Pubdate: Tue, 06 May 2003
Source: Charleston Gazette (WV)
Copyright: 2003 Charleston Gazette
Contact:  http://www.wvgazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/77

UNFAIR

Blacks Still Cheated

LAST Wednesday, human-rights crusader Julian Bond told a West Virginia 
State College audience that genuine racial tolerance and equality haven't 
yet arrived in America.

By coincidence, on the same day, a new federal lawsuit accused Charleston 
police of manhandling three black honor students as if they were slum drug 
peddlers. The "racial profiling" case alleges:

A year ago, three youths in State College's Student Leadership Program - 
limited to the top 5 percent of the school's 6,000 enrollees - were taken 
to an East End barbershop for grooming and instruction on how to "dress for 
success." As the exceptional young men drove away, they were surrounded by 
nine officers with drawn guns.

The driver was ordered to toss his keys out the window. Then all three were 
forced to kneel on the ground while they were handcuffed. Officers claimed 
that the students had received drugs in the barbershop - but an hour of 
intensive searching found nothing, so the students were released.

Ask yourself: Would the youths have been treated in this manner if they 
were white honor students?

The state director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the 
suit, said the incident was another example of "the substitution of skin 
color for evidence" by police.

The officers' behavior probably will cost Charleston taxpayers large sums 
in legal defense costs. Although the outcome of the case can't be 
predicted, the accusation rings true to black families everywhere, who are 
accustomed to their children being treated like criminals.

Huntington has been a hotbed of such allegations. One father started an 
Internet Web site to vent his frustration after pistol-waving Huntington 
officers seized his 17-year-old son, terrifying him into tears, then 
laughed it off as a mistake. Some of the Huntington reports involve 
beatings of black youths by white police.

In his State College talk, Bond, a renowned Georgia legislator who is 
chairman of the NAACP, said most white Americans don't perceive the racial 
unfairness that still saturates U.S. society - but blacks are painfully 
aware of it, long after the civil-rights movement supposedly brought legal 
equality to the nation.

"We find ourselves refighting old battles we thought already won, and 
facing new problems we have barely begun to acknowledge," he told the audience.

America was created on a declaration that "all men are created equal." 
Maybe that ideal can't be fully achieved, but conscientious people must 
never stop striving for it.
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