Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Run, Lowell, Run
The Connecticut Yankee could stop Pat Buchanan from hijacking the Reform Party -- and give that Texas preppy in cowboy boots a run for his money in November.
By Bruce Shapiro
[09/14/99]

Hair-brained politics
Braiding is an age-old tradition in the African-American community, but California cosmetology regulators are cracking down.
By Lee Hubbard
[09/13/99]

The real China scandal
Was whistle-blower Notra Trulock a right-wing ideologue or a bureaucrat caught in the cross-fire between Clinton and Clinton haters?
By Joshua Micah Marshall
[09/13/99]

The American way of bigotry
As we divide along racial lines, aren't we surrendering the fundamental idea of what it means to be American?
By David Horowitz
[09/13/99]

Another U.N. disaster
United Nations ineptitude has paved the way for the current East Timor crisis.
By Ian Williams
[09/11/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

This neighborhood's name tells you pretty much everything you need to know about it. It's a high-density, low-income area of crumbling, pocket-sized houses, propped up on concrete blocks, filled with people who aren't going anywhere. Men aged 18 to 60, shirtless and shoeless, hold down the porches in the middle of the day, with postures that speak of uninterrupted idleness. They brush their hair, brush their teeth,and just hang out. That's it.

There are a number of well-tended homes here too, but somehow, they only highlight the desolation that's all around. One common sight is a pregnant 15-year-old pushing a stroller down the street. Not-yet-pregnant 15- year-olds hold down the corners, laughing and joking with their boyfriend-pimps as they wait for paying customers.

Flashy SUVs cruise by slowly so young black boys can ride up on their bikes to buy and sell drugs. Children, much too young to be unsupervised, run around unsupervised. Four people will die violently here in the Bottoms during the 36 hours of my visit.

This is where the Martin Luther King Community Center has been located for 31 years. Reporters have been calling or coming by here lately, but not to talk about the children filling the Crisis Center and the Alternative School across the street, or the just-completed transitional housing units for the homeless down the way. No, they want to catch George W. Bush with his pants down. This is the place, the MLK Center, where the presidential hopeful is rumored to have done community service to clear his record of a cocaine conviction in the early 1970s.

Madgelean Bush (no relation to the governor) has lived in the Bottoms since the 1940s and owns several homes in the neighborhood. The creator and director of the center since its inception, "Madge" Bush doesn't bother to hide her disgust at the current media frenzy (she fields several more calls from reporters while we speak).

"George W. Bush did not do community service here," she intones angrily, "and I'm insulted by all of this. When did white folks start asking black folks to provide references for them? Never, that's when. When (they're) running for office, they don't need to hear from me on their policies. But when its something low-down like drugs, here they come."

That sentiment is shared by her colleagues. "Who would know better than us, right?" sneered one of Madge Bush's staffers. "We got folks in this neighborhood getting 20, 25 years for microscopic amounts of drug residue on their clothes that they had to take to the lab to find and y'all think somebody like George W. Bush even got community service? You're not from around here, are you?"

As has been well documented, Gov. Bush refuses to discuss his possible past drug use, but he is not shy in championing some of the harshest drug laws in the country against kids who come from neighborhoods like the Bottoms. Under the previous Texas governor, Ann Richards, first-time offenders received automatic probation with drug counseling; when he ran against her, candidate Bush ridiculed this approach, calling it 'Penal Code Lite.'

Once he was in office, Bush signed a law ending such foolishness. Now, recreational users, first time offenders and even those caught with less than a gram face jail time: six months to two years.

Cynthia Cline, a Houston criminal defense attorney who is often appointed by the court to defend such cases, says most of her clients are poor, minority, and will lose. At $130 a day, Cline says, "you're not paid to prepare. The police will stop people of color in certain neighborhoods for any reason you can think of, like not wearing seat belts, routine traffic stops, not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. Then they search everyone and everything."

Although she doesn't like seeing the governor's privacy invaded by the press, Cline is angered by what she sees as Bush's hypocrisy on the drug issue.

"Ann Richards talked about overcoming her alcoholism. Why can't he? He could tell people about why they should get off drugs, not just throw away the key, but it looks like he's forgotten about rehabilitation."

(Actually, Bush does talk about rehab. "Incarceration is rehabilitation," he has stated.)

Next page | Lock up those moms and grandpas