And is it too fanciful to draw a straight line from that perversion of the justice system to six black kids charged with attempted murder in Jena, La., for jumping on a white boy, or to dozens of black men and women lied into jail by a fake cop in Tulia, Texas, or to Marcus Dixon sentenced to 15 years for having sex with a white girl near Atlanta, or to studies documenting beyond refutation or debate the systemic racism of the nation's cops and courts?
Small wonder, says Mr. Blackmon, "there is a fundamental culture of skepticism, cynicism, fear of the judicial system among African-Americans."
As Mr. Blackmon sees it, the revelations here reset the clock on the old argument over how much progress blacks have or have not made since slavery "ended" in 1865: "It changes all the math of racial progress and racial achievement. Huge numbers of people who are alive today were born into a world where de facto slavery was still a part of American life."
