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.