TROUBLE IN TULIA

Mattie White Claims a Rogue Cop Accused Her Kids of Crimes They Didn't
Commit

Mattie White never planned on becoming an activist. Being black in
Tulia, Texas (pop. 5,033), wasn't always easy, but she saw the dusty
crossroads halfway between Amarillo and Lubbock as a haven from
big-city dangers. "I like Tulia," says the 51-year-old grandmother.
"You don't have to worry about drive-by shootings and people breaking
into your house."

But White's view of her hometown would change forever on July 23,
1999, when local sheriff's deputies arrested 46 people - all but six
of them African-American -- as alleged drug dealers. Although the only
evidence came from a single white undercover officer with a checkered
past and, critics charge, a penchant for lying, four of White's six
children, her brother, a niece, two nephews, two cousins and a
son-in-law were caught up in the dragnet, making her the person with
the most jailed relatives in town. "I guess I was in shock," she says.
"I never did cry."

Since then the Tulia case has become a lightning rod for civil rights
activists and the subject of investigations by the Texas attorney
general and U.S. Department of justice. Prominent pundits, from
liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert to conservative talk show
host Bill O'Reilly, have denounced the arrests. And through it all,
White has worked tirelessly to free the 13 still incarcerated, who
include a son and a daughter. "Mattie is my hero," says Randy Credico,
director of the New York City-based William Moses Kunstler Fund for
Racial Justice, which is helping contest the convictions. "Her
strength inspires those around her."

That toughness comes from a hardscrabble life on the Texas plains.
Born in 1951 to Early Smith and his wife, Ida, both farmworkers,
Mattie grew up poor in then-segregated Tulia, where blacks were barred
from white schools and restaurants. In 1972 she married machinist
Rickey White, raising Cecil, 35, Tonya, 33, Donnie, 32, Rickey, 30,
Kizzie, 25, and Kareem, 23, while picking cotton, fixing radios and
working in a Levi's factory. (Mattie and Rickey divorced in 1981, and
she married truck driver Coby Russell, 26, last January.) After her
children were grown, she studied to become a corrections officer and
worked as a home health aide. "She's been there for her kids through
thick and thin," says friend Barbara Yarbrough.

No one in White's family saw trouble coming when a white newcomer to
Tulia who worked alongside Donnie at a local stockyard befriended
several local blacks. Although he called himself T.J. Dawson, the
stranger was actually Tom Coleman, now 42, an undercover officer
employed by Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart as part of a
federally funded initiative to combat narcotics. Town residents
disagree about the extent of an actual drug problem in tiny Tulia, but
for 18 months Coleman-who never wore a wire, never worked with a
partner and kept few written records of alleged drug deals other than
notes scrawled on his leg-approached dozens of people in Tulia's black
community, asking to buy small amounts of cocaine and other drugs. "No
way I'm prejudiced," he insists. "Tulia is not the nice, sweet little
place people think it is."

In the summer of 1999 Stewart orchestrated a wave of predawn arrests
based on Coleman's information -- hauling suspects into the county
jail in their bedclothes and parading them before the local media
("Tulia Streets Cleared of Garbage," read one headline in a local
newspaper). In a series of trials that lasted no more than four days
each, juries on which no blacks served meted out harsh retribution.
Kizzie White, then 22 and with no prior criminal record, was sentenced
to 25 years in prison; her ex-boyfriend William Cash Love, a white man
who had a previous conviction for marijuana possession, received 341
years for selling cocaine. Kareem White, who had a previous felony
conviction for robbery, received a 60-year sentence for selling
Coleman 3.5 grams of the drug.

To avoid such penalties several defendants entered plea bargains.
(Donnie Smith, who uses his mother's maiden name, admitted to using
crack but not selling it and ultimately served two years in prison.)
But many of the accused steadfastly denied ever meeting the informer.
Charges against Tonya White and two others were dropped after they
proved they were out of town or at work when Coleman said they were
dealing drugs. Another defendant, described as "tall and
bushy-haired," was freed when lawyers pointed out he was short and
bald.

Coleman's own record also raised questions about his testimony. One
Texas sheriff who had employed him described the deputy as unreliable,
and investigators discovered that Coleman was the subject of an arrest
warrant in another county for stealing gasoline during the time he was
undercover. Local judges, however, ruled most of that information
inadmissible in the Tulia trials. "I was shocked," says lawyer Vanita
Gupta of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "An entire community was
brought down basically on the word of one man."

Infuriated, White took action. Although she was raising Kizzie's two
children and working two jobs, she became a spokeswoman for
defendants' families and joined with a group of local whites called
the Friends of Justice to publicize the case. Prompted by White and
others, the NAACP filed suit to overturn the convictions, charging
that the prosecution had suppressed information about Coleman's
credibility. White also worked with the Kunstler Fund to raise nearly
$10,000 to help the convicts and their families get back on their feet.

Still, local authorities and many townspeople believe the trials were
fair and that charges of racism are unjust. "There's nothing special
about [the drug defendants] other than they saw an easy way to make
money," says Tulia's Mayor Boyd Vaughn. Sheriff Stewart continues to
believe that his deputy, who now lives in Waxahachie, Texas, "did what
he said he did in Swisher County."

White is determined to prove otherwise. She has traveled to Austin
several times to lobby on behalf of a state law requiring undercover
operatives to provide corroboration for evidence at drug trials. The
legislation passed in May 2001. "Without her the bill would have
died," says William Harrell, executive director of the Texas ACLU. But
until the remaining Tulia defendants are freed, she sees her work as
far from done. "I'm just the mother," she says of her children still
in prison. "I'm hurting, but not like them."