Tulia

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town (2005) is a non-fiction book by American journalist Nate Blakeslee. In 1999, 38 black citizens of Tulia—a small town in the Texas panhandle—were convicted of drugs charges solely on the testimony of a single disreputable police officer named Tom Coleman. Civil rights lawyers and journalists—including Blakeslee—investigated the case, and Coleman was eventually found to have framed every single one of the convicted people. Tulia narrates this story, reflecting on the racism and failures of law enforcement that brought it about.

Blakeslee opens his story in the early hours of July 23, 1999. Local police—wearing SWAT-team vests—burst through doors across the economically depressed cow-town of Tulia, Texas. Forty-seven people were hauled outside—some of them naked—and charged with selling drugs. Thirty-eight of the 47 were black, representing 20 percent of the town’s adult black population.

Local media focused on the heroism of Tulia police officer Tom Coleman. The son of a Texas Ranger, Coleman posed as a construction worker to buy drugs from Tulia’s dealers. Not only had he rolled up the whole network, but he also fingered Tulia’s criminal mastermind: Joe Moore. Although he had once been a bootlegger and had historic cocaine convictions on his record, few of Tulia’s black citizens believed that Moore was a drug kingpin. On the contrary, the tall, quiet man who made his living raising hogs was a pillar of the community.



Soon, other concerning details emerged. The pre-dawn arrest raids had turned up not a single piece of evidence. Coleman could produce no witnesses and had recorded nothing on a wire or video. The 120 purchases he claimed to have made were all powdered cocaine, which struck many as odd, given that those citizens of Tulia who did use drugs tended to favor the cheaper crack cocaine. None of the people arrested on Coleman’s evidence confessed. Many claimed never to have met Coleman.

Nevertheless, district attorney Terry McEachern proceeded with most of the prosecutions. He dropped only the indictments leveled against those with cast-iron alibis, like Tonya White, whose bank records put her in another state at the time of the alleged drug deal. He zealously prosecuted defendants with no previous record and defendants from middle-class families with no known connections to crime. He sought long sentences: up to 434 years. Thirty-eight of the accused would eventually be convicted. Tom Coleman was named a Texas Lawman of the Year.

Blakeslee examines how the background of the “War on Drugs” contributed to these arrests and convictions. Coleman had been re-hired in law enforcement as part of the panhandle region’s attempt to cash in on federal funding for narcotics enforcement. Many of the draconian sentences handed down in Tulia were a result of the “drug-free zones” policy which “enhanced” the punishments for selling drugs near a school. Tulia is such a small town that half of it falls into such a zone.



Blakeslee also asks why Tulia’s white citizens were willing to accept that a large drug gang had been operating under their noses, despite the lack of evidence for it. Race is the single biggest factor, but Blakeslee also fingers “faith.” Tulia is a religiously conservative town, and Blakeslee argues that white Tulians are habituated to insisting that the world is the way they believe it to be, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Nevertheless, there were local people who refused to take the court’s decisions lying down. The most prominent of these was Gary Gardner, a bankrupt farmer and crop-duster. Never seen without his straw hat, Gardner was known in the Tulia area as an eccentric. He had taught himself the rudiments of law in order to sue the Tulia school district over its drug-testing policy (his son Hollister had refused to submit to the tests).

Gardner wrote a letter to the local newspaper, questioning the truth of Coleman’s testimony and the probity of court proceedings. The editor refused to print it. However, a sub-editor went behind his back and the letter made it into print anyway. The letter so enraged Judge Ed Self that he made a crucial procedural error, which would later prove valuable to the lawyers for the accused.



Former corporate lawyer Paul Holloway was the first attorney to take up the case. He was also the first to uncover disquieting information about Coleman, which would prove useful on appeal. It also helped to bring the case to a wider audience. Blakeslee, then the editor at the Texas Observer, told Coleman’s full story in an 8000-word investigative piece that earned national attention.

Blakeslee found that Coleman’s career in law enforcement had only been made possible by his father, Texas Ranger Joe Coleman. As a deputy sheriff, Coleman had routinely abused his power and lied about it. He had twice quit jobs in the police to avoid being fired or suspended. He owned a large collection of weapons, many of them illegal, he was thousands of dollars in debt, and he was rumored to be a member of the KKK. He was certainly a proud racist. He was also a criminal himself. During his investigation in Tulia, he had been arrested for stealing gasoline during a previous job. Repeatedly, his father’s connections had helped him not only to avoid imprisonment but to return to policing.

The prosecutions continued unabated. However, Blakeslee’s story reached Vanita Gupta at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She organized for heavyweight attorneys to represent the Tulia accused. They arrived in Tulia, Blakeslee recalls, “like TV-drama F.B.I. agents, coming to investigate crop circles.”



Seizing on the judicial gaffe provoked by Gardner’s letter, the lawyers began to overturn convictions. They forced Judge Self to recuse himself, and his replacement agreed to admit evidence about Coleman’s previous history. Almost four years after the dawn raid, Coleman was put on the stand. He perjured himself and was found to have invented every one of his accusations. All the accused were freed, pardoned, and awarded a total of $6 million in compensation.

Blakeslee concludes by pointing out that white Tulians remained unmoved by this reversal. They continued to believe that their black neighbors were criminals and that Coleman had been guilty of nothing more than poor record keeping.