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. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom