mama heard that and ordered him onto the porch where she blessed him out, telling him to never be disrespectful like that again. They were “nigras” not “niggas”.

Many people might not see the difference, but the fact that he did and could tell us who on that jury list was most likely to let racist views control the verdict, was what I respected. We would have had a damn good jury had not President Carter’s people pulled strings behind the scenes to assure that the case of the Dawson Five was settled in their favor before we had to go to trial.