Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town

Nate Blakeslee. <i>PublicAffairs. $26.</i>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Investigative journalist Nate Blakeslee’s tale of an infamously crooked cocaine sting has plenty of villains. The most prominent is Tom Coleman, the rogue police officer whose uncorroborated testimony led to the arrest of 46 people in Tulia, Texas, in 1999—most of them black and most of them innocent. Also sharing the blame in Tulia are unscrupulous county officials, a hanging judge, and gullible white juries infected by small-town racism and swayed by the overheated rhetoric of the war on drugs.

Working undercover, without witnesses or a wire, Coleman, by his own account, made more than 120 purchases of powder cocaine—odd in itself, considering that crack was the drug of choice in Tulia’s less-than-prosperous black community. His bust led to 38 drug-dealing convictions in a town with a population of only 5,000. Most resulted in long prison sentences—up to 434 years—before the tide turned. Blakeslee, an editor at the Texas Observer, broke the story of Coleman’s checkered past, including an arrest for theft and allegations of dishonesty, paranoia, and domestic violence. But in Tulia he also credits the phalanx of appellate attorneys who rode to the rescue, eventually winning the release of most of the defendants and a substantial civil settlement as well.

Blakeslee’s prose is crystalline, but there are so many characters in Tulia—scoundrels, victims, and heroes—that sometimes it’s hard to keep the story straight. The flashback-heavy narrative, at once intimate and panoramic, can be a slog. In the end, though, Blakeslee’s portrait of Tulia—a place where white and black live side by side but separately and warily—is indelible.


If you buy a book using a Bookshop link on this page, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate