Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches From Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America by Calvin Trillin

Author:Calvin Trillin [Trillin, Calvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: African American, Discrimination & Race Relations, History, Minority Studies, Non-Fiction, Social Science
ISBN: 9780399588242
Google: UPVMDAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B018PD0ECM
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-06-27T23:00:00+00:00

“Well, you do the best you can,” the judge replied.

The backers of Lee Otis Johnson maintain that, unlike someone caught with a hundred pounds of marijuana or convicted of armed robbery, Johnson was punished for activities that had nothing to do with the charge in court. But not many people in Houston would find that outrageous or even surprising. When the Houston district attorney, Carol Vance, is asked why he chose to try Johnson’s one-marijuana-cigarette case personally, after having left virtually all other cases to his fifty or so assistants, he replies that Johnson was a dangerous man. “Everyone’s got a right to criticize,” the district attorney has explained. “But when you start trying to encourage people to burn the city, that’s a different matter.” Johnson was never arrested for inciting to riot or for conspiracy to commit arson, but it is now customary in many parts of the country to use the marijuana laws for imprisoning people considered dangerous by district attorneys, whether whatever makes them dangerous is against the law or not. John Sinclair, the leader of an organization called the White Panthers, was convicted in Detroit of possession of two marijuana cigarettes and is now serving a prison sentence of nine and a half to ten years. The Texas Observer, a durable liberal biweekly published in Austin, recently carried an account by Dave Beckwith of the trial of four black students from the University of California at Santa Barbara who were charged with possession of marijuana while traveling through Dallas and were presented to the town as captured black militants. Not long after sentencing two of them to three years in the penitentiary, the judge was quoted by The Dallas Morning News as saying, “We had pretty good reason to believe that they were members of the Black Panther organization, dedicated to the overthrow of the government by revolution, but we couldn’t prove that.”

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