After all, none of the 46 people arrested showed the slightest outward sign of material gain that would surely come from the heady lifestyle of a cocaine dealer. Kizzie White, for example, was accused of selling to Coleman no fewer than seven times.The accusations seemed beyond a joke. Each of them, prosecutors maintained, had been caught selling the stuff to an undercover narcotics agent called Tom Coleman. To believe the indictments subsequently handed down by the district attorney’s office, these impoverished farming people were running a high-class racket in powder cocaine.
They included Kizzie’s husband, a white man named William “Cash” Love, her brothers Donnie and Kareem, her sister Tonya, an uncle and five cousins. Six non-blacks were also arrested, but all of these either lived in the black neighbourhood in Tulia – a shanty area of tenements and trailer homes officially known as the Sunset Addition but popularly referred to by white folks as “Niggertown” – or were closely tied to black families.In all, 46 people were caught up in the police dragnet, although not quite all of them were arrested that morning. The racist undertone of the coverage could not have been more clearly signalled; whether or not the police had actually arrested a single drug-dealer, it was incontrovertible fact that they had hauled in more than 10 per cent of Tulia’s black population, including one in every two adult males. An editorial on the inside pages lavished praise on the police for rounding up the town’s drug-dealing “scumbags”.
To add to the humiliation, local photographers, tipped off in advance, were now busy capturing the bizarre scene for the next day’s front pages.The town’s now-defunct newspaper, The Tulia Sentinel, ran a headline on the affair announcing: “Tulia’s Streets Cleared of Garbage”. Every last detainee, as far as she could see, was black, while the arresting officers were uniformly white. Men were being paraded across the courthouse lawn in their underwear, their hair uncombed and their faces lost in bewilderment. “Basically, they took me out half-naked.”When the squad car reached the Swisher County courthouse in the centre of town, she saw that dozens of others had been arrested just like her.
She asked if she could at least put her clothes on, but they said no “I had on boxers and a T-shirt with no underclothes on With no shoes on,” she recounts much later. She had never been in trouble for anything in her life.
They told her, to her astonishment, that she was under arrest on drugs charges and ordered her out of the house. After all, she was an ordinary 24-year-old mother of two small children living in Tulia, a small, dusty farming town of 5,000 souls in northern Texas. Kizzie White was still fast asleep when the police came knocking on her door in the early hours on 23 July, 1999 She had no idea what they could possibly want. The capital’s high flood walls, built at the turn of the last century, held off the floodwater in the city centre, though one barrier gave way in a northern suburb.. The German Labour Ministry announced yesterday that it would draft 5,000 of the country’s four million unemployed to help in stricken areas.In Hungary, the Danube peaked at a historic high in Budapest without causing major flooding after relief workers spent a frantic night bolstering defences.