Author: Ed Weathers

THE STRAIGHT STORY

Some of our colleagues in the Memphis media seem to be more interested in the sideshows than the main event when it comes to the story of serial plagiarism at the Tri-State Defender.

On Tuesday, The Commercial Appeal published a front-page story about a former Defender employee, Myron Hudson, being charged with trying to extort $50,000 from the Defender in April. The CA story reinforced the erroneous idea, first put forth by the Tri-State Defender in an editorial, that the Tri-State Defender is an innocent “victim” of a serial plagiarist and, now, an extortion scheme.

That is not the case. The plagiarism was first discovered by a weekly newspaper in California which had a story stolen almost verbatim by the Tri-State Defender under the byline of Larry Reeves. An investigation by the Flyer uncovered several more stolen stories under the bylines of Larry Reeves and Reginold Bundy, whose combined output was nearly 200 stories and commentaries. Our charge of plagiarism, which has not been disputed, was based 100 percent on the evidence of clumsily disguised stories in the Defender that matched up against nearly identical stories published earlier in weekly newspapers across the country. Whatever the facts of the extortion allegation against Hudson, they do nothing to change that.

The owner of the Defender, Tom Picou, and editor Marzie Thomas declined to go over the evidence with us. They contend Larry Reeves is a freelance writer who was not paid for writing more than 140 articles, never came to the office, and whose whereabouts cannot be determined. A former managing editor of the Defender, Virginia Porter, told the Flyer, The Commercial Appeal, and other publications that she believes Tom Picou is Larry Reeves and Reginold Bundy, who was also a serial plagiarist.

Three weeks after the Flyer published two articles about plagiarism at the Defender, Hudson contacted us to corroborate Porter’s claim. We gave him two paragraphs in the middle of a 900-word story about plagiarism at The New York Times.

By no stretch of the imagination was Myron Hudson the whistle-blower in this story, nor does it stand or fall on his credibility, as readers of The CA might think based on the page-one headline “Newspaper accuser arrested.” Television reporter Stephanie Scurlock of WREG-TV Channel 3, The CA‘s media partner, asked us two weeks ago if we were aware that Hudson possibly has a criminal record.

For the record, neither the CA nor Channel 3 had anything to say about fraud at the Tri-State Defender until the Flyer broke the story locally. We offered to provide our evidence, a “road map” to how we found it, or both to The CA, Scurlock, WMC-TV Channel 5, The Chicago Reader (a weekly in Picou’s home town), The Columbia Journalism Review the Association of Alternative News Weeklies, and the Tri-State Defender. Several news organizations have picked up the story, some more accurately than others. We did not check out every story by Larry Reeves or Reginold Bundy and have never said we did. We think that is the Defender‘s job.

In case any of our readers have the same question as Scurlock, the answer is no. This reporter and this newspaper do not do criminal background checks on the people we interview unless there is a compelling reason to do so. We are not aware of any news organization that does. But we do check our sources, and in the current media climate it may be worth saying a little more about that. Hudson, like Porter, spoke on the record with no restrictions. Both produced satisfactory evidence, verified by other employees, that they had indeed worked at the Tri-State Defenderin the jobs they claimed to have held. Porter, the main accuser, supplied additional biographical information about her news career, which also checked out.

Most important, of course, was the overwhelming evidence of serial plagiarism and manipulation of stories and the absence of a credible official explanation. Both Porter and Hudson were in positions to know Tom Picou, Larry Reeves and Reginold Bundy. If you believe the Tri-State Defender‘s owner and editor, two unscrupulous serial plagiarists remain at large, possibly ready to strike again at some unsuspecting newspaper. No charge, of course, for the first 200 stories.

As Virginia Porter and others have noted, the victims of the Tri-State Defender‘s fraud were not only the reporters whose work was stolen and the organizations like the Nashville Metro Police Department that were smeared by having crimes and official misconduct transposed to their staffs and jurisdictions. The victims were also the Defender‘s honest employees, its readers, and the Memphis African-American community it serves. “Larry Reeves” and “Reginold Bundy” treated them like gullible dupes unable to distinguish fact from fiction and easily inflamed by outrageous stories and poorly sourced claims.

Memphis deserves better. There is a profitable and important niche for an African-American newspaper. Hopefully, the epidemic of “can-do spirit” that the CA loves to write about will spread to publishing, and a group of Memphians will start one. That’s the real continuing story and the only way to put a happy ending on this sorry saga.

THE ACCIDENTAL VOICE

I recently declared in this space that I don’t believe in any god, messiah, prophet, or afterlife. I further declared that I believe religion does more harm than good, and that presidents, prime ministers, and judges who promote religious ideas are dangerous to the world at large. Religion, I asserted, maims, tortures, kills and demoralizes. Religion is the root of much evil, I wrote, and it should be kept out of government.

I had hoped that my Declaration of Disbelief would be read by the fundamentalists and evangelicals in Memphis and maybe elsewhere. I had hoped to push the preachers, smug as they are, up against a wall of questions and into the rare position of having to defend their beliefs against two-fisted skepticism. I had expected–let’s be honest, I had even hoped for–angry emails from the Bible-thumpers consigning me to hell for denying God.

But that’s not what happened. The audience I had wanted to reach simply ignored me. I received only one email sending me to hell and telling me I’d better start praying to Jesus today if I want to save my soul. Either the old-time religionists were cowed by the brilliance of my arguments or they never read what I wrote. I don’t think they were cowed.

Instead of hate mail, though, I began receiving something else: hundreds upon hundreds of emails praising me for what I had written! I got emails not just from Memphis, but from almost every state in the union, not to mention Canada, Brazil, England and Scotland. Somehow my column had made its way through the Internet to sites with names like “Internet Infidels,” “Atheist Parents,” “The Secular Web” “The Heathen Handbook,” “Freedom from Religion” and “The Freethinkers Forum.”

Thousands of nonbelievers were reading my little screed, drinking it in, they said, as if it were the purest spring water, and many of them felt compelled to write to me. Their emails contained the same messages over and over: “Thank you for saying what needed to be said.” “You are so brave to write what you wrote.” “You have written what I have always believed and could never say.” “I’m sending your column to everyone I know.” “May I reprint your column for our local atheist group?” “I wish I could speak out as you have.” “When I told my [family/friends/coworkers] that I didn’t believe in God, I was [ostracized/cursed/ fired]. I admire your courage.” “I hope you don’t lose your job for writing what you wrote.” “I hope our support will serve as a small antidote to those heaps of ignorant derision you’ll get from the church-goers.”

This has been an experience both heartening and discouraging. I had failed to reach the knee-jerk believers I wanted to challenge, which was disappointing. But I had somehow succeeded in speaking for thousands of nonbelievers who are desperate for a public voice, which was rewarding. Yet in a way, that very success was also disheartening. Why didn’t those thousands of nonbelievers feel they had a voice of their own? What does it say about America today that, in a supposedly secular nation, there are millions of people who are afraid to say that they don’t believe in any god or in any life after death? What does it say that they can’t speak out lest their families and friends disown them?

It says, I think, that the tyranny of the majority, as de Toqueville called it, is still a mighty restraint on free speech in this supposedly free society.

I’ve learned some lessons from all this:

I’ve learned that sometimes it doesn’t matter if you miss the audience you’re trying to reach. Sometimes all that matters is that you declare what you believe, as honestly and articulately as you can, because you might find another audience that needs to hear what you have to say.

I’ve learned that when you speak frankly for yourself, you almost inevitably speak for thousands of others who need a voice.

I’ve learned that even if you can’t change the world–just as I can’t unelect a president who blurs the distinction between church and state–it is useful to express your opinion, if only to give a sense of community to the like-minded who think they’re alone.

I’ve learned that if you would find alternative ideas, you would do best to look in alternative media, like the Internet and the weekly newspapers.

I’ve learned that strangers will worry about you (“I hope you don’t lose your job”) and wish you well just because they like your words.

I’ve learned that what’s compulsion for one person is courage for another. It took no bravery for me to write what I wrote; I’m driven to write what I believe, come what may. But I understand better now the strength it takes for others to express unpopular opinions when job, family, friendship or simple social acceptance is on the line.

And I’ve been reminded once more that such strength is the muscle of democracy.

So whoever you are, whatever your opinions, I hope that you think hard, stake out your corner, then climb your platform in the bright light of full noon and shout your policies to anyone who stops to listen. So what if you’re greeted with catcalls and rotten fruit? If you believe that France was right and Bush was wrong about Iraq, say so aloud, though the mass of jingoists call you traitor. If you believe that the rich should be made to share more with the poor, and not vice versa, let everybody know it, though bleeding-heart liberals may be out of fashion this year. And if you have no god, proclaim your godlessness to the world, though you fear the mob will damn you forever to hell.

Speak out, speak out, speak out. With the world as it is, silence is a sin.

BURNING MISSISSIPPI

Mississippi, it’s often said, is stuck in the past. But is any other state so constantly reminded of the worst elements of its past by authors, journalists, and movie makers?

Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy by Paul Hendrickson, a former feature writer for the Washington Post who now teaches writing, is the latest exploration of the desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962 by James Meredith. Just two years ago, Nadine Cohodas plowed much of the same ground in The Band Played Dixie. Newspaper reporters revisit the story on on increasingly frequent “major” anniversaries or whenever Meredith makes a ceremonial visit. Sometimes the mere revival of the periodic controversy over Colonel Rebel the mascot is enough of an excuse to dust off the story.

The desegregation of Ole Miss isn’t the only target. The 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County has been the subject of a book and two movies, Attack on Terror and Mississippi Burning. The assassination of Medgar Evers and the long-delayed trial of Byron De La Beckwith were made into the movie Ghosts of Mississippi. An effort is underway to reopen the 1955 murder case of Emmett Till. If it is, a movie won’t be far behind.

Other states have unsolved murders and travesties of justice, but they don’t capture the national imagination — or at least the imagination of writers and editors and publishers — the way Mississippi does. I worked in Mississippi for three years and my wife’s family lives there. The surest way to get national attention for a story was to write about civil rights and the Ku Klux Klan. Anniversaries generated articles which generated books which generated movies which generated more articles and books until a new genre was created: Mississippi porno.

Hendrickson does an exhaustive and, ultimately, exhausting examination of the seven Mississippi sheriffs in a semi-famous magazine photograph taken days before the rioting in Oxford that killed two people and tore the campus apart. While one of the lawmen seems to be showing off his batting prowess with a stick or club, others sneer or grin in apparent approval.

That picture may well be worth 1,000 words. But Hendrickson takes 300 pages documenting what happened to the sheriffs (two of whom were alive and willing to be interviewed by him) and their children to explore the legacy of racism. In some ways, Sons of Mississippi is a companion book to David Halberstam’s 1998 book The Children, about the black college students who desegregated the lunch counters in Nashville in 1960.

But unlike Halberstam’s Children, who included future Washington D. C. mayor Marion Barry and future congressman John Lewis, these seven old racists did nothing remarkable with their lives. The two surviving sheriffs turn out to be somewhat conflicted about their past but not all that different in their racial attitudes from what we’ve learned about some of the cops in, say, Chicago, South Boston, or Los Angeles. Hendrickson gains the trust of the families and former colleagues of the seven sheriffs and chronicles their dinner-table conversations and reactions to the picture and its aftermath. Surprise! The children got on with their lives, no matter how hard Henrickson tries to tie their fate to a 40-year-old picture of their fathers.

The most extraordinary person in the book is Meredith, who might be leading a quiet life in Jackson, Mississippi, if writers did not insist on making him an American icon. Hendrickson is the latest to chronicle Meredith’s failures as a political candidate, crusader, businessman, aide to Jesse Helms, and university lecturer. But Meredith was a very competent writer, and his autobiographical book, Three Years in Mississippi, is must reading. Everything else on Ole Miss in 1962 is an epilogue.

Hendrickson pays homage to the standard good guys including Ole Miss history professors David Sansing, the late James Silver, and the late writer Willie Morris. This is Mississippi by the numbers. He talks with former Mississippi governor and historian William Winter about sheriffs and the black-market whiskey tax that put as much as $100,000 a year in fees into their pockets. (As state treasurer in the Fifties, Winter was also a fee-paid official and profited from the bootleg whiskey tax before abolishing it, but Hendrickson gives him a pass.)

The photograph itself is seriously misleading. Whatever their mindset, the sheriffs were not in Oxford to give James Meredith a beating. As Hendrickson notes, they were at a conference and did not take part in the rioting. Meredith surely went through hell but was not physically beaten by anyone. The picture is arguably less famous than one taken three years later in Neshoba County of Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price, laughing and sharing a bag of Red Man chewing tobacco during a court appearance. Price was convicted of conspiracy in the murders of three civil rights workers (and the picture became a derisive poster about law enforcement on college campuses).

Different lawmen, different circumstances, but all “sons of Mississippi,” then and forever, in the eyes of the national media.