LETTER FROM CYBERSPACE
Tribune reporter Howard Witt hasn't seen a reaction to a story quite like the one he got after writing about a controversy in the small Texas town of Paris
March 26, 2007, 8:57 PM CDT
Sometimes, as a newspaper reporter, you write a story that touches enough readers that a few write you letters or e-mails in response.
Less often, but even more gratifying, you write a story that actually changes something, like getting a bad law fixed or a corrupt politician indicted or a donation for a kid who can't afford life- saving surgery.
And every once in a blue moon, you write something that literally explodes across the Internet in ways no one could predict.
That has now happened with a story I wrote two weeks ago, about a 14- year-old black girl from the small Texas town of Paris, who was sent to a youth prison for up to 7 years for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. A 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, was sentenced by the same Paris judge to probation.
If you had Googled the black girl's name, Shaquanda Cotton, the day before the story was published on the front page of the March 12 edition of the Tribune, you would have gotten zero results. On Monday afternoon, there were more than 35,000 hits.
The story has been picked up on more than 300 blogs around the country, many of them concerned with African-American affairs. It has generated thousands of postings to Internet message boards.
It was the top story on digg.com, a site that ranks Internet pages by user popularity and recommendations. It became the most-viewed and most-e-mailed story on chicagotribune.com more than a week after it was originally published, which is particularly remarkable because most news stories on the site automatically expire after just a few days.
And now the story has jumped across the ethernet into the physical world: Dozens of talk-radio stations across the nation were buzzing about Shaquanda last week, protests on her behalf were held in Paris, a petition- and letter-drive aimed at Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the judge in the case, Chuck Superville, is under way, and civil rights leaders from the NAACP and the ACLU to the Rev. Al Sharpton are weighing whether to get involved.
I've written thousands of stories for the Tribune over the last 25 years, from around the nation and across the world, and I've never seen a reaction like this before.
What's driving the attention to this story is outrage—most people who come across it say they are upset at what they believe was an excessive sentence imposed on a teenager for a moment of reckless behavior. Many perceive racial discrimination, because, as the story explained, Shaquanda's case occurred against a backdrop of other discrimination complaints in the town.
"This sentence is unexplainable. Where is the justice in this?" wrote one man in a posting typical of many others. "I cannot imagine my daughter in this situation. I will pass this on to everyone I know."
There's been some outrage in the other direction, as well: A number of residents of Paris have contended, in e-mails and articles in the local Paris newspaper, that the Tribune story unfairly portrayed their town as racist.
"Paris is being burned at the media stake by a journalist that didn't get the whole story poking the hot irons and igniting the fire," wrote Phillip Hamilton, a columnist for the Paris News. "...Does racism exist in Paris? Yes, but not nearly to the extent the Tribune reporter would have readers believe."
Now it appears all of this ferment might affect Shaquanda's case. Hers will be among the first cases to be examined by a special commission being established this week to review the sentence of every youth being held inside Texas' youth prisons, because of concerns that many inmates might have had their sentences arbitrarily extended by prison officials.
The review panel was sparked by a wide-ranging scandal currently plaguing the state's juvenile prison system in which numerous prison guards and officials are accused of coercing imprisoned youths for sex.
While that scandal does not directly involve Shaquanda, the high public profile of her case has caused the special master overseeing the investigation of the juvenile system to say he wants to review her case in particular.
Shaquanda also has an appeal pending with Texas' 6th Court of Appeals in Texarkana, which has heard arguments on her case and could rule at any time.
But what's particularly interesting to me, beyond the content of all the reactions, has been the vehemence, and what it may tell us about the powerful new Internet communications tools we all now have at our fingertips but don't yet fully comprehend.
I had no idea, for example, of the extent of the African-American blogging world out there and its collective powers of dissemination.
But now, after reading thousands of anguished, thoughtful comments posted on these blogs reflecting on issues of persistent racial discrimination in the nation's schools and courtrooms, what's clear to me is that there's a new, "virtual" civil rights movement out there on the Internet that can reach more people in a few hours than all the protest marches, sit-ins and boycotts of the 1950s and 60s put together.
There's another lesson to be drawn from this episode: Newspapers do still matter.
Many Americans are very skeptical about the health of the newspaper business these days. Readership is declining as long-time newspaper subscribers die off and younger consumers decline to take a paper in their place. Advertising revenue is bleeding away onto the Internet.
Everybody seems to think they can just flip on their TV or bring up a Yahoo! page or a blog and find all the news they need.
Well, it is quite true that uncountable hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of the Chicago Tribune before have now read my story about Shaquanda Cotton, thanks to its broad distribution across the Internet.
But in order for all of that to happen, people had to read it here first.
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Howard Witt is the Tribune's Southwest Bureau Chief, based in Houston.
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To some in Paris, sinister past is back
In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.'
By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent
March 12, 2007
PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.
There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.
Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the "black" side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she's begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself "the best small town in Texas."
"Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston," Cherry said. "They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s."
There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family.
There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.
And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.
The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year- old teacher's aide--was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.
Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation.
"All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?" said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. "It's like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated."
The Tribune generally does not identify criminal suspects younger than age 17, but is doing so in this case because the girl and her family have chosen to go public with their story.
None of the officials involved in Shaquanda's case, including the local prosecutor, the judge and Paris school district administrators, would agree to speak about their handling of it, citing a court appeal under way.
But the teen's defenders assert that long before the September 2005 shoving incident, Paris school officials targeted Shaquanda for scrutiny because her mother had frequently accused school officials of racism.
Retaliation alleged
"Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved in a protest march in front of a school," said Sharon Reynerson, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, who has represented Shaquanda during challenges to several of the disciplinary citations she received. "Some of the write-ups weren't fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each one to get the whole story."
Among the write-ups Shaquanda received, according to Reynerson, were citations for wearing a skirt that was an inch too short, pouring too much paint into a cup during an art class and defacing a desk that school officials later conceded bore no signs of damage.
Shaquanda's mother, Creola Cotton, does not dispute that her daughter can behave impulsively and was sometimes guilty of tardiness or speaking out of turn at school--behaviors that she said were manifestations of Shaquanda's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which the teen was taking prescription medication.
Nor does Shaquanda herself deny that she pushed the hall monitor after the teacher's aide refused her permission to enter the school before the morning bell--although Shaquanda maintains that she was supposed to have been allowed to visit the school nurse to take her medication, and that the teacher's aide pushed her first.
But Cherry alleges that Shaquanda's frequent disciplinary write-ups, and the insistence of school officials at her trial that she deserved prison rather than probation for the shoving incident, fits in a larger pattern of systemic discrimination against black students in the Paris Independent School District.
In the past five years, black parents have filed at least a dozen discrimination complaints against the school district with the federal Education Department, asserting that their children, who constitute 40 percent of the district's nearly 4,000 students, were singled out for excessive discipline.
An attorney for the school district, Dennis Eichelbaum, said the Education Department had determined all of the complaints to be unfounded.
"The [department] has explained that the school district has not and does not discriminate, that the school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations, and that there was no validity to the allegations made by the complainants," Eichelbaum said.
Not so clear
But the federal investigations of the school district are not so clear-cut, and they are not finished. In one 2004 finding, Education Department officials determined that black students at a Paris middle school were being written up for disciplinary infractions more than twice as often as white students--and eight times as often in one category, "class disruption."
The Education Department asked the U.S. Justice Department to try to mediate disputes between black parents and the district, but school officials pulled out of the process last December before it was concluded.
And in April 2006, the Education Department notified Paris school officials that it was opening a new, comprehensive review to determine "whether the district discriminated against African- American students on the basis of race" between 2004 and 2006. Federal officials say that investigation is still in progress.
According to one veteran Paris teacher, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, such discrimination is widespread.
"There is a philosophy of giving white kids a break and coming down on black kids," said the teacher, who is white.
Not everyone in Paris agrees, however, that blacks are treated unfairly by the city's institutions.
"I've lived here all my life, and I don't see that," said Mary Ann Reed Fisher, one of two black members of the Paris City Council. "My kids went to Paris High School, and they never had one minute of a problem with the school system, the courts or the police."
A peculiar inmate
Meanwhile, Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly inside the Texas Youth Commission prison system, where officials say 95 percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are chronic, serious offenders who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation and local treatment or detention.
"The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for those youth who are most violent or most habitual," said commission spokesman Tim Savoy. "The whole concept of commitment until your 21st birthday should be recognized as a severe penalty, and that's why it's typically the last resort of the juvenile system in Texas."
Inside the youth prison in Brownwood where she has been incarcerated for the past 10 months--a prison currently at the center of a state scandal involving a guard who allegedly sexually abused teenage inmates--Shaquanda, who is now 15, says she has not been doing well.
Three times she has tried to injure herself, first by scratching her face, then by cutting her arm. The last time, she said, she copied a method she saw another young inmate try, knotting a sweater around her neck and yanking it tight so she couldn't breathe. The guards noticed her sprawled inside her cell before it was too late.
She tried to harm herself, Shaquanda said, out of depression, desperation and fear of the hardened young thieves, robbers, sex offenders and parole violators all around her whom she must try to avoid each day.
"I get paranoid when I get around some of these girls," Shaquanda said. "Sometimes I feel like I just can't do this no more--that I can't survive this."