Driving While Black in Tenaha, Texas

“You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you’re African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.” This is Tenaha, Texas, as described by journalist Howard Witt in the Chicago Tribune (10 March). Cops in this Klan-ridden backwater have for years targeted black drivers with out-of-state plates, demanding that they either sign over their belongings to the town or face felony charges of money laundering or other crimes. These included a grandmother who was forced to surrender $4,000 in cash, as well as two people who were obliged to forfeit more than $50,000.

Lawyers in a federal class-action lawsuit have identified nearly 200 cases between 2006 and 2008 of police seizing cash, jewelry, cell phones and even automobiles from motorists. For example, the Boatrights, a mixed-race family, were pulled over by the police for supposedly driving in a left-turn lane. The police threatened to turn the Boatrights’ children over to Child Protective Services if the couple didn’t hand over the $6,000 they had on hand. Jennifer Boatright later declared: “We figured we better give them our cash and get the hell out of there.”

This is far from being the dirty secret of a few corrupt cops. In fact, the property seized through terror and intimidation in Tenaha is officially used to pay police salaries. In Texas, as in many other states, state law allows police to seize assets based solely on the cops’ “suspicion” that they are being used to commit a crime. Witt, whose article brought the issue to national attention, reported that “according to a prominent state legislator, police agencies across Texas are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.”

The raw racism and brazen corruption in Tenaha reflect in crude form the daily workings of American capitalism. The capitalist state, consisting at its core of the cops, courts, prisons and military, is nothing more than an apparatus of organized violence to maintain the rule of the capitalist class against those they exploit and oppress. In this country, founded on chattel slavery, class oppression comes wrapped in the envelope of racism, which is especially raw in the states of the former Confederacy.

And all the more so in locales such as rural Texas. In 1999 in the Texas panhandle town of Tulia, 42 people, including half of the adult black male population, were framed up and imprisoned on transparently false drug charges. Just down Route 96 from Tenaha is Jasper, Texas, where in 1998 KKK race-terrorists killed James Byrd Jr. by dragging him behind a pickup truck. Across the Louisiana border is Jena, which is notorious for the Jim Crow justice meted out against six black high school students who defended themselves after sitting under a “whites only” tree outside their school in 2007. When East Texas cops beat to death Loyal Garner Jr. in 1987, we wrote: “Some hellholes are so irremediably backward and racist that it will take the equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea to make them fit for habitation” (“Loyal Garner Was Victim of Racist Murder!” WV No. 458, 29 July 1988).

Tenaha officials seek to justify their racist rip-off scheme by portraying it as part of a fight against “drug trafficking.” Likewise, Texas’s “Border Star” program, supposedly aimed at drug smuggling, has targeted thousands of Latino drivers near the Mexican border for invasive searches and harassment. The chiefs of three of the law enforcement agencies involved in “Operation Border Star” have been implicated in or convicted of organized crime charges. This is the stark reality of the “war on drugs,” a racist war against blacks, Latinos and other minorities.

Past masters at inflaming every variety of backward prejudice and bigotry to keep working people atomized and divided, the racist American rulers have embarked on an anti-immigrant crusade, seeking to maintain a population of immigrant workers without legal rights who can be deported at any time. Barack Obama fed into this anti-immigrant frenzy through his calls during the presidential election campaign for increased “security” on the already heavily militarized Mexican border. As the despised la migra immigration authorities have carried out raids and deportations, breaking up families and destroying lives, Obama simply objected that they are “ineffective.”

As the newly elected chief executive of U.S. capitalism, Obama has done the bourgeoisie a great service by refurbishing illusions in capitalist “democracy.” The purpose of executive officials, from the mayor of Tenaha to the top cop of U.S. imperialism, is to administer capitalist class rule. Black president or not, America is America—racist, brutal, violent. The “end of racism” myth, a central theme in Obama’s presidential campaign, is a cruel hoax, as is Obama’s contention that the civil rights movement brought America “90 percent of the way” toward racial equality.

The key to confronting the forces of racist reaction in the South lies in the mobilization of the multiracial working class. This requires a political fight against the pro-capitalist labor tops, not least to organize the open shop South. This is part of the struggle to forge a workers party that acts as a tribune of the people and fights for a workers government. Just as it took a revolutionary war to overthrow the Southern slaveowners, it will take a workers revolution to overthrow the capitalist class and bring about black liberation.