To be sure, in this year commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, President Kennedy’s civil-rights speech, and the March on Washington, it is appropriate to note the strides that have been made to overcome past racial injustice. Today, of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, 41 are African-American. Well over 600 cities have black mayors. And the country has elected (and reelected) its first African-American president.
But despite these advances, injustices remain. For years, the nation’s prison population has contained a disproportionately large number of African-American prisoners. A good percentage of these inmates are incarcerated on minor infractions, such as possession of small quantities of drugs. Worse, some are there under questionable circumstances. Few cases are more dubious than that of Curtis Flowers, a black man who has spent the last 16 years on death row in Mississippi for a crime to which he was connected by the most meager of circumstantial evidence.
Of course, Mississippi has a long history of racial incidents, from the Duck Hill lynchings in 1937 to the Mississippi Burning murders of three civil-rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson in the 1960s. Another small town, Winona, achieved notoriety when voting-rights activist Fannie Lou Hammer spoke at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and described how, while under arrest in Winona, she was savagely beaten by police. With Winona as backdrop, it should not be surprising, then, that Curtis Flowers’s saga has racial overtones.