Monday morning, I was in the parking lot across from the Fulton County courthouse when a former co-worker remarked, via Facebook, that she was “struck by the racial divide” on whether the convicted educators in the Atlanta schools cheating trial should get locked up.
I had noted earlier that they rolled the dice and lost. They went to trial, were found guilty and were likely headed to prison. That’s how it works. If they got the same probation deals as those who fessed up before the trial, I reasoned, then why make deals in the first place? The judge warned them — repeatedly — about it.
“Most black commenters believe the teachers may have done wrong but don’t deserve prison. Most white commenters believe the opposite,” my old colleague wrote. “Like the OJ and Rodney King cases, it’s very revealing.”
I’ve always thought the unswerving support of many in the black community of O.J. Simpson was mass delusion. And whites who said Rodney King needed that extended beating were off their rockers, too.
Race has always lurked in the wings of this recent public morality tale. All 35 educators indicted were black, as anyone who saw the mugshots in the media knows.
All were successful, middle-class people who would never have considered themselves criminals but were afraid to rock the boat and lose the careers they spent their lives building. And almost all the kids who saw the fraudulent test gains were black, too, although many will never attain the same social status as those who cheated them. Most are likely to remain poor and struggling.
The trend lines do seem to show less empathy for the convicted cheaters in the white community. The fact that Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard, who pushed the hard-nosed racketeering charges, is black, seems to quash race as an issue for many whites. Race can’t be involved, right? It’s a hermetically-sealed black biosphere, and us white folk are hands off on this one, except to tsk-tsk from the outside.
But things aren’t quite that clear cut. Even Dick Williams, the conservative Atlanta media commentator, who runs a bit to the right of Benito Mussolini, came out in favor of leniency on his TV show.
To be sure, some elements of the drama did run true to form. As I left my car to walk to the courthouse Monday, I heard a chant bouncing off the buildings: “Let the teachers go! Let the teachers go!”
It was an old-style Atlanta rally with all the old-line agitators — the Rev. Timothy McDonald, Joe Beasley, John Evans — and about 75 others outside on the steps, many holding signs saying: “We support Beverly Hall and APS employees.”
Some voiced the theory that Paul Howard had used the tough charges to grandstand. Others saw an orchestrated attack on public education, designed to spur privatization and allow moneyed interests to become even richer.
Terry Thomas, a retired teacher, supported the second theory and later passed on to me a short essay he emailed to many politically active Atlantans.
“To say race did not matter in this case is to ignore the big pink elephant in the room,” he wrote. “There are two justice systems in America, one for the Black and poor, and one for the white, rich and well connected.”
White educators would have escaped such charges, Thomas said, but “these are Black educators and predominantly Black children from the Metro-Atlanta area, the so-called Mecca of Black America, they don’t matter. Moreover, they need to be made an example of.”
It was a sentiment heard again and again on the courthouse steps and in the hallways.
But in Thomas’ email chain was a woman, Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, who pushed back: “To those of us who did have children affected by cheating, you come off as misinformed exhibitionists who care more about agitating the system than doing anything to improve it.
“My son was a victim of the cheating and it has taken years to recover,” she wrote.
I called Nuriddin, who said her son was a first-grader struggling in reading when he took a test that said he read at fifth grade level. As a mother, she knew it was not true. She said she went to regional director Sharon Davis-Williams with her suspicions. She said Davis-Williams was rude, downright mean and unapproachable. And then hung up on her.
Nuriddin told her story to the Blue Ribbon Committee put together by Beverly Hall (a team later known as the Whitewash Committee). Nothing happened. After about another year, she yanked her three kids from the APS regular schools and put them in Atlanta charter schools. Her first-grader is now a seventh grader and is thriving.
“But other children were trapped in the system,” she said.
Nuriddin, who’s on the city’s Human Relations Commission, said there was a rally last week where people referred to Howard as an Uncle Tom for his prosecution. “There’s nothing worse that you can call a black man,” she said.
Inside the courtroom Monday, was Andrew Young, the former mayor and one of the surviving lions of the civil rights movement. Young was the big artillery called in to sway Judge Jerry Baxter from hard-line sentences.
He did his best to soften the cranky jurist. Young started out by saying judges were often heroes of the South, helping to overcome discriminatory laws. He urged Baxter to get creative with a sentence that would allow the teachers to avoid prison and do good works.
But Baxter pushed back, clearly annoyed that Young had “interjected” himself into the situation.
The judge then pivoted and addressed the prosecutor, apologizing to him for having cussed him out before the hearing started.
“Something awful is going on here,” the judge said. “Mr. Howard had the courage of going up against some pretty strong opposition to go forward with the case.”
Earlier in the day before the hearing, the judge expressed dismay that Howard, after pushing successfully for the very serious RICO convictions, was now advocating lenient sentences. The judge, who verges between humor, empathy and temper tantrums, employed the latter, accusing the veteran prosecutor of bowing to public pressure.
“Who got to you?” Baxter asked Howard in the back room. “Was it Andy Young?”
Later Monday, Baxter swung toward empathy, offering lenient deals if the culprits admitted their guilt.
But on Tuesday, just two of 10 did, and the judge hit the rest hard, including Davis-Williams, who got seven years in prison.
The sentences brought cries, curses and more racial imagery. One activist called it a lynching. Another well-dressed man in the hallway called the judge a redneck.
The case will settle down now for a while, but only until the appeals. Or when Paul Howard runs for re-election again next year.
As I write this Tuesday afternoon in that same parking garage, I can hear the crowd chanting again.
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