Pubdate: Sat, 09 Aug 2003 Source: Ft. Worth Star-Telegram (TX) Copyright: 2003 Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas Contact: http://www.star-telegram.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/162 Author: Mary Rogers Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htm (Tulia, Texas) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/raids.htm (Drug Raids) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues) REBEL WITH A CAUSE Gary Gardner, a Tulia farmer who successfully questioned the validity of several arrests on drug charges in the Africa-American community that hinged on the testimony of one undercover officer. This article contains graphic and explicit language. Maybe this story really began in 1906, the year his granddaddy, an Indiana carpenter, came to the Texas plains to build a combination store and hotel at Vigo Park near Palo Duro Canyon and stayed to frame up a life. Never mind that he was a Yankee, a Republican and a Methodist in a Southern state that leaned heavily to the Baptists and Democrats. Or maybe it started long before that in some tangle of DNA that, through the generations, has demanded not only blue eyes and a ruddy complexion, but also a certain single-minded contrariness, a pronounced distaste for conformity and an intense respect for fairness - - not to mention a distrust of the `practiced' rules of order. But if Gary O. Gardner had to name the moment it began, he would point to the day in 1999 when a black man named Joe Moore was sentenced to 90 years in prison. From then on, Gardner was hellbent to fight the justice system of Swisher County. In 1999, a now discredited Swisher County sheriff's deputy ran an undercover drug sting that landed 46 people in jail - 39 of them black. Gardner heard the talk about how "fine" the lawman was and how "sorry" and "no-account" the accused were, but when he saw television footage of some of the suspects herded across the courthouse lawn at Tulia handcuffed - some of them rousted out of bed and wearing only their underwear - his blood boiled. "They stripped those people of their dignity and for what?" Gardner demanded. "I don't care how heinous the crime, when you arrest someone, you treat him as a person, a human being. There's no honor in humiliating your fellow man." He grew angrier when he learned that even those who had never had any brush with the law drew hefty prison terms. But for Gardner, the absolute last straw came when Moore, now 60, was sentenced. Moore was a one-time roadhouse operator, a bootlegger in a dry county and a man with a record that he said was earned with trumped-up charges. But by 1999, Moore said, he was a hog farmer who kept his nose clean. From time to time he'd done farm chores for Gardner. According to Moore, they weren't friends - just friendly. But Gardner didn't believe Moore was guilty of drug trafficking. At first Gardner was alone in his showdown with the law. Then others joined him, and in June, after a four-year battle, all 46 defendants were released. The story made national headlines, and those close to the situation say it might never have happened if Gardner, 57, had kept quiet. Instead, he did all he could to put the spotlight on the cases. So who is Gary O. Gardner, and why did he care what happened to those 46 people? An unexpected champion On a recent summer day Gardner and his wife, Darlene, sipped iced tea in the shade of a tree on the lawn at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where one of their daughters is studying for a master's degree. He admitted that he's cantankerous, bullheaded, controlling and hot-tempered. He didn't say that he's politically incorrect. He didn't have to. He demonstrated it in almost every sentence. "Some of those n---s might have been guilty. Some of them might have used recreational drugs. Some of them were probably addicts - but they wasn't `all' guilty," he said. He talked about "pickaninnies" and "dark town" and "sons of b---s" without apology, then grinned, showing off a row of teeth stained dark since childhood by the minerals in the West Texas water. He wore bib overalls, and when the camera came up, he plopped a $10 straw hat on his round head, clearly aware of the impression he makes. "He likes to exaggerate things," said Charles Kiker, a retired minister who grew up in Tulia. "It's his way of saying you can say the n-word and still take up for people of color." Kiker and his son-in-law, Alan Bean, were among the first to join Gardner in his fight to free the Tulia 46. Gardner and his wife, convinced that local coverage of the bust had scuttled any hope of a fair trial, wrote letters to all the prisoners and urged them to ask for a change of venue. The Beans and the Kikers contacted Gardner after Bean's wife, Nancy, spotted one of Gardner's letters to the editor. Soon they were laying the groundwork for the Friends of Justice, a grassroots organization that advocates criminal-justice reform. Although Kiker, Gardner and Bean are sometimes called the KGB, Gardner insists he is not a member of the Friends. "I'm not a joiner," he said. He did, however, help contact the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Bean. It didn't take long for word to reach the American Civil Liberties Union. Then in September 2000, Gardner and the Friends of Justice took about 50 people to an Austin rally. Suddenly, television cameras were focused on the children of those incarcerated, and newspapers began sending reporters to Tulia for the story. Word spread that Tom Coleman, the undercover police officer, had manufactured the charges and doctored the evidence. There was no other witness, no video, no audio surveillance, nothing but one man's word. Coleman had entered drugs into evidence, but defense attorneys argued that there was no proof the defendants had ever touched those drugs. While residents of Swisher County organized a rally to thank the sheriff for keeping them safe from drug dealers, the ACLU pushed for a criminal investigation of the undercover narc. In May of this year, Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill that freed the defendants pending an appeals court's review of the cases. Last month, the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Perry pardon 35 of the defendants. Coleman faces perjury charges. "Taking those pickaninnies to Austin was the most exciting thing," Gardner said proudly. "We had those kids out front on the steps of the Capitol. Television cameras were everywhere. We were getting the word out." While Friends President Thelma Johnson, a black woman who is also Moore's longtime girlfriend, said she is unperturbed by Gardner's language, other African-Americans are offended. "The Gardners were always people who stood for what was right, much like Gary," said Freddie Brookins of Tulia, whose son was one of those jailed. "I'll always love ol' Gary because that man stood up for truth, but racial slurs do hurt. That doesn't go around me, and Gary knows it." A life full of learning For all his posturing and political incorrectness, Gardner is no rube. It's true that he's had little formal study beyond high school, but he considers himself an educated man from a family that values schooling. His mother was a teacher, and his aunt studied music at Juilliard. His sisters earned college degrees. "I've probably got a better education than most; I just don't have the papers to show for it," Gardner said. Part of that education came in 1965 when he spent six months in the Army's Officer Candidate School. "They kicked me out. The sons of a b---s said I wasn't tactful," he said. But the training he got there and later in noncommissioned officers school made an enormous impression on him. Honorably discharged as a sergeant a few years later, he went home to farm - but that was the year "the green bugs hit the milo." He cast about for something else to do and decided he'd make a dandy highway patrolman. He soaked up that education, too. He's proud of his service but pokes fun at it. "Lack of tact and ugly was exactly what the DPS [Department of Public Safety] was looking for," he said. Then with a sly smile he added, "I was really looking for a date. You know, a girl will give her phone number to a highway patrol officer." "Oh, he was really handsome in that uniform," said Darlene, the woman he married in 1970 and still calls his partner. They've raised five children of their own, and from 1991 to 1995 they served as foster parents for nine others - many of them black - placed by Catholic Family Services. Gardner was never shy about punishing his kids. He sometimes administered a well-placed pop to their backsides - but more often he demanded that they read him poetry or sing hymns to him. "He'd have us read to him for hours. We hated that," said his daughter, Kimber Gardner. "But as we got older, we really kind of liked it. We began to argue about who would get the book: `A Treasury of the Familiar' edited by Ralph L. Woods." He insisted the children read, among other things, Mark Twain's Advice to Youth speech, Frank R. Stockton's `The Lady, or the Tiger?' - and Martin Luther King Jr.'s `Letter From the Birmingham Jail.' A small town remembers Gardner doesn't drink and only occasionally smokes a pipe. He seldom goes to church, prays when he needs something, thanks God when he gets it and sleeps in fits and starts. He said he's dyslexic but reads ravenously. His sisters say he can do anything he sets his mind to. He plays the harmonica and taught himself to fly. At one time he owned four crop-dusters. Gardner is an insulin-dependent diabetic whose heft is too much for his 5-foot-9-inch frame and whose knees are giving out under the weight. He takes medication for depression, and laughs often, his sky-blue eyes crinkling at the corners. But underneath the comic exterior of a redneck farmer is a man who is a knotty jumble of mind and heart. A man doesn't simply wake up one morning and decide to confront community leaders or argue with his neighbors. It takes a lifetime of practice to do that, and Gardner learned early to exercise his contentious nature. "They're all contrarians," said Kiker, who knew Gardner's father. "They're not just contrary. They're contrarians." West Texas tolerates - even encourages - characters and nonconformists such as Gardner, but he admits that this time, he was uncomfortable with the stand he said he was compelled to take. He knew that challenging the verdict placed on the Tulia 46 might cost him friendships, damage his reputation and even hurt his income as people went elsewhere for the water well service he provides to some of the community. You don't grow up in a tiny place like Vigo Park without knowing how to gauge your neighbors' reactions. After all, there are only 8,000 souls in all of Swisher County's 896 wind-swept square miles. About 5,000 of them live in Tulia, the county seat some 60 miles from Amarillo. A few hundred sit down to supper in Kress or Happy or Claytonville. Vigo Park, with a population of about 30, is a wide place in the road 25 miles from the middle of nowhere - big enough to support a Methodist church at one end of town and a Baptist church at the other. Locals eat chicken-fried steak at Mom's Place and discuss the weather, politics - and dogs. Gardner often takes a bloodhound and a Chihuahua with him as he ranges over the county in a '93 Chevy Lumina with folding chairs filling the trunk and legal papers spilling over the dusty back seat. Locals drive to Tulia for school, the mail or a haircut. Gardner lives in one of the few houses scattered about this outpost - but now he goes to Amarillo when he wants his hair trimmed. It got back to him that the Tulia barber didn't like Gardner's stance on the Tulia 46. Folks in Swisher County weren't about to tolerate drug dealing. Gardner wouldn't abide that, either - but for him there was a bigger issue. He wanted a justice system blind to color, economic standing and social class. He wanted a system that would ferociously protect a person's dignity `and' his presumption of innocence. It didn't, he said, and he couldn't turn his back on what he believed was divine guidance to put things right. "If I'd have been a stranger in town it wouldn't have been a problem," he said. "Some of those people in Tulia who I had to oppose had prayed for my family when we needed their prayers." Gardner rubbed his thick hands together remembering those hard days. In 1996 the Gardners' son Charlie died of a brain tumor. He was almost 17. The boy's sickness, and finally his death, changed Gardner in important ways. For more than three years, Gardner did all he could to hold the cancer at bay. When the tumor stole control of Charlie's right side, Gardner fashioned a left-handed shotgun stock for the boy. Then he rebuilt Charlie's pickup, installing controls for everything on the left side. But in the end, the cancer won. Gardner built Charlie's casket himself from black walnut, waiting until the last minute to make the first cut in the lovely wood. Hospice workers paved the way for Gardner and his other sons to dig the grave themselves at Vigo Park Cemetery. On the day of the funeral, the casket was set on hay bales. A piano was moved under the windmill, and Charlie's Sunday school teacher played the old hymns while hundreds of mourners crowded into the yard. Gardner sang. Charlie was carried to the cemetery in the back of his pickup and was buried beside his great-granddaddy. When it was over, Gardner had to find a way to go on. "That was the first time he didn't have control of things," said his son, Craig Gardner, 32, of Bryan. Charlie's illness gave Gardner a profound awareness of how feeble his attempts at control really were. It deepened his empathy for those who are powerless to direct their own destiny. It also left him time to fight for the Tulia 46. Gardner is grieved that he had to clash with those who had supported him - and sorry that Tulia got a bad rap from the media, but he is not sorry for what he did. In fact, he and his family are proud of the part he played in freeing the Tulia 46, pleased that the justice system of Swisher County was examined in a more public arena and found flawed. Gardner likes the role of advocate for the underdog, savors the correctness of the law - the drama of litigation. But when this story is finally over, when the fate of the Tulia 46 is only a memory, Gardner and his wife will be left with neighbors they've had for years in a place his granddaddy pioneered - a place now marked by his own brand of stubborn determination. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin