Category: Free the Jackson Five

In America, every accused person is innocent until proven guilty, right? Well, we may profess such lofty thoughts, but the cold reality is that most people believe that if you are in jail, you gotta be guilty of something. Look no further than the way people have reacted to Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., the prime suspect in the Dru Sjodin disappearance. From the very first moment Minnesotans saw him under the glare of television lights, manacled and wearing a faded prison-orange jumpsuit, he was as good as guilty. What’s more, Rodriguez became exhibit A in the argument for bringing back the death penalty to Minnesota. The hysteria surrounding Dru Sjodin graphically illustrates the dangers of publicizing crimes before they’ve been prosecuted, publicly identifying “criminals” before they’ve been convicted of anything.

Dakota County recently created a website identifying who is in the pokey. I am normally a big First Amendment kind of guy, but I think such websites, in the guise of “keeping the public informed,” provide the kind of information that makes a mockery of the notion of presumed innocence.

The website, called the “Dakota County Jail Booking Search,” allows anyone with access to a computer to search the Dakota County jail records to find “anyone that has been booked or is currently in jail.” Now, keep in mind that not only have these individuals not yet been convicted, many have not even made their first appearance before a judge. The DCJBS home page cautions that “information contained herein should not be relied upon for any type of legal action.” Wait, it gets even better. The Dakota County Sheriff’s Office admits that it “cannot represent that the information is current, accurate, or complete. Persons may use false identification information. True identity can only be confirmed through fingerprint comparison.”

So, if the website information should not be relied upon for “any type of legal action” and in fact may be flat out wrong, why in the name of truth, justice, and the American way would any sane organization post it? Dakota County Sheriff Don Gudmundson reportedly believes that it will reduce calls from lawyers, bail bonds workers, and others who want to see if someone is locked up. Chief Deputy Dave Bellows told the Star Tribune, “a lot of people do call to find out if their husband is in jail…we are just trying to make this department a little more user-friendly.”

Which users does Deputy Bellows have in mind? Does he really think that some distraught spouse looking for her husband will get an “I could have had a V-8” moment, pop on to the jail website, and find her Waldo? More likely, the web-site users will not be bail bondsmen and worried wives, but others—like landlords or the habitually nosy. And, given that African Americans and other people of color are disproportionately arrested in this state, this is very scary stuff. According to Robert Sykora, publicizing this information could lead to lost jobs and denied housing. Sykora, a public defender and member of a Minnesota Supreme Court advisory committee looking at Internet access of court records, thinks that easy electronic access to such sensitive information is the start of a very slippery and dangerous slope.

I think Sykora is absolutely right. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the media could not obtain comprehensive FBI “rap sheets” from a central location. Why? Because the court decided that requiring people to physically retrieve this kind of information creates “practical obscurity” that helps to protect privacy.

The jails are filled with the accused, not necessarily the guilty. An arrest is really only a criminal accusation, and to put an accusation online means that the accused have acquired the electronic equivalent of a scarlet A. Even if they are ultimately exonerated, there is a good chance they can be scarred.

If “innocent until proven guilty” has even a ghost of a chance in our web-crazed society, we should accept that there is such a thing as “too much information.” We do not need to make access to arrest records easy. They are merely a starting point for legal action, not an end point, and the web implies that the case is already closed. Arrests should not be allowed to acquire the aura of established legal fact that a listing on the Internet can create.

Until the late sixties, in much of the country, the pigmentation differences between my wife and I would have made us felons had we tried to get married. According to one Virginia judge in 1959, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents.…The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.” When the Supreme Court finally declared the “antimiscegenation” laws unconstitutional in 1967, almost one in three states still had them on the books.

Today, all but the most hardened bigots accept that banning unions based on skin color is unconstitutional and just plain wrong. And yet many of the same people, such as Gov. Tim Pawlenty, use the same tired, illogical argument—that it is morally wrong—to rail against legally sanctioned same-sex unions. The fact that Minnesota already bans same-sex unions is not enough for this governor. He wants to amend the state constitution to make sure that ban remains beyond the reach of Minnesota’s traditionally civil-rights-minded judiciary. Progressive, fair-minded people need to band together to stop him. All Minnesotans should be able to get the legal and social benefits of a legally sanctioned union.

Despite the all the jokes, the married life does have a lot of real advantages. Married people get better insurance rates, preferred income-tax treatment, and a host of other legal benefits. Those who doubt the legal perks of marriage should talk to someone who has ended, either through a breakup or death, a less formal (i.e., living together) arrangement. The surviving half of the nonlegally recognized couple does not have the right to inherit that person’s property, can be legally excluded from participating in the funeral arrangements—the list goes on.

Not surprisingly, many of those who oppose same-sex unions rely heavily on the Bible. Now, I am not anti-Bible—I just believe that using the Bible to justify state-sanctioned discrimination can place one on a very slippery slope. Yes, Leviticus 18:22 states that man “should not lie with mankind, as with womankind: It is abomination.” However, Leviticus also states that a man should not have any contact with a woman while she is “in her period of menstrual uncleanliness”; permits slavery (provided the slaves come from neighboring nations); allows a father to sell his daughter into slavery; and directs believers to kill a neighbor who works on the Sabbath.

Our Founding Fathers wisely relieved us of the burden of deciding whether to kill our neighbors for cutting the grass on Sunday by creating a Constitution that expressly forbids our government from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion.” And that same Constitution also makes it very clear that we are all entitled to equal protection under the law. Now, when one views these two concepts in the context of same-sex unions, then the efforts to ban them become exposed for what they really are—discrimination based on homophobia-fueled religious dogma. Our current Constitution does not tolerate using religious beliefs as a battering ram for bigotry—which is why Tim Pawlenty wants a constitutional amendment to do his dirty work for him.

To paraphrase a bumper sticker, Pawlenty and the religious right need to keep their religion out of our laws. Recent court decisions in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii have held that there is nothing unconstitutional about permitting two human beings of the same sex to join together in a civil union. Whether it is “immoral” is perhaps a religious and personal decision, but it’s not one that should trigger statutory legal prohibitions. Beyond that, one would think that this supposedly “pro-family” governor would want to encourage all people, not just the heterosexual ones, to become part of a committed, monogamous relationship.

Now, I could understand the virulent opposition if churches were being forced to perform gay marriage ceremonies within their own walls. They are not. If the Jerry Falwells of the world want to refuse to permit a gay couple to make a lifelong commitment to each other in their churches—let ’em. The beauty of the religious freedom mandated by the First Amendment is that it keeps government out of their pulpits. It also keeps the religious right from imposing their narrow views of who is worthy of constitutional protection on the rest of us.

Here we go again. A young, white, blond-haired blue-eyed woman is abducted, presumably by some dark-skinned nefarious person. The media play swells into hyper, almost orgiastic über-coverage. The military gets drafted to search for the damsel in distress, and, in the latest round, the governor calls for the death penalty and holds candlelight vigils.

Excuse me if I sound just a little bit cynical about the overwhelming national outpouring of emotional stuff about Dru Sjodin. Yes, the abduction and presumed murder of Sjodin is tragic. However, I cannot shake this deep-seated resentment that wells up inside me whenever I read yet another story about her abduction.

I want to shout in anguish: What about the nameless black women and American Indian women who have been and continue to be stolen, raped and murdered? Do we launch dramatic rescues to save them? Do we send the National Guard looking for them? Does the governor make an impassioned plea to bring back the death penalty because something bad happened to them?

Are you kidding? This is America, where certain lives have a greater value than others.

A good friend of mine told me to be careful about this column. After all, I have a blond-haired, blue-eyed wife. Yes, I do. And I also have a dark-haired, dark-skinned sister and mother. As much as I love my wife, it makes me mad as hell to realize that, in all probability, her abduction would rate more media attention than one of her dark-skinned sisters-in-law.

With our nation’s sordid past of measuring one’s worth based on appearance and ethnicity, why should we expect anything different? The men who wrote our Constitution explicitly held that black people were worth three-fifths of a white person, placing into law what most white people accepted without much thought—that a black life was worth less than a white one.

There is a collective memory that most black people share, at some deep level, of the day-to-day humiliations, of beatings, cross-burnings, and Jim Crow, that even bourgeois black folk cannot completely exorcise. And the goal of the beatings and burnings was to keep the races separate, lest white women be ruined. Ever since we have been in America, we have seen white women held up as a commodity to be protected at all costs, especially from the swarthy men who were most likely to do them harm. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas knew full well what he was doing when he called his confirmation confrontation a high-tech lynching. He knew that black people, regardless of political orientation, would instinctively circle the wagons to keep another brother from being lynched from the tree of sexual impropriety.

Now, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., Sjodin’s alleged abductor, is not a “brother”; however, with his Latino surname and less-than-ivory skin tone, he is close enough for many Minnesotans. Governor Pawlenty has had a year’s worth of criminal mayhem to pick from as the launching pad for his death penalty crusade. Yet this so-called pro-life governor picked the snatching of an attractive Scandinavian princess, and not the murder and/or abduction of a dark-skinned Minnesotan, to bring back the state-sanctioned snuffing of a life. That speaks volumes about whose lives have the most value.

I am sure that some of the more jaded readers are thinking, “There he goes again, playing the race card.” I am upset about Dru Sjodin because it was such a terrible crime. Race had nothing to do with it.

Many readers probably believe that I am race-baiting. OK, name one abduction of a woman of color in Minnesota that led to any of the following—national media coverage, a National Guard search, a gubernatorial press conference complete with a vow to kill sexual predators that prey on the Dru Sjodins of this state.

I am not advocating that we ignore things like the Dru Sjodin abduction. I readily admit that it is newsworthy and it is upsetting when these kinds of crime happen to people. I just want the people who look like Dru Sjodin to be just as concerned and outraged when the people who look like my sister have bad things happen to them. Why is it news only when the victim is white?

Remember those low-budget horror films from the 1950s? Other-worldly music would play, and then a creepy creature would land its spaceship in a swamp in the middle of nowhere, slither out, and tell the first startled Earthling, “Take me to your leader.” Now, as then, we laugh at the idea that there could possibly be “one leader” of anything—unless you’re talking about black people. Sadly, most white people and even a few misguided black ones expect that there must be one, two, or maybe three individuals who speak for all black people. This is a stupid, racist, outmoded view of the world that must be discarded once and for all.

During slavery, “Massa” would often appoint one or two trusted field hands as overseers of the other slaves. Instead of having to interact with many slaves, Massa would simply give the word to the “head nigger in charge,” who would take it from there. For slave owners, who viewed black people as simple-minded chattel, the system made perfect sense. Why deal with fifty to a hundred darkies when one could easily limit contact to a manageable one or two? Underpinning this system were two concepts—first, that the HNIC was selected, not elected. Second, and more important, the HNIC was merely a go-between for the white and black folks. The HNIC could never really serve as an advocate for fellow blacks and sure as hell could not tell the white folks what to do.

Now, many people think things have changed. We have Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice—African-Americans who have risen well above HNIC status. But when it comes to the bread and butter stuff that most of us care about, the impulse to find the HNIC is still pervasive, at least here in Minnesota.

Consider one of the most recent examples—the fallout from the allegation by Stephen Porter that Minneapolis cops sodomized him with a toilet plunger during a drug raid. In the tense days that followed, a number of good ol’ white boys openly questioned who speaks for black folks (in other words, who’s the HNIC) in this town. Mayor R.T. Rybak got publicly sliced and diced at a North Side rally. Referring to Spike Moss and Rev. Randy Staten, he asked aloud, “Who do these people represent?” Rybak probably thought he was asking a legitimate question—who do you speak for? Why should I listen to you? He failed to grasp that, given our country’s shameful racial legacy, any white person asking that question in a racially tinged crisis about black community activists would hit a nerve of deep resentment and distrust. Once again, black folks made Massa mad for failing to have him anoint the next HNIC.

Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow, picking up where Rybak left off, decided that by venturing into what he perceived as hood central, a North Minneapolis barbershop, he could talk with a few brothers and, working on the presumption that all black people think alike, verify who the real HNIC is.

Think about that—imagine me going to an Edina barbershop and telling the locals there the equivalent of, “Hey, white people, take me to your leader.” Who would take me seriously?

I am not trying to beat up—at least not too much—on the well-meaning Doug Grow or our politically challenged mayor. After all, there are those in the African-American community who do believe that we should march in political lockstep. But that doesn’t excuse Rybak. His blundering attempt to find an “authentic voice” of the African-American community is arrogant and unenlightened. I do not think that Spike Moss or Rev. Randy Staten speak for all black people in Minneapolis, any more than I believe Rep. Arlon Lindner (who seriously believed that gays were not persecuted during the Holocaust) speaks for all white Minnesotans.

Hopefully, people like R.T. Rybak will come to understand that they cannot expect to act like Massa on the plantation and talk to one or two trusted HNICs to find out what the field hands are thinking. He, along with the Doug Grows of the world, must learn that African-Americans in this town do not think, talk, or act as one big monolithic block. Bottom line: Y’all ain’t Massa, and we ain’t slaves.

You may shoot me with your words,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
-Maya Angelou

Ever since she toppled incumbent Jackie Cherryhomes in 2001, Minneapolis Fifth Ward council member Natalie Johnson Lee, the council’s lone African-American woman, has continued to rise. She has successfully deflected and deflated those wanting to blow her off-especially the North Side wannabes and has-beens who are bitter that Johnson Lee derailed the Cherryhomes gravy train, and the DFL potentates who mock her as an “Angela Davis with funky hair.”

“These are the same people who said that I could not beat Jackie. They are mad because, through me, people who have been disrespected are getting access,” she told me recently.

Johnson Lee got her “incredible fighting spirit,” as one council member called it, growing up scrappy, black, and working class in Oklahoma City. According to Johnson Lee, a single mother at seventeen, her family taught her that she had “every right to be who I was.” Their motto was “don’t give no shorts [Johnsonspeak for slighting someone] and don’t take no shorts.”

After high school, she landed in Philadelphia and earned a two-year accounting degree. From there, she started working for General Mills, who eventually enticed her to Minnesota. After a stint in the corporate “big house,” as she puts it, Johnson Lee got into employment training jobs, first at the Urban League and then the Employers Association.

When husband Travis failed to unseat DFLer Cherryhomes in 1997, Johnson Lee decided to take up the mantle in 2001 under the Green Party banner. She firmly believes that her husband, who managed her campaign, paved the way for her improbable seventy-six-vote victory margin against the allegedly unbeatable Cherryhomes.

Johnson Lee, who won with little support or respect from old North Side guardians like the Urban League and the black clergy, suddenly had to play nice with people who had actively campaigned against her. She says of her relationships with them, “We’re cool now. We have conversations together.” But the tightness in her voice betrays her knowledge that many in the old guard would knock her off in a hot minute. “Jackie gave them a lot of goodies over the years. They were understandably reluctant to give them up.”

Getting the proper respect is a recurring theme with Johnson Lee. Those who know her on the council say that she can be quick to turn a phrase or a look into a sign of disrespect. Says one of her closest allies, “Disrespecting Natalie is a very bad thing to do. If she senses that people are not taking her seriously, she will get in their face.”

Some well-placed political veterans, such as former council member Lisa McDonald, say this in-your-face approach is just what Minneapolis politicos need. “Natalie is the only one at City Hall shaking it up and rattling cages. What has Don Samuels done besides sit in a tent and go hungry? She sure has [Mayor] R.T. Rybak’s shorts in a bundle.” Still, McDonald believes that Johnson Lee could use more political “savoir faire” instead of sometimes “needlessly pissing people off.”

Some of Johnson Lee’s council colleagues agree with McDonald. One member flatly told me her “stuff is raggedy” and that she relies too heavily on others to do the heavy lifting on tough procedural battles. Johnson Lee counters that she refuses to use Robert’s Rules as a “manipulation tool.” “I can go head to head with the best of them when I need to.”

Yet the criticism, despite Johnson Lee’s tough exterior, stings a little. “The learning curve here has been huge,” she admits. “I’ve had to get used to the backstabbing nature of Minneapolis politics. I’ve had to try to work with people like R.T. Rybak, who thinks he is a great teacher, but is not always very teachable, especially when it comes to black people.” After pausing for a moment, she says, “I make no apologies for who I am and how I serve the people who sent me here. R.T., the old DFL machine, the black preachers-they did not make me and will not define me. I have just as much right to advocate, negotiate, and yes, piss people off-as any other Minneapolis council member. This is my house, too.”

One of my oldest friends, actor Joseph C. Phillips (mayor on CBS’s The District), who grew up black, hopeful, and liberal, but is now African-American, angry, and conservative, recently asked me how I felt about the latest Ward Connerly initiative. Connerly, the black University of California regent who convinced voters to make affirmative action verboten in college admissions, now wants California to banish all racial references from official state records. Joseph liked the idea. I knew, or at least thought I knew, that I did not like the idea, but told him I needed to mull it over for a few days to figure out why.

Meanwhile, I chanced across an article about Anatole Broyard, a New York Times book reviewer who spent forty years passing as a white man. Broyard, who died in 1990 without ever telling his children who he really was, left a rich legacy of literary criticism. According to one of Broyard’s close friends, Broyard believed he could not simultaneously be an “aesthete” and a Negro. Harvard scholar Henry Gates said that Broyard “did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be black, but…has anyone ever seen such a thing?”

My musings about Connerly and Broyard took place against the backdrop of the March on Washington’s fortieth anniversary. I heard Martin Luther King’s classic words replayed many times that week: “…an America where my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” What do King’s words mean now, in the context of Ward Connerly’s latest crusade? Do they place Broyard’s deceptions in a more sympathetic light?

I think King envisioned an America where race would be acknowledged as part of who one is, not as a criterion by which to measure what someone is worth. But the America in which Martin Luther King and Anatole Broyard came to manhood contained many reminders of the direct correlation between race and value. Almost everything associated with black people—from the schools we attended to the jobs we held—was inferior. Remember the scene in the film Malcolm X, when a white teacher told him that being a lawyer was not a “proper job for a nigger”? “Now Malcolm,” he said in a very kind voice, “you are good with your hands… you should be a carpenter. After all, Jesus was a carpenter…”

Broyard had, as we would say now, “trust issues” with America. He did not trust that the land of his birth would judge him solely by the “content of his character” and did not believe that he could transcend race. So he decided to hide his race to give his talent room to soar.

Reflecting on Anatole Broyard made it clear to me why I do not like Connerly’s idea. Quite simply, I do not trust that the people who run our bureaucracies—and let’s be real, it is still primarily white folks—will do the right thing.

Collecting racial information provides the statistical firepower to know, for example, that African-American motorists are far more likely to be stopped by the police, for “driving while black.” Racial statistics have been the smoking gun in housing discrimination lawsuits, damning proof of funding disparities for all sorts of stuff, and the basis for just about every social service decision ever made. To stop collecting this information because the Ward Connerlys of the world believe that we have reached some racial utopia would be stupidity of nearly criminal proportions. Our society has yet to demonstrate that it can be trusted to treat all its citizens equally without the accountability that this information helps to provide.

Sadly, Broyard felt that his only option for addressing this mistrust of the society white folks built was to fold himself into the very ranks of those who built the racist walls that trapped him. For better or worse, collecting racial data is another, less personally destructive way of doing the same thing. We simply cannot make the leap to the world King dreamed of on that bright summer day so full of hope forty years ago, without keeping track of who’s who.

What do the Episcopal Church and Kobe Bryant have in common? Both are being forced to face the consequences of earlier moral commitments that may take them to places they never wanted to go. For the Episcopal Church, the initial commitment was to social equality. For Kobe, it was marital fidelity. Next year at this time, the Episcopalians may be splintered into several factions, and Kobe could be on permanent loan to the Colorado penal system. Like most conundrums, by the time the shouting started, it really was too little too late, because the ending was ordained by the beginning.

The Episcopal Church has historically helped lead the spiritual charge for social change. When Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Selma, Episcopal clergy were right alongside him. When women demanded a more authoritative voice in mainstream churches, the Episcopal Church was among the first, albeit reluctantly, to hear their cry. It was not surprising that the Episcopalians were also among the first to accept openly gay people as leaders in their church.

And so, in Minneapolis on August 6, the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. confirmed the openly gay Rev. Gene Robinson as a bishop. The historic vote, hailed variously as a “calling by God” or the beginning of the apocalypse (hey, in a metaphysical way, isn’t that the same thing?), the Episcopalians made the front page of every newspaper in America. Strangely enough, nearly everyone acted as though the vote caught them by surprise. Considering the past forty years of Episcopal commitment to equality and basic human nature, this decision was a foregone conclusion.

Can an organization make a commitment to equality for all (as the Episcopalians say they do), and then deny equal access to its entry-level management position (priest)? Well, enough church members did not think so, and admitted openly gay people like Robinson into its divinity schools, knowing that eventually, they would want to be priests. And once they became priests, they would want all the perquisites that come with the job—including the chance to move up the food chain.

How does this have any possible connection with hoopster Kobe Bryant? Think about it: Kobe, like the Episcopal Church, also made a commitment, one that involved the words “honor” and “forsaking all others.” Once he made that commitment, he certainly knew that most people, especially his wife and the companies who paid him millions to hawk their stuff, expected him to keep it. He’s not married to his sponsors, but they’re certainly married to a reputable image of him; that’s why they pay the big bucks.

Yes, basketball made Kobe a prosperous sports star, but what made him really famous and really, really rich were his endorsements. The Nikes of the world realize that being tight with a clean-living good guy makes you look like a good guy, too. And Kobe, unlike the Dennis Rodmans of sportsdom, epitomized clean living. He spoke Italian, had a drop-dead-gorgeous wife, and boycotted the after-game parties where his teammates consumed booze and women with equal gusto.

Therefore, once Kobe made his decision (or more likely, continued to make his decision) to trash his commitment, there were several possible consequences. Some were immediate, such as sexual gratification. Others—for example, disease, pregnancy, divorce, scandal, loss of endorsements—were only possibilities and, Kobe apparently thought, worth the risk.

What is the lesson learned from these two summer headline grabbers? First, publicly committing to high ideals creates the entirely reasonable expectation that one will live by them, too. In other words, when the Episcopal Church says, as it does on its official website, that its mission is to “restore all people to unity with God,” then does it have any choice but to make its priesthood (and higher positions such as bishop) accessible without regard to how gay is too gay? And when Kobe promised to forsake all others, and then made that commitment an integral part of a public image worth millions, can he honestly be surprised when his fans and his corporate sponsors drop him like a used jock strap?

This brings us to the most important lesson of the past six weeks. One should never forget when making a commitment—either to treating every person the same or being intimate with just one—that keeping it can be just as costly as breaking it.

“Equal justice under law.” These words, emblazoned over the entrance to the United States Supreme Court in Washington, really represent the “bottom line” of our court system. No matter who you are—Joe Blow or Joe Biernat—if you do the crime, you should get the same time.

In unguarded moments, however, lawyers will tell you what they want is not equal justice but justice for their client. They want to win. And the good trial lawyers know that trials are won or lost during jury selection. If you don’t believe them, just ask O.J. Simpson. His “Dream Team” spent big money to figure out what the ideal jury would look like and did everything they possibly could to get it.

The preemptory challenge or “strike” is the weapon lawyers use to terminate jurors they do not want. Lawyers can strike a juror for almost any reason—except race. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, racially based juror strikes are unconstitutional because they violate a defendant’s right to a bias-free jury and also violate a prospective juror’s right to participate in jury service. If a judge suspects that a lawyer is trying to get rid of a potential juror because of race, then the judge must give the lawyer a chance to produce a “race-neutral” reason for canning the juror. If the judge thinks the reason is bogus, the juror stays.

This is precisely what Judge Harry Crump did in The State of Minnesota v. Reiners. Judge Crump, who quickly realized that the lawyers defending a white man accused of assaulting a Latino man were trying to keep a black woman off the jury simply because she was black, refused to be duped by their flimsy subterfuge. He kept her on the jury. Unfortunately, five of the seven Minnesota Supremes said Judge Crump was wrong, even though they tacitly conceded that the defendant’s “race-neutral” reason was bunk. Justice Alan Page, the court’s lone African-American, offered a well-reasoned dissent (in which he was courageously joined by Justice Russell Anderson), bitterly explaining why, for people of color, “equal justice under law” remains an elusive goal in our justice system.

Cecil John Reiners was charged with first-degree assault after he fractured Jose Padilla’s skull with a two-by-four because he spoke Spanish to one of Reiners’s employees. Reiners’s defense counsel quickly struck an African-American woman whose dad was a former cop. The prosecutors argued that Reiners’s defense lawyers were simply trying to camouflage the real reason for removing her—the color of her skin. Judge Crump was not bamboozled and told the lawyers, “I am going to deny the strike. Keep her on.” Reiners was convicted and sentenced to 91 months in prison.

Normally, appellate courts accept the trial judge’s decision (or in judgespeak, give them “great deference”) on matters such as jury selection, because, after all, he or she is the person who saw the show and knows where the bodies are buried. Instead, the Minnesota Supreme Court, sitting miles and months removed from the Reiners trial, and ignoring reams of judicial precedent, dissed Judge Crump. The court said that once Reiners’s lawyers gave a so-called race-neutral reason for striking the African-American juror, it did not matter if the reason was not “persuasive or even plausible.” In other words, as long as Reiners made up some excuse, even if everyone knew it was bull, that was good enough for Minnesota’s highest court. From there, it was easy for the court to throw out his conviction, because a “tainted” jury rendered it, and to grant Reiners a new trial.

Justice Page’s blistering words cleanly exposed the racist hypocrisy of the supreme court’s decision. “Today’s decision highlights an extremely troublesome trend emerging from this court, one that evinces a hostility towards jurors of color.” Page noted that the Minnesota Supreme Court never second-guessed a trial judge’s call on racially tainted jury strikes until the defendant was white and the victim was not. “It is beyond ironic that, in this case with its Caucasian defendant…we decline to give the trial court any deference whatsoever.”

Justice Page said from the bench what most black and brown folks in the streets have always known—that when it comes to justice, there are two flavors. White people are far more likely to get one and the rest of us get another. And, as long the our state’s highest court issues decisions like State v. Reiners, that ain’t gonna change anytime soon.

Pitching great Satchel Paige used to tell his teammates to never look back, “because something may be gaining on you.” This is great advice, especially if you are R.T. Rybak and Don Samuels is the guy gaining on you. Why? Because key Minneapolis political insiders increasingly view Mayor Rybak as a “sound bite” schmoozer and Don Samuels as a real leader.

One City Hall wag told me that the mayor has never met a side of a political issue he doesn’t like. When Rybak ran against two-time incumbent Sharon Sayles-Belton, he portrayed himself as a grassroots leader diametrically opposed to subsidizing fat cats like Target and Carl Pohlad. During an MPR debate, Rybak unequivocally said no to any public stadium funding. Then, six months after using the stadium-funding issue to pummel incumbent Sayles-Belton, Rybak, tag-teaming with Hennepin County Commish Mike Opat, decided public money for a stadium was not so bad if it was popular with the right folks.

According to one Minneapolis council member, Rybak’s greatest weakness is that he is deathly afraid of making people mad at him. “R.T. talks in sound bites. Why? Because he is a schmoozer who wants everyone to like him. Politics does not work that way. If you are going to lead, you’ve got to take strong positions, which means you are going to piss some people off.” Former mayoral candidate Lisa McDonald goes even further. “R.T. waits to see the lay of the land before he jumps into any political debate. He never takes a stand early on. Just look at how he approached whether Minneapolis should go ahead with the new library. He held off taking a position until the last possible minute.”

At first blush, Samuels and Rybak appear to be cut from the same cloth. Both are attractive, polished men who started their political careers at the grassroots—Rybak battled jet noise; Samuels put his life on the line taking on the gangs who were terrorizing his Jordan neighborhood. Over time, Samuels gained the gangs’ grudging respect. That, however, is where the similarities end. Samuels is not afraid to call it as he sees it, and say things that will anger his supporters. Last summer, when a routine police arrest escalated into a riot, Samuels confronted Jordan residents spoiling for a fight and told them to act responsibly and go home. Samuels then became a key bridge between shell-shocked city officials and gangsters. In fact, some political observers said that Samuels’ virtuoso performance set the stage for his quick political rise a few months later.

From the moment Don Samuels beat the once-mighty DFL machine and succeeded the disgraced Joe Biernat, he became the Next Great Thing. Remarkably, Samuels did so by carrying much of “Nordeast,” historically a part of Minneapolis that Archie Bunker would be proud to call home. Just like Sayles-Belton in her salad days, Samuels showed that he had “crossover” appeal. Samuels, however, has something that Sayles-Belton never had—genuine charisma. When he speaks, he sounds authoritative and articulate. Samuels uses words that, because they are unambiguous, are not going to please everyone. And he readily admits he doesn’t really care, “if that is what it takes to build a real community.”

Samuels does not support public funding of sports stadiums and does not intend to change his position just because it suits the prevailing political winds. “I believe that all politicians have to have a moral foundation—one cannot lead without one.”

However, one of his Minneapolis council colleagues says that “he gives excellent soliloquies in council chambers… but he can be mighty weak on the details.” Even Samuels’ supporters concede that he is more of a “big picture kind of guy.” He’s been known to make dramatic statements at meetings without the statistical firepower to back it up. His staff, a hodgepodge of Biernat holdovers and newcomers—do not always provide effective cover for their boss, making him ripe pickings for City Hall barracudas that do know the details.

There is no question that Samuels must get his administrative groove on before he can effectively challenge the political juggernaut that propelled R.T. Rybak into City Hall. He needs to learn the minutiae of the budget process and Robert’s Rules of Order. But these are relatively minor adjustments. If Don Samuels does his homework, he will be ready for prime time.

On March 20, 2003, Quinn Keating Collins made his grand entrance on planet Earth. On April 29, 2003, his grandfather, Clinton Clarence Collins, Sr., took his final bow. My two oldest sons, Joseph and Alexander, knew their grandfather and heard, probably more times than they wanted to, the stories of Mississippi cross-burnings and ducking bullets on Omaha Beach, homemade bootleg brew and the “come to Jesus” meetings between me, my father, and his dancing leather belt. Those stories are now safely fermenting in their minds for all the family retellings yet to come.

Alas, Quinn, the newest Collins, will not have his own personal memories of his grandfather. So it will be left to our family and particularly to me to conjure in Quinn’s mind his grandfather’s life and legacy. I’ll start right now with this column.

Clinton Collins, Sr., was born in Wiggins, Mississippi, in either 1923 or 1924, depending on whether you believe the old, weather-beaten family Bible or the birth certificate that mysteriously emerged from the bowels of some bureaucratic computer about a decade ago. His mother was named Judia and his father was a “professor” (which is what any black male teacher with even a whiff of college was called in those days). My dad thought his last name was Johnson. “Professor” Johnson never married Judia, who died when my father was four or five years old. Judia’s brother, Isaac Collins, took him to Laurel, Mississippi, and raised him there.

Clarence was his “Sunday-come-to-meeting” name, but his everyday name was “Boy.” No, not “boy” as in the white put-down. “Boy” as in “ain’t you one of them Collins boys?” In fact, the name stuck so hard that even when he made his last trip to Laurel a few years ago, he was still “Boy,” albeit “Mr. Boy” Collins. Boy Collins lived the life that black people lived in Mississippi in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s. He attended segregated, dilapidated schools, went to the Mississippi state fair on “Colored Day,” and tried to avoid the ire of “white folks.” Unfortunately, that was a very hard thing for a young black manchild coming of age in the “Solid South.”

He dropped out of tenth grade, picked cotton for a hot minute, and was ultimately drafted into World War II. During the war, he landed on Omaha Beach and drove trucks for the famed Red Ball Express, a group of black soldiers that kept Patton juiced during his dash to Germany. After the war, he came back to Mississippi determined to make sure that his native land gave him his due as an American citizen and as a man.

By 1949, he had finished high school and college, earned an officers’ commission in the newly integrated Army, and was applying to the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) law school. Ole Miss rejected him because he was black. After a year at an all-black law school in Missouri, Mr. Boy went back to Mississippi and became one of the youngest public school superintendents ever. Now, because Mississippi was still caught up in the fallacy of “separate but equal,” he was only responsible for the “colored” students in his district. Outraged at the substandard equipment and poor treatment, Mr. Boy bought an hour on a Laurel radio station in the 1950s, a time when most Mississippi blacks were afraid to even look a white man in the eye, and told those crackers exactly what he thought of their racist world.

In 1957, he married Carrie Beatrice Holloway, a kindred spirit who did not take any abuse from racists either. Together, they risked everything to take in young Freedom Riders who traveled Dixie’s bus lines to break segregation’s chokehold on the South. In 1962, Mr. Boy became the first black man to run for public office in Mississippi since Reconstruction. He told his terrified neighbors that if he was going to die, as his good friend Medgar Evers did in the awful, bloody summer of 1963, he was going to do so on his feet, not his knees. Even after the Klan burned a cross on our front lawn, Mr. Boy took no unanswered blows. He simply ran for public office again.

Like most sons, I had my “issues” with my father. He was not perfect. Yet, not a day passes, when I do not gain a deeper appreciation for the many life lessons he taught me. The most crucial, one that I have taught Joseph and Alexander and will teach Quinn, is this: You gain nothing by blaming white people, the world, whoever, for giving you crap. And you have no one to blame but yourself if you take it.