The DISH

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Vol. 13 No. 49…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…December 6, 2010

Intuit's Vibe

Slavery by Another Name

By John Burl Smith

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II is a book by Douglas A. Blackmon that unearthed a period in American history covered over by myths about the 13^th Amendment and ending American slavery. The longtime Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal used an enormous quantity of existing scholarship, interviews and archival records to tell the amazing story about how Southern states reconfigured their judicial systems following the Civil War to make them instruments of coercion, suppression and intimidation in order to force African Americans to comply with social customs and labor demands of whites, while setting the stage for the full disenfranchisement of blacks throughout the South.

Using personal accounts from blacks snared in the South's interlocking systems of racial exploitation that included "black code" laws that criminalized, disfranchised and re-enslaved freedmen; peonage or forced labor to pay off rigged debts; a fee-based judicial system that manufactured crimes to produce forced laborers; and a convict leasing system that tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of blacks serving time for petty or bogus charges, Blackmon' treatise flew in the face of conventional history by proving slavery did not end in 1865.

Slavery by Another Name reflects Blackmon's evolution from a kid born in the Mississippi Delta -- the belly of the beast- into a man trying to understand the legacy of Southern slavery and why after more than a century of freedom such deep disparities between blacks and whites remained. It is a guide through a nightmarish hell where injustice, pain, terror, torture and death of all descriptions are unmasked by the author's honesty, research, good storytelling, and keen insight.

Rummaging through a vast record of original documents and personal narratives on a tireless prodigious seven year odyssey in attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage sheds and local historical societies, Blackmon substantiated his thesis. "Almost as soon as the Civil War ended, powerful white politicians, plantation owners and industrialists began re-instituting slavery through laws that 'criminalized black life." The system of forcing convicts to work off debts and fines was justified by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865), which did not free slaves; instead it stipulated that "duly convicted" prisoners could be enslaved.

Exposing the myth of the 13th Amendment, Blackmon showed that the judicial system was the mechanism used to re-enslave blacks across the South. Blacks were arrested on such charges as vagrancy, changing employers without permission, disturbing females on railroad cars, abusive and obscene language and selling cotton after sunset. Exclusively reserved for black men, such charges drew fines of $5 to $10. State and county officials leased or sold prisoners that could not pay fines to large corporations, small time entrepreneurs and provincial farmers; they worked off their debt at "hundreds of forced labor camps across the South.

Alabama is a classic example of a justice system organized to supply dirt-cheap labor to feed the ravenous appetite of plantations, sawmills, mines and other industries. Southern states saw black convicts as a captive docile work force, incapable of organizing and available when free laborers went on strike.

Emerging from the Civil War, the South's economy was in ruins. Southern states were addicted to slave labor and saw using their penal systems to generate revenue by incarcerating hundreds of thousands of former slaves as their right. Leasing prisoners to private individuals or companies provided revenue. Sheriffs, deputies and court officials were compensated from fees charged convicts for each step in their own arrest, conviction and shipment to private companies. Sheriffs also pocketed any savings from feeding prisoners as little as possible.

Thousands of convicts died as a result of living in squalid conditions, poor medical treatment, scant food and frequent floggings. Entries on a typical page from a 1918 state report on causes of death among leased convicts included: "killed by convict, asphyxia from explosion, tuberculosis, pneumonia, shot by foreman, and gangrenous appendicitis." Annual mortality rates among prisoners ranged from 3% to 25% and the numbers are indicative of the 4,000 fatalities reported by the convict-board in1918.

Blackmon's perspective on history clarifies why he pursued this story. "According to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally abused, was tempered by the fact that they were criminals. Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened couldn't be determined."

Once and for all Blackmon dispelled that bunkum. "In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of hundreds of thousands of African Americans to mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the US Department of Justice at the National Archives.

Moving from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally flawed. That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created by the most dubious sources -- southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system.

The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to total in the hundreds of thousands. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime.

Hundreds of forced labor camps scattered throughout the South were operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon that suppressed black aspirations. The Ku Klux Klan terrorizing black citizens with mob violence and the return of forced labor as a function of government became a pervasive fixture of African American life. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible forces of tradition and history. The record is replete with episodes in which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically chose the former."

Venue for an Artist

The Chain (1839)

By John Pierpont

Is it his daily toil, that wrings

From the slave's bosom that deep sigh?

Is it his niggard fare, that brings

The tear into his down-cast eye?

O no; by toil and humble fare,

Earth's sons their health and vigor gain;

It is because the slave must wear

His chain.

Is it the sweat, from every pore

That starts, and glistens in the sun,

As, the young cotton bending o'er,

His naked back it shines upon?

Is it the drops that, from his breast,

Into the thirsty furrow fall,

That scald his soul, deny him rest,

And turn his cup of life to gall?

No; -- for, that man with sweating brow

Shall eat his bread, doth God ordain;

This the slave's spirit doth not bow;

It is his chain.

Is it, that scorching sands and skies

Upon his velvet skin have set

A hue, admired in beauty's eyes,

In Genoa's silks, and polished jet?

No; for this color was his pride,

When roaming o'er his native plain;

Even here, his hue can he abide,

But not his chain.

Nor is it, that his back and limbs

Are scored with many a gory gash,

That his heart bleeds, and his brain swims,

And the MAN dies beneath the lash.

For Baal's priests, on Carmel's slope,

Themselves with knives and lancets scored,

Till the blood spirted, -- in the hope

The god would hear, whom they adored;--

And Christian flagellants their backs,

All naked, to the scourge have given;

And martyrs to their stakes and racks

Have gone, of choice, in hope of heaven;--

For here there was an inward WILL!

Here spake the spirit, upward tending;

And o'er Faith's cloud-girt altar, still,

Hope hung her rainbow, heavenward bending.

But will and hope hath not the slave,

His bleeding spirit to sustain: --

No, -- he must drag on, to the grave,

His chain.

About Me: John Pierpont (1785-1866), born in Litchfield, Connecticut, had careers as an attorney, merchant, and then minister. He was instrumental in establishing the English Classical School of Boston in 1821 and gained national recognition as an educator. He published two of the better-known early school readers in the United States, The American First Class Book (1823) and The National Reader (1828). (Source: http://antislavery.eserver.org/poetry/antislaverypoems )

Now That It Is Known

By John Burl Smith

Returning in 1978 to Memphis State University (now University of Memphis), I was motivated by a desire to understand why after a century of freedom the chasm of political and socioeconomic disparity between black and white Americans remained. I researched the subject over the next several years and arrived at the inescapable conclusion "slavery never ended." That conclusion was based on Article I Section II (3/5 Compromise) and the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution. This thesis was met with incredulity among academicians and total disbelief in the general public, particularly by African Americans. Unfortunately, the US public's unwillingness to accept what statistics and a careful reading of US history clearly reveal, I learned recently that these attitudes were also shared internationally.

Responding to the decision (February 2010) by the United States to come under the United Nations Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) Universal Periodic Review of human rights, I filed a petitioned with the UNHRC requesting an opportunity to testify on behalf of slave descendants about US violations of slave descendants' human rights. This petition was a rebuttal to the US government's report which ignored systemic racism in the US as a violation of human rights. Slave descendants could not get a single NGO, civil rights group or black leader to support the charges in the petition which clearly show US government guilt in human rights violations.

However, author and Wall Street Journal bureau chief in Atlanta, Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize (2009), posits a similar thesis. An excellent researcher and writer, Blackmon, a white man, says he undertook his investigation because he, "grew up wondering about the disparities between black and white Americans," but from a different perspective. Although he came at the subject from a different direction, our conclusions dovetail.

After writing an article for the journal about U.S. Steel's use of convict slave laborers and the graveyard filled with thousands of unmarked convict graves, Blackmon says he asked himself, "What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?" Blackmon then concentrated on research that revealed Southern states like Alabama, between the Civil War and WW II "eviscerated black citizenship -- used convict labor and denied blacks access to education, voting rights and other benefits of citizenship." He argued that "this period amounted to decades of re-enslavement that stripped blacks of wealth and opportunities which accrued to whites," and "must be taken into account when assessing the damage done to African-Americans by centuries of involuntary servitude."

Slavery by Another Name reveals that "Southern states, with a compliant US government, re-enslaved blacks in a system of convict-leasing, where state officials contracted with companies such as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., which was acquired by U.S. Steel in a deal arranged by Wall Street banker J. Pierpont Morgan to provide a specific number of prisoners for labor. State officials supplied companies with large blocks of black men -- often hundreds at a time -- who were state prisoners. Companies entered into separate deals with county sheriffs to obtain thousands more prisoners who had been convicted of misdemeanors. Of the 67 counties in Alabama, 51 actively leased their convicts, according to a contemporary newspaper report."

The convict board's records show that "Alabama's forced-labor system generated nearly $17 million for state government alone -- between $225 million and $285 million in today's dollars -- from 1900 to 1920. The total amount collected by counties isn't known." A newspaper in Birmingham reported (1908) that "U.S. Steel's unit in Alabama paid Jefferson County about $60,000 ($1.1 million in today's dollars) for county convicts in that year. Revenues from neo-slavery poured tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina--where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived."

In recent years, German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and Swiss bankers who robbed Holocaust victims of their fortunes have faced tough questions about the debt owed descendants of slave labor. After lawsuits and intense diplomatic pressure from the U.S. and others, German corporations have set up a $4.5 billion fund to pay victims of Nazi slave-labor during the 1930s and 1940s. Even Japanese manufacturers are receiving intense US criticism for their alleged use of forced labor during WW II. Swiss banks, at US insistence, agreed in 1998 to a $1.25 billion settlement of claims related to the seizure of Jewish assets during the Holocaust.

Ending at the beginning of WW II, Blackmon's documentation chronicles another chapter in the dark history of corporate involvement in racial abuses of the last century. However, the petition I filed with the UNHRC continues through 2010 outlining US companies -- real-estate agents that helped maintain rigid housing segregation, insurers and other financial-services companies that red-lined minority areas as off-limits, employers of all stripes that discriminated in hiring -- which helped maintain traditions of segregation into the 21^st century. But recurring calls for reparations to slave descendants in the US are ignored even though the US is in the forefront demanding reparations for Jews. Even President Barack Obama, who undoubtedly read Mr. Blackmon's account, see no parallel between his support of reparations for Jews, but not for blacks, or contradictions in his opposition to a dialogue on race regarding US governmental actions that helped re-enslave blacks.

Sadly, neither the United Nations nor individual countries, not even one African nation, is willing to speak up for slave descendants and demand America pay reparations, as they demanded for Jews. How is it possible for a book to win a Pulitzer Prize that exposed the same injustice pointed out in my petition, yet the world turns blind eyes? Why was the Pulitzer given, if not for telling the truth?

The re-enslavement or use of slave descendants as peonage labor began immediately after the Civil War ended, according to Mr. Blackmon, and lasted through the time Jews became slave laborers (1933-1945), some 13 years compared to 86 years for slave descendants. Yet, slave descendants' pleas for justice continue to be ignored. If this is not blatant international racism, what is it? Either the human rights of blacks have no value or slave descendants are not human beings. Consequently, what happened to them during a time that even white people refer to as a dark chapter in American history does not matter. Now that it is known, as Mr. Blackmon has shown, slavery did not end in 1865 with the 13th Amendment, how does one know that it has ended today, when the same conditions still persist?

To read the United Nations petition, go to www.thedish.org and click on Human Rights Petition.

Hood Notes

Ex-Cop Gets 6-Months for '60s Murder

James Bonard Fowler, an ex-Alabama state trooper, who recently pleaded guilty to the civil rights-era killing of a black man, will serve six months in jail near his home in Geneva County, rather than in a predominantly black Perry County prison. Fowler, a 77-year-old white man said, referring to the Perry County black inmates, "They'd have killed me."

However, in an interview Monday, Fowler revealed that being in the Geneva County Jail does not make him feel any safer. "There are more blacks in the jail than whites," he said.

Tony Helms, chief deputy for Geneva County, said safety is a concern for any imprisoned ex-cop, but that his jail has safely housed former officers before. Upon his arrival, Fowler will be assessed to determine whether to place him in a private cell for high-risk inmates or in the low-risk dorm area. In any event, Helms does not anticipate a problem at the southeast Alabama jail, which normally holds 60 to 70 inmates.

Fowler fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson on February 18, 1965, after a voting rights march in Marion erupted into violence. Witnesses said Jackson, 26, was trying to protect his grandfather and mother from being clubbed by state troopers. Fowler maintained Jackson hit him with a bottle and he fired to protect himself. Jackson's murder helped galvanize the civil rights movement, inspiring another march in Alabama that was part of a series of protests that prompted Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Charges were not brought against Fowler until Perry County's first black district attorney reopened the case and obtained a murder indictment in 2007. Fowler pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge of second-degree manslaughter. He said he took the plea deal because his trial judge refused to move the case from Perry County; he did not believe he could get a fair trial in the west Alabama county. He said he spent more than $100,000 on his legal defense and sold farmland and cattle to pay the bills. "It broke me," he said.

Jackson was one of two black men Fowler murdered during his tenure as a trooper. He said both shootings were self-defense. But the FBI recently said its investigation of his 1966 shooting of Nathan Johnson in Alabaster remains open as part of its review of old civil rights era cases.

Politics Y2K10

Democrats' Missing Convictions

By Eugene Robinson

Why did Republicans go to the trouble and expense of winning the midterm elections? It looks like they're about to prove, once again, that you can get your way in Washington without a congressional majority - if you have a firm sense of purpose. Maybe the Democratic Party will find one someday. Or maybe not. Sigh.

What has me exercised - okay, frothing - is the ongoing fight over the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which are set to expire at the end of the year. By all rights, this shouldn't be a fight at all. The Republican position is so ludicrous that it beggars belief.

Here's what they argue: Extend the tax cuts for the richest Americans - in fact, make them permanent. Doing so would increase the deficit by $700 billion over the next decade, but this doesn't matter. We did tell you that we're the party of fiscal responsibility, however, so to prove it we'll block the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of jobless workers. Three weeks before Christmas.

In other words, there's no additional money in the national coffers for the victims of the most devastating recession since the Great Depression. But to help investment bankers start the new year right, perhaps with a new Mercedes or a bit of sun in the Caribbean? Step right up, and we'll write you a check.

And there's more: Republicans contend that whatever the long-term impact of extending those tax cuts, it would be a mistake to let anyone's taxes rise when the economy is still struggling to find its legs. Some economists agree. But it's hard to find any economist who believes that ending jobless benefits is a good idea, since this money gets spent almost immediately - recipients, after all, are without other income but still have to pay for housing, food, clothing, transportation and other necessities. That's why unemployment payments pack such a stimulative punch. Tax savings for the rich, by contrast, have a much weaker economy-wide impact; the well-to-do, whose basic needs are already met, may decide to skip the new car or the vacation and just put the money in the bank.

So why is there even an argument? Certainly not because of any statement "the American people" might have made in last month's election. Every poll I've seen indicates that the Democrats still have public opinion on their side. They also hold the presidency and big majorities in Congress - and even in January they'll still control the White House and the Senate. Yet not only is there an argument over the tax cuts, but Republicans are also seen as having the upper hand.

That's because the GOP has been disciplined and purposeful in pursuit of its goals. I happen to think those goals are cynical, situational and ultimately bad for the country: Block the Democrats whenever and wherever possible, try to limit President Obama to a single term, and prevent any meaningful departure from the trickle-down economic philosophy that has left the nation's finances in such a parlous state. It's an agenda that may lack nobility, but not clarity.

What is the Democratic Party's bottom line? Who knows?

The White House, for the umpteenth time, has approached a negotiation by signaling in advance its willingness, if pushed to the wall, to make major concessions - in this case, a temporary tax-cut extension for the rich. It doesn't take a genius to recognize this as a flawed bargaining strategy. Voters may want more bipartisan cooperation in Washington, but I believe they also want their president to fight for the principles that got him elected.

Democrats in Congress are all over the map. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership, predictably, are ready to have a fight on what they see as favorable political terrain. In the Senate, Democrats have to parse the implications of a GOP threat to halt all business until the tax cut issue is dealt with. And everyone wonders whether the White House intends to stand tough, or has decided to give in, or has already caved - or, perhaps, has a specific preferred outcome in mind. If so, the White House doesn't seem to have made clear what the objective is, much less how to get there.

Power without purpose, in fact, doesn't get you anywhere. (Send comments to eugenerobinson@washpost.com )

News You Use

Coming to PBS Fall 2011

Historians have presented the lack of development and progress of slave descendants in America as the result of being genetically inferior indolent brutes incapable of acquiring the characteristic of truly civilized human beings, rather than being the result of centuries of forced bondage that deprived them of the rudimentary aspects of education and self sufficiency. These historians point readily to the fact that slaves were freed in 1865 and their descendants have had nearly 150 years of unrestricted freedom to close the gap between whites and black but continue to lag behind in education, social skills, political development and wealth formation. Alternative scenarios of racism, discrimination, disparate treatment and a hostile environment have been rejected in favor of theories that blame slave descendants, most notably their lack of education and unwillingness to change.

Finally, with the publication of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II, a book by Douglas A. Blackmon, readers have been provided with factual information that documents the actual history from that crucial period. More importantly, TPT National Productions is developing a 90-minute PBS prime-time television documentary of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book. This multi-part PBS special of Slavery by Another Name explores one of America's most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Recounting the years following the Civil War, this documentary lances the cover hiding the truth about insidious forms of forced labor that emerged in the US that kept hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

The documentary is directed by noted filmmaker Sam Pollard (Eyes on the Prize, The Blues, When the Levees Broke). Also, the project will include educational outreach, in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves and The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, by providing a standards-based curriculum for high school educators and students nationwide, as well as a Viewer's Guide for use by families and community groups. PBS.org will offer an online interactive site using Web 2.0 tools to share stories gathered in partnership with the oral history organization, StoryCorps.

To learn more about Douglas Blackmon and his book, Slavery by Another Name visit: http://www.slaverybyanothername.com. To learn more about the National Productions department at Twin Cities Public Television visit: http://www.tpt.org/national.

Disgruntled feels: Remorse! The US has provided ten years of tax cuts for the wealthy. And, if you really think about the fact that "war is a racket," the principal beneficiaries of the Bush/Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the wealthiest Americans. Tax cuts, wars and an economic downturn that can be laid at the feet of the greedy on Wall Street have resulted in job losses, debt and deficits, rather than job increases. The economy has yet to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The November economic outlook published on Friday drives home the point that the job market remains in deep trouble. If the Republicans are truly concerned about the combination of deficits and debt and putting Americans back to work, then their argument against phasing out the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans makes absolutely no sense. In the final analysis, I am inclined to believe they simply do not care whether or not their voodoo economic argument makes sense, since they are running interference for the rich. Say it long enough and give it plenty of favorable press, then even people too poor to pay attention will repeat the nonsensical voodoo chants and think they are espousing intelligent arguments. Ironically, President Obama appears poised to go along in an inane gesture to appease Republicans that have vowed to insure he is a one-term wonder. If he does capitulate to the right, this will be one more campaign promise that he has ditched, giving those who voted for him one more reason for buyer's remorse.

Disgruntled wants to know: This week, Kenyata Bryant, a 36-year-old DeKalb County man, was convicted of two counts of aggravated cruelty to animals. Accused of enticing Bo, his neighbor's 9-year-old Lab-Dalmatian mix, with an anti-freeze-laced bowl of chicken bones and cornbread, Bryant was sentenced to five years, two of which will be spent in custody. He was also ordered to pay the vet bills and forbidden from further contact with his neighbor. In a statement following this conviction, District Attorney Robert James said, "We will not tolerate cruelty to animals in DeKalb County. The horrific manner in which this animal was poisoned was beyond cruel." I agree that we cannot tolerate cruelty to animals. Having said that, it is strange that those found guilty of killing people of color receive slaps on the wrist in comparison to the sentences meted out for killing dogs. For example, in the same county, a white man killed a child of color and got a month in jail for vehicular homicide. A police officer murdered a fleeing suspect and faced no jail time, because "he felt threatened by the backside of a black man." At some point, one must question how justice is meted out and ask, is a dog more valued in US society than a person of color?

Disgruntled says: After operating on cruise control at 9.6% for the past three months, the national unemployment rate rose to 9.8% in November. While no increase at this level of joblessness can be viewed favorably, the overall unemployment rate pales in comparison to the economic tsunami drowning the black community. For November, the black unemployment rate remained mired at 16%, nearly twice the rate of white Americans. Arguably, even this double-digit rate is conservative, because it fails to capture all black unemployed workers. However, if one drilled deeper along demographic lines, these conservative statistics paint an uglier picture of US unemployment. The unemployment rate for black teens in November was 46.5%, more than twice the rate of white teens (20.9%). Although stark, these numbers fail to capture the reality of economic conditions for black Americans, who bear the brunt of the worst socioeconomic and political conditions in this country. Yet, when remedies are fashioned to fix the national ills, the black human condition is never the focal point around which improvements are designed, even when the president is a black man. Sadly, blacks must await a rising tide!

Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls

Email www.kxly.com/index.html...A white separatist drew complaints from neighbors and a visit from law enforcement officers after building a snowman shaped like a member of the Ku Klux Klan on his front lawn. Kootenai County sheriff's deputies told Mark Eliseuson that he could be charged with a crime because the 10-foot-tall snowman was holding what appeared to be a noose. Deputies were called by neighbors who were appalled by the pointy-headed snowman with two dark eyes. Eliseuson could have been charged with creating a public nuisance. Idaho law defines such a nuisance as anything "offensive to the senses" or that interferes with the comfort of an entire neighborhood. Eliseuson removed the noose and toppled the snowman after he talked with officers. Eliseuson told KXLY-TV of Spokane that he sees nothing wrong with the snowman. But other people did. "It's such a message of hate," said Amber Caldwell, who saw the snowman while visiting her cousin in the neighborhood. "My kids asked me about it and I had to explain what that symbol means." Eliseuson has angered neighbors in the past by flying Aryan Nations flags at his home. At Halloween he passed out bullet casings after he said he ran out of candy.

Email www.ajc.com...Prosecutors: Woman says judge detailed racial bias...By Kate Brumback...Federal prosecutors says a federal judge already convicted of drug possession may have shown racial bias when sentencing defendants earlier this year. U.S. Attorney Sally Yates says a woman who developed a relationship with former U.S. Senior Judge Jack Camp in May has told prosecutors he said he had a difficult time sentencing black men because they reminded him of someone he didn't like. Yates says Camp has denied the bias allegations and that her office will comply with requests from defendants who want a review of their cases. Authorities say Camp was arrested Oct. 1 after he handed an undercover law enforcement agent money for drugs that he intended to use with a stripper. Camp pleaded guilty last month to some of the charges.

Email www.wsbtv.com...Gregory Armwood of Covington pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of vehicular homicide in DeKalb State Court. Armwood's SUV struck and killed a 6-year-old girl just 12 days after her family moved to Clarkston from Nepal. Armwood will spend a month in jail for his crime. He admitted to illegally passing a stopped MARTA bus and hitting and killing Suk Maya Mager in 2009. As part of a plea deal, he will spend 30 days in jail and serve probation for a year. His driving license also will be suspended for a year. "This is one of those kinds of cases where nobody wins, everybody loses," Judge Alvin T. Wong said just before deputies took Armwood away to begin serving his sentence.