SCOTT SIMON, Host:
NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports the key organizer behind the African-American community's activism in both towns is a mild-mannered, 54-year-old former Baptist minister who is white.
WADE GOODWYN: In 1998, when Bean moved to his wife's tiny hometown in Texas to be near her aging parents, he never imagined he was about to enter a whirlwind.
ALAN BEAN: The idea of moving to Tulia for me was like moving to the end of the world.
GOODWYN: But Tulia, Texas, was about to change Alan Bean forever, and he was going to return the favor. In July of 1999, 46 people in Tulia - nearly all of them black - were arrested and charged with cocaine trafficking. There was no hard evidence, no video, no witnesses. The case is rested solely on the word of one undercover sheriff's deputy. The allegation that there were so many cocaine dealers in an economically depressed rural town of 5,000 people did not register as something unusual except to a few.
BEAN: My mother-in-law - when she saw the article in the paper, her initial reaction was 46 drug dealers in Tulia? Who were they selling to?
GOODWYN: The first defendant to go to trial was an African-American hog farmer named Joe Moore. Although no cocaine was ever found, Moore was sent to prison for 90 years.
BEAN: A lot of us were deeply concerned about the drug sting prior to the conviction of Joe Moore. But when Joe went down for 90 years, we were just absolutely appalled. And then when we started to look at the case, we realized, by God, this guy was almost certainly innocent.
GOODWYN: When Alan Bean says that a lot of people in Tulia were appalled, he means Tulia's black community and three white families - his, his in-laws and an old, white farmer who had employed Joe Moore as a farmhand.
BEAN: What we did was we started writing letters to the editor. And so I wrote a letter and then Charles Kiker, my father-in-law, wrote a letter approving of my letter and then Garry Gardner chipped in, approving of our letters, and it sounded almost as if we had this groundswell of opposition to what was happening in the courtroom.
GOODWYN: In despair, Bean tried to contact the outside world. He called the NAACP, the ACLU, the Amarillo Globe-News, the New York Times, the governor's office, the Justice Department. His pleas were dust in the prairie wind, so Bean gave up and tried to organize Tulia's black community, starting with the families of the 46 defendants. And that, actually, was quite a few people.
BEAN: One of the lessons that we learned in Tulia was the importance of grassroots organizing. You know, we were able to get this group of families together that was not very cohesive on its own, and we were able to get people to hang together long enough for the story to sort of become self-sustaining.
GOODWYN: Alan Bean wasn't telling Tulia's black community something it didn't already know about its relationship with local law enforcement. What Bean brought was a fresh, raw Canadian sense of outrage and perhaps even more importantly a conviction that they could actually do something about this - make the world pay attention, and improbably he turned out to be right.
BEAN: When a story is small, nobody wants to listen to you because the story is small and there's very little national impact. When a story gets sufficiently big, you reach a tipping point at which everybody gets involved.
GOODWYN: Eventually, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote nearly a dozen op-ed pieces that spurred a high-priced East Coast lawyer to fly down and represent the defendants pro bono. And that made a big difference. In an evidentiary hearing, the sheriff's deputy's testimony collapsed, and the governor pardoned most of the defendants. In a state that prides itself on its unflinching commitment to law enforcement, it was an unlikely victory for the defense. But it was not Alan Bean's last battle.
CRAIG FRANKLIN: He came to Jena, did extensive interviews with the family members of the Jena Six.
GOODWYN: Craig Franklin is the assistant editor of the Jena Times and he is no fan of Alan Bean.
FRANKLIN: He actually came in anonymously, and I call it snooping around, trying to find out what he could. I believe he might be a retired minister of some kind and that was the pretense in which he came into the community.
GOODWYN: Jena, population 3,000, is the Louisiana town where three nooses were hung in the school courtyard tree after a black freshman asked if he could sit under there too. A subsequent series of racial confrontations ended with six black students charged with attempted murder after they attacked a white student who'd been melding off. Just like Tulia, all of this happened in relative anonymity until, Franklin says, Alan Bean showed up.
FRANKLIN: There wasn't any media attention or any outside groups interested in this at all at the particular time.
GOODWYN: And even though Bean was much more widely known because of what had happened in Tulia, the response was exactly the same as before - nobody cared. So Bean wrote the story himself. Jena Times editor Craig Franklin reads Bean's opening which, if a bit overstated, was prescient nonetheless.
FRANKLIN: So there we have in that very opening paragraph what he intends to do with the situation in Jena, Louisiana and, in fact, what has Jena become known as the most racist town in America, which is totally untrue.
GOODWYN: Craig Franklin blames Alan Bean for what has happened to his hometown of Jena.
FRANKLIN: He was able to this by contacts who he knew would be friendly to his version of events. Because I'll be honest with you, when you first look at the situation and you say, oh, there was noose that's hung in a white tree and then we have blacks that were overly charged, that certainly makes great headlines. And it did make great headlines, but the truth of the matter is many of the things that were being reported were false.
GOODWYN: The white community in Tulia certainly knows how Franklin feels, but it actually wasn't Alan Bean who first put together the Jena narrative. It was a young African-American lawyer, a public defender named Derwyn Benton. Remember that first Jena e-mail that was forwarded to Alan Bean? That was Benton's e-mail.
DERWYN BENTON: We knew they were going to need good, strong legal counsel.
GOODWYN: What Benton wanted were experienced Louisiana trial lawyers willing to do a little pro bono work. What he got was Alan Bean. But Benton says that turned out much better than he expected.
BENTON: He wouldn't take no for an answer. And what he also did, he was in a way that others weren't able to - to make folks understand that if this is the sort of oppression and injustice that you think is run-off-the-mill, then shame on you. It made folks really think, god, you're right. And I think folks around these parts had become used to injustice, just being normal.
GOODWYN: Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.