Word started to seep into the crevices of the Internet last month about a young woman of color going to jail for 15 years for cutting line at a Missouri Wal Mart.. For a while it was hush hush but there are still some people in the United States who have heard of justice and even more who no longer are frightened by the cards left by the Ku Klux Klan. Brown cards with red writing that read: “You’ve just been paid a social visit by the Ku Klux Klan. The next visit will not be social.” Those cards will not stop those trying to find justice for Heather Ellis from Kennet, Missouri.
More than a few people find it hard to believe that Miss Ellis went to Wal Mart in January of 2007 and was accused of cutting line which led to her being arrested, beaten and taken to jail. She was charged with four misdemeanors which were dropped. When she returned to school at Xavier University in New Orleans she learned that the prosecutor had changed the supposedly dropped misdemeanors to 3 Class C felonies because Ellis refused to accept a guilty plea deal and issued a warrant for the student’s arrest. Ellis has lost jobs and entry to medical school because of this mess. She faces 15 years in prison for cutting line. Are they serious?
It seems that Ellis has to be in court on November 18. The town tried to hide the incident from the news media but CNN, Anderson Cooper, Tom Joyner and others have shown interest in this case so there is a lot of coverage now, almost three years after the original incident. On November 16 the ACLU, the NAACP, National Action Network, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Your Black World Coalition plan a march of the Kennet, Missouri courthouse to heighten awareness of this case. This is a town that is 90% white and has a few KKK leaders, perhaps some of them among the police. They want to make an example of a young black woman who never had a record, who only did what she thought was part of the American dream: go to college.
I will not recount what led up to the incident. If you are interested it is slowly started to swell on the world wide web. There are too many instances of racial prejudice and profiling hidden under the welcome mats at many stores. You don’t know prejudice until you are told by a vendor that “we don’t really want your kind in here.” And you don’t have to be African American to have had that said to you. But people have learned that to say what they really mean is politically incorrect so they let their prejudice blossom in other ways. They follow you throughout the store making your shopping experience uncomfortable or at least a nightmare, they take too long to wait on you or wait on others of a different race first, you ask for something and they tell you they don’t have it, even if you see it sitting there. You are supposed to get the hint and leave and tell your friends not to shop there anymore. Racism and prejudice forget that money talks, anybody’s money. And most of these incidents are not store policy. They are the policy of the bigots who got jobs there and have made decisions on who should be allowed to shop or work there. Large chains like Wal Mart have policies where the police are called in for altercations. But what if the police called side with the store clerk who may have thrown the first punch because the customer is African American, Jewish, Muslim, overweight or gay?. What if the police don’t like the same people the management team of the store doesn’t like? Is it safe to assume they will not be the best judge of character for the store’s employees or that they just don’t care?
Some people don’t want to believe things like this happen daily. Believe, people. This is a country where a minister publicly defamed our President and prayed for him to die. This is a place where color still decides a great deal of what is acceptable. This is the nation that needs work on how it treats all the people, not just the ones that are the same race, color, religion and sex as the founding fathers.
We still have work to do and a prejudice free society won’t happen overnight. As I write this somewhere some child is getting his first lesson in intolerance. I really wish I didn’t have to think about this anymore but I do. We all do. We overcame some things but not everything. We have a long ways to go.
Horrendous story, but it looks like she has quite a team behind her for the battle in court. ACLU, NAACP and plenty of others. Very dumb of the prosecutor (unless he thinks he is going to somehow profit from being dragged through all the negative publicity) and very dumb of most of the people involved.
It just takes some people longer to wake up than others. And, we can’t forget that this type of race-based stupidity is a cultural thing in many cases. Most of these jerks just don’t know any better.
Minnette,
I have had a quick whizz around the case and, as I best understand it, Heather Ellis and her friend were either cutting line or believed to be cutting line in a Wal-Mart store. There was an argument between the girls and the other shoppers who felt aggrieved and the shop security got involved. Security asked the girls to leave but Heather Ellis refused to (hence the trespass charge, I assume), preferring to slug it out with Security and the other shoppers. The police were called and while they tried to remove Heather from the store, she kicked one and punched the other in the face.
Even if all this is as it happened, it would seem to be a rather minor incident to ruin a person’s whole life for, and no criminal system in its right mind would send an otherwise aspring medical student to jail for this.
However, we are in the age of zero tolerance where the argument goes that even butterflies get broken on the wheel in the name of the greater longer-term public good.
What isn’t explained is why Heather was so angry. Is she a brat? Was she drunk / high? Did she believe that she wasn’t cutting the line at all? Was she racially insulted (a criminal offence in its own right in the UK nowadays)?
The trespass charge suggests that she had every opportunity to avoid the final confrontation if she had wished to do so (or does that relate to the time when she was struggling with the police rather than to an earlier stage in the altercation?). Still the fact that the other girl was not prosecuted suggests that she could have avoided the final outcome. It is hard to explain away the kick, but the punch could have been accidental.
Wal-Mart presumably believe that the whole thing is as it appears otherwise they would have put pressure on the police to drop the case (this is publicity they do not need). Equally, I am sure that Wal-Mart management is keen to emphasise that they will not tolerate abuse of, or physical assults on, their staff.
I know that checkouts can get very heated. A couple of years back, I was standing in line in a local DIY store and after 15 minutes of waiting to be served the shop closed the checkout right in front of me and pointed me towards another long line which would have taken me another fifteen minutes to get served. I was so furious, I hurled a large box of screws hard at the ground, scattering 250 small screws all over the floor area around the checkouts and flounced out of the shop. It must have taken them some time to clear all that lot up, or at least I hope so.
However, take this story another way. If the perpetrator had not been a high-scoring otherwise squeaky black female medical student but a classic case of twenty year old ‘white trash’ with a swastika tattooed on his forehead who tried to jump the line, got in a fight, kicked one police officer and punched another, which civil rights movements would have been championing his cause?
Coincidentally, I came across this report today of the British pop singer Leona Lewis being racially abused by a shopkeeper in a store in London, UK:
http://entertainment.oneindia.in/music/international/2009/lewis-race-ban-row-021109.html
A friend of mine who is West Indian living in an overwhelmingly white area of the UK says that he is racially abused in shops and out in the street at least once a week.
Thanks for the article, I like to see more people read such stories and get alert with that around.
Everyone should be Aware!
Minnette I didn’t see this post. I’m sorry I’m so late in making comment. I tend to go on and on so I’ll try my very best to be brief.
Unless someone has walked in the shoes that you and I share it is impossible for them to understand. I’m not saying that one can not sympathize. Anyone with a heart can but to truly understand is in my view impossible unless ÿou’ve walked a mile in my shoes”.
I have an adopted sister who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic until the age of 12. The other night we were talking about Mr. Woods, of all people, and his seeming hatred of being of African decent and his preference for Caucasian women. My sister made a comment that struck me as a sad reality. She said that growing up in DR it was never an issue or an oddity to see a dark skinned person married to or dating a white or light skinned person. Families were comprised of dark, light and in between. No one thought anything of skin color. It wasn’t until she came to the US that she experienced racial prejudice. In the United States she was discriminated against at work, at school and yes in stores. She had two, no three strikes against her; she was brown, Hispanic and female.
My sister is a professor at one the colleges within the City University system in New York. She has her masters and years of on the job experience and teaching experience in her field and yet, she encounters discriminationalmost daily. Most of the time it is subtle but it is there. Sometimes the perpetrator isn’t even aware of it but the victumn always is.
I’m a native New Yorker. When I lived in the City I often went into the[Greenwich] Village to shop, go to restaurants, jazz clubs and generally hang out (if people still say that). I vivitly recall going into a book store on 14th Street just off of 6th Avenue and being followed around by a clerk and then being almost asalted as I approched the register because this guy had it in his mind that I was shoplifiting. I had the book I wanted to purchase and my wallet in my hand in plain view and I was walking to the register and yet, this man thought I was going tosteal a book. Did he think this because I was dressed in a designer suit? Did he think this because I had my wallet ready to make the purchase. Did he think this because I am a professinal woman or because I am Black? This guy only saw my skin color. He didn’t see anything else and after my portestations and profuse aoplogies from the store manager the clerk commented and I do quote,”Well you know how thoses people are, they’ll steal the shirt off your back.” He actually thought he was the wronged party and was livid because the store manager made him apologize.
We are an infected society. There is not one person in this great society of ours who is not. I must, with a great deal of shame, admit to thinking and even saying negitives about Mexicans and Caucasians, East Indians, Asians, men, overweight people and even of my own people. I streotype those we have labled “Ghetto”. I’ve smerked as I’ve passed on emails with pictures of “Fat people” or “Ghetto folk”. I wanted my sons to marry only women of color. Now how sick is that?
I’ll admitt that shopping while Black has not openingly reared its ugly head often it has nonetheless happned to me and more than once. To be honest, it has happended to me more in New York City than it has in Columbia, South Carolina. I have found it very difficult to hail a cab on the streets of the Big Apple. I’ve found it just as difficult to obtain employment in in my field the south.
We are a sick society.