Waller County, Texas: Not So Wonderful, Not So Great

Texas, Our Texas! all hail the mighty State!
Texas, Our Texas! so wonderful so great!

The State Song doesn't play well in Waller County to the north and west of Houston.

Waller County is the home of the oldest traditionally African American college in Texas: Prairie View A&M University (6,000+ students).

In 2008, Waller County is a hotbed of racial conflict. Waller County officials, mostly white, have attempted to suppress the black voting power of Prairie View students. More recently, an unidentified murder victim's remains triggered a long-simmering dispute over segregated cemeteries and mortuary services in Waller County. It's a pity that George Carlin stepped on a rainbow before he could add a riff about Waller County's segregated cemeteries in his standup routine. One can only imagine. "What the hell difference does it make?" (Carlin would have asked.) "They're all dead. They can't see. They can't smell. They can't hear. They can't touch. They are not even there." In the meantime, the racial conflict continues on in Waller County. If this is (fair & balanced) irrational behavior, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]

¹2 Voter Rights Cases, One Gripping a College Town, Stir Texas
By Ralph Blumenthal

“Vote or Die,” exhorts the faded slogan on a roadway at Prairie View A&M University, where black students once marched for the right to vote here in the town where they attend school, on a former cotton plantation about 50 miles northwest of Houston.

The students won that battle in 2004, long after the United States Supreme Court supposedly decided the issue in 1979. But disputes over minority voting rights — along with accusations of election fraud — continue to rouse Prairie View, home to one of the nation’s leading historically black colleges, and other Texas locales.

“The cold war’s not over — they just moved the fence from Berlin to the Texas border,” said DeWayne Charleston, Waller County justice of the peace, who maintains that local officials failed to record hundreds of students whom he registered to vote in 2006. The federal Department of Justice and the Texas attorney general’s office say investigations are under way here, but will not give details.

Meanwhile, the attorney general, Greg Abbott, is a defendant in a separate voting rights case that goes to federal trial on Wednesday in the East Texas city of Marshall, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last month upholding Indiana’s tough voter identification law.

Arguing that antifraud provisions enacted in 2003 were being selectively enforced to intimidate minority voters who are largely Democrats, the Texas Democratic Party filed suit against Mr. Abbott and Phil Wilson, the secretary of state, both Republicans.

The suit, initially filed in 2006, contends that get-out-the-vote activists who help voters with mail ballots have been “interrogated, harassed and intimidated” by state investigators.

J. Gerald Hebert, the lawyer for the Democrats, said his first witnesses would be several elderly black women prosecuted on fraud charges for what Mr. Hebert described as help given other elderly voters in the mailing of early ballots in Texarkana, Fort Worth and Dallas.

Mr. Abbott and Mr. Wilson say they have a duty to prevent voter fraud. To complaints that any infractions at issue have been insignificant, they say that in pursuit of that duty, they must pursue violations of provisions like one that requires anyone mailing in a ballot to sign the envelope.

They say that “there is no evidence of any voters who have been unable to vote due to enactment or enforcement” of the provisions, which, they also note, were sponsored in the Texas House by a Democrat. Further, they say, there is no evidence that enforcement has intimidated anyone into stopping voter assistance efforts.

The Dallas Morning News reported on May 18 that all 26 cases of voter fraud prosecuted by Mr. Abbott had been brought against Democrats, almost all of them black or Hispanic.

But in their legal brief, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Wilson said that the state had brought voter fraud cases against Republicans as well and that “mere questioning” of people about activities that might have broken the law did not deprive them of a constitutional right.

The brief said the two officials’ position was strengthened by the Supreme Court’s Indiana ruling, on April 28, which allowed states, as a way of preventing fraud, to require voters to show photo identification.

The suit against Mr. Abbott and Mr. Wilson involves enforcement of provisions that make it a crime in certain cases to carry someone else’s filled-in early-voting ballot to the mailbox, to possess another person’s blank ballot or to provide early-voting ballot assistance to anyone who has not asked for it.

The case, to be tried without a jury before Judge T. John Ward, has put Mr. Abbott at odds with Judge Charleston and some campus activists at Prairie View, who say they once looked to the attorney general as a champion of their voting rights.

In 2004, Oliver Kitzman, then the Waller County district attorney, challenged the students’ right to cast ballots here rather than in their home communities, although the Supreme Court had long ago decided they could. Students, claiming that the county’s white residents feared the voting power of the predominantly black 9,000-member student body, marched in protest, and Mr. Abbott wrote an opinion supporting them. Mr. Kitzman soon retired, and students continued to cast ballots here.

But other voting rights disputes have since erupted. Before the 2006 election, Judge Charleston said in an interview, he personally registered about 1,000 students. But on Election Day, he said, hundreds of them were turned away as not registered to vote. The registration cards were later found in county offices, he said.

Ellen C. Shelburne, the county tax assessor and registrar, who took office in January 2007, said she had recently been questioned by investigators from Mr. Abbott’s office and had told them that she knew nothing about the matter. Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Mr. Abbott, said, “We cannot comment on ongoing investigations.”

Jamie Hais, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said, “We do have an ongoing investigation into the matter,” but declined to comment further.

Judge Charleston said he had also complained to federal and state officials that Waller County had denied Prairie View students convenient polling locations. Further, he told them that for the May 10 school board election, not only did district trustees use public money to issue a voter guide, the guide also gave short shift to two black candidates, Jemiah Richards and Charli Cooksey, both Prairie View students, who subsequently lost to incumbents.

Patrick W. Mizell, a lawyer for the firm of Vinson & Elkins, which was hired to represent the school board, said that this was the first time the trustees had put out a guide but that he saw nothing wrong with it.

Anyway, Mr. Mizell said, “I don’t think a large number of Prairie View students have kids in the local school district.”

[Ralph Blumenthal is Southwest Bureau Chief for the The New York Times in Houston, Texas. He has worked as a Times reporter since 1964 and has written four books based on investigative crime reporting. Blumenthal's books include Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners (2004); Stork Club: America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society (2000); Once Through the Heart: A Police Detective's Struggle to Rescue His Daughter from Drugs (1992); and Last Days of the Sicilians: At War with the Mafia: The FBI Assault on the Pizza Connection (1988).]

²Burial Exposes Racial Rift in Texas
By Steve Friess

The corpse of a white woman whose 2007 killing barely made headlines is now at the center of a peculiar racial conflict over the desegregation of the cemeteries in a rural Texas county.

Black leaders in Waller County, northwest of Houston, say white county authorities deliberately sabotaged their efforts to have the woman’s unidentified body buried in one of two public black cemeteries. Judge Owen Ralston, the county’s top elected official and the man who decided where the woman would be interred, denies the accusation, insisting that cost — not race — led to her burial on Monday in a white cemetery.

“I had no idea what color the lady was and didn’t care,” Judge Ralston said. “There’ve been some bad racial situations in this county, but I’ve tried to be right about it. I’m not a racially motivated person.”

Upon learning Wednesday night that the burial had taken place without his knowledge, a county justice of the peace, DeWayne Charleston, who is black, said, “I’m going to have that body exhumed.”

Judge Charleston, who was initially legally responsible for dealing with the body, had ordered it handled by a black-owned funeral home, Singleton & Sons, and had asked a black minister to officiate at the burial.

Racial strife is a mainstay of this rural county of about 36,000 residents, 30 percent of whom are black, census figures show. Accusations of racial bias in such matters as access to polling places have been common in recent years. About five years ago, black leaders successfully sued the City of Hempstead, the county seat, for failing to provide the same upkeep of black cemeteries as white ones.

Neither Judge Ralston nor Judge Charleston knew the woman, who was strangled and her body so badly disfigured that a crime laboratory in Houston spent a year trying, unsuccessfully, to identify her. The body, its face mutilated and hands severed, was found March 18, 2007, along a road in the part of Waller County over which Judge Charleston has jurisdiction.

Judge Charleston said that when he was notified last month that the crime laboratory was releasing the body for burial, he saw it as a chance to break the color barrier in the region’s public cemeteries. On June 13, he assigned the task to Singleton & Sons.

“In my time as J.P., I’ve come to understand that I am to call black funeral homes to pick up black people, white funeral homes to pick up white people,” said Judge Charleston, elected the county’s first black justice of the peace in 2003. “I didn’t want to cross that line when I was dealing with white bodies and the families were grieving, because I didn’t want to make a political point out of cases like that. But here was a case where the body was unidentified. I believed this was it, this was the opportunity for the cemeteries to be integrated without offending anyone.”

But Judge Ralston, who oversees the county’s legislative and judicial branches, said he was troubled by the funeral home’s estimate that a pauper’s funeral would cost $3,376. He said he asked the funeral home owner, LeRoy Singleton, a former Hempstead mayor, specifically if the $250 charge for a hearse to carry the body from Singleton & Sons to the grave site was excessive when it cost only $175 to bring the remains from Houston, a much greater distance.

Judge Ralston said he most likely would have approved Mr. Singleton’s handling of the body had Mr. Singleton not insisted on a written guarantee that the county would pay the bill. That was not the county’s procedure, Judge Ralston said, and he was concerned about the cost of delay as well, because the Houston morgue was charging Waller County $45 a day to store the corpse.

So, Judge Ralston said, he assigned another justice of the peace to replace Judge Charleston’s order with one directing the body to be handled by the Canon Funeral Home, known as a white mortuary. Judge Ralston said Canon had told him that it would charge $2,950 for the same services as Singleton & Sons. Mr. Singleton did not return calls for comment.

That reassignment angered Judge Charleston as well as the Rev. Walter Pendleton, the black minister who was to have officiated at the burial. Mr. Pendleton issued a news release on Monday accusing Judge Ralston of thwarting the burial of a white person in a black cemetery.

Judge Ralston denied that he was biased, and insisted that until reading the news release he did not know the victim was white. He had assumed, he said, that she was black because her body was to have been handled by Mr. Singleton’s funeral home. Judge Ralston pointed out that he had not been troubled that in ordering the body handled by the Canon Funeral Home, he was, had his assumption been correct, effectively directing the integration of a white cemetery. And he questioned his critics’ motives.

“I think there are three or four people,” he said, “that are out looking for things all the time to try to identify some racial motivation.”

While Judge Charleston and others disagreed, Mayor Michael Wolfe of Hempstead, who is black, defended Judge Ralston as fair-minded and unbiased.

“People here are aware of segregated cemeteries,” Mr. Wolfe said, but other than a few black activists, “people don’t make it an issue.”

“It’s not,” he added, “a topic of daily conversation.”

But Judge Charleston vowed to fight to have the body moved and, he said, to have something positive emerge from a senseless death.

“Here’s a woman who nobody knows, and maybe, if nothing else, the Lord sent her to be laid to rest in Texas for this purpose, for a milestone,” he said. “She can help heal the racial divide in our community.”

[Steve Friess graduated Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1994. Friess is a freelance journalist whose credits include Newsweek, The New York Times, Time, Boston Globe, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, US News & World Report, San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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