The Lessons Tulia Teaches

摘要

Tulia will forever be known as that tiny town in Texas where dozens of innocent black folks were imprisoned on the word of a lying white narc—which is not to say Tulians are comfortable with that fact. "We moved past that. I wish the rest of the world could," said Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart—who has been "burned so much in the past" that he had no desire to talk to the press. He would rather focus on helping people, such as the two women waiting to see him the day I stopped by. But the world is not yet done with Tulia. Nate Blakeslee, the young Texas Observer writer who produced the first in-depth report on the Tulia sting, takes us back there in "Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town" ($26.95. PublicAf-fairs). Blakeslee re-creates the predawn hours of July 23, 1999, when state troopers, local cops and sheriff's deputies fanned out to arrest 47 supposed drug dealers—the vast majority of whom were black—in a town whose entire black population numbered fewer than 400.