#I looked up restraining order laws for this. that’s in my search history now.

[gaywarcriminals]

AU where Shen Jiu and Luo Binghe have a mutual restraining order, but then Shen Yuan tries to bring his new boyfriend home for dinner.

“A-Yuan he can’t come in the house.”

“Ge, I know you don’t like me dating, but-“

“No, he legally can’t come in the house. Or within 200 meters of me.”

[i-am-extremely-mad]

Discussion I have on YouTube under video 'A Mediocre Recap of Mediocre Alternate History Shows' from AlternateHistoryHub

Sir Reginald Meowington 1 month ago Uh-oh here comes the Korra Stans. Back to the topic, I feel that some of the people who worked on Fringe most likely worked on Man in the High Castle. It's too early similar or they are Fringe fans.

Extreme Madness 1 month ago (edited) Becase she wasn't Mary Sue... an argument that ignores the original meaning and is actually used against any female character that shows even hints of self-confidence or arrogance or is even better at something than male characters. Aang learned and became a master of all four elements in less than 9 months, almost constantly dominating his opponents, somehow people don't consider him Mary Sue, Korra who spent 13 YEARS! of intense training, and despite that still could not airbending, struggling in fighting opponents who have some superior abilities, ended up in a wheelchair, recovered for more than three years from mental and physical trauma ... somehow it makes her Mary Sue, if she was a male character no one would even thought of considering him a Mary Sue...

Sir Reginald Meowington 1 month ago ​@Extreme Madness I like how you automatically assume that I dislike Korra out of misogyny or a hidden agenda despite enjoying female characters like She-Hulk, Wonder Woman, Rogue, Big Barda, Phoenix, Zarya (Overwatch), and Noi (Dorohedoro). Basically, women who fight like men and have the muscles/powers to prove it. There is a reason why I dislike Goku, Wolverine, Batman, and similar characters. Nice try on attempting to find a non-existent bias. When it comes to a wheelchair recovery story I prefer Barbara Gordon's journey and triumph to become Batgirl again, over Korra's lackluster 10-minute portrayal. There was more emotional weight seeing Barbara doing normal mundane tasks like eating, showering, attempting to walk (after failing numerous times), and talking to a therapist about her trauma in the course of several issues than it was for Korra getting a quick fix in one episode. Korra isn't a well-written character and it shows. She never has to own up to her mistakes like the time she broke up with Mako by wrecking his desk and threatening him for doing the right thing. Does she apologize for her behavior in the police station? Never. Did she apologize when seducing Mako so he can cheat with Asami or apologizes to Bolin for using him as a way to get Mako? Never. Does she apologize to Tenzin for yelling at him for being a horrible teacher? The story forgets it. Do any characters tell Korra she is making the wrong decision or that her going in fists first will cause more damage and be proven right. Nope. Was Korra shown to be wrong when wanting to create a fictional Gulf of Tonkin incident to get the United Nations in a war with the Northern Watertribe as careless and harmful? No. The plots dictate that she can never be wrong even when it could potentially put people in danger. Korra is given fixes too quickly. She gets her bending taken away. That's interesting. We can see her work through her anger, hurt, and self-delusion, Oh nope sorry she gets it back 5 minutes later after crying about it. Oh no she lost the past Avatars. Why should Korra care? She never talked to them or formed a relationship with any of them similar to Aang and Roku. Oh wow, she is disabled are we going to get two or three episodes where she deals with her new life in a wheelchair including how mundane tasks are now a struggle? Sorry, we don't get time for that or life-long PTSD, we have to rush the plot because we can't understand how to tell a story in 12 episodes. You can also tell how much of a fetish they have for brutalizing Korra and show it in meticulous detail. Ah yes, this is what I asked for more man pain and people wonder why I hate Wolverine.

Extreme Madness 3 weeks ago (edited) @Sir Reginald Meowington Even if everything you said was true (it isn't), that's still argument against her being Mary Sue (character that supposed to be ridiculously perfect and not having flaws and weaknesses).  Her being in wheelchair was just part of her slow recovery through entire season (she didn't recover immediately, she was in wheelchair for months, while trying to walk again, and after that she was still recovering for 3 years). How is she guilty for Mako cheating? He have his own agency. If he really loved Asami he could just said that he wasn't interested. Korra give up to be with Mako anyway when she became friend with Asami, she even ask Mako to go to Asami after they escape from her father. Everything after that was on him.  She didn't use Bolin to get Mako, she just go out with him to have fun. Bolin was the one who mistakenly thought that they are on date. Mako was technically right when he stop Korra attend, but he still did that behind her back, she was right to be angry, especially when it was desperate attempt to save her tribe from occupation. Isn't she apologized to Tenzin when she come back after learning what her uncle trying to do.

Sir Reginald Meowington 3 weeks ago @Extreme Madness "Even if everything you said was true (it isn't)," Talk about denialism there. I don't like the evidence you presented to me therefore it is not true. That doesn't refute anything I have said or why it's problematic. That just tells me you don't like any argument presented to you therefore everything you don't like is false or a lie. Just a reminder Korra isn't right to create a Gulf of Tonkin situation and starting a war will cost the lives of citizens who are unaffiliated with the conflict. (Looks at Vietnam and Spanish American War) It is not right for a high ranking member (General Iroh) to create a situation that leads to justification for war. You know what happens with that right? Court Martial and possible execution. We have whistleblower laws for a reason. Apologizing isn't enough. The writers should known better and have everyone call her out for it. It's the biggest reason why Korra is problematic in the show. The writers have no understanding of writing Korra or any political ideologies (Everyone ranting how Amon is communist is using red-baiting arguments) present in the show that they flaunt to make them appear edgy and mature. It's why Korra comes out bad for forcing a kiss on Mako and telling him "Yeah, but when you're with her, your thinking about me, aren't you?", never apologizing to Bolin for cheating only Mako apologized, having her disabilities skipped because they don't know how to scope within 12 episodes (Barbara Gordon did it better and in less than 30 pages), Asami getting back with her dad was brought up last minute and then he is dead. Just because someone apologizes doesn't mean they deserve forgiveness. Especially not after destroying property damage over a fit. You do that and I get the restraining order.

Extreme Madness 1 week ago (edited) @Sir Reginald Meowington I actually started watch the show again and look at that, you are full of shit, Korra actually apologize to Tenzin for calling him terrible teacher in second episode of Book 1! Korra didn't use Bolin to get closer to Mako, that's what Mako accused Korra for, doesn't make it true, Korra was actually right about his feelings for her, and Korra literally apologize to Bolin while healing his arm in episode 5 for whole situation. About situation when she desperately trying to free southern water tribe from occupation, it's interesting how you blame entire situation on her and not at her uncle. She have every right to be frustrated. She make only few brash decisions, in most situations she listens and work with others like when she  listen Mako how they should save Bolin from Amon, she was doing that for the rest of the show, especially after she returns after having vision of Avatar Wan and learning what her uncle actually planning, in book 3 she surrender to Red Lotus so others can save Airbenders. About her recovery, you don't see the forest for the trees, her being in wheelchair was just part of her slow recovery, it wasn't only important part of it. When did Barbara Gordon stopped being Oracle? It's another lazy retcon from DC? DC couldn't work with other batgirls so they took one of rear example of superheroes with disabilities and make her somehow magically recover from spine cord injury. Lazy writing I'd say. Bad example. I will stay with Korra.

Extreme Madness 5 days ago @Sir Reginald Meowington "Does she apologize for her behavior in the police station? Never." I know you ignored my previous answers but ... Just a few days ago I watched the finale of Book 2 and look at that, Korra actually APOLOGIZED to Mako for that before they broke up! When you actually watch the show you see how many arguments arose from people who didn’t actually watch the show or didn’t pay attention to such important details.

Sir Reginald Meowington 5 days ago @Extreme Madness You lost all credibility when you put Barbara Gordon and Gail Simone under the bus to make Korra look good when a 10-minute google search into the story arcs and fan discussions regarding disabilities and whether or not she should walk again were ignored. Not to mention the decades of critiques and discussions of the event in The Killing Joke and the input of various writers who talked about it for decades in several series starting Barbara. Then you go by using ad-hominem attacks towards me by claiming I am a liar and that I don't watch the show. I quoted the episodes and the scene in the last comment that mysteriously disappeared including why that was problematic and how the show does not do a good job at addressing her faults. As mentioned before, apologizing after enacting violence against your partner during a break up is not enough. As I said when I addressed it, "Just because someone apologizes doesn't mean they deserve forgiveness. Especially not after destroying property damage over a fit. You do that and I get the restraining order." and this is the problem of the writers not understanding how to write Korra or her archetype. It is obvious she was sacrificed in the altar of man pain for character growth and the most abysmal love triangle since the Jean Grey/Scott Summers/Wolverine ship. It's the only reason why I started shipping Asami and Korra as I do with Jean Grey and Emma Frost due to the levels of toxicity. Of course, that would require you to have basic reading comprehension or understanding of social/political issues when moving the goal post so you don't have to address those ugly truths when questioning the romance even fans addressed was badly handled. So now you are trying to grasp at anything in an attempt to make yourself look good after calling you out about supporting a toxic relationship with a female abuser. But of course, it ain't toxic or bad when it's female on male. It's just for laughs.

Extreme Madness 5 days ago @Sir Reginald Meowington "apologizing after enacting violence against your partner during a break up is not enough" Originally you only claimed that she never apologized, which is a notorious untruth, now you claim that her apology is not enough, who here moving the goal post actually. "supporting a toxic relationship with a female abuser" What the hell are you talking about ?! Korra, abuser ?! Go fuck off. I also don't care about the convoluted mess that DC and Marvel comics are for which no one knows which continuum they follow anymore. So no I don’t want to see them as an argument.

Sir Reginald Meowington 5 days ago ​@Extreme Madness Saying they don't count as an argument because it is not your preference is a lame excuse to dismiss evidence regarding a comparison between two similar story arcs between Korra and Barbara. As for the other point It would be good of you to stop time traveling between comments and look at the entire picture of why throwing your partner's desk while they are at work during an argument is problematic. As defined by several resources that talk about relationship and spousal abuse.

It is not okay for your significant other to throw or breaks things when angry in front of you even if they have no intention of physically hurting you.

That is a person who is purposefully threatening you and reestablishing the power dynamics of control/dominance when their partner does something they do not like. That is a person with massive anger issues who is one step away from physically hurting you someday. It's a big red flag that you need to get out and it's only going to escalate from there. There is no excuse for that kind of behavior, no excuse for your partner to throw items in front of you, no excuse for them intimidating you, and no excuse for creating a scene or atmosphere of violence. That is damaging to the psyche of the person that it is enacted upon. In any situation, get out and contact the authorities immediately don't wait, especially if you feel you are in danger. Grab your things, file a protection order, and don't look back. Nobody should vent or release their anger at someone like that.

Ugh...

How do I answer this, they first claimed that Korra never apologized to anyone and that her recovery is worse than some completely different character who has nothing to do with her and now claims that Korra was abusive in her relationship with Mako. I don't know what to say anymore...

[laundryandtaxes]

you've made me change my opinions on gun control but the parkland students have me question that again. what's your take on their activism?

I mean my views aren’t based on current events, they’re based on what seems to be effective and what doesn’t seem effective to me. “Ban assault weapons” sounds cool to lots of people but 1) we did try banning “assault weapons” (used in the Clinton ban to mean semi auto rifles that looked scary) from 1994 to 2004 when they were actually hard to get- if our goal was to limit availability this was the PERFECT TIME, when they cost a grand and there weren’t many of them in the country- and EVEN though the number of them actually ROSE during the ban as manufacturers designed around the ban 2) there’s no conclusive evidence that it managed to reduce spree shootings, as shooters just switched over to other kinds of semi auto rifles and handguns. So it’s a bandaid solution that doesn’t even seem to work well under the best conditions- when they are already hard to get and there aren’t that many of them in the country. There’s an estimated 3 million AR-15s in the country now ALREADY, I would guess that number is -at least- 5x, and maybe even 10x, lower than the actual number, there are kits being sold to build lower receivers in your garage with a $200 press and some time, and on top of that you can build a decent (not premium, not shit) rifle yourself for $500, you can buy one off the rack for $400. There is no future for this country where, imo, knowing what I know about availability of parts, an AR is all that hard to get. The people I’m personally worried about anyway (violent neonazis) are watching the news and will have 5 or 6 more before midterms elections. Nobody is gonna turn in their rifles when asked or even when compensated- I’d be surprised if you got 1 million back under a buyback. Like if we had seen a massive decrease in spree shooting during the AWB of ‘94, I would support bans. But not only did we not see that, not see any impact on violent crime, but we saw a modest decrease in the use of banned weapons specifically in spree shootings (which, no, does not mean less lethality when the round an AR shoots is also in plenty of other rifles that look less scary and like hunting rifles) and all rifles from hunting rifles to the AR account for less than 5% of all gun homicides in the country. Even when considering that rifle rounds seem generally to kill at a higher rate, .223 in particular is so underpowered a round the military is likely to switch away from it soon and it’s not uncommon for people to survive 3 or 4 shots with it, so this idea that the AR is outrageously lethal doesn’t hold up. Your odds of making it after getting shot with it aren’t great but they’re better than if you’re shot with grandad’s bolt .308 or.303 rifle.

“Ban so-called large capacity magazines” also sounds cool to lots of people but it takes an amateur less than 3 seconds to reload and a well trained shooter hardly over a second, and cops have a habit of showing up to spree shootings and waiting for shooting to stop completely rather than directly getting in there- this fantasy that anybody, let alone cops, will wait for a reload to try to get a shot is a fantasy. Cops are not legally obligated, as of the most recent court cases, to come into a dangerous situation and do shit to “protect” you. They’re gonna wait outside and fret while people die. So those idea that 10 rounds is a magical number where your shooter won’t just switch magazines when cops are not going to intervene anyway is silly. What I WILL say is your odds of surviving a handgun shot in this country are great (if I’m ever shot with a pistol I have 80% odds of making it out alive) and rifle rounds tell to have a higher lethality rate because of what we have good trauma care for. I would be less upset to see them go than ARs because, again, you can just reload quickly. A 10 round magazine doesn’t mean 10 people get shot when you can just buy more magazines.

I don’t ideologically oppose licenses for firearms purchases, and we have them in my state- minor annoyance to get but 10 bucks and not difficult, and even though mine required no test or class (unlike my concealed carry license) I don’t think requiring a sort of written and shooting exam to ensure basic proficiency is that unreasonable. I also think it does nothing to prevent violence. Someome capable of handling a gun well enough to kill people should be able to pass a basic course, and someone who plans their massacre for months is going to laugh at a waiting period. Most of these men have plans and there’s no reason to think they couldn’t just plan to take a course too. So I don’t actively support licensing measures- again because I have no reason to think they’d be effective. When building policy the goal is to do things that work. Not just to do a thing for its own sake.

So the three most common ideas to stop this stuff are both likely to just not be effective and I don’t support them for that reason even BEFORE you consider my ideological oppositions to disarming regular people and leaving cops with tanks. I do think this kind of violence might be better prevented with something like my state has where if you’re under a restraining order (as many men who eventually commit domestic violence are before committing that violence) then a friend or the state is required to hold your guns while you fight it in court. Judicial oversight is critical though- I don’t trust judges but I definitely don’t think anyone should be deprived of a constitutionally guaranteed right with no chance to appeal. It goes a bit further than barring domestic abusers from owning guns- which is ALREADY FEDERAL LAW, the ATF just doesn’t actually enforce that law by searching whether someone just convicted of domestic violence has already bought guns. If you’re just barred from buying more but have 10 in the house, that’s obviously stupid. Oregon has a new law where neighbors and friends can suggest to a judge that you be disarmed, but it doesn’t require the “accused” to even be in court as it’s figured out, which is bullshit. It is a good idea that a judge has to actually look at evidence and make that decision, and that it can be appealed. With any kind of rights revokation I think judicial oversight is a good thing. I also think it's an issue that 12 states don't report well to NICS because the background check system only reads what records it has- and I think we need a law REQUIRING military and law enforcement agencies to report internally investigated affairs that bar someone from owning firearms. The Air Force just quietly slipped 4000 more personnel names to the FBI that it hasn't submitted to it. That has to stop. Cops being domestic abusers (when they abuse at almost 50% higher rates than the general population) should not happen and should not be preventable by internal investigations. Committing a crime that prevents you from owning and using firearms should actually...prevent that. I do not think that law enforcement and military agencies should be able to investigate themselves at all in any capacity anyway in addition to...all the other things I also think about these groups. The Sutherland Springs shooter having been not reported to the FBI, many cops having DV investigations handled internally and still carrying a gun every day, these are ACTUAL loopholes around current law.

I think a lot of people see this stuff and go “Oh my goodness gun violence” and think this is what drives national gun murder numbers. It isn’t. Remember than murders using “assault rifles” account for less than 5% of all gun murders, not even counting other kinds of homicides like stabbing. There is one approach for spree violence- these men all seem to have histories of violence against women as the greatest single common thread between them and I still think addressing that (like with the restraining order law we have here) is the single greatest measure you’ve got, although that requires not just women reporting but women being BELIEVED by judges. If you wanted to actually talk about gun violence in general, you would be talking about handgun murders since they’re the majority of those in the country. But “gun violence” and “spree shootings” are not at all the same phenomenon and don’t really have a single set of solutions between both.

I have no interest in bullshit about mentally ill people being violent- not only are mentally ill people more likely to receive violence than cause it, but someone who plans a massacre and puts peices together, and carries it out, and even escapes after, is not IMPAIRED BEYOND ABILITY TO CARE FOR THEMSELF as is currently the legal threshold for disarmament; somebody who’s depressed (which, it can be depressing world- lots of people are depressed) should also not be stripped of firearms rights without judicial review spurred by someone seeming to be a threat to themself or others; no diagnosis should allow someone to be stripped of a rigjt automatically and anyway I domt want the FBI looking at people’s health records without good cause when there is no diagnosis thst means you’ll murder someone. Plenty of mentally ill people manage not to kill someone every day. Sometimes people are just bad and the goal here is to limit the damage they can do. I don’t have answers but I also don’t pretend to. What I can say is that this kind of behavior displayed by the Parkland shooter (including, my newest CNN alert says, holding people at gunpoint) should be grounds for at least temporary disarmament. I also have no interest in talking about it in terms of “needs,” considering there are all kinds of dangerous things (harder to get than guns but available) that I also don’t need, like an excessively heavy truck or a car that goes over 80 miles an hour or a sword of literallt any kind.

So no, my opinions haven’t changed because I don’t have new information about the efficacy of the measures most people are still calling for. We tried an “assault weapons” ban and it didn’t work when they were 10 times harder to get and twice as expensive and much less commonly owned than they are now. We have no evidence it worked. Whatever we try, it needs to be something other than an ineffective policy that didn’t work under the best conditions for it. Typed this on mobile and may add links later when I can/this probably has some good ole phone typing typos.

[afroavocadowitch]

News reports and interesting up-dates on POS Hardware and POS.

Every Juneteenth, as soon as Pamela Baker got to Booker T. Washington Park, she’d race to the merry-go-round, squeeze through the swarm of shrieking kids, grab one of the shiny rails, and hold on tight. After a few minutes, she would jump off and dart up the steps of the nearby dance hall to survey the throngs below. She and her brother Carl would weave through the crowd, looking for cousins from Dallas and Houston they hadn’t seen since the previous year. Eventually, her whole family would congregate under an oak tree their ancestors had claimed as a gathering place a century before, in the years after news of the end of slavery reached Texas. 

“Every year, this is where we’d be,” Baker said. It was a cold January day, and she sat in a purple pew in the park’s open-air tabernacle. Baker, sixty, wore camo pants, a hoodie, and a knit cap. She had come from work and looked tired as a heavy rain beat down around her. The park sits along Lake Mexia (pronounced “muh-hay-ah”), about thirty miles east of Waco. For generations, African Americans made pilgrimages to this spot to celebrate Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day. They came from all over the country to hear the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, to worship, to run and play in the green fields, to dance in the creaky pavilion, to eat barbecue and drink red soda water, to sleep under the stars. Locals referred to the park by its name from an earlier time: Comanche Crossing. Juneteenth here would run for days on end. It was like a giant family reunion, held on hallowed ground. 

The merry-go-round at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Baker grew up in nearby Mexia, and each June, her family would camp around that same towering oak. In the early sixties her grandfather built a wooden countertop around the trunk, and every June 19, her grandmother and members of her grandmother’s social club would fry scores of chickens in an old black washpot—enough to serve a few hundred people who’d stop by to sit, eat, and reminisce. “Juneteenth meant everything to us,” Baker said. As a kid, she looked forward to the holiday all year long. 

Until she didn’t.

“After what happened with my brother,” she said, “we weren’t interested in coming out here anymore.” 

Forty years ago, on June 19, 1981, not far from where she sat now, her brother Carl and two other Black teenagers drowned while in the custody of a Limestone County sheriff’s deputy, a reserve deputy, and a probation officer. The Baker family was devastated—as was the entire town of Mexia. The deaths became national news, with people from New York to California asking the same question as those in Central Texas: Why had three Black teens died while all three officers—two of them white, one Black—survived?

Over the years, whenever a highly publicized incident of police brutality against a Black person occurred, many in Mexia would think back to that night in 1981. This was never more true than last summer, when outrage at George Floyd’s murder, captured on video in broad daylight, sparked one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. As millions of demonstrators took to the streets, Mexia residents were reminded of the drownings that once rocked their community and forever changed their hometown’s proud Juneteenth celebration, which had been among the nation’s most historic. 

Four decades later, Baker still grieves for her brother. “It never goes away,” she said quietly, sitting in the pew, surrounded by the ghosts of her ancestors. “I miss everything about Carl—just seeing his smile, his dark skin with beautiful white teeth, walk into the house after work. I wish I could see him come up out of the water right now, but I know I can’t.”

She paused and looked toward the lake. “My brother,” she said, “he didn’t deserve that, what they did to him.”

Pamela Baker sitting in the park tabernacle on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

James Ferrell was at Comanche Crossing on June 19, 1981. It was a clear, warm Friday night, and Ferrell, a tall 34-year-old who sported a scruffy beard and a cowboy hat, had led a trail ride to the park from nearby Sandy. He sat with his brothers, cousins, friends, and their horses, drinking beer, telling stories, laughing. They could hear music coming from the pavilion and see a line of cars creeping over the bridge onto the grounds, while pedestrians who had parked two miles away on U.S. 84 hiked through the gridlock. The moon was almost full, and the air smelled of grilled burgers, fried fish, and popcorn. 

Sometime after ten, three law enforcement officers clambered into a boat on the other side of the lake and pushed off. Lake Mexia is a shallow, dammed stretch of the Navasota River in the shape of an M; the park sits near the lake’s center, where the water is about two hundred yards across. The Limestone County Sheriff’s Office had set up a command post on the opposite bank. The deputies rarely patrolled the park after sundown, but on this night they did. Because the bridge was bottlenecked, they cut across the lake in a fourteen-foot aluminum vessel. They were led by sheriff’s deputy Kenny Elliott, 23, who’d been on the force for about a year. The Black officer, reserve deputy Kenneth Archie, was also 23 and a former high school basketball player from Houston. The third man was David Drummond, a 32-year-old probation officer who planned to check on some of his parolees.

The boat hit the shore, and the men climbed onto the bank, which was muddy from recent rains. Though the three officers wore street clothes, they stuck out in the nearly all-Black crowd of roughly five thousand. “Police have a special way of walking,” recalled one bystander. They stopped at the concession stands to buy some soft drinks, then moved on. Young lovers walked through the crowd, eating cotton candy. Elderly men and women, many wearing their Sunday best, perched on benches talking to old friends. Everywhere the officers walked, they saw tents and campers with families gathered around. Some folks were dozing, some were playing dominoes, some were drinking beer or whiskey. Some were smoking marijuana, and as the officers passed, they either snuffed out their joints or hid them behind their backs. “When they came up,” Ferrell said, “we just put it down. They never said nothing. They walked off.” 

As the trio approached one of the park’s small caliche roads, they came upon a yellow Chevrolet Nova stuck in traffic. Inside were four local teenagers: Carl Baker, Steve Booker, Jay Wallace, and Anthony Freeman, whom friends called “Rerun” because he resembled the hefty character from the sitcom What’s Happening!! As Elliott shone his flashlight through the windshield, he saw the teens passing a small plastic bag of what he took to be marijuana. It was just after eleven, and in the time since he’d crossed the lake, Elliott hadn’t acknowledged similar violations of the law. Now, though, the deputy ordered the four out of the car and made them put their hands on the roof while the officers patted them down and searched the interior. 

A bridge over Lake Mexia.Photograph by Michael Starghill

They found the baggie of weed and a joint, which they confiscated. Wallace would later say that the officers “didn’t act like they knew what they was doing; they kept asking each other what they should do.” The crowd began to take notice. As far as anyone could remember, there had never been an arrest at the park during Juneteenth festivities. 

Elliott made the decision to take Baker, Freeman, and Booker into custody. Days later, Wallace would tell the Waco Tribune-Herald that the officers found drugs on Baker and Booker, while Freeman was arrested because the car belonged to him. Wallace was spared because “they didn’t find anything on me.”  

At least two and possibly all three of the teens were handcuffed; some witnesses said Baker and Booker were cuffed together, while others recalled each being restrained individually. Onlookers didn’t like what they saw, and some began to curse at the officers. Rather than walk the teens through the crowd, over the bridge, and around the lake, the officers opted to go back the way they came. 

When the group reached the boat, Elliott climbed into the back by the motor. Next were Booker and Baker, then Drummond and Freeman. Archie, who weighed more than two hundred pounds, sat in the bow. There were no life jackets, and the combined weight of the passengers exceeded the boat’s capacity by several hundred pounds. 

Elliott started the motor. The craft had no running lights, and as it crept forward, water started pouring in. Drummond yelled back to Elliott, who couldn’t hear him over the engine; Drummond yelled again, and this time Elliott turned it off. By then, they had traveled about forty yards. As the boat slowed, more water rushed in, and the craft submerged and flipped over. All six began splashing wildly in the ten-foot-deep water. 

Elliott shouted for the others to stay with the boat while he swam to shore for help. As soon as he reached water shallow enough to stand in, he fired his gun into the air, in what he would later say was an attempt to summon assistance. Soon after, he was joined by Drummond. Out on the water, Archie, who wasn’t a good swimmer, clung to the boat “like a spider,” one witness said. 

The teens were nowhere in sight. 

Mexia High School yearbook photos of Anthony Freeman, Carl Baker, and Steve Booker.Gibbs Memorial Library

While a boater pulled Archie out of the water, Elliott and Drummond ran across the bridge to the command post to report what had happened. Someone called the fire department, and before long a search party was on the lake. As campers watched from the shore, firefighters in three boats threw dredging hooks into the water. Onlookers hoped against hope that the teens had been able to swim to safety.

Around 2 a.m., the crowd’s worst fears were realized. A body was found near the bridge, tangled in a trotline. An observer, David Echols, said the rescuers positioned their boats between the body and the civilians and spent twenty minutes pulling it out. “They were shielding the bank where we couldn’t see.” 

The body was Baker’s. The searchers brought him back to shore, where they took a couple of hours to regroup before returning to the lake at dawn. All the while, Juneteenth campers kept watch. Mexia was a small town where just about everybody knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker. They were country boys who had grown up playing at the local pool and in this very lake, although Freeman was scared of water, and his mother said he “couldn’t swim, not one lick.” Baker and Booker, however, were known to be excellent swimmers. “Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

“Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

How could Elliott, Archie, and Drummond survive while all three teens were presumed lost? Many witnesses had seen the teenagers marched through the crowd with handcuffs on. Had the handcuffs stayed on in the boat?

About 1:30 p.m., another body was found near the bridge. Three rescue boats formed a circle around it, blocking observers from making out the crew’s actions. “They took a while before they pulled the body out,” said a reporter who covered the search, “but we couldn’t see what they were doing.” What they were doing was retrieving Freeman’s body from the water. 

The apparent secrecy fueled more suspicions, which intensified as the search for Booker continued. The next day, his body floated to the surface not far from where the others had been found. By then, many in Mexia who’d heard about the drownings believed that the teens had been handcuffed when the boat flipped. A hot-dog vendor named Arthur Beachum Jr. told a reporter about seeing Baker being removed from the water. “I saw them pull the body from the lake and it still had handcuffs on it. One officer took them off and put them in his pocket.” 

Sheriff Dennis Walker denied this to the press. “It was a freak accident,” he said. “All of what they’re saying is untrue.” Reserve deputy Archie told a reporter that two of the teens had been handcuffed together but that the cuffs had been removed before Baker, Booker, and Freeman were led into the boat. According to the Dallas Times Herald, Archie also said that if he’d been in charge, things would have been different: “I probably would’ve pulled the marijuana out and put it in the mud puddle next to the car and sent the suspects on their way.” (He later denied saying this.) Sheriff Walker said, “This could turn out to be a racial-type deal.”  

That was an understatement. Reporters and TV crews from Waco, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston arrived in Mexia. By Sunday, the drownings were national news. “Youths Allegedly Handcuffed,” read a headline in the New York Times. The NAACP sent a team of investigators and demanded the Department of Justice conduct an inquiry. Someone from the DOJ called the sheriff on Monday morning and was given directions to the sheriff’s headquarters in Groesbeck, the county seat. The FBI came too.

Richard Dockery, the head of the Dallas NAACP, examined Baker’s body and told reporters he thought that the position of the young man’s hands—wrists together, fingers curled—meant he had been cuffed. Initial autopsies of Baker and Freeman, done in Waco, found no bruising or signs of struggle, prompting Booker’s mother to announce she was taking her son’s body to Dallas because she wouldn’t get “anything but lies” from Waco pathologists.  

Reporters rang the sheriff around the clock, and Walker later complained that the attention “severely hampered” his investigation. “The press has been calling me day and night from as far away as Chicago and New York,” he said. “I had to leave the house to get a couple of hours of rest.” Mexia’s mayor called the coverage “sensationalized,” while many white townspeople felt torn between defending their home against its portrayal as a racist backwater and acknowledging the wrong that had been done. “I was at a laundromat yesterday,” a white waitress told a reporter from Fort Worth, “and usually everyone gets along alright, but yesterday some of the Blacks were kind of testy . . . and I don’t blame them.”

The drownings had exposed a deep rift in Mexia, one that went back generations and couldn’t be smoothed over. “My God, this has turned the whole town upside down,” a local man told the Waco Tribune-Herald, “and those three boys ain’t even in the ground yet.” 

The pavilion and tabernacle at Booker T. Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Rick Washington was in the Navy in June 1981, stationed aboard the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa in the Philippines, when a shipmate handed him a newspaper. “Wash,” he said, “ain’t this where you’re from? M-e-x-i-a, Texas?” Washington, then twenty, read the headline about a triple drowning. Then he saw the names. “I just broke down like a twelve-gauge shotgun. Steve, Carl, Rerun. They were my best friends.”

Now sixty, Washington is the pastor at Mexia’s Greater Little Zion Baptist Church, and every day he drives past places where he and his friends used to play. “We would eat breakfast, leave home, come home for lunch, leave again, be home before the streetlights came on,” Washington said. “We were almost never inside.” They would ride bikes, play football and basketball, hunt rabbits, swim at the city pool, and explore the rolling, scrubby plains. 

Washington, like everyone else in Mexia who knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker, remembered them as typical small-town teenagers. Baker was short, handsome, and athletic. He liked hanging out at the pool—he was such a good swimmer that the lifeguards sometimes asked him to help out when it got busy. He’d graduated from Mexia High School the previous year and was working at a local cotton gin. He was nineteen, with an easy charm and a voluminous Afro that had taken months to grow out. 

Anthony Freeman, the youngest of the three at eighteen, was an only child of strict parents. He played piano, performing every week at the church his family attended. “He was a very bright kid,” said Shree Steen-Medlock, who went to high school with Freeman. “I remember him trying to fit in and not be the nerdy kind of guy.” He had graduated that spring, and he and Baker planned on going to Paul Quinn College, then in Waco, in the fall. 

Nineteen-year-old Steve Booker was the group’s extrovert. “He was flamboyant, like Deion Sanders,” said his friend John Proctor. Booker was born in Dallas and raised on his grandparents’ farm in Mexia, where he helped to pen cattle, feed hogs, and mend fences. He loved basketball and grew up shooting on a hoop and backboard made out of a bicycle wheel and a sheet of plywood. Once, playing for Mexia High’s JV team, he hit a game-winner from half-court. In 1980 Booker moved back to Dallas, where he graduated high school and found work at a detergent supply company, but he’d returned that week to celebrate Juneteenth.

The Mexia where the three grew up was a tight-knit city of roughly seven thousand, about a third of whom were Black. Kids left their bikes on the lawn, families left their doors unlocked, and horses and cattle grazed in pastures on the outskirts of town. Boys played Little League, and everybody went to church. Mexia was known as the place near Waco with the odd name (which it got from the Mexía family, who received a large land grant in the area in 1833). City leaders came up with a perfect slogan: “Mexia . . . a great place to live . . . however you pronounce it.” Football fans might have heard that NFL player Ray Rhodes grew up there; country music fans knew Mexia as the home base of famed songwriter Cindy Walker. 

The VICA Building Trades club at Mexia High School in 1979, which included Carl Baker, Anthony Freeman, and Jay Wallace.Gibbs Memorial Library

Black Texans knew Mexia for something entirely different: it was the site of the nation’s greatest Juneteenth celebration. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when Union general Gordon Granger stood on the second-floor balcony of the Ashton Villa, in Galveston, and announced—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation—that enslaved people in Texas were, in fact, free. Word spread throughout the state and eventually reached the cotton-rich region of Limestone County. Formerly enslaved people in the area left plantations and resettled in tiny communities along the Navasota River with names like Comanche Crossing, Rocky Crossing, Elm, Woodland, and Sandy. 

They had to be careful. Limestone County, like other parts of Texas, was a hostile place for newly freed African Americans. In the decade after emancipation, the state and federal governments had to intervene in the area on multiple occasions to stop white residents from terrorizing Black communities. Historian Ray Walter has written that “literally hundreds of Negroes were murdered” in Limestone County during Reconstruction.

The region’s first emancipation festivities took place during the late 1860s, in and around churches and spilling out along the terrain near the Navasota River. “If Blacks were going to have big celebrations,” said Wortham Frank Briscoe, whose family goes back four generations in Limestone County, “they had to be in the bottomlands, hidden away from white people.”

Over time, several smaller community-based events coalesced into one, gravitating to a spot eight miles west of Mexia along the river near Comanche Crossing. There, families would spread quilts to sit and listen to preachers’ sermons and politicians’ speeches. Women donned long, elegant dresses, and men sported dark suits and bowler hats. They sang spirituals, listened to elders tell stories of life under slavery, and feasted on barbecued pork and beef. 

In 1892 a group of 89 locals from seven different communities around Limestone County formed the Nineteenth of June Organization. Six years later, three of the founders and two other men pooled $180 and bought ten acres of land along the river. In 1906 another group of members purchased twenty more acres. They cleared the area, preserving several dozen oak trees, alongside which members bought small plots for $1.50 each. The grounds were given a name: Booker T. Washington Park. 

The celebration continued to grow, especially after oil was discovered in Mexia, in 1920. Some of the bounty lay under Black-owned land, and money from the fields gave the Nineteenth of June Organization the means to build the park’s tabernacle and a pavilion with concession stands. During the Great Migration, as Black residents left Central Texas for jobs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they took Juneteenth with them, and word spread about the grand festivities along the Navasota River. Every year, more and more revelers came to Comanche Crossing, bringing their children and sometimes staying the entire week. Some built simple one-room huts to spend nights in; others pitched Army tents or just slept under the stars. During the busiest years, attendance reached 20,000. 

James Ferrell’s Black Frontier Riding Club on a trail ride to the Juneteenth celebration at Comanche Crossing, year unknown.Courtesy of James Ferrell

On the actual holiday, it was tradition to read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, along with the names of the park’s founders. Elders spoke about the holiday’s significance, and a dinner was held in honor of formerly enslaved people, some of whom were still alive. “You instilled this in your children,” said Dayton Smith, who was born in 1949 and began attending Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing shortly before his first birthday. “It had been done before you were born, by your parents and grandparents. Don’t forget the Emancipation Proclamation.Your parents didn’t come here every year just because. They came because of the Emancipation Proclamation at Juneteenth.”

Kids would grow up going to Comanche Crossing, then marry, move away, and return, taking their vacations in mid-June and bringing their own kids. “It was a lifelong thing,” said Mexia native Charles Nemons. “It was almost like a county fair. If you were driving and you saw someone walking, you’d go, ‘Going to the grounds? Hop in!’ ” 

At the concession booths, vendors would sell fried fish, barbecue, beer, corn, popcorn, homemade ice cream, and Big Red, the soda from Waco that became a Juneteenth staple. Choirs came from all across the country to sing in the tabernacle. Sometimes preachers would perform baptisms in the lake, which was created in 1961, when the river was dammed. 

The biggest crowds came when Juneteenth landed on a weekend. Renee Turner recalled attending a particularly busy Juneteenth with her husband in the mid-seventies. “My husband was in the service, and we couldn’t even get out,” she said. “He had to be back at Fort Hood that Monday morning, and so I remember people picking up cars—physically picking up cars—so that there would be a pathway out.” Everyone, it seemed, came to Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing. Daniel Keeling was an awestruck grade-schooler when he saw Dallas Cowboys stars Tony Dorsett and Drew Pearson walking the grounds. “If you were an African American in Dallas or Houston,” Keeling said, “you made your way to Mexia on the nineteenth of June.” 

Even as Mexia’s Black residents took great pride in the annual Juneteenth festivities at the park, back in town they were still denied basic rights. Ferrell, who started spending the holiday at Comanche Crossing as a kid in the fifties, recalled life in segregated Mexia. “Up until the sixties, you still had your place,” he said. “If you were Black, you drank from the fountain over there, whites drank from the one over here, and if I went and drank in the fountain over here, well, I got a problem.” Back then, many Black residents lived near a commercial strip of Black-owned businesses called “the Beat,” along South Belknap Street, where they had their own movie theater, grocery stores, barbershops, juke joints, cleaners, and funeral home. When white and Black residents found themselves standing on opposite street corners downtown, the Black pedestrians had to wait for their white counterparts to cross first. “We couldn’t walk past each other,” said Ray Anderson, who was born in 1954 and went on to become Mexia’s mayor. “And if it was a female, you definitely better stay across the street or go the other way. You grew up knowing you couldn’t cross certain boundaries or you’d go to prison—or get hung.”

For years, the only law enforcement at Lake Mexia during Juneteenth consisted of a few well-known Black civilians. One was Homer Willis, an older man who had been deputized by the sheriff to walk around with a walkie-talkie, which he could use to radio deputies in case of an emergency. In the late seventies, more rigorous licensing requirements made such commissions a thing of the past, and the sheriff set up a command post across the lake where officers would hang out and wait. They stayed mostly on the periphery, helping to direct traffic and occasionally crossing the lake to break up a fight. 

Until June 19, 1981, when, during the peak hours of one of the biggest Juneteenth celebrations in years, three officers piled into a small boat, started the motor, and cruised across narrow Lake Mexia. 

The concession stands at Booker T. Washington Park.Photograph by Michael Starghill

When Baker and Freeman’s dual funeral was held in Mexia, so many mourners planned to attend the service that it had to be convened at the city’s largest church, First Baptist. Even so, the 1,400-seat space couldn’t accommodate them all. Baker and Freeman were remembered as kind young men who never hurt anyone and never got in trouble. At one point, Freeman’s mother, Nellie Mae, broke down, fainted, and had to be carried out. She insisted on returning for one last look at her only child before she was rushed to the hospital.

The district judge in Limestone County, P. K. Reiter, hoped that a swift investigation would defuse the escalating racial tensions. “We need to clear the air,” he said, announcing the opening of a court of inquiry, a rarely used fact-finding measure intended to speed up proceedings that would normally take months to complete. The court lacked the authority to mete out punishment, but it could refer cases for prosecution. Reiter asked the NAACP to recommend a Black lawyer to lead the inquest. The organization sent Larry Baraka, a 31-year-old prosecutor from Dallas. Baraka arrived in town two days after Booker’s body was found. 

Limestone County had never seen anything like this. News helicopters flew into Groesbeck from Dallas and Fort Worth, landing in the church parking lot across the street from the courthouse. It was summer in Central Texas, and the courtroom, which lacked air conditioning, was crammed with 150 people; reporters filled every seat in the jury box. A writer from the Mexia Daily News wrote that the room was loaded with a “strong suspicion of intrigue, deep pathos, heavy remorse, and indignation.” 

The main issue was the handcuffs. Eighteen witnesses testified, including Drummond, the probation officer. He insisted that the officers had brought just one pair of handcuffs, that only Baker and Booker were handcuffed to each other, and that the cuffs had been removed before they got into the boat. A witness who’d been on a nearby craft—a Black woman from Dallas—told the court that she saw the officers remove the restraints from two men who’d been handcuffed together. The fire chief testified that no cuffs were found on the bodies as they were pulled from the lake. 

Other witnesses contradicted the officials’ version of events. Beachum, the hot-dog seller, again said that he saw cuffs taken off Baker’s body after it was retrieved from the lake, but he also admitted to drinking almost a fifth of whiskey that day. Another said all three were handcuffed—and that Elliott was drinking beer and his eyes were “puffy.” The local funeral home director, who had seen some two hundred drowning victims in his seventeen-year career, said that the position of Baker’s hands indicated that the teen had been cuffed. “It’s highly unlikely you will find a drowning victim’s hands in that position.” 

At the end of the three-day proceeding, Baraka told reporters that the evidence suggested the teens were not handcuffed in the boat. He believed the officers had acted without criminal or racist intent, but he added that they had behaved with “rampant incompetence” and “gross negligence.” The boat was overloaded and there were no life preservers, so the officers could still face criminal charges.

For Mexia’s Black residents, the court of inquiry had cleared up nothing. They rejected the testimony of both Drummond and the fire chief and suspected a cover-up. Whites in Mexia also criticized the officers’ judgment. “You put a gun on someone’s hip, and it goes to their head,” former district attorney Don Caldwell told a reporter. “The evidence in this case doesn’t add up. It was a terrible act of stupidity, and somebody is going to have to pay the fiddler.” 

That fall, Limestone County attorney Patrick Simmons, together with a lawyer from the state attorney general’s office named Gerald Carruth, took the court of inquiry’s findings to a grand jury. They hoped the panel would indict the officers for involuntary manslaughter, a felony. Instead, the jury came back with misdemeanor charges for criminally negligent homicide and violating the Texas Water Safety Act. If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams, a spokesperson for the Comanche Three Committee, an advocacy group formed in response to the drownings. 

Defense attorneys argued that the officers couldn’t receive a fair trial in Mexia, so they requested the proceedings be moved. A judge in Marlin, about forty miles away, said he didn’t want it, not after “statements in the news media by certain persons created an atmosphere in this county that is charged with racial tension to the point that violence is invited.” The case was moved to San Marcos, where another judge punted. “No one wants this,” Joe Cannon, the attorney defending Drummond, told a reporter. “It’s a hot potato.” Finally, Baraka, who had by then joined the prosecution, convinced Dallas County Criminal Court judge Tom Price to preside over the trial.

If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams.

Price, who was eight years into a four-decade judicial career, would later call the Mexia drownings the biggest case he ever handled. “It was a hard, emotional trial,” he said. “Three young kids who died for no reason. There was so much tension, and it was so racially mixed up in there. I was thirty-three, thinking, ‘What have I got myself into?’ ”

The trial, which lasted three weeks, was perhaps the highest-profile misdemeanor proceeding in Texas history. Each defendant had his own attorney, and each attorney objected as often as possible, squabbling with prosecutors and spurring Price to threaten them all with contempt. The atmosphere was further strained by the presence of news crews, who swarmed the legal teams and the teens’ families during recesses. 

To convict the officers of criminal negligence, the all-white, six-person jury would need to be convinced that under the same circumstances an ordinary person would have perceived a substantial risk of putting the teens into the boat and avoided doing so. Defense lawyers acknowledged that the officers had made mistakes but argued that their actions were reasonable—that they had needed to use the boat to avoid what they viewed as a hostile crowd. Two defense witnesses said they had seen the officers remove handcuffs from the teens before boarding the boat. Beachum, the witness who told the court of inquiry he’d seen handcuffs on Baker’s body, didn’t testify at trial because the prosecution didn’t call him to the stand. “I think Carruth, Baraka, and I all had problems with his credibility,” Simmons said recently. Instead, the prosecutors centered their case on other facts—from the absence of lights and life jackets aboard the boat to the officers’ reckless decision to overload the craft. “They made mistakes that would shock the consciences of reasonable people,” Baraka told the jurors. 

The officers took the stand and said they had tried to save the teenagers. Archie told the jury that while he clung to the overturned boat, Drummond pushed Freeman toward Archie, who grabbed the thrashing teen by the hair and shirt and pulled him onto the hull. Archie said he tried to maneuver to the other side of the craft while holding Freeman across the top but the teen slipped off, sank, and then bobbed up four times before disappearing. Archie didn’t try to rescue him again because the reserve deputy wasn’t a strong swimmer. Drummond testified that he tried to help Baker but the teen kept pulling him under, so the officer let go and swam to shore. He also said that if he could have done anything to change the situation, he “wouldn’t have made an arrest in the first place.” 

Elliott acknowledged that he and the other officers had erred. He called the drownings “just a horrible accident” and said he’d do things differently given another chance. When Baraka asked Elliott if he thought they deserved forgiveness, the deputy answered, “Under the circumstances, yes.”  

After the closing arguments, the jury took less than five hours to render a verdict: not guilty. The defendants, showing no emotion, were rushed away. Afterward, Nellie Mae Freeman sat on a bench outside the courtroom reading the Bible. “No,” she told a reporter, “justice was not done.” Evelyn Baker, Carl’s mother, said she had expected the verdict. “This is very terrible, but that’s Mexia for you, and that’s Limestone County. The Lord will take care of them.” 

The families found more disappointment when it came to their last remaining legal option: civil lawsuits, in which the deputies and the county could be held responsible for negligence under a much lower burden of proof. Each family sued for $4 million in damages, alleging that their sons’ civil rights had been violated. In December 1983, they settled for a total of $200,000, or $66,667 per teen. 

A local official told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the county’s lawyers felt “very lucky” about the outcome. “We were just sitting on pins and needles hoping it would get as low as possible but we never really thought [the settlement] would get this low,” said Howard Smith, a county judge familiar with the civil case. Attorneys for the county made a lowball offer, and the families and their lawyers accepted it. “I was tired,” Evelyn said recently. “I was hurt, and I never did get to really grieve. They just really ran us through it.” 

The pavilion at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For many Black Mexia residents, Comanche Crossing was never the same after the drownings. “It just changed my whole life,” said Steen-Medlock, the teens’ schoolmate. “I never went back to another Juneteenth there.” Many others felt similarly. Attendance in 1982, the year after the drownings, was about two thousand, the lowest in 35 years. It wasn’t just that celebrants were fearful of being harassed, arrested, or worse. Comanche Crossing was sacred ground, land that had been purchased by people who had survived slavery, to ensure that they, along with future generations, would have a place to commemorate emancipation. Now that land had been defiled.

Texas had made Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1980, and celebrations of Black freedom spread to other cities. In 1982 Houston’s Juneteenth parade attracted an estimated 50,000 onlookers. As crowds moved elsewhere, attendance at Comanche Crossing’s Juneteenth ceremonies continued to decline. Arson attacks in 1987 and 1989 caused severe damage to the tabernacle and pavilion, and the structures had to be rebuilt. Concession booths were tagged with racist graffiti.

Many of those who’d grown up with the teens left town. “It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” Over the years, Juneteenth crowds at Comanche Crossing dwindled even more, while the brush along the lake grew thicker and the buildings fell into disrepair. During the past decade, official attendance has sometimes dropped to less than a hundred. When the Nineteenth of June Organization elected former county commissioner William “Pete” Kirven as its new president in 2015, some locals felt optimistic. “I had a lot of hope,” said Judy Chambers, a municipal judge for the city of Mexia and a past member of the organization’s board of directors. She thought the group—and Comanche Crossing—could use some new blood. 

That hope didn’t last. Although the new leadership cleaned up the park’s grounds and installed new light poles and swing sets, it also posted a sign banning alcohol, instituted a 1 a.m. closing time, and increased the law enforcement presence during Juneteenth. The new rules did not go over well. “Juneteenth is not worth going out there,” said a Mexia resident who had attended the festivities since he was a boy. “It’s not any fun. So many police you can’t enjoy yourself. I went in 2018. I didn’t like it. I haven’t been back.”  

Echols, a member of the organization’s board of directors, said that despite the “No Alcohol” sign, members of the public are allowed to drink as long as they use plastic cups. He agreed that law enforcement had gone overboard in 2018 and “was scaring people away” but added that after the group expressed these concerns to the sheriff, the presence was reduced.

Simmons, the prosecuting attorney at the 1982 trial, is now the district judge for Limestone and Freestone Counties. “This was the Juneteenth place, and it’s a shame we lost that,” he said. “At the time, I looked at it as an incident that needed to be prosecuted. I look back on it now and say, ‘What a tragedy. What a shame.’ The ridiculous idea of going over—three guys in a boat—could they rethink it? It was such a tragedy, not just the loss of three young men but the whole Juneteenth.” 

In recent years, awareness of Juneteenth has exploded. Some of that is due to a woman from Fort Worth named Opal Lee. In 2016, when she was 89, she set out to walk from Texas to Washington, D.C., to publicize a campaign to designate Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Last year, Lee collected 1.5 million signatures on a petition in pursuit of that goal, and in Congress, Texas senator John Cornyn and U.S. representative Sheila Jackson Lee filed legislation to take Juneteenth nationwide. The bills didn’t pass, though they have been reintroduced this year.

Perhaps the biggest factor wasn’t a petition or a bill, though, but the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. In the weeks after Floyd’s murder, the Juneteenth holiday became linked with the national protest movement in support of Black lives. On June 19, hundreds of thousands of protesters hit the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., and Houston. All across the country, marchers carried Juneteenth banners as well as signs emblazoned with Floyd’s face and the names of other Black people killed by law enforcement. 

Back in Mexia, locals drew a straight line from 1981 to 2020. “When I saw that video,” said Chambers, “it took me back to that place and time where Black men were getting killed on the streets of Limestone County by law enforcement—and back then it was just swept under the rug.” Steen-Medlock said watching the video immediately reminded her of her three friends who died 39 years earlier. “Those three deputies thought, ‘We have a right to do whatever we want to do’—and that meant putting these boys in a small boat, at night, handcuffed, with no life jackets,” she said. “That’s how they dealt with Black people. If it had been white kids, they would have said, ‘Call your dad to come get you.’ But when you’re Black, you’re not treated like that. You’re guilty.”

“It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” 

This history helps explain why Chambers, Steen-Medlock, and almost every other current or former Black Mexia resident still believe the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Chambers said she has spoken with witnesses who told her they were scared to testify forty years ago. “I don’t know if you live in a small town in the South,” she said, “but a lot of powerful people in town control others with things like mortgages and loans.” Echols said, “Back in those days, there was a fear of the sheriff’s department. A lot of guys may have had some problems with the law, so they didn’t come forward.” 

The foreperson of the grand jury, Ray Anderson, said that jurors discussed the handcuffs at length and subpoenaed Beachum to testify about their presence, but Beachum never showed up. At the time, that spoke volumes to Anderson. “I was never presented enough evidence of handcuffs,” he said. “If I could’ve proved murderous intent, I would have been the first to vote on it. I would have said, ‘We need to make an example—right here.’ ” Now, almost forty years later, Anderson doubts the grand jury got the whole story. “I still feel there was a lot of stuff that didn’t come out.” 

Most white officials involved in the case maintain that there was no evidence the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Instead, they cite other factors that could have caused the three to drown. “I’ve taught swimming for years,” said Cannon, the attorney who represented Drummond. “If you’re fully clothed and it’s dark and you’re not oriented correctly, then you panic. You easily panic. I was surprised that any of them got back.”

Daniel Keeling was ten in 1981, and he grew up in Mexia hearing about the handcuffs as a statement of fact. The drownings left him so unsettled that he eventually pursued a career in law enforcement, where he hoped to improve the field from within. Keeling also hoped that he might uncover the truth behind his hometown’s most controversial case. 

“Supposedly Drummond took the handcuffs off,” said Keeling, who spent over seven years as a deputy in Hunt County and six more as a deputy constable in Dallas and now works as a corporate security manager. “Well, usually when you’re making an arrest, you put handcuffs on a subject and don’t take them off until you get where you’re going. Did the pressure come down on him to change his story? The blue shield is real. And telling the truth could ruin your whole career.” 

What really happened that night? Keeling’s search convinced him that the answer will never be known.

Around Mexia, locals don’t talk about the drownings much anymore. “This is still very raw for a lot of people,” said Steen-Medlock. “They want to forget it ever happened.” The city boasts several colorful murals depicting local heroes and historical figures, but there’s no memorial for Baker, Freeman, and Booker—not at the park, not anywhere in town. There is also no official record of the 1982 trial in either Dallas or Limestone County because the officers had their records expunged. Legally, it’s as if they were never even arrested.

These days, most Black Mexia residents celebrate Juneteenth at home with family and friends. Some hold block parties; others attend events in nearby towns. Many use that week for family reunions, with faraway aunts and uncles taking vacation time to come home to Mexia. But most don’t go to Comanche Crossing. 

None of the officers involved in the drownings agreed to speak with Texas Monthly for this story. Archie, who retired from his job as a security guard, lives close enough to Lake Mexia that he can see it from his porch. Drummond retired from a career running a fencing company; he declined when reached for comment, adding, “I’ve done that. It’s been a long time and it’s still relatively fresh on my mind, believe it or not.” 

Elliott did not respond to several interview requests. Ronnie Davis, an old friend who hasn’t spoken with him in decades, said the deputy took the incident hard back in 1981. “He looked really bad when I talked to him a week after,” Davis recalled. “It was bothering him that lots of people thought he did it on purpose. No. It had nothing to do with prejudice. Nothing at all.” 

After the trial, Elliott moved to College Station and began a decorated career as an investigator with the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, where he solved the twelve-year-old cold case of a murdered local real estate agent. At Elliott’s retirement ceremony in 2018, one colleague lauded him as a zealous loner, and another noted his “perseverance, integrity, respect, and trust.” Elliott was hanging up his badge because he had been elected as a justice of the peace for Brazos County. To Mexia residents who’ve never forgotten the drownings, the thought that life simply moved on for Elliott and the other officers is maddening. “They got away with murder!” said Edward Jackson, who went to school with the three teens. “Nothing happened to their lives or careers.” 

Jay Wallace, the fourth teen in the car, also declined interview requests for this story. Friends of his say that Wallace, now 58, has never talked to them about that night. “I can just imagine what he’s feeling,” Proctor, who grew up with the teens, said. “What’s going on in his head is ‘That could have been me.’ ”

As the officer in charge that night and the one who initiated the arrests, Elliott has usually been considered most responsible for the tragedy. In 2001 Simmons, the prosecutor, told the Texas Observer that Elliott was viewed as a “wild man” and not well-liked by fellow officers. More recently, Simmons said, “I think Kenny was trying to make a name for himself as a hotshot officer, but if you look back on it, why on earth would you have done that?”

A big part of a deputy’s job is learning to deal with crowds, Keeling said. “The way I was taught, you ask yourself the question ‘Do I really need to make this arrest? Are they breaking the peace? Are they causing harm to others?’ If not, let it go.” Keeling added that he remembers the pressure he felt early in his career. “I know the weight of being a young officer—you have to prove yourself. I think it was basically an ‘I’ll show you who I am’ mentality. I think it was one officer’s fault, and the other two backed him. 

“Hopefully he’s atoned for whatever the hell he did.”

Pamela, her sister Evelyn Jean, and Patricia Baker under their family oak tree at Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For the first time since her brother’s death, Pamela Baker visited Comanche Crossing on Juneteenth last year. The official festivities had been rescheduled as a virtual event due to COVID-19, but a group of locals set up a few stands and gathered at the park, and Baker met some friends there. She hadn’t wandered the grounds in decades, and now she found herself walking down the caliche road and past the merry-go-round and the dance hall. She pointed out to one of her friends the oak where her grandmother used to serve fried chicken and biscuits to hundreds of fellow campers. The counter her grandfather built was long gone, but the tree still stood. Baker perused the vendor stalls and bought a purse and a plate of fried fish before settling on a bench by the lake. She looked out at the water. Before long, she was crying. 

The Nineteenth of June Organization has reached out to Baker about holding a memorial for the three teens this Juneteenth, and she’s thinking about going back. She talked with her children about possibly getting together around the old oak and even rebuilding her grandparents’ counter. Her ancestors celebrated emancipation on this same land while living through their own unthinkable tragedies, and she figures it’s time she did so too. “I don’t think it’ll ever be like it used to be,” she said. “I wish it would, ’cause this is history for us. This is something we should build back up together.”

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Ghosts of Comanche Crossing.” Subscribe today.

The above article was published here.

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[gibsongirlselections]

The Populist Radio Host Who Really Was Trump Before Trump

Somewhere in New Jersey, on the border of Trenton and Hamilton, just a few miles from where critical battles during the Revolutionary War were fought, just a block down from a German restaurant, nestled inside a blue-collar neighborhood of police officers, firefighters, and war veterans, was a barbershop right out of central casting.

It was here that I was introduced to the strong voice of Bob Grant, “the King of Conservative Talk Radio.” He was the only alternative many of us had to the Star Ledger, the Trenton Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, and other left-leaning media organs. There’s not much left of that world, the one before the internet gave conservatives a voice, which is why the memories of that barbershop linger.

The center of attention there was “Angelo,” the kindly, short, stocky, sharp-witted Italian barber. Angelo cut my father’s hair, just as Angelo’s father had cut my father’s father’s hair. I never knew my grandfather who came to this country from Mayo, Ireland, in search of opportunity and found it first in New York and later at the Trenton railroad. I would sometimes hear Angelo and Dad talk about how proud he was to be an American and lament how hard it is now for anyone to immigrate legally from Ireland to America.

When I came home from college, that was when I got to know “old Ang,” as Dad would call him. Oftentimes he had Grant’s program on, heard live starting at three in the afternoon on WABC-AM radio. I realize now that I was catching the tail end of a special moment in the life of the “Greatest Generation”—the one that served in World War II and lived through the Great Depression. They never expected to live to see the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Desert Storm was a bookend to that period and Grant lent his voice to the cause. I remember stopping in one day and hearing Grant unload on Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, who became New Jersey’s longest serving U.S. senator.

“And let’s be heard!” Grant would say. “Good afternoon everyone, the telephone lines are open, in a program dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas and opinions. And what is on your mind this afternoon?”

It was Lautenberg who was on Grant’s mind this particular afternoon. Lautenberg had been showing up at rallies expressing support for the troops during Desert Storm. Yet he’d also voted against providing the president with the authority he needed to apply the “use of force” against Saddam Hussein and his army.

I’m just going from memory with this quote, but it’s close: “I understand Lautenberg, Frank Lousenberg, doesn’t like me reminding the public that he voted against authorizing the use of force in Desert Storm. Well I’m going to keep on reminding them, Lousenberg, you phony.”

Grant got under Lautenberg’s skin. There was only one time he was in any serious danger of losing his seat and that was in 1994 when the Republicans won both houses of Congress. Grant helped almost pull off an upset, but the radio host ran smack dab into the perpetual enemy of the conservative movement—polite, genteel, moderate Republicans who were unwilling to fight.

Angelo’s shop was prime Grant territory, in that it was an Old Right shop, if you follow me. Capital O and Capital R. The patrons were defined by their opposition to the New Deal, their affinity for the founding period of the United States, America’s heroic role in history, and a fervent belief in American exceptionalism.

On a Saturday, the usual drill was for Dad and his friends to linger after their haircuts and talk horseracing, sports, and, of course, politics. There was one particular Saturday when the focus was on the perfidy of the United Nations and the heroism of General “Stormin Norman” Schwarzkopf, the U.S. Army general who led coalition forces to victory in Desert Storm. A Trenton native, Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, a highly decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, oversaw the extensive air campaign followed by a 100-hour ground offensive that liberated Kuwait from Iraq.

At the time, the news media was expressing skepticism over the idea of an unambiguous American military victory while U.N. officials were working feverishly to block the U.S.-led ground campaign that ultimately routed Hussein’s army. There are several conversations I recall, but I’ll just pick one.

In his favorite seat at the back of the shop was “Shady,” a retired Trenton police officer, World War II veteran, and a mountain of a man who I have to say looked a lot like Schwarzkopf. Shady related to Grant because he too was concerned about “mass immigration” and uncontrolled borders. But during this visit, he was most concerned with the “transnationalists” at the U.N. and was suspicious that some American politicians were complicit in efforts to subordinate the U.S. Constitution to U.N. charters. He supported Desert Storm, but wasn’t sure what Bush had meant by a “New World Order.”

Apparently, Shade knew the Schwarzkopf family in some way. He explained to me that Schwarzkopf’s father was the founding superintendent of the New Jersey State Police and had taken on a prominent role in the investigation into the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindberg baby. There’s a lot of history packed into a small state.

Like I said, this was an Old Right barbershop.

After Desert Storm came and went, Grant returned to what I think was his central focus—the need to unwind and reverse the changes to immigration policy that Senator Edward Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson had set into motion.

Here’s one segment that was typical of Grant’s commentary:

Do you know that the Immigration and Naturalization Reform Act of 1965, which was signed in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty by then President Lyndon Baines Johnson, our 36th president standing there with Hubert Humphry smiling, standing there with Teddy Kennedy smiling, Bobby Kennedy smiling? But I looked up at the face of the lady holding the lamp and I don’t think she was smiling. Do you know why? That Act changed America forever because it said henceforth only 15 percent of our legal immigrants will be allowed to come from Europe. The other 85 percent shall be dispersed from Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. And that’s what it is, folks. Teddy Kennedy said not to worry, this is not going to change, no pun intended, the complexion of America. I leave it to you. Did it?

Anytime a caller with rough, uneven English protested Grant’s views on immigration, he’d ask, “Hey, just where are you from, pal?!!” If they continued to protest, he’d do an impersonation of the caller that could bring down the house in that barbershop. We all knew what was coming next: “Get off my phone, you fake, you fraud, you phony!!”

Grant was tough, entertaining, insightful, articulate, knowledgeable, patriotic, and incendiary. He could be highly effective as a foil to the left in academia and the media. At his best, he was a fearless truth teller who defied political correctness while opening up honest discussions on race relations eschewed by the mainstream press. In his most undisciplined moments, he made himself the issue with overheated rhetoric that was not helpful to the conservative cause.

Grant has been somewhat lost to history since he died in 2013, but he is highly relevant to today’s politics and instructive to conservatives in the Age of Trump. We can only imagine what Grant’s tweets would have been like. He might even make Trump appear moderate and restrained by comparison.

Like Trump, Grant was an effective communicator who operated deep inside enemy territory and knew it. But what made both men effective in their preferred mediums (Grant on radio, Trump on Twitter) also brought some baggage.

If you want to understand Trump, his brand of populism, and how he appeals to conservatives who may not be with him on every issue, then go back to Grant. He was not optimistic about America’s future and made it clear to listeners that in his view, the 1965 Immigration Act would lead to a radical transformation of the country’s culture and institutions. On Grant’s broadcast, there was no talk of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on hill.” He described America as a “once great country.”

Is that too bleak? Consider today Grant’s home state of New Jersey. There, Governor Phil Murphy and other top Democrats are pushing for illegal aliens to acquire driver’s licenses. Murphy has also signed off on legislation that would allow for what his administration and its allies term “undocumented immigrants” to qualify for financial aid.

In many instances, illegal aliens already receive in-state tuition at colleges and universities, giving them a leg up on legal citizens who seek higher education in states other than their own. Let’s also not forget that many Democrats sound serious about providing free health care for illegals while plotting to torpedo private insurance for citizens.

Meanwhile, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, a former Democratic presidential candidate, was last seen escorting migrants from Mexico into El Paso, Texas, where they can process asylum claims.

Standing in opposition to permissive immigration policies that do not put “America first” is President Donald Trump who has made an issue out of illegal immigration in a way that no other recent president has. Like Grant, Trump has demonstrated a willingness to get down in the mud and fight elitists and globalists in both parties who are unwilling to protect America’s borders and to prioritize American sovereignty over international agreements forged at the U.N.

With Americans now attuned to Grant’s prescient warnings about the dangers of mass immigration without assimilation and its impact on the rule of law and the nation’s finances, Trump’s appeal to key voting blocs in 2016 is easy to understand. Like Trump, Grant understood that elites in both major parties were unwilling to step up enforcement of existing immigration laws while failing to press ahead with necessary reforms.

Grant was an ardent supporter of California’s Proposition 187, which prevented illegal aliens from receiving taxpayer-funded benefits. Voters approved the measure in 1994 after it was championed by then-Republican governor Pete Wilson. Grant was sharply critical of conservative stalwarts Jack Kemp, a former congressman, and William Bennett, a former education secretary, for opposing the law. Kemp and Bennett argued that the economic benefits of immigration outweighed the costs. Grant didn’t agree with their math and expressed enthusiasm for Wilson as a presidential candidate to take on Bill Clinton in 1996. Wilson ultimately ran into trouble with social conservatives in his party who felt some of his views were too permissive. Wilson was, for instance, pro-choice on abortion. But then again, so was Grant.

So what did it mean to be a conservative when Grant was at the peak of his fame and popularity? He dominated the airwaves in the New York market beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s. He was not exactly a Christian conservative and went so far as to express doubts about the second coming of Jesus Christ. Grant also had some sympathy for the use of euthanasia in certain circumstances and he seemed open to some form of gun control. But Grant was also an enemy of the left and consistently challenged the political establishment in his home state of New Jersey and in New York. He was a proponent of constitutional limited government who celebrated the ideals of America’s founding. Grant also had a keen appreciation for the dangers of judicial activism, a topic he discussed at length.

Conservatism is a much bigger church today than it was when Grant first became ascendant. There are economic conservatives, cultural conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, neocons, traditionalists, and subdivisions thereof. But even in his time, Grant understood the necessity of finding common cause with average Americans who might have differed on cultural questions but were united in their opposition to runaway taxes, oversized government, and unaccountable bureaucracies. In many ways, Grant was the ultimate fusionist who brought together seemingly disparate groups to achieve larger goals beyond single-issue concerns.

His approach hit a high water mark during the 1993 gubernatorial race in New Jersey. Christine Todd Whitman, a former Somerset County Republican freeholder, was running to unseat Jim Florio, the incumbent Democratic governor. The 1993 Florio-Whitman contest occurred on the outer fringes of the Gingrich Revolution that was to deliver the House to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years. The New Jersey race was widely and correctly viewed as one with national ramifications and a bellwether for what might happen the following year. James Carville, President Bill Clinton’s campaign operative, nicknamed the “The Ragin’ Cajun,” came in to save Florio, and Ed Rollins, the former Reagan campaign manager, intervened for Whitman. After forcing through a $2.8 billion tax hike, Florio had become extremely unpopular.

A grassroots movement known as Hands Across New Jersey (HANJ) brought together a broad cross-section of state residents who felt victimized by the high costs imposed on them. Grant amplified the scope and reach of the movement on radio. Think of HANJ as a prototype for the Tea Party movement that emerged in 2010. Bumper stickers that read “Florio Free in ‘93” were widely dispersed throughout the state. But by the time 1993 came around, Florio had found a way to put Whitman on the defensive, attacking her as an out-of-touch elitist who could not relate to average people. He also, remarkably, moved to her right on issues like welfare reform.

But Whitman found her footing after making repeated appearances on the Grant program where she reminded voters how costly and damaging Florio’s tax hikes had been. She also embraced a Reagan-style tax cut package co-authored by businessman Steve Forbes and economist Larry Kudlow. After trailing by double-digits in some polls, Whitman pulled off an upset victory on the back of her proposed tax cuts. She also received more than a little help from Grant who provided her with a powerful media platform.

Fred Lucas, author of The Right Frequency, details in his book what happened next: “It was not until Bob Grant’s show had a clear impact on political contests that Democrats and Democratic operatives decided to smear him.” In 1994, Lautenberg knew he was in trouble for the first and only time in his career. He had been losing ground to Republican Assembly Speaker Garabed “Chuck” Haytaian. Like Whitman, Haytaian had gained notoriety by calling into Grant’s program. But when Lautenberg accused Grant of racism and seized upon what Lucas describes as “insensitive comments,” Whitman and Haytaian quickly turned on Grant. Whitman joined in the criticism while Haytaian headed for the tall grass.

Lautenberg was able to put his opponent on defense and shift the public’s attention away from his voting record, which was not friendly to taxpayers. He ultimately won re-election. That’s the short version of what went down. The lesson for today is that if you want to win a tough election, then make it about your opponent’s defects. In 1993, Grant made the election about Florio. In 1994, Lautenberg made the election about Grant.

Today, with a pandemic raging and issues of police brutality rising to the fore, there are plenty of avenues open to the Democratic nominee to make the Trump the issue in this year’s election. The president could do a lot worse than to label the Democratic Party as a giant advocacy group for illegal aliens. In fact, now would be a great time for Trump to revisit Grant’s commentaries on immigration policy and other issues where the radio host was ahead of his time.

Did Trump and Grant ever meet?

Apparently, there’s a photo on the walls of the Reo Diner in Woodbridge, New Jersey, that says they did. Grant, who was a resident of Woodbridge for a time, would occasionally broadcast from the diner. He died on New Year’s Eve in 2013 at the age 84. But as one of his final acts, Grant anticipated an opening for Trump before anyone in the punditry took the real estate mogul seriously.

“There is only one potential candidate who has demonstrated he is not afraid,” Grant wrote in a commentary published in April 2011. “And if you people are looking for someone different; if you are looking for the right man at the right time, then you don’t have to look any further than the man who stands beside me in a photo on the wall at the Reo Diner Restaurant…Donald Trump!”

Angelo died shortly before Bill Clinton was elected. I think Dad and I went to get one of the last haircuts. Just three years ago, our friend “Shady,” the Trenton police officer, passed away. Dad is the last one left from that group. Recently, we drove past Angelo’s old neighborhood. Many of the homes had been redesigned with new facades. The German restaurant, my old landmark, is gone. I couldn’t even tell which one was once the barbershop.

We were on our way to an Irish pub, one that Dad has been going to for as long as I can remember. He asked me why it’s so hard now for the Irish to immigrate legally into the U.S. I reminded him of Grant, the conversations he’d had with Angelo, and the 1965 Immigration Act.

The rest of the ride was subdued and quiet.

Kevin Mooney is a journalist and investigative reporter for the Commonwealth Foundation in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

The post The Populist Radio Host Who Really Was Trump Before Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.

[politicalmamaduck]

The Last Shot

A Smuggler Ben Solo/Dark Side Rey arranged marriage fic for @the-reylo-void. Many thanks to @lariren-shadow for her inspiration and betaing, and @cosetteskywalker for the amazing moodboards!

Read it on AO3 here.

Chapter Seven: The Negotiations | Chapter Six: The Duel | Chapter Five: The Discovery | Chapter Four: The Bargain | Chapter Three: The Bounty | Chapter Two: The Meeting | Chapter One: The Treaty

Rey had been furious after the smuggler let slip his history, if she could call it that, with her Master.

She was strong, and she was powerful, and she was unfailingly loyal. Yet she had not been the Supreme Leader’s first choice in apprentice, and it rankled her more than it should have. Hux and Phasma had been with the First Order far longer than she had, and it did not bother her at all that they were given their due as officers.

Yet her betrothed had given up on his Jedi training to play at smuggling with his lackadaisical father.

She knew he had been even more powerful in the Force than his famed uncle. Everyone had said so.

She learned it for herself that morning. She had wanted to vent her frustrations on him in their sparring session, to show him that she was to be feared and respected as her position required.

Her plan had not worked, however. She had not expected him to recall his uncle’s lessons so easily. Rey would never underestimate Ben Solo again.

He irritated her. To have that much power at his disposal, and to throw it all away? He had not used his lightsaber in years, he told her. Now that she had her own powerful weapon at her side, she could not imagine putting it aside for a blaster.

If he thought he could beat her so easily, then she had many more tricks hidden in her cloak. He was arrogant, to be sure, and she would show him that he had to earn her respect. She not even begun to scrape the depths of the well of her power, the Supreme Leader had told her. Her raw strength in the Force was nigh unmatched. Save for the man she was to marry.

Rey did not trust easily, and she was not about to begin with a lowborn smuggler. Even if he could speak her family’s ancestral language, which she desperately wanted to learn. He had slipped into it effortlessly the day before after she had accidentally shattered the water pitcher in the conference room.

A humanoid droid walking down the hallway opposite her suddenly bumped her with its arm. She howled, even though it didn’t hurt that badly, and sliced it in half with her lightsaber. She needed to freshen up and head to the afternoon negotiation sessions. Everyone’s presence was required, including her wayward fiance’s.

She needed to meditate, to find a better outlet for her anger than hapless, clumsy droids. She needed to develop a plan to turn the situation to her advantage.

She would certainly have to accede to the terms of their personal agreement, as well as the formal treaty, for a length of time. Rey could be patient. She would learn what she needed and wanted to learn, and she would get what she wanted.

And then they could all be damned.

She was done with being the second choice. She had not been consulted about her position in this treaty; she was not privy to the negotiations that Hux was leading. She, in fact, would not have chosen self-serving Armitage to lead the negotiations in the first place. Grand Admiral Sloane would have been vastly preferable.

Rey cared nothing for the First Order’s internal politics; she had seen all the petty bickering between the non-Force sensitives as beneath her. She vastly preferred seeking out Dark Side relics with her Knights of Ren.

And hopefully, even though she would be aiding the smuggler on some of his jobs, she could continue to do some of that as well.

She let her hair out of her buns as she headed into the ‘fresher, and stretched her arms behind her back. She had a meeting to get ready for, and she did not want to disappoint.

Rey wore a daringly low cut jumpsuit under an armor weave cape to the negotiations. Her lightsaber was prominently displayed at her waist, and she had accentuated her eyes with some cosmetics. It was not something with which she normally bothered, but she wanted to emphasize who she was and from where she had come. She wore a shining circlet about her head; it was from Naboo. Let them whisper about Palpatine’s granddaughter, she thought.

She entered the very conference room where she and Ben had met the day before, and as she had wanted, many heads turned or rose from their datapads to look at her as she entered. She sat to Hux’s left, across from Phasma, at the end of the table farther from the door. Across the table at the other end was General Organa; to her left, Rey’s fiance. He would have a good view of her, and she tried not to smirk at the thought.

“The treaty negotiations have largely concluded,” Mon Mothma began after everyone had arrived and settled in their seats. “What remains is the date and location of the marriage alliance. After we have settled on those details, we shall sign the treaty provisionally today. After the wedding, we will have a formal signature ceremony on a neutral location to be broadcast live on the HoloNet, as agreed yesterday. Does everyone understand?”

Rey tried not to look startled at the mention of her impending wedding; she could tell Ben was doing the same.

There were nods and murmurs of assent around the table.

“Very well,” said the Chandrilan senator. Rey tried not to glare at her. She couldn’t understand how one woman had been at the center of galactic politics for so long.

Your grandfather controlled the galaxy for over thirty years, a voice said at the back of Rey’s mind.

Whose voice it was, Rey could not tell, and she suppressed a chill down her spine.

Rey searched her feelings, and tried to find her center once more. She decided to try to focus on her anger regarding the New Republic’s politicians. They had never done anything for Jakku; at least her grandfather had taken an interest and tried to build the Imperial presence on the planet.

She pulled herself back into the meeting, where Hux was arguing with one of the Resistance generals regarding where the wedding should be held. She restrained herself from rolling her eyes at him, and turned her attention to the opposite end of the table.

She briefly caught her fiance’s gaze, and he winked and smirked at her.

Trying not to look too taken aback and startled, she reached for the water glass in front of her and was about to take a sip just as General Organa finally spoke, interrupting Hux.

“Why don’t we ask our bride and groom what they think? It is their wedding we are discussing.”

Rey took her sip of water, watching the general. The general, much like her son, did not blink or shrink under her gaze. Rey then turned her attention to her fiance, waiting for him to speak.

“What about Naboo?” he finally said, looking at his mother. “Both the Lady Rey and I share grandparents who were from Naboo, and it would serve as a stunning backdrop to the celebration.”

The table was silent for a moment. Even garrulous Hux didn’t seem to have any complaints about the smuggler’s suggestion, at least not at that moment.

When no one said anything after the space of a few breaths, Ben looked at Rey once more.

“Would you like that, Rey?” he asked, and she found herself wanting to smile for the first time since Hux had told her she was to marry the smuggler.

Hux was glaring, but looking back and forth between them as if he didn’t know who was irritating him more or how to oppose the proposition before Rey could answer. She could tell Phasma was bored out of her mind underneath her shining helmet.

“I would like that very much,” she replied, finally giving in and glaring back at Hux after she nodded at the Resistance contingent.

“Very well then,” said Mon Mothma. “Naboo it shall be. What about an officiant? Do the bride and groom have any preferences?”

At that, Hux finally lost it.

“The First Order will not recognize a Republic judicial official,” he spat. “One of our military officers will have to preside.”

“Then what’s the point of having a wedding at all to symbolize unity, if you won’t recognize our legal system?” Poe Dameron spoke up, running his hands through his hair.

Rey noted that the men of the Resistance seemed to run their hands through their hair quite a bit when they were frustrated or anxious. It was highly undisciplined, and a tell that would have required sanctions for unnecessary contact or affect in the First Order, and worse if leave had not been given to remove a helmet in the first place.

“Were you given leave to speak for the Resistance?” Hux retorted.    

Ben had covered his eyes with his hand, and General Organa looked downcast, her eyes on her datapad as if it held the answers she needed.

“Since the wedding is to take place on Naboo, diplomacy would seem to require someone from the planet should officiate the wedding, or at least protocol would seem to dictate that result,” the Resistance’s protocol droid piped up. The droid seemed the type at which normally everyone would rule their eyes as it unfailingly obeyed its programming, but the Resistance visibly perked up at the droid’s suggestion.

“C-3PO makes an excellent point,” General Organa said. “Would the First Order object to someone unaffiliated with the Republic judiciary, but a former Imperial senator?”

“Whom do you have in mind?” Hux asked slowly, narrowing his eyes at his counterpart.

“Former Senator Pooja Naberrie. She’s also my first cousin,” the General added. “She chose not to return to the Senate after it had been dissolved under the Emperor and reformed in the Republic. I’m not sure about Nubian laws regarding wedding officiants, but I’m sure we can discuss that with the Queen when we begin the formal wedding discussions.”

Mon Mothma nodded at General Organa’s words, and looked to General Hux for a response.

Phasma beat him to it.

“The First Order has many connections with Naboo,” she said, the acoustics of the room making her voice sound even more powerful through her helmet. “Emperor Palpatine was ever proud of his home planet. This woman seems neutral enough to suffice. Make ready the arrangements, and the First Order will be there.”

At that, she stood up, sweeping her cape around her, and left the room.

“Well I guess that settles it,” Ben said, shrugging at his mother and Mon Mothma, and completely ignoring the consternation present on Hux’s face.

“That will conclude our negotiations,” the Chandrilan senator said, “pending approval from the Naboo government. We will contact the Queen tomorrow.”

Rey nodded at her, and then hurriedly left the room, pointedly not looking at Hux.

[vankoya]

Work In Progress Tag.

I was tagged by my sweetest @dailydoseofdia so thank you very much, my honey! Now, I am going to explicitly expose all of my WIPs, some of which are not known about or displayed on my story schedule as I have no hecking clue in the slightest as to when I will finish writing all of them. Rest in peace, me. (I really went on a spree with the previews.)

I am going to tag: @tayegi / @versigny / @inktae / @trbld-writer!

The Devil Skates On Thin Ice | Twoshot, Part Two

→ Rivalry & Sports AU • Min Yoongi & Reader

Status: First priority. 6K words currently written. Twenty-five percent complete.

Preview: The number ’31’ is salient in large, bold white lettering at the centre of the hockey jersey. Though it is most certainly not as prominent as the ‘MIN’ that stands out inches above it, the three letters setting off screeching alarm bells within your mind that have you bolting upright on the mattress in a state of suffocating panic, cracking your elbow against the sill of the window in the process.

“Shit!” You yelp, cringing from the sharp pain that shoots up your arm, cradling it to your chest as you keel over your knees and dramatically collapse back onto the bed like the world just could not help but dig your hell hole of a situation all the deeper.

You are in Yoongi’s room. Of all the fucking people it could have been, it had to be him.

Amidst the anguish, a succession of thumping footsteps steadily becomes apparent as they grow louder, nearer, almost as though they are jogging. Then, the door is histrionically thrown open and a wide-eyed, flustered Yoongi comes into view within the frame, panting a little like he had ran from the other side of the apartment at the voicing of your distress. Honestly, you surprise yourself by holding back the lurching urge to hurl up the contents of last night at the sheer sight of him.

An Oath For Sinners | Series, Part Three

→ Vampire & Escort AU • Min Yoongi & Reader

Status: 10K words currently written. Fifty percent complete.

Preview: There are two and a half hours remaining until she is supposed to be knocking at his front door, and Yoongi is still holed up in his office, signing a stack of papers inked with paragraphs of information that he is barely processing due to the simple fact that he has caved to the torment of hardly restrained lechery. For all he knows, he could be signing his life over to the devil since the sole thought that he cannot tear his disgracefully crude attention from is what divine facial expression she is going to pull the moment his dick slides into her dripping cunt.

At that, his mind blanks completely, eyes glazing over and muddling the page before him into a blur of white smeared with black, the nib of the pen drooling an expanding spot of ink on the paper where he distractedly presses it. Shit. Yoongi’s lips part to create an airless sound, his imagination ravaging his sanity as he pieces together the image of her underneath him in completely nude glory, her warm, mundane skin glittering with a sheen of perspiration, wide eyes crazed with ferocious desire, the pupils blown like dark moons, always watching him. She looks excited, afraid, utterly ravishing. 

The Heart’s Variable | Oneshot

→ Hacker AU • Kim Taehyung & Reader

Status: 2K words currently written. Ten percent complete.

Preview: Roommates tend to walk in on a lot of shit that they would much rather have scrubbed from their field of vision by a wire sponge, but such visual torment is an unspoken given when it comes to share-housing. Most especially when one of the aforementioned roommates is the one and only Kim Taehyung. So when Park Jimin, a law student of baby soft features that no courtroom can ever take seriously because he somewhat appears like an irritated child when he is trying to defend his case, knocks on Taehyung’s bedroom door at ten in the morning and is given the sole response of dead silence, he, without thinking, twists the handle and thrusts it open with a determination to give the guy the grandest, loudest wake-up call possible. 

At least, that was Jimin’s plan until his gaze fell upon Taehyung slouched facedown over his keyboard, surrounding monitors dulled to sleep just as he is. Except, unlike him, the computer does not have its soft dick nestled on unadulterated display in its lap like a lifeless, pink sea cucumber, sweatpants uselessly shoved halfway down the defined curve of its ass.

A Ticket To The Sun | Series, Part Three

→ Dystopia AU • Min Yoongi & Reader

Status: 5.5K words currently written. Twenty percent complete.

Preview: The countdown is in full swing. Seventeen days until doom reaches his doorstep, until the truth will be revealed and Yoongi will be framed as a goddamn coward for never telling her from the very start. He deserves to die like that, at least, with shame stuffed in his pockets, with a knife of regret slicing through his back. Horrible, truly such a gruesome excuse of a human being, he is.

I could tell her right now, he blankly considers, but knows he never would. It is close to two in the morning, and she is swaying gently, making an order at the diner counter with a blurred smile, eyes glazed. I could tell her right now and make pancakes taste like my death, make vanilla cling like my blood to the back of her throat. I could do it, I could do it.

She, with wobbly grace, turns on her heel to face him. Her drooping gaze lands on the divot between his collarbones that kisses the collar of his navy shirt before it lazily trails up, up, up to meet his own eyes, a grin lighting up on her lips as if caught redhanded staring where she should not. The breathtaking culprit to their exceptional crime.

Yoongi could never do it. 

Paroxysm of Repulsion | Oneshot

→ Single Dad / Teacher AU • Jeon Jeongguk & Kim Taehyung

Status: Still drafting and plotting. 1.7K words currently written.

Preview: The guy of long honey limbs and deftly mussed hair wears an expression fit for murder, which would have been entirely convincing if he was not wearing the most repulsive sweater to ever have the misfortune of existing on this very earth. Traffic cone orange and fluorescent violet striped, like Halloween just threw up on his chest and this is the mouldy aftermath a week later. Jeongguk decides the guy deserved such an insult for wearing an atrocity to mankind.

“Uh,” he cannot even form a coherent sentence, it is that disgusting. 

“Uh?” The Serial Killer In The Ugliest Sweater To Exist offers brusquely, face unchanging. “That’s all you have to say? Uh?”

Jeongguk gulps. “Uh–“

“Is that the only word in your vocabulary?”

“Well–“

“Amazing! He knows more than one word!” He throws his hands enthusiastically in the air, slatted eyes still fresh with intent to kill. Before Jeongguk can stammer out another vocalisation of unintelligence forced by sheer repugnance, the guy accusingly jabs a finger at him. “Kids need to learn manners at an early stage in life if they want to grow up to be good adults. Get on that fuckin’ shit, man.”

Fight Blood With Blood | ATM Drabble

→ Witch Hunter AU • Jeon Jeongguk & Reader

Status: 3.8K words currently written. Eighty-five percent complete.

Preview: Jeongguk wants to ask more, wishes to pick apart her bones and search the marrow for the answers, more truths, to learn of the genuine honesty about herself and who she is. But whatever he wishes to say becomes lodged in his mouth when he watches her bring the blade to her palm and cut a clean slice through the flesh, crimson that looks like liquid black beneath the moonless sky instantly bubbling to the surface and spilling into the clear patch of dirt that the very same knife carved out.

The witch stays quiet and calm, dropping the now tarnished blade to the snow and dipping her fingertips into the sticky, red mess accumulating in her other palm. They come away dripping, soaked in the colour of her very own coat, and Jeongguk observes with his lips parted, shoulders rigid while she draws nonsensical script into the frozen surface of the dirt she has cleared. Witch language, looking twisted and evil, like it is going to reach out and bite him if he dares to look away.

Gateway to Gehenna | Oneshot

→ Witch / Demon AU • Kim Taehyung & Reader

Status: Still drafting and plotting. 2K words currently written. Ten percent complete.

Preview: For the first twenty years, the door is avoided at all costs. 

Nestled between the library and the living quarters, it is alike any other door within the cottage. A thick slab of mahogany lacquered in rich syrup that still holds its woodsy scent beyond decades since its construction, a brass handle which glints in the afternoon sunlight that manages to trickle down the hallway, much less worn or touched than any other knob. It finds its differences in the dense carvings that are inscribed on the surface, a variation of symbols and words as old as time itself, not even belonging to history, for the language has surpassed such limitations.

They start at the centre of the door and bloom in an enormous wooden rose, the petals fanning out to the very edges where the inscriptions become smaller, near frantic, as though the incantations were bordering incomplete yet the space was quick to be eaten up; desperation embedding urgency into the grain. Because if there was not enough room to finish, all efforts would have been entirely fruitless. The plan would be torn to shreds, the earth would be brought to ruin.

You see, it is not the door itself that is necessarily the problem. It merely keeps it contained. Instead, it is what is held within that should be feared.

Rather he who should not be released.

There’s A Rainbow (Always, After The Rain) | Oneshot

→ Soulmate AU • Jeon Jeongguk & Kim Taehyung

Status: 1.3K words currently written. Fifteen percent complete.

Preview: The barista, as if realising what he has just done, clamps a palm over his mouth, eyes still remaining to roundly stare at Jeongguk like he has just stripped naked in the middle of the cafe. On the other hand, Jeongguk is about ready to turn on his heel and flee, or fold his body like origami until he can fit into the linoleum cracks beneath his feet. Instead, by sheer force of will and his ferocious desire to have a double shot long mac after The Worst Day of His Existence, Jeongguk stands statuesque until the barista seems to get his shit together and drops his hand away from his face.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” the barista, who’s name tag reads Jimin babbles, baby cheeks flaring with muted fuchsia. “I-I didn’t mean to react that way, I swear! It’s just that– Holy shit, how long– When did it change like that?” The colour of his face ripens. “Oh– Or maybe, did you do that yourself–“

“Does it look like I would have done this–“ Jeongguk aggressively points at the rainbow monstrosity sprouting from his roots, biting down on his urge to scream the words, rather than hiss them under his breath– “To myself? Why the fuck?”

Lips of Divinity | Oneshot

→ Daitengu AU • Min Yoongi & Jeon Jeongguk

Status: Still drafting and plotting. 780 words currently written.

Preview: there is purpose behind this trek, not just a measly, careless adventure into the unknown of a forest deemed dangerous by the town at its feet. jeongguk absently wonders, if he were to trip over an unforeseen rock or jutted stick, whether the fall would have him tumbling down to the very base, crashing him back upon square one that he last stood upon just before midday.

but the boy should not think so soon, his eyesight is getting worse with every stretch that night begins to make across the daylight, almost as if it wishes to put his theory to the test.

he whistles a tune unheard of, one that bounds through the trees, echoing on and on. to set the pace of his tread, to fend off the eerie quiet that otherwise lulls the mountain. the birds are no longer near to pick it up, to carry on the sound in their own chirp, flourish it into something entirely different that belongs to them, and them only; started by a boy who never listens.

[serenavangstuff]

Journal of Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine-JuniperPublishers

Editorial

All around the world geriatric population is increasing. This is accompanied by its unique problems including issues of senescence and frailty, and at times complicated by multimorbidities [1]. Against the backdrop of increasing numbers of elderly population and their unmet and rising medical requirements with stagnant and dwindling resources at many places around the globe, it's about time that we start to explore creditable newer ideas, concepts and research that are aimed towards helping geriatric population [1]. Having to deal with long term multi-morbidities is as such quite challenging, and the challenge just increases a bit more with the progress of aging. There can be some associated morbidities which may at times get superimposed by a few psychosocial issues as well. Shouldn't our endeavor be to help the elderly achieve graceful aging?

From the perspective of longevity, no one amongst the elderly seems to be looking forward to a life of 1000 years; not yet. To be sure, just try taking views from any youth about their own aging, when they do start getting old. Probably the views would be revealing, and with my experience I dare say that I would expect a prompt response from most of the young and middle aged people when asked this question responding by replying that they would be trying in their own ways to keep healthy till their last breath, and avoid becoming bed-ridden or dependent on anyone when they get old. With the experience gained, for me the aged are no different, and while most of them will never be fearing death, and will have no desire to prolong their lives, they too probably would say that they do not want to fall ill, become bed-ridden, or disabled, and if they had their choice they would never like to become dependent on anyone. Their efforts are therefore directed to stay as fit as possible [2].

In the developing world, it's not that the aged are anyway different. But here, since ages, much reliance was placed on the family structure for support and care, but now that the family structure is disintegrating, the old and infirm are now worried because there is no one to look after them as their health deteriorates [2]. Hence they probably have a desire to remain healthy for as long as possible, for the simple reason of being able to fend for themselves for as long as they can [2]. Fortunately, those who have managed their health well, taken appropriate and timely care of their health problems, and those who are adequately insured medically may not have any such issues or apprehensions.

It should be quite heartening to note that the world is definitely taking steps to alleviate the problems of the old age. Scientists around the world are searching for clues regarding healthy aging [3]. In the elderly population there is permanent decrease of functional capacity, gradual emergence of various diseases leading to the wider multi-morbidity and increased problems in the social sphere, which can develop frailty and social dependency [4]. The authors have emphasized the need of awareness of the problem so that they could understand and cope with this absolutely new reality [4]. Multi-morbidity and the consequent poly-pharmacy are indeed another big challenges globally, that is being appropriately understood and evaluated [5-9].

Therefore it's time that the plight and predicaments of the elderly population should be evaluated and taken into account on an urgent basis. It is no secret that at many places around the globe, the available resources and medical facilities for the elderly population are getting overwhelmed due to increasing demands and unmet needs. Fragmentation of care is also some concern and there are long waiting periods [10]. Some of the aged may be turning despondent and losing hopes due to multi-morbidities, poly-pharmacies, inequities in appropriate and readily available geriatric care, which as such is getting more fragmented with either actual or perceived limitations and inadequacies of geriatricians, and the effect of super-specializations. No doubt, there will always be a requirement of all other specialties, but a time has come where there is a need for Geriatricians to brace up for resolving more, and to refer less [10].

For this to happen, firstly of the governments, policy makers, administrators, medical fraternity and world medical bodies, NGOs, community leaders, etc, must all get together and decide about establishing the new norms, scope, up gradation of knowledge, skills and expertise of a geriatrician that become well suited for resolving more and referring less. For this there is a requirement for adding additional knowledge, skills, competence, and expertise. Obviously the medical curriculum during graduation and post graduation has to be suitably upgraded so as to pave way for a new Geriatrician, who is knowledgeable, expert in assessing and dealing with geriatric problems and challenges. With new evidences surfacing regularly, maybe there is a need to refresh our understanding of the geriatric problems regularly. The presentations could be diverse, intertwined and/or mixed, and perhaps not as straight as are met in other age groups. There could be many independent or correlated underlying problems as given below (Figure 1).

Hence, this will require a geriatrician to be more meticulous and alert right from the point when an elderly patient walks in or is brought in for consultation. Observations must be meticulous and thorough, with some structuring that helps in reaching out for a detailed of history and clinical examination. Regular individualized and structured reviews and follow ups will be equally important. Besides senility, there can be many other factors which might play up for which we need to be alert, like underreporting of illness, impairment of homeostasis, vulnerability to various stresses, etc. Some other points that need to be considered are given in (Figure 2).

As Geriatricians we need to be vigilant and look out for the transition, and also screen and manage risk factors with the ultimate aim of helping them in aging gracefully. There could also be a need for environmental facilitation with all proactive and preventive measures in order to maintain their continued independence, fitness levels, and competence, which might be found getting deteriorated with time. It is perhaps not so difficult to understand that one set of management techniques would not be meeting all the challenges at all times, and therefore the treatment and management will have to be individualized and tailored for better outcomes [11]. Principles of rehabilitation will also have to be suitably modified for indevidual cases.Assessing & recording fitness levels should become a routine, and can be undertaken by such simple non-invasive tests like:

Katz Index of Independence in Activities of Daily Living

Harvard Step Test

Assessment of V2 MAX

Hand grasp strength assessment by hand dynamometer

Mini mental state examination

Pulmonary function test

Vision test

Whispering test with masking

This is the first issue of this new journal, the Open Access Journal of Gerontology & Geriatric Medicine (OAJGGM). I wish it becomes another torch bearer the world over in the days to come, for the gerontologists and specialists in geriatric medicine. As an invitee for writing for the very first issue, and a member of the editorial board, it would certainly be my delight I would like to see the journal taking on the challenge of overcoming and managing all accompanying morbidities and poly-pharmacy being addressed from a newer perspective, while sifting through the research that has already been done for the geriatric population and at the same time promoting and gaining from recent researches.

Whatever fears and apprehensions the elderly might have, will possibly be laid to rest by meaningful dialogue about preventive and proactive actions that they would be advised to take, based on not what they hear and see but on actual scientific reasoning and facts. Among other issues involved in the editorial policy, it would be a reasonably good and thoughtful effort if this journal also pitches for giving out vetted comprehensive health bulletins, thereby taking care for the geriatric population's needs as well for accurate and doable information, recommending only indisputable preventive and proactive measures as the need of the day for the elderly and their care givers. Isn’t the ultimate aim is to improve the quality of life of the elderly, and provide adequate respite from morbidities?

Finally, in today's world, the direction of future research needs to be carefully steered, and not left to or overtaken by some vested groups to model research. Costly procedures, investigations, medicines, etc, have raised the costs of management. There is surely a need to take a second look at all that is being done or recommended for the elderly patients. Recently there was a study that has revealed that  medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the USA [12]. Therefore unnecessary tests, unnecessary procedures, unnecessary medicines, etc, will have to be restrained. Possibly in the free and competitive market, it is all about selling an idea, perhaps, and patients will automatically follow the 'flow'. It is up to the society, the law makers, and the keepers of the society as also the medical and scientific fraternities to decide whether it is OK to be going with the flow every time. The 'evidence based medicine' also comes to decide the 'evidence' from only the researches that have taken place and have been found published. What about the other 'evidence' that has as yet not been researched in the proper scientific manner, having come about unintentionally,half-heartedly, or maybe accidentally, and for which there are no takers as yet and no one cares? [13].

To read more articles in Journal of Gerontology & Geriatric Medicine

Please Click on: https://juniperpublishers.com/oajggm/index.php

For more Open Access Journals in Juniper Publishers

Click on: https://juniperpublishers.com/journals.php

[anagamitofotografia]

News reports and interesting up-dates on POS Hardware and POS.

Every Juneteenth, as soon as Pamela Baker got to Booker T. Washington Park, she’d race to the merry-go-round, squeeze through the swarm of shrieking kids, grab one of the shiny rails, and hold on tight. After a few minutes, she would jump off and dart up the steps of the nearby dance hall to survey the throngs below. She and her brother Carl would weave through the crowd, looking for cousins from Dallas and Houston they hadn’t seen since the previous year. Eventually, her whole family would congregate under an oak tree their ancestors had claimed as a gathering place a century before, in the years after news of the end of slavery reached Texas. 

“Every year, this is where we’d be,” Baker said. It was a cold January day, and she sat in a purple pew in the park’s open-air tabernacle. Baker, sixty, wore camo pants, a hoodie, and a knit cap. She had come from work and looked tired as a heavy rain beat down around her. The park sits along Lake Mexia (pronounced “muh-hay-ah”), about thirty miles east of Waco. For generations, African Americans made pilgrimages to this spot to celebrate Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day. They came from all over the country to hear the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, to worship, to run and play in the green fields, to dance in the creaky pavilion, to eat barbecue and drink red soda water, to sleep under the stars. Locals referred to the park by its name from an earlier time: Comanche Crossing. Juneteenth here would run for days on end. It was like a giant family reunion, held on hallowed ground. 

The merry-go-round at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Baker grew up in nearby Mexia, and each June, her family would camp around that same towering oak. In the early sixties her grandfather built a wooden countertop around the trunk, and every June 19, her grandmother and members of her grandmother’s social club would fry scores of chickens in an old black washpot—enough to serve a few hundred people who’d stop by to sit, eat, and reminisce. “Juneteenth meant everything to us,” Baker said. As a kid, she looked forward to the holiday all year long. 

Until she didn’t.

“After what happened with my brother,” she said, “we weren’t interested in coming out here anymore.” 

Forty years ago, on June 19, 1981, not far from where she sat now, her brother Carl and two other Black teenagers drowned while in the custody of a Limestone County sheriff’s deputy, a reserve deputy, and a probation officer. The Baker family was devastated—as was the entire town of Mexia. The deaths became national news, with people from New York to California asking the same question as those in Central Texas: Why had three Black teens died while all three officers—two of them white, one Black—survived?

Over the years, whenever a highly publicized incident of police brutality against a Black person occurred, many in Mexia would think back to that night in 1981. This was never more true than last summer, when outrage at George Floyd’s murder, captured on video in broad daylight, sparked one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. As millions of demonstrators took to the streets, Mexia residents were reminded of the drownings that once rocked their community and forever changed their hometown’s proud Juneteenth celebration, which had been among the nation’s most historic. 

Four decades later, Baker still grieves for her brother. “It never goes away,” she said quietly, sitting in the pew, surrounded by the ghosts of her ancestors. “I miss everything about Carl—just seeing his smile, his dark skin with beautiful white teeth, walk into the house after work. I wish I could see him come up out of the water right now, but I know I can’t.”

She paused and looked toward the lake. “My brother,” she said, “he didn’t deserve that, what they did to him.”

Pamela Baker sitting in the park tabernacle on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

James Ferrell was at Comanche Crossing on June 19, 1981. It was a clear, warm Friday night, and Ferrell, a tall 34-year-old who sported a scruffy beard and a cowboy hat, had led a trail ride to the park from nearby Sandy. He sat with his brothers, cousins, friends, and their horses, drinking beer, telling stories, laughing. They could hear music coming from the pavilion and see a line of cars creeping over the bridge onto the grounds, while pedestrians who had parked two miles away on U.S. 84 hiked through the gridlock. The moon was almost full, and the air smelled of grilled burgers, fried fish, and popcorn. 

Sometime after ten, three law enforcement officers clambered into a boat on the other side of the lake and pushed off. Lake Mexia is a shallow, dammed stretch of the Navasota River in the shape of an M; the park sits near the lake’s center, where the water is about two hundred yards across. The Limestone County Sheriff’s Office had set up a command post on the opposite bank. The deputies rarely patrolled the park after sundown, but on this night they did. Because the bridge was bottlenecked, they cut across the lake in a fourteen-foot aluminum vessel. They were led by sheriff’s deputy Kenny Elliott, 23, who’d been on the force for about a year. The Black officer, reserve deputy Kenneth Archie, was also 23 and a former high school basketball player from Houston. The third man was David Drummond, a 32-year-old probation officer who planned to check on some of his parolees.

The boat hit the shore, and the men climbed onto the bank, which was muddy from recent rains. Though the three officers wore street clothes, they stuck out in the nearly all-Black crowd of roughly five thousand. “Police have a special way of walking,” recalled one bystander. They stopped at the concession stands to buy some soft drinks, then moved on. Young lovers walked through the crowd, eating cotton candy. Elderly men and women, many wearing their Sunday best, perched on benches talking to old friends. Everywhere the officers walked, they saw tents and campers with families gathered around. Some folks were dozing, some were playing dominoes, some were drinking beer or whiskey. Some were smoking marijuana, and as the officers passed, they either snuffed out their joints or hid them behind their backs. “When they came up,” Ferrell said, “we just put it down. They never said nothing. They walked off.” 

As the trio approached one of the park’s small caliche roads, they came upon a yellow Chevrolet Nova stuck in traffic. Inside were four local teenagers: Carl Baker, Steve Booker, Jay Wallace, and Anthony Freeman, whom friends called “Rerun” because he resembled the hefty character from the sitcom What’s Happening!! As Elliott shone his flashlight through the windshield, he saw the teens passing a small plastic bag of what he took to be marijuana. It was just after eleven, and in the time since he’d crossed the lake, Elliott hadn’t acknowledged similar violations of the law. Now, though, the deputy ordered the four out of the car and made them put their hands on the roof while the officers patted them down and searched the interior. 

A bridge over Lake Mexia.Photograph by Michael Starghill

They found the baggie of weed and a joint, which they confiscated. Wallace would later say that the officers “didn’t act like they knew what they was doing; they kept asking each other what they should do.” The crowd began to take notice. As far as anyone could remember, there had never been an arrest at the park during Juneteenth festivities. 

Elliott made the decision to take Baker, Freeman, and Booker into custody. Days later, Wallace would tell the Waco Tribune-Herald that the officers found drugs on Baker and Booker, while Freeman was arrested because the car belonged to him. Wallace was spared because “they didn’t find anything on me.”  

At least two and possibly all three of the teens were handcuffed; some witnesses said Baker and Booker were cuffed together, while others recalled each being restrained individually. Onlookers didn’t like what they saw, and some began to curse at the officers. Rather than walk the teens through the crowd, over the bridge, and around the lake, the officers opted to go back the way they came. 

When the group reached the boat, Elliott climbed into the back by the motor. Next were Booker and Baker, then Drummond and Freeman. Archie, who weighed more than two hundred pounds, sat in the bow. There were no life jackets, and the combined weight of the passengers exceeded the boat’s capacity by several hundred pounds. 

Elliott started the motor. The craft had no running lights, and as it crept forward, water started pouring in. Drummond yelled back to Elliott, who couldn’t hear him over the engine; Drummond yelled again, and this time Elliott turned it off. By then, they had traveled about forty yards. As the boat slowed, more water rushed in, and the craft submerged and flipped over. All six began splashing wildly in the ten-foot-deep water. 

Elliott shouted for the others to stay with the boat while he swam to shore for help. As soon as he reached water shallow enough to stand in, he fired his gun into the air, in what he would later say was an attempt to summon assistance. Soon after, he was joined by Drummond. Out on the water, Archie, who wasn’t a good swimmer, clung to the boat “like a spider,” one witness said. 

The teens were nowhere in sight. 

Mexia High School yearbook photos of Anthony Freeman, Carl Baker, and Steve Booker.Gibbs Memorial Library

While a boater pulled Archie out of the water, Elliott and Drummond ran across the bridge to the command post to report what had happened. Someone called the fire department, and before long a search party was on the lake. As campers watched from the shore, firefighters in three boats threw dredging hooks into the water. Onlookers hoped against hope that the teens had been able to swim to safety.

Around 2 a.m., the crowd’s worst fears were realized. A body was found near the bridge, tangled in a trotline. An observer, David Echols, said the rescuers positioned their boats between the body and the civilians and spent twenty minutes pulling it out. “They were shielding the bank where we couldn’t see.” 

The body was Baker’s. The searchers brought him back to shore, where they took a couple of hours to regroup before returning to the lake at dawn. All the while, Juneteenth campers kept watch. Mexia was a small town where just about everybody knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker. They were country boys who had grown up playing at the local pool and in this very lake, although Freeman was scared of water, and his mother said he “couldn’t swim, not one lick.” Baker and Booker, however, were known to be excellent swimmers. “Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

“Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

How could Elliott, Archie, and Drummond survive while all three teens were presumed lost? Many witnesses had seen the teenagers marched through the crowd with handcuffs on. Had the handcuffs stayed on in the boat?

About 1:30 p.m., another body was found near the bridge. Three rescue boats formed a circle around it, blocking observers from making out the crew’s actions. “They took a while before they pulled the body out,” said a reporter who covered the search, “but we couldn’t see what they were doing.” What they were doing was retrieving Freeman’s body from the water. 

The apparent secrecy fueled more suspicions, which intensified as the search for Booker continued. The next day, his body floated to the surface not far from where the others had been found. By then, many in Mexia who’d heard about the drownings believed that the teens had been handcuffed when the boat flipped. A hot-dog vendor named Arthur Beachum Jr. told a reporter about seeing Baker being removed from the water. “I saw them pull the body from the lake and it still had handcuffs on it. One officer took them off and put them in his pocket.” 

Sheriff Dennis Walker denied this to the press. “It was a freak accident,” he said. “All of what they’re saying is untrue.” Reserve deputy Archie told a reporter that two of the teens had been handcuffed together but that the cuffs had been removed before Baker, Booker, and Freeman were led into the boat. According to the Dallas Times Herald, Archie also said that if he’d been in charge, things would have been different: “I probably would’ve pulled the marijuana out and put it in the mud puddle next to the car and sent the suspects on their way.” (He later denied saying this.) Sheriff Walker said, “This could turn out to be a racial-type deal.”  

That was an understatement. Reporters and TV crews from Waco, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston arrived in Mexia. By Sunday, the drownings were national news. “Youths Allegedly Handcuffed,” read a headline in the New York Times. The NAACP sent a team of investigators and demanded the Department of Justice conduct an inquiry. Someone from the DOJ called the sheriff on Monday morning and was given directions to the sheriff’s headquarters in Groesbeck, the county seat. The FBI came too.

Richard Dockery, the head of the Dallas NAACP, examined Baker’s body and told reporters he thought that the position of the young man’s hands—wrists together, fingers curled—meant he had been cuffed. Initial autopsies of Baker and Freeman, done in Waco, found no bruising or signs of struggle, prompting Booker’s mother to announce she was taking her son’s body to Dallas because she wouldn’t get “anything but lies” from Waco pathologists.  

Reporters rang the sheriff around the clock, and Walker later complained that the attention “severely hampered” his investigation. “The press has been calling me day and night from as far away as Chicago and New York,” he said. “I had to leave the house to get a couple of hours of rest.” Mexia’s mayor called the coverage “sensationalized,” while many white townspeople felt torn between defending their home against its portrayal as a racist backwater and acknowledging the wrong that had been done. “I was at a laundromat yesterday,” a white waitress told a reporter from Fort Worth, “and usually everyone gets along alright, but yesterday some of the Blacks were kind of testy . . . and I don’t blame them.”

The drownings had exposed a deep rift in Mexia, one that went back generations and couldn’t be smoothed over. “My God, this has turned the whole town upside down,” a local man told the Waco Tribune-Herald, “and those three boys ain’t even in the ground yet.” 

The pavilion and tabernacle at Booker T. Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Rick Washington was in the Navy in June 1981, stationed aboard the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa in the Philippines, when a shipmate handed him a newspaper. “Wash,” he said, “ain’t this where you’re from? M-e-x-i-a, Texas?” Washington, then twenty, read the headline about a triple drowning. Then he saw the names. “I just broke down like a twelve-gauge shotgun. Steve, Carl, Rerun. They were my best friends.”

Now sixty, Washington is the pastor at Mexia’s Greater Little Zion Baptist Church, and every day he drives past places where he and his friends used to play. “We would eat breakfast, leave home, come home for lunch, leave again, be home before the streetlights came on,” Washington said. “We were almost never inside.” They would ride bikes, play football and basketball, hunt rabbits, swim at the city pool, and explore the rolling, scrubby plains. 

Washington, like everyone else in Mexia who knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker, remembered them as typical small-town teenagers. Baker was short, handsome, and athletic. He liked hanging out at the pool—he was such a good swimmer that the lifeguards sometimes asked him to help out when it got busy. He’d graduated from Mexia High School the previous year and was working at a local cotton gin. He was nineteen, with an easy charm and a voluminous Afro that had taken months to grow out. 

Anthony Freeman, the youngest of the three at eighteen, was an only child of strict parents. He played piano, performing every week at the church his family attended. “He was a very bright kid,” said Shree Steen-Medlock, who went to high school with Freeman. “I remember him trying to fit in and not be the nerdy kind of guy.” He had graduated that spring, and he and Baker planned on going to Paul Quinn College, then in Waco, in the fall. 

Nineteen-year-old Steve Booker was the group’s extrovert. “He was flamboyant, like Deion Sanders,” said his friend John Proctor. Booker was born in Dallas and raised on his grandparents’ farm in Mexia, where he helped to pen cattle, feed hogs, and mend fences. He loved basketball and grew up shooting on a hoop and backboard made out of a bicycle wheel and a sheet of plywood. Once, playing for Mexia High’s JV team, he hit a game-winner from half-court. In 1980 Booker moved back to Dallas, where he graduated high school and found work at a detergent supply company, but he’d returned that week to celebrate Juneteenth.

The Mexia where the three grew up was a tight-knit city of roughly seven thousand, about a third of whom were Black. Kids left their bikes on the lawn, families left their doors unlocked, and horses and cattle grazed in pastures on the outskirts of town. Boys played Little League, and everybody went to church. Mexia was known as the place near Waco with the odd name (which it got from the Mexía family, who received a large land grant in the area in 1833). City leaders came up with a perfect slogan: “Mexia . . . a great place to live . . . however you pronounce it.” Football fans might have heard that NFL player Ray Rhodes grew up there; country music fans knew Mexia as the home base of famed songwriter Cindy Walker. 

The VICA Building Trades club at Mexia High School in 1979, which included Carl Baker, Anthony Freeman, and Jay Wallace.Gibbs Memorial Library

Black Texans knew Mexia for something entirely different: it was the site of the nation’s greatest Juneteenth celebration. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when Union general Gordon Granger stood on the second-floor balcony of the Ashton Villa, in Galveston, and announced—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation—that enslaved people in Texas were, in fact, free. Word spread throughout the state and eventually reached the cotton-rich region of Limestone County. Formerly enslaved people in the area left plantations and resettled in tiny communities along the Navasota River with names like Comanche Crossing, Rocky Crossing, Elm, Woodland, and Sandy. 

They had to be careful. Limestone County, like other parts of Texas, was a hostile place for newly freed African Americans. In the decade after emancipation, the state and federal governments had to intervene in the area on multiple occasions to stop white residents from terrorizing Black communities. Historian Ray Walter has written that “literally hundreds of Negroes were murdered” in Limestone County during Reconstruction.

The region’s first emancipation festivities took place during the late 1860s, in and around churches and spilling out along the terrain near the Navasota River. “If Blacks were going to have big celebrations,” said Wortham Frank Briscoe, whose family goes back four generations in Limestone County, “they had to be in the bottomlands, hidden away from white people.”

Over time, several smaller community-based events coalesced into one, gravitating to a spot eight miles west of Mexia along the river near Comanche Crossing. There, families would spread quilts to sit and listen to preachers’ sermons and politicians’ speeches. Women donned long, elegant dresses, and men sported dark suits and bowler hats. They sang spirituals, listened to elders tell stories of life under slavery, and feasted on barbecued pork and beef. 

In 1892 a group of 89 locals from seven different communities around Limestone County formed the Nineteenth of June Organization. Six years later, three of the founders and two other men pooled $180 and bought ten acres of land along the river. In 1906 another group of members purchased twenty more acres. They cleared the area, preserving several dozen oak trees, alongside which members bought small plots for $1.50 each. The grounds were given a name: Booker T. Washington Park. 

The celebration continued to grow, especially after oil was discovered in Mexia, in 1920. Some of the bounty lay under Black-owned land, and money from the fields gave the Nineteenth of June Organization the means to build the park’s tabernacle and a pavilion with concession stands. During the Great Migration, as Black residents left Central Texas for jobs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they took Juneteenth with them, and word spread about the grand festivities along the Navasota River. Every year, more and more revelers came to Comanche Crossing, bringing their children and sometimes staying the entire week. Some built simple one-room huts to spend nights in; others pitched Army tents or just slept under the stars. During the busiest years, attendance reached 20,000. 

James Ferrell’s Black Frontier Riding Club on a trail ride to the Juneteenth celebration at Comanche Crossing, year unknown.Courtesy of James Ferrell

On the actual holiday, it was tradition to read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, along with the names of the park’s founders. Elders spoke about the holiday’s significance, and a dinner was held in honor of formerly enslaved people, some of whom were still alive. “You instilled this in your children,” said Dayton Smith, who was born in 1949 and began attending Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing shortly before his first birthday. “It had been done before you were born, by your parents and grandparents. Don’t forget the Emancipation Proclamation.Your parents didn’t come here every year just because. They came because of the Emancipation Proclamation at Juneteenth.”

Kids would grow up going to Comanche Crossing, then marry, move away, and return, taking their vacations in mid-June and bringing their own kids. “It was a lifelong thing,” said Mexia native Charles Nemons. “It was almost like a county fair. If you were driving and you saw someone walking, you’d go, ‘Going to the grounds? Hop in!’ ” 

At the concession booths, vendors would sell fried fish, barbecue, beer, corn, popcorn, homemade ice cream, and Big Red, the soda from Waco that became a Juneteenth staple. Choirs came from all across the country to sing in the tabernacle. Sometimes preachers would perform baptisms in the lake, which was created in 1961, when the river was dammed. 

The biggest crowds came when Juneteenth landed on a weekend. Renee Turner recalled attending a particularly busy Juneteenth with her husband in the mid-seventies. “My husband was in the service, and we couldn’t even get out,” she said. “He had to be back at Fort Hood that Monday morning, and so I remember people picking up cars—physically picking up cars—so that there would be a pathway out.” Everyone, it seemed, came to Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing. Daniel Keeling was an awestruck grade-schooler when he saw Dallas Cowboys stars Tony Dorsett and Drew Pearson walking the grounds. “If you were an African American in Dallas or Houston,” Keeling said, “you made your way to Mexia on the nineteenth of June.” 

Even as Mexia’s Black residents took great pride in the annual Juneteenth festivities at the park, back in town they were still denied basic rights. Ferrell, who started spending the holiday at Comanche Crossing as a kid in the fifties, recalled life in segregated Mexia. “Up until the sixties, you still had your place,” he said. “If you were Black, you drank from the fountain over there, whites drank from the one over here, and if I went and drank in the fountain over here, well, I got a problem.” Back then, many Black residents lived near a commercial strip of Black-owned businesses called “the Beat,” along South Belknap Street, where they had their own movie theater, grocery stores, barbershops, juke joints, cleaners, and funeral home. When white and Black residents found themselves standing on opposite street corners downtown, the Black pedestrians had to wait for their white counterparts to cross first. “We couldn’t walk past each other,” said Ray Anderson, who was born in 1954 and went on to become Mexia’s mayor. “And if it was a female, you definitely better stay across the street or go the other way. You grew up knowing you couldn’t cross certain boundaries or you’d go to prison—or get hung.”

For years, the only law enforcement at Lake Mexia during Juneteenth consisted of a few well-known Black civilians. One was Homer Willis, an older man who had been deputized by the sheriff to walk around with a walkie-talkie, which he could use to radio deputies in case of an emergency. In the late seventies, more rigorous licensing requirements made such commissions a thing of the past, and the sheriff set up a command post across the lake where officers would hang out and wait. They stayed mostly on the periphery, helping to direct traffic and occasionally crossing the lake to break up a fight. 

Until June 19, 1981, when, during the peak hours of one of the biggest Juneteenth celebrations in years, three officers piled into a small boat, started the motor, and cruised across narrow Lake Mexia. 

The concession stands at Booker T. Washington Park.Photograph by Michael Starghill

When Baker and Freeman’s dual funeral was held in Mexia, so many mourners planned to attend the service that it had to be convened at the city’s largest church, First Baptist. Even so, the 1,400-seat space couldn’t accommodate them all. Baker and Freeman were remembered as kind young men who never hurt anyone and never got in trouble. At one point, Freeman’s mother, Nellie Mae, broke down, fainted, and had to be carried out. She insisted on returning for one last look at her only child before she was rushed to the hospital.

The district judge in Limestone County, P. K. Reiter, hoped that a swift investigation would defuse the escalating racial tensions. “We need to clear the air,” he said, announcing the opening of a court of inquiry, a rarely used fact-finding measure intended to speed up proceedings that would normally take months to complete. The court lacked the authority to mete out punishment, but it could refer cases for prosecution. Reiter asked the NAACP to recommend a Black lawyer to lead the inquest. The organization sent Larry Baraka, a 31-year-old prosecutor from Dallas. Baraka arrived in town two days after Booker’s body was found. 

Limestone County had never seen anything like this. News helicopters flew into Groesbeck from Dallas and Fort Worth, landing in the church parking lot across the street from the courthouse. It was summer in Central Texas, and the courtroom, which lacked air conditioning, was crammed with 150 people; reporters filled every seat in the jury box. A writer from the Mexia Daily News wrote that the room was loaded with a “strong suspicion of intrigue, deep pathos, heavy remorse, and indignation.” 

The main issue was the handcuffs. Eighteen witnesses testified, including Drummond, the probation officer. He insisted that the officers had brought just one pair of handcuffs, that only Baker and Booker were handcuffed to each other, and that the cuffs had been removed before they got into the boat. A witness who’d been on a nearby craft—a Black woman from Dallas—told the court that she saw the officers remove the restraints from two men who’d been handcuffed together. The fire chief testified that no cuffs were found on the bodies as they were pulled from the lake. 

Other witnesses contradicted the officials’ version of events. Beachum, the hot-dog seller, again said that he saw cuffs taken off Baker’s body after it was retrieved from the lake, but he also admitted to drinking almost a fifth of whiskey that day. Another said all three were handcuffed—and that Elliott was drinking beer and his eyes were “puffy.” The local funeral home director, who had seen some two hundred drowning victims in his seventeen-year career, said that the position of Baker’s hands indicated that the teen had been cuffed. “It’s highly unlikely you will find a drowning victim’s hands in that position.” 

At the end of the three-day proceeding, Baraka told reporters that the evidence suggested the teens were not handcuffed in the boat. He believed the officers had acted without criminal or racist intent, but he added that they had behaved with “rampant incompetence” and “gross negligence.” The boat was overloaded and there were no life preservers, so the officers could still face criminal charges.

For Mexia’s Black residents, the court of inquiry had cleared up nothing. They rejected the testimony of both Drummond and the fire chief and suspected a cover-up. Whites in Mexia also criticized the officers’ judgment. “You put a gun on someone’s hip, and it goes to their head,” former district attorney Don Caldwell told a reporter. “The evidence in this case doesn’t add up. It was a terrible act of stupidity, and somebody is going to have to pay the fiddler.” 

That fall, Limestone County attorney Patrick Simmons, together with a lawyer from the state attorney general’s office named Gerald Carruth, took the court of inquiry’s findings to a grand jury. They hoped the panel would indict the officers for involuntary manslaughter, a felony. Instead, the jury came back with misdemeanor charges for criminally negligent homicide and violating the Texas Water Safety Act. If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams, a spokesperson for the Comanche Three Committee, an advocacy group formed in response to the drownings. 

Defense attorneys argued that the officers couldn’t receive a fair trial in Mexia, so they requested the proceedings be moved. A judge in Marlin, about forty miles away, said he didn’t want it, not after “statements in the news media by certain persons created an atmosphere in this county that is charged with racial tension to the point that violence is invited.” The case was moved to San Marcos, where another judge punted. “No one wants this,” Joe Cannon, the attorney defending Drummond, told a reporter. “It’s a hot potato.” Finally, Baraka, who had by then joined the prosecution, convinced Dallas County Criminal Court judge Tom Price to preside over the trial.

If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams.

Price, who was eight years into a four-decade judicial career, would later call the Mexia drownings the biggest case he ever handled. “It was a hard, emotional trial,” he said. “Three young kids who died for no reason. There was so much tension, and it was so racially mixed up in there. I was thirty-three, thinking, ‘What have I got myself into?’ ”

The trial, which lasted three weeks, was perhaps the highest-profile misdemeanor proceeding in Texas history. Each defendant had his own attorney, and each attorney objected as often as possible, squabbling with prosecutors and spurring Price to threaten them all with contempt. The atmosphere was further strained by the presence of news crews, who swarmed the legal teams and the teens’ families during recesses. 

To convict the officers of criminal negligence, the all-white, six-person jury would need to be convinced that under the same circumstances an ordinary person would have perceived a substantial risk of putting the teens into the boat and avoided doing so. Defense lawyers acknowledged that the officers had made mistakes but argued that their actions were reasonable—that they had needed to use the boat to avoid what they viewed as a hostile crowd. Two defense witnesses said they had seen the officers remove handcuffs from the teens before boarding the boat. Beachum, the witness who told the court of inquiry he’d seen handcuffs on Baker’s body, didn’t testify at trial because the prosecution didn’t call him to the stand. “I think Carruth, Baraka, and I all had problems with his credibility,” Simmons said recently. Instead, the prosecutors centered their case on other facts—from the absence of lights and life jackets aboard the boat to the officers’ reckless decision to overload the craft. “They made mistakes that would shock the consciences of reasonable people,” Baraka told the jurors. 

The officers took the stand and said they had tried to save the teenagers. Archie told the jury that while he clung to the overturned boat, Drummond pushed Freeman toward Archie, who grabbed the thrashing teen by the hair and shirt and pulled him onto the hull. Archie said he tried to maneuver to the other side of the craft while holding Freeman across the top but the teen slipped off, sank, and then bobbed up four times before disappearing. Archie didn’t try to rescue him again because the reserve deputy wasn’t a strong swimmer. Drummond testified that he tried to help Baker but the teen kept pulling him under, so the officer let go and swam to shore. He also said that if he could have done anything to change the situation, he “wouldn’t have made an arrest in the first place.” 

Elliott acknowledged that he and the other officers had erred. He called the drownings “just a horrible accident” and said he’d do things differently given another chance. When Baraka asked Elliott if he thought they deserved forgiveness, the deputy answered, “Under the circumstances, yes.”  

After the closing arguments, the jury took less than five hours to render a verdict: not guilty. The defendants, showing no emotion, were rushed away. Afterward, Nellie Mae Freeman sat on a bench outside the courtroom reading the Bible. “No,” she told a reporter, “justice was not done.” Evelyn Baker, Carl’s mother, said she had expected the verdict. “This is very terrible, but that’s Mexia for you, and that’s Limestone County. The Lord will take care of them.” 

The families found more disappointment when it came to their last remaining legal option: civil lawsuits, in which the deputies and the county could be held responsible for negligence under a much lower burden of proof. Each family sued for $4 million in damages, alleging that their sons’ civil rights had been violated. In December 1983, they settled for a total of $200,000, or $66,667 per teen. 

A local official told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the county’s lawyers felt “very lucky” about the outcome. “We were just sitting on pins and needles hoping it would get as low as possible but we never really thought [the settlement] would get this low,” said Howard Smith, a county judge familiar with the civil case. Attorneys for the county made a lowball offer, and the families and their lawyers accepted it. “I was tired,” Evelyn said recently. “I was hurt, and I never did get to really grieve. They just really ran us through it.” 

The pavilion at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For many Black Mexia residents, Comanche Crossing was never the same after the drownings. “It just changed my whole life,” said Steen-Medlock, the teens’ schoolmate. “I never went back to another Juneteenth there.” Many others felt similarly. Attendance in 1982, the year after the drownings, was about two thousand, the lowest in 35 years. It wasn’t just that celebrants were fearful of being harassed, arrested, or worse. Comanche Crossing was sacred ground, land that had been purchased by people who had survived slavery, to ensure that they, along with future generations, would have a place to commemorate emancipation. Now that land had been defiled.

Texas had made Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1980, and celebrations of Black freedom spread to other cities. In 1982 Houston’s Juneteenth parade attracted an estimated 50,000 onlookers. As crowds moved elsewhere, attendance at Comanche Crossing’s Juneteenth ceremonies continued to decline. Arson attacks in 1987 and 1989 caused severe damage to the tabernacle and pavilion, and the structures had to be rebuilt. Concession booths were tagged with racist graffiti.

Many of those who’d grown up with the teens left town. “It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” Over the years, Juneteenth crowds at Comanche Crossing dwindled even more, while the brush along the lake grew thicker and the buildings fell into disrepair. During the past decade, official attendance has sometimes dropped to less than a hundred. When the Nineteenth of June Organization elected former county commissioner William “Pete” Kirven as its new president in 2015, some locals felt optimistic. “I had a lot of hope,” said Judy Chambers, a municipal judge for the city of Mexia and a past member of the organization’s board of directors. She thought the group—and Comanche Crossing—could use some new blood. 

That hope didn’t last. Although the new leadership cleaned up the park’s grounds and installed new light poles and swing sets, it also posted a sign banning alcohol, instituted a 1 a.m. closing time, and increased the law enforcement presence during Juneteenth. The new rules did not go over well. “Juneteenth is not worth going out there,” said a Mexia resident who had attended the festivities since he was a boy. “It’s not any fun. So many police you can’t enjoy yourself. I went in 2018. I didn’t like it. I haven’t been back.”  

Echols, a member of the organization’s board of directors, said that despite the “No Alcohol” sign, members of the public are allowed to drink as long as they use plastic cups. He agreed that law enforcement had gone overboard in 2018 and “was scaring people away” but added that after the group expressed these concerns to the sheriff, the presence was reduced.

Simmons, the prosecuting attorney at the 1982 trial, is now the district judge for Limestone and Freestone Counties. “This was the Juneteenth place, and it’s a shame we lost that,” he said. “At the time, I looked at it as an incident that needed to be prosecuted. I look back on it now and say, ‘What a tragedy. What a shame.’ The ridiculous idea of going over—three guys in a boat—could they rethink it? It was such a tragedy, not just the loss of three young men but the whole Juneteenth.” 

In recent years, awareness of Juneteenth has exploded. Some of that is due to a woman from Fort Worth named Opal Lee. In 2016, when she was 89, she set out to walk from Texas to Washington, D.C., to publicize a campaign to designate Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Last year, Lee collected 1.5 million signatures on a petition in pursuit of that goal, and in Congress, Texas senator John Cornyn and U.S. representative Sheila Jackson Lee filed legislation to take Juneteenth nationwide. The bills didn’t pass, though they have been reintroduced this year.

Perhaps the biggest factor wasn’t a petition or a bill, though, but the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. In the weeks after Floyd’s murder, the Juneteenth holiday became linked with the national protest movement in support of Black lives. On June 19, hundreds of thousands of protesters hit the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., and Houston. All across the country, marchers carried Juneteenth banners as well as signs emblazoned with Floyd’s face and the names of other Black people killed by law enforcement. 

Back in Mexia, locals drew a straight line from 1981 to 2020. “When I saw that video,” said Chambers, “it took me back to that place and time where Black men were getting killed on the streets of Limestone County by law enforcement—and back then it was just swept under the rug.” Steen-Medlock said watching the video immediately reminded her of her three friends who died 39 years earlier. “Those three deputies thought, ‘We have a right to do whatever we want to do’—and that meant putting these boys in a small boat, at night, handcuffed, with no life jackets,” she said. “That’s how they dealt with Black people. If it had been white kids, they would have said, ‘Call your dad to come get you.’ But when you’re Black, you’re not treated like that. You’re guilty.”

“It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” 

This history helps explain why Chambers, Steen-Medlock, and almost every other current or former Black Mexia resident still believe the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Chambers said she has spoken with witnesses who told her they were scared to testify forty years ago. “I don’t know if you live in a small town in the South,” she said, “but a lot of powerful people in town control others with things like mortgages and loans.” Echols said, “Back in those days, there was a fear of the sheriff’s department. A lot of guys may have had some problems with the law, so they didn’t come forward.” 

The foreperson of the grand jury, Ray Anderson, said that jurors discussed the handcuffs at length and subpoenaed Beachum to testify about their presence, but Beachum never showed up. At the time, that spoke volumes to Anderson. “I was never presented enough evidence of handcuffs,” he said. “If I could’ve proved murderous intent, I would have been the first to vote on it. I would have said, ‘We need to make an example—right here.’ ” Now, almost forty years later, Anderson doubts the grand jury got the whole story. “I still feel there was a lot of stuff that didn’t come out.” 

Most white officials involved in the case maintain that there was no evidence the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Instead, they cite other factors that could have caused the three to drown. “I’ve taught swimming for years,” said Cannon, the attorney who represented Drummond. “If you’re fully clothed and it’s dark and you’re not oriented correctly, then you panic. You easily panic. I was surprised that any of them got back.”

Daniel Keeling was ten in 1981, and he grew up in Mexia hearing about the handcuffs as a statement of fact. The drownings left him so unsettled that he eventually pursued a career in law enforcement, where he hoped to improve the field from within. Keeling also hoped that he might uncover the truth behind his hometown’s most controversial case. 

“Supposedly Drummond took the handcuffs off,” said Keeling, who spent over seven years as a deputy in Hunt County and six more as a deputy constable in Dallas and now works as a corporate security manager. “Well, usually when you’re making an arrest, you put handcuffs on a subject and don’t take them off until you get where you’re going. Did the pressure come down on him to change his story? The blue shield is real. And telling the truth could ruin your whole career.” 

What really happened that night? Keeling’s search convinced him that the answer will never be known.

Around Mexia, locals don’t talk about the drownings much anymore. “This is still very raw for a lot of people,” said Steen-Medlock. “They want to forget it ever happened.” The city boasts several colorful murals depicting local heroes and historical figures, but there’s no memorial for Baker, Freeman, and Booker—not at the park, not anywhere in town. There is also no official record of the 1982 trial in either Dallas or Limestone County because the officers had their records expunged. Legally, it’s as if they were never even arrested.

These days, most Black Mexia residents celebrate Juneteenth at home with family and friends. Some hold block parties; others attend events in nearby towns. Many use that week for family reunions, with faraway aunts and uncles taking vacation time to come home to Mexia. But most don’t go to Comanche Crossing. 

None of the officers involved in the drownings agreed to speak with Texas Monthly for this story. Archie, who retired from his job as a security guard, lives close enough to Lake Mexia that he can see it from his porch. Drummond retired from a career running a fencing company; he declined when reached for comment, adding, “I’ve done that. It’s been a long time and it’s still relatively fresh on my mind, believe it or not.” 

Elliott did not respond to several interview requests. Ronnie Davis, an old friend who hasn’t spoken with him in decades, said the deputy took the incident hard back in 1981. “He looked really bad when I talked to him a week after,” Davis recalled. “It was bothering him that lots of people thought he did it on purpose. No. It had nothing to do with prejudice. Nothing at all.” 

After the trial, Elliott moved to College Station and began a decorated career as an investigator with the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, where he solved the twelve-year-old cold case of a murdered local real estate agent. At Elliott’s retirement ceremony in 2018, one colleague lauded him as a zealous loner, and another noted his “perseverance, integrity, respect, and trust.” Elliott was hanging up his badge because he had been elected as a justice of the peace for Brazos County. To Mexia residents who’ve never forgotten the drownings, the thought that life simply moved on for Elliott and the other officers is maddening. “They got away with murder!” said Edward Jackson, who went to school with the three teens. “Nothing happened to their lives or careers.” 

Jay Wallace, the fourth teen in the car, also declined interview requests for this story. Friends of his say that Wallace, now 58, has never talked to them about that night. “I can just imagine what he’s feeling,” Proctor, who grew up with the teens, said. “What’s going on in his head is ‘That could have been me.’ ”

As the officer in charge that night and the one who initiated the arrests, Elliott has usually been considered most responsible for the tragedy. In 2001 Simmons, the prosecutor, told the Texas Observer that Elliott was viewed as a “wild man” and not well-liked by fellow officers. More recently, Simmons said, “I think Kenny was trying to make a name for himself as a hotshot officer, but if you look back on it, why on earth would you have done that?”

A big part of a deputy’s job is learning to deal with crowds, Keeling said. “The way I was taught, you ask yourself the question ‘Do I really need to make this arrest? Are they breaking the peace? Are they causing harm to others?’ If not, let it go.” Keeling added that he remembers the pressure he felt early in his career. “I know the weight of being a young officer—you have to prove yourself. I think it was basically an ‘I’ll show you who I am’ mentality. I think it was one officer’s fault, and the other two backed him. 

“Hopefully he’s atoned for whatever the hell he did.”

Pamela, her sister Evelyn Jean, and Patricia Baker under their family oak tree at Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For the first time since her brother’s death, Pamela Baker visited Comanche Crossing on Juneteenth last year. The official festivities had been rescheduled as a virtual event due to COVID-19, but a group of locals set up a few stands and gathered at the park, and Baker met some friends there. She hadn’t wandered the grounds in decades, and now she found herself walking down the caliche road and past the merry-go-round and the dance hall. She pointed out to one of her friends the oak where her grandmother used to serve fried chicken and biscuits to hundreds of fellow campers. The counter her grandfather built was long gone, but the tree still stood. Baker perused the vendor stalls and bought a purse and a plate of fried fish before settling on a bench by the lake. She looked out at the water. Before long, she was crying. 

The Nineteenth of June Organization has reached out to Baker about holding a memorial for the three teens this Juneteenth, and she’s thinking about going back. She talked with her children about possibly getting together around the old oak and even rebuilding her grandparents’ counter. Her ancestors celebrated emancipation on this same land while living through their own unthinkable tragedies, and she figures it’s time she did so too. “I don’t think it’ll ever be like it used to be,” she said. “I wish it would, ’cause this is history for us. This is something we should build back up together.”

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Ghosts of Comanche Crossing.” Subscribe today.

The above article was published here.

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Every Juneteenth, as soon as Pamela Baker got to Booker T. Washington Park, she’d race to the merry-go-round, squeeze through the swarm of shrieking kids, grab one of the shiny rails, and hold on tight. After a few minutes, she would jump off and dart up the steps of the nearby dance hall to survey the throngs below. She and her brother Carl would weave through the crowd, looking for cousins from Dallas and Houston they hadn’t seen since the previous year. Eventually, her whole family would congregate under an oak tree their ancestors had claimed as a gathering place a century before, in the years after news of the end of slavery reached Texas. 

“Every year, this is where we’d be,” Baker said. It was a cold January day, and she sat in a purple pew in the park’s open-air tabernacle. Baker, sixty, wore camo pants, a hoodie, and a knit cap. She had come from work and looked tired as a heavy rain beat down around her. The park sits along Lake Mexia (pronounced “muh-hay-ah”), about thirty miles east of Waco. For generations, African Americans made pilgrimages to this spot to celebrate Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day. They came from all over the country to hear the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, to worship, to run and play in the green fields, to dance in the creaky pavilion, to eat barbecue and drink red soda water, to sleep under the stars. Locals referred to the park by its name from an earlier time: Comanche Crossing. Juneteenth here would run for days on end. It was like a giant family reunion, held on hallowed ground. 

The merry-go-round at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Baker grew up in nearby Mexia, and each June, her family would camp around that same towering oak. In the early sixties her grandfather built a wooden countertop around the trunk, and every June 19, her grandmother and members of her grandmother’s social club would fry scores of chickens in an old black washpot—enough to serve a few hundred people who’d stop by to sit, eat, and reminisce. “Juneteenth meant everything to us,” Baker said. As a kid, she looked forward to the holiday all year long. 

Until she didn’t.

“After what happened with my brother,” she said, “we weren’t interested in coming out here anymore.” 

Forty years ago, on June 19, 1981, not far from where she sat now, her brother Carl and two other Black teenagers drowned while in the custody of a Limestone County sheriff’s deputy, a reserve deputy, and a probation officer. The Baker family was devastated—as was the entire town of Mexia. The deaths became national news, with people from New York to California asking the same question as those in Central Texas: Why had three Black teens died while all three officers—two of them white, one Black—survived?

Over the years, whenever a highly publicized incident of police brutality against a Black person occurred, many in Mexia would think back to that night in 1981. This was never more true than last summer, when outrage at George Floyd’s murder, captured on video in broad daylight, sparked one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. As millions of demonstrators took to the streets, Mexia residents were reminded of the drownings that once rocked their community and forever changed their hometown’s proud Juneteenth celebration, which had been among the nation’s most historic. 

Four decades later, Baker still grieves for her brother. “It never goes away,” she said quietly, sitting in the pew, surrounded by the ghosts of her ancestors. “I miss everything about Carl—just seeing his smile, his dark skin with beautiful white teeth, walk into the house after work. I wish I could see him come up out of the water right now, but I know I can’t.”

She paused and looked toward the lake. “My brother,” she said, “he didn’t deserve that, what they did to him.”

Pamela Baker sitting in the park tabernacle on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

James Ferrell was at Comanche Crossing on June 19, 1981. It was a clear, warm Friday night, and Ferrell, a tall 34-year-old who sported a scruffy beard and a cowboy hat, had led a trail ride to the park from nearby Sandy. He sat with his brothers, cousins, friends, and their horses, drinking beer, telling stories, laughing. They could hear music coming from the pavilion and see a line of cars creeping over the bridge onto the grounds, while pedestrians who had parked two miles away on U.S. 84 hiked through the gridlock. The moon was almost full, and the air smelled of grilled burgers, fried fish, and popcorn. 

Sometime after ten, three law enforcement officers clambered into a boat on the other side of the lake and pushed off. Lake Mexia is a shallow, dammed stretch of the Navasota River in the shape of an M; the park sits near the lake’s center, where the water is about two hundred yards across. The Limestone County Sheriff’s Office had set up a command post on the opposite bank. The deputies rarely patrolled the park after sundown, but on this night they did. Because the bridge was bottlenecked, they cut across the lake in a fourteen-foot aluminum vessel. They were led by sheriff’s deputy Kenny Elliott, 23, who’d been on the force for about a year. The Black officer, reserve deputy Kenneth Archie, was also 23 and a former high school basketball player from Houston. The third man was David Drummond, a 32-year-old probation officer who planned to check on some of his parolees.

The boat hit the shore, and the men climbed onto the bank, which was muddy from recent rains. Though the three officers wore street clothes, they stuck out in the nearly all-Black crowd of roughly five thousand. “Police have a special way of walking,” recalled one bystander. They stopped at the concession stands to buy some soft drinks, then moved on. Young lovers walked through the crowd, eating cotton candy. Elderly men and women, many wearing their Sunday best, perched on benches talking to old friends. Everywhere the officers walked, they saw tents and campers with families gathered around. Some folks were dozing, some were playing dominoes, some were drinking beer or whiskey. Some were smoking marijuana, and as the officers passed, they either snuffed out their joints or hid them behind their backs. “When they came up,” Ferrell said, “we just put it down. They never said nothing. They walked off.” 

As the trio approached one of the park’s small caliche roads, they came upon a yellow Chevrolet Nova stuck in traffic. Inside were four local teenagers: Carl Baker, Steve Booker, Jay Wallace, and Anthony Freeman, whom friends called “Rerun” because he resembled the hefty character from the sitcom What’s Happening!! As Elliott shone his flashlight through the windshield, he saw the teens passing a small plastic bag of what he took to be marijuana. It was just after eleven, and in the time since he’d crossed the lake, Elliott hadn’t acknowledged similar violations of the law. Now, though, the deputy ordered the four out of the car and made them put their hands on the roof while the officers patted them down and searched the interior. 

A bridge over Lake Mexia.Photograph by Michael Starghill

They found the baggie of weed and a joint, which they confiscated. Wallace would later say that the officers “didn’t act like they knew what they was doing; they kept asking each other what they should do.” The crowd began to take notice. As far as anyone could remember, there had never been an arrest at the park during Juneteenth festivities. 

Elliott made the decision to take Baker, Freeman, and Booker into custody. Days later, Wallace would tell the Waco Tribune-Herald that the officers found drugs on Baker and Booker, while Freeman was arrested because the car belonged to him. Wallace was spared because “they didn’t find anything on me.”  

At least two and possibly all three of the teens were handcuffed; some witnesses said Baker and Booker were cuffed together, while others recalled each being restrained individually. Onlookers didn’t like what they saw, and some began to curse at the officers. Rather than walk the teens through the crowd, over the bridge, and around the lake, the officers opted to go back the way they came. 

When the group reached the boat, Elliott climbed into the back by the motor. Next were Booker and Baker, then Drummond and Freeman. Archie, who weighed more than two hundred pounds, sat in the bow. There were no life jackets, and the combined weight of the passengers exceeded the boat’s capacity by several hundred pounds. 

Elliott started the motor. The craft had no running lights, and as it crept forward, water started pouring in. Drummond yelled back to Elliott, who couldn’t hear him over the engine; Drummond yelled again, and this time Elliott turned it off. By then, they had traveled about forty yards. As the boat slowed, more water rushed in, and the craft submerged and flipped over. All six began splashing wildly in the ten-foot-deep water. 

Elliott shouted for the others to stay with the boat while he swam to shore for help. As soon as he reached water shallow enough to stand in, he fired his gun into the air, in what he would later say was an attempt to summon assistance. Soon after, he was joined by Drummond. Out on the water, Archie, who wasn’t a good swimmer, clung to the boat “like a spider,” one witness said. 

The teens were nowhere in sight. 

Mexia High School yearbook photos of Anthony Freeman, Carl Baker, and Steve Booker.Gibbs Memorial Library

While a boater pulled Archie out of the water, Elliott and Drummond ran across the bridge to the command post to report what had happened. Someone called the fire department, and before long a search party was on the lake. As campers watched from the shore, firefighters in three boats threw dredging hooks into the water. Onlookers hoped against hope that the teens had been able to swim to safety.

Around 2 a.m., the crowd’s worst fears were realized. A body was found near the bridge, tangled in a trotline. An observer, David Echols, said the rescuers positioned their boats between the body and the civilians and spent twenty minutes pulling it out. “They were shielding the bank where we couldn’t see.” 

The body was Baker’s. The searchers brought him back to shore, where they took a couple of hours to regroup before returning to the lake at dawn. All the while, Juneteenth campers kept watch. Mexia was a small town where just about everybody knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker. They were country boys who had grown up playing at the local pool and in this very lake, although Freeman was scared of water, and his mother said he “couldn’t swim, not one lick.” Baker and Booker, however, were known to be excellent swimmers. “Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

“Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

How could Elliott, Archie, and Drummond survive while all three teens were presumed lost? Many witnesses had seen the teenagers marched through the crowd with handcuffs on. Had the handcuffs stayed on in the boat?

About 1:30 p.m., another body was found near the bridge. Three rescue boats formed a circle around it, blocking observers from making out the crew’s actions. “They took a while before they pulled the body out,” said a reporter who covered the search, “but we couldn’t see what they were doing.” What they were doing was retrieving Freeman’s body from the water. 

The apparent secrecy fueled more suspicions, which intensified as the search for Booker continued. The next day, his body floated to the surface not far from where the others had been found. By then, many in Mexia who’d heard about the drownings believed that the teens had been handcuffed when the boat flipped. A hot-dog vendor named Arthur Beachum Jr. told a reporter about seeing Baker being removed from the water. “I saw them pull the body from the lake and it still had handcuffs on it. One officer took them off and put them in his pocket.” 

Sheriff Dennis Walker denied this to the press. “It was a freak accident,” he said. “All of what they’re saying is untrue.” Reserve deputy Archie told a reporter that two of the teens had been handcuffed together but that the cuffs had been removed before Baker, Booker, and Freeman were led into the boat. According to the Dallas Times Herald, Archie also said that if he’d been in charge, things would have been different: “I probably would’ve pulled the marijuana out and put it in the mud puddle next to the car and sent the suspects on their way.” (He later denied saying this.) Sheriff Walker said, “This could turn out to be a racial-type deal.”  

That was an understatement. Reporters and TV crews from Waco, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston arrived in Mexia. By Sunday, the drownings were national news. “Youths Allegedly Handcuffed,” read a headline in the New York Times. The NAACP sent a team of investigators and demanded the Department of Justice conduct an inquiry. Someone from the DOJ called the sheriff on Monday morning and was given directions to the sheriff’s headquarters in Groesbeck, the county seat. The FBI came too.

Richard Dockery, the head of the Dallas NAACP, examined Baker’s body and told reporters he thought that the position of the young man’s hands—wrists together, fingers curled—meant he had been cuffed. Initial autopsies of Baker and Freeman, done in Waco, found no bruising or signs of struggle, prompting Booker’s mother to announce she was taking her son’s body to Dallas because she wouldn’t get “anything but lies” from Waco pathologists.  

Reporters rang the sheriff around the clock, and Walker later complained that the attention “severely hampered” his investigation. “The press has been calling me day and night from as far away as Chicago and New York,” he said. “I had to leave the house to get a couple of hours of rest.” Mexia’s mayor called the coverage “sensationalized,” while many white townspeople felt torn between defending their home against its portrayal as a racist backwater and acknowledging the wrong that had been done. “I was at a laundromat yesterday,” a white waitress told a reporter from Fort Worth, “and usually everyone gets along alright, but yesterday some of the Blacks were kind of testy . . . and I don’t blame them.”

The drownings had exposed a deep rift in Mexia, one that went back generations and couldn’t be smoothed over. “My God, this has turned the whole town upside down,” a local man told the Waco Tribune-Herald, “and those three boys ain’t even in the ground yet.” 

The pavilion and tabernacle at Booker T. Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Rick Washington was in the Navy in June 1981, stationed aboard the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa in the Philippines, when a shipmate handed him a newspaper. “Wash,” he said, “ain’t this where you’re from? M-e-x-i-a, Texas?” Washington, then twenty, read the headline about a triple drowning. Then he saw the names. “I just broke down like a twelve-gauge shotgun. Steve, Carl, Rerun. They were my best friends.”

Now sixty, Washington is the pastor at Mexia’s Greater Little Zion Baptist Church, and every day he drives past places where he and his friends used to play. “We would eat breakfast, leave home, come home for lunch, leave again, be home before the streetlights came on,” Washington said. “We were almost never inside.” They would ride bikes, play football and basketball, hunt rabbits, swim at the city pool, and explore the rolling, scrubby plains. 

Washington, like everyone else in Mexia who knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker, remembered them as typical small-town teenagers. Baker was short, handsome, and athletic. He liked hanging out at the pool—he was such a good swimmer that the lifeguards sometimes asked him to help out when it got busy. He’d graduated from Mexia High School the previous year and was working at a local cotton gin. He was nineteen, with an easy charm and a voluminous Afro that had taken months to grow out. 

Anthony Freeman, the youngest of the three at eighteen, was an only child of strict parents. He played piano, performing every week at the church his family attended. “He was a very bright kid,” said Shree Steen-Medlock, who went to high school with Freeman. “I remember him trying to fit in and not be the nerdy kind of guy.” He had graduated that spring, and he and Baker planned on going to Paul Quinn College, then in Waco, in the fall. 

Nineteen-year-old Steve Booker was the group’s extrovert. “He was flamboyant, like Deion Sanders,” said his friend John Proctor. Booker was born in Dallas and raised on his grandparents’ farm in Mexia, where he helped to pen cattle, feed hogs, and mend fences. He loved basketball and grew up shooting on a hoop and backboard made out of a bicycle wheel and a sheet of plywood. Once, playing for Mexia High’s JV team, he hit a game-winner from half-court. In 1980 Booker moved back to Dallas, where he graduated high school and found work at a detergent supply company, but he’d returned that week to celebrate Juneteenth.

The Mexia where the three grew up was a tight-knit city of roughly seven thousand, about a third of whom were Black. Kids left their bikes on the lawn, families left their doors unlocked, and horses and cattle grazed in pastures on the outskirts of town. Boys played Little League, and everybody went to church. Mexia was known as the place near Waco with the odd name (which it got from the Mexía family, who received a large land grant in the area in 1833). City leaders came up with a perfect slogan: “Mexia . . . a great place to live . . . however you pronounce it.” Football fans might have heard that NFL player Ray Rhodes grew up there; country music fans knew Mexia as the home base of famed songwriter Cindy Walker. 

The VICA Building Trades club at Mexia High School in 1979, which included Carl Baker, Anthony Freeman, and Jay Wallace.Gibbs Memorial Library

Black Texans knew Mexia for something entirely different: it was the site of the nation’s greatest Juneteenth celebration. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when Union general Gordon Granger stood on the second-floor balcony of the Ashton Villa, in Galveston, and announced—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation—that enslaved people in Texas were, in fact, free. Word spread throughout the state and eventually reached the cotton-rich region of Limestone County. Formerly enslaved people in the area left plantations and resettled in tiny communities along the Navasota River with names like Comanche Crossing, Rocky Crossing, Elm, Woodland, and Sandy. 

They had to be careful. Limestone County, like other parts of Texas, was a hostile place for newly freed African Americans. In the decade after emancipation, the state and federal governments had to intervene in the area on multiple occasions to stop white residents from terrorizing Black communities. Historian Ray Walter has written that “literally hundreds of Negroes were murdered” in Limestone County during Reconstruction.

The region’s first emancipation festivities took place during the late 1860s, in and around churches and spilling out along the terrain near the Navasota River. “If Blacks were going to have big celebrations,” said Wortham Frank Briscoe, whose family goes back four generations in Limestone County, “they had to be in the bottomlands, hidden away from white people.”

Over time, several smaller community-based events coalesced into one, gravitating to a spot eight miles west of Mexia along the river near Comanche Crossing. There, families would spread quilts to sit and listen to preachers’ sermons and politicians’ speeches. Women donned long, elegant dresses, and men sported dark suits and bowler hats. They sang spirituals, listened to elders tell stories of life under slavery, and feasted on barbecued pork and beef. 

In 1892 a group of 89 locals from seven different communities around Limestone County formed the Nineteenth of June Organization. Six years later, three of the founders and two other men pooled $180 and bought ten acres of land along the river. In 1906 another group of members purchased twenty more acres. They cleared the area, preserving several dozen oak trees, alongside which members bought small plots for $1.50 each. The grounds were given a name: Booker T. Washington Park. 

The celebration continued to grow, especially after oil was discovered in Mexia, in 1920. Some of the bounty lay under Black-owned land, and money from the fields gave the Nineteenth of June Organization the means to build the park’s tabernacle and a pavilion with concession stands. During the Great Migration, as Black residents left Central Texas for jobs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they took Juneteenth with them, and word spread about the grand festivities along the Navasota River. Every year, more and more revelers came to Comanche Crossing, bringing their children and sometimes staying the entire week. Some built simple one-room huts to spend nights in; others pitched Army tents or just slept under the stars. During the busiest years, attendance reached 20,000. 

James Ferrell’s Black Frontier Riding Club on a trail ride to the Juneteenth celebration at Comanche Crossing, year unknown.Courtesy of James Ferrell

On the actual holiday, it was tradition to read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, along with the names of the park’s founders. Elders spoke about the holiday’s significance, and a dinner was held in honor of formerly enslaved people, some of whom were still alive. “You instilled this in your children,” said Dayton Smith, who was born in 1949 and began attending Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing shortly before his first birthday. “It had been done before you were born, by your parents and grandparents. Don’t forget the Emancipation Proclamation.Your parents didn’t come here every year just because. They came because of the Emancipation Proclamation at Juneteenth.”

Kids would grow up going to Comanche Crossing, then marry, move away, and return, taking their vacations in mid-June and bringing their own kids. “It was a lifelong thing,” said Mexia native Charles Nemons. “It was almost like a county fair. If you were driving and you saw someone walking, you’d go, ‘Going to the grounds? Hop in!’ ” 

At the concession booths, vendors would sell fried fish, barbecue, beer, corn, popcorn, homemade ice cream, and Big Red, the soda from Waco that became a Juneteenth staple. Choirs came from all across the country to sing in the tabernacle. Sometimes preachers would perform baptisms in the lake, which was created in 1961, when the river was dammed. 

The biggest crowds came when Juneteenth landed on a weekend. Renee Turner recalled attending a particularly busy Juneteenth with her husband in the mid-seventies. “My husband was in the service, and we couldn’t even get out,” she said. “He had to be back at Fort Hood that Monday morning, and so I remember people picking up cars—physically picking up cars—so that there would be a pathway out.” Everyone, it seemed, came to Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing. Daniel Keeling was an awestruck grade-schooler when he saw Dallas Cowboys stars Tony Dorsett and Drew Pearson walking the grounds. “If you were an African American in Dallas or Houston,” Keeling said, “you made your way to Mexia on the nineteenth of June.” 

Even as Mexia’s Black residents took great pride in the annual Juneteenth festivities at the park, back in town they were still denied basic rights. Ferrell, who started spending the holiday at Comanche Crossing as a kid in the fifties, recalled life in segregated Mexia. “Up until the sixties, you still had your place,” he said. “If you were Black, you drank from the fountain over there, whites drank from the one over here, and if I went and drank in the fountain over here, well, I got a problem.” Back then, many Black residents lived near a commercial strip of Black-owned businesses called “the Beat,” along South Belknap Street, where they had their own movie theater, grocery stores, barbershops, juke joints, cleaners, and funeral home. When white and Black residents found themselves standing on opposite street corners downtown, the Black pedestrians had to wait for their white counterparts to cross first. “We couldn’t walk past each other,” said Ray Anderson, who was born in 1954 and went on to become Mexia’s mayor. “And if it was a female, you definitely better stay across the street or go the other way. You grew up knowing you couldn’t cross certain boundaries or you’d go to prison—or get hung.”

For years, the only law enforcement at Lake Mexia during Juneteenth consisted of a few well-known Black civilians. One was Homer Willis, an older man who had been deputized by the sheriff to walk around with a walkie-talkie, which he could use to radio deputies in case of an emergency. In the late seventies, more rigorous licensing requirements made such commissions a thing of the past, and the sheriff set up a command post across the lake where officers would hang out and wait. They stayed mostly on the periphery, helping to direct traffic and occasionally crossing the lake to break up a fight. 

Until June 19, 1981, when, during the peak hours of one of the biggest Juneteenth celebrations in years, three officers piled into a small boat, started the motor, and cruised across narrow Lake Mexia. 

The concession stands at Booker T. Washington Park.Photograph by Michael Starghill

When Baker and Freeman’s dual funeral was held in Mexia, so many mourners planned to attend the service that it had to be convened at the city’s largest church, First Baptist. Even so, the 1,400-seat space couldn’t accommodate them all. Baker and Freeman were remembered as kind young men who never hurt anyone and never got in trouble. At one point, Freeman’s mother, Nellie Mae, broke down, fainted, and had to be carried out. She insisted on returning for one last look at her only child before she was rushed to the hospital.

The district judge in Limestone County, P. K. Reiter, hoped that a swift investigation would defuse the escalating racial tensions. “We need to clear the air,” he said, announcing the opening of a court of inquiry, a rarely used fact-finding measure intended to speed up proceedings that would normally take months to complete. The court lacked the authority to mete out punishment, but it could refer cases for prosecution. Reiter asked the NAACP to recommend a Black lawyer to lead the inquest. The organization sent Larry Baraka, a 31-year-old prosecutor from Dallas. Baraka arrived in town two days after Booker’s body was found. 

Limestone County had never seen anything like this. News helicopters flew into Groesbeck from Dallas and Fort Worth, landing in the church parking lot across the street from the courthouse. It was summer in Central Texas, and the courtroom, which lacked air conditioning, was crammed with 150 people; reporters filled every seat in the jury box. A writer from the Mexia Daily News wrote that the room was loaded with a “strong suspicion of intrigue, deep pathos, heavy remorse, and indignation.” 

The main issue was the handcuffs. Eighteen witnesses testified, including Drummond, the probation officer. He insisted that the officers had brought just one pair of handcuffs, that only Baker and Booker were handcuffed to each other, and that the cuffs had been removed before they got into the boat. A witness who’d been on a nearby craft—a Black woman from Dallas—told the court that she saw the officers remove the restraints from two men who’d been handcuffed together. The fire chief testified that no cuffs were found on the bodies as they were pulled from the lake. 

Other witnesses contradicted the officials’ version of events. Beachum, the hot-dog seller, again said that he saw cuffs taken off Baker’s body after it was retrieved from the lake, but he also admitted to drinking almost a fifth of whiskey that day. Another said all three were handcuffed—and that Elliott was drinking beer and his eyes were “puffy.” The local funeral home director, who had seen some two hundred drowning victims in his seventeen-year career, said that the position of Baker’s hands indicated that the teen had been cuffed. “It’s highly unlikely you will find a drowning victim’s hands in that position.” 

At the end of the three-day proceeding, Baraka told reporters that the evidence suggested the teens were not handcuffed in the boat. He believed the officers had acted without criminal or racist intent, but he added that they had behaved with “rampant incompetence” and “gross negligence.” The boat was overloaded and there were no life preservers, so the officers could still face criminal charges.

For Mexia’s Black residents, the court of inquiry had cleared up nothing. They rejected the testimony of both Drummond and the fire chief and suspected a cover-up. Whites in Mexia also criticized the officers’ judgment. “You put a gun on someone’s hip, and it goes to their head,” former district attorney Don Caldwell told a reporter. “The evidence in this case doesn’t add up. It was a terrible act of stupidity, and somebody is going to have to pay the fiddler.” 

That fall, Limestone County attorney Patrick Simmons, together with a lawyer from the state attorney general’s office named Gerald Carruth, took the court of inquiry’s findings to a grand jury. They hoped the panel would indict the officers for involuntary manslaughter, a felony. Instead, the jury came back with misdemeanor charges for criminally negligent homicide and violating the Texas Water Safety Act. If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams, a spokesperson for the Comanche Three Committee, an advocacy group formed in response to the drownings. 

Defense attorneys argued that the officers couldn’t receive a fair trial in Mexia, so they requested the proceedings be moved. A judge in Marlin, about forty miles away, said he didn’t want it, not after “statements in the news media by certain persons created an atmosphere in this county that is charged with racial tension to the point that violence is invited.” The case was moved to San Marcos, where another judge punted. “No one wants this,” Joe Cannon, the attorney defending Drummond, told a reporter. “It’s a hot potato.” Finally, Baraka, who had by then joined the prosecution, convinced Dallas County Criminal Court judge Tom Price to preside over the trial.

If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams.

Price, who was eight years into a four-decade judicial career, would later call the Mexia drownings the biggest case he ever handled. “It was a hard, emotional trial,” he said. “Three young kids who died for no reason. There was so much tension, and it was so racially mixed up in there. I was thirty-three, thinking, ‘What have I got myself into?’ ”

The trial, which lasted three weeks, was perhaps the highest-profile misdemeanor proceeding in Texas history. Each defendant had his own attorney, and each attorney objected as often as possible, squabbling with prosecutors and spurring Price to threaten them all with contempt. The atmosphere was further strained by the presence of news crews, who swarmed the legal teams and the teens’ families during recesses. 

To convict the officers of criminal negligence, the all-white, six-person jury would need to be convinced that under the same circumstances an ordinary person would have perceived a substantial risk of putting the teens into the boat and avoided doing so. Defense lawyers acknowledged that the officers had made mistakes but argued that their actions were reasonable—that they had needed to use the boat to avoid what they viewed as a hostile crowd. Two defense witnesses said they had seen the officers remove handcuffs from the teens before boarding the boat. Beachum, the witness who told the court of inquiry he’d seen handcuffs on Baker’s body, didn’t testify at trial because the prosecution didn’t call him to the stand. “I think Carruth, Baraka, and I all had problems with his credibility,” Simmons said recently. Instead, the prosecutors centered their case on other facts—from the absence of lights and life jackets aboard the boat to the officers’ reckless decision to overload the craft. “They made mistakes that would shock the consciences of reasonable people,” Baraka told the jurors. 

The officers took the stand and said they had tried to save the teenagers. Archie told the jury that while he clung to the overturned boat, Drummond pushed Freeman toward Archie, who grabbed the thrashing teen by the hair and shirt and pulled him onto the hull. Archie said he tried to maneuver to the other side of the craft while holding Freeman across the top but the teen slipped off, sank, and then bobbed up four times before disappearing. Archie didn’t try to rescue him again because the reserve deputy wasn’t a strong swimmer. Drummond testified that he tried to help Baker but the teen kept pulling him under, so the officer let go and swam to shore. He also said that if he could have done anything to change the situation, he “wouldn’t have made an arrest in the first place.” 

Elliott acknowledged that he and the other officers had erred. He called the drownings “just a horrible accident” and said he’d do things differently given another chance. When Baraka asked Elliott if he thought they deserved forgiveness, the deputy answered, “Under the circumstances, yes.”  

After the closing arguments, the jury took less than five hours to render a verdict: not guilty. The defendants, showing no emotion, were rushed away. Afterward, Nellie Mae Freeman sat on a bench outside the courtroom reading the Bible. “No,” she told a reporter, “justice was not done.” Evelyn Baker, Carl’s mother, said she had expected the verdict. “This is very terrible, but that’s Mexia for you, and that’s Limestone County. The Lord will take care of them.” 

The families found more disappointment when it came to their last remaining legal option: civil lawsuits, in which the deputies and the county could be held responsible for negligence under a much lower burden of proof. Each family sued for $4 million in damages, alleging that their sons’ civil rights had been violated. In December 1983, they settled for a total of $200,000, or $66,667 per teen. 

A local official told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the county’s lawyers felt “very lucky” about the outcome. “We were just sitting on pins and needles hoping it would get as low as possible but we never really thought [the settlement] would get this low,” said Howard Smith, a county judge familiar with the civil case. Attorneys for the county made a lowball offer, and the families and their lawyers accepted it. “I was tired,” Evelyn said recently. “I was hurt, and I never did get to really grieve. They just really ran us through it.” 

The pavilion at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For many Black Mexia residents, Comanche Crossing was never the same after the drownings. “It just changed my whole life,” said Steen-Medlock, the teens’ schoolmate. “I never went back to another Juneteenth there.” Many others felt similarly. Attendance in 1982, the year after the drownings, was about two thousand, the lowest in 35 years. It wasn’t just that celebrants were fearful of being harassed, arrested, or worse. Comanche Crossing was sacred ground, land that had been purchased by people who had survived slavery, to ensure that they, along with future generations, would have a place to commemorate emancipation. Now that land had been defiled.

Texas had made Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1980, and celebrations of Black freedom spread to other cities. In 1982 Houston’s Juneteenth parade attracted an estimated 50,000 onlookers. As crowds moved elsewhere, attendance at Comanche Crossing’s Juneteenth ceremonies continued to decline. Arson attacks in 1987 and 1989 caused severe damage to the tabernacle and pavilion, and the structures had to be rebuilt. Concession booths were tagged with racist graffiti.

Many of those who’d grown up with the teens left town. “It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” Over the years, Juneteenth crowds at Comanche Crossing dwindled even more, while the brush along the lake grew thicker and the buildings fell into disrepair. During the past decade, official attendance has sometimes dropped to less than a hundred. When the Nineteenth of June Organization elected former county commissioner William “Pete” Kirven as its new president in 2015, some locals felt optimistic. “I had a lot of hope,” said Judy Chambers, a municipal judge for the city of Mexia and a past member of the organization’s board of directors. She thought the group—and Comanche Crossing—could use some new blood. 

That hope didn’t last. Although the new leadership cleaned up the park’s grounds and installed new light poles and swing sets, it also posted a sign banning alcohol, instituted a 1 a.m. closing time, and increased the law enforcement presence during Juneteenth. The new rules did not go over well. “Juneteenth is not worth going out there,” said a Mexia resident who had attended the festivities since he was a boy. “It’s not any fun. So many police you can’t enjoy yourself. I went in 2018. I didn’t like it. I haven’t been back.”  

Echols, a member of the organization’s board of directors, said that despite the “No Alcohol” sign, members of the public are allowed to drink as long as they use plastic cups. He agreed that law enforcement had gone overboard in 2018 and “was scaring people away” but added that after the group expressed these concerns to the sheriff, the presence was reduced.

Simmons, the prosecuting attorney at the 1982 trial, is now the district judge for Limestone and Freestone Counties. “This was the Juneteenth place, and it’s a shame we lost that,” he said. “At the time, I looked at it as an incident that needed to be prosecuted. I look back on it now and say, ‘What a tragedy. What a shame.’ The ridiculous idea of going over—three guys in a boat—could they rethink it? It was such a tragedy, not just the loss of three young men but the whole Juneteenth.” 

In recent years, awareness of Juneteenth has exploded. Some of that is due to a woman from Fort Worth named Opal Lee. In 2016, when she was 89, she set out to walk from Texas to Washington, D.C., to publicize a campaign to designate Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Last year, Lee collected 1.5 million signatures on a petition in pursuit of that goal, and in Congress, Texas senator John Cornyn and U.S. representative Sheila Jackson Lee filed legislation to take Juneteenth nationwide. The bills didn’t pass, though they have been reintroduced this year.

Perhaps the biggest factor wasn’t a petition or a bill, though, but the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. In the weeks after Floyd’s murder, the Juneteenth holiday became linked with the national protest movement in support of Black lives. On June 19, hundreds of thousands of protesters hit the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., and Houston. All across the country, marchers carried Juneteenth banners as well as signs emblazoned with Floyd’s face and the names of other Black people killed by law enforcement. 

Back in Mexia, locals drew a straight line from 1981 to 2020. “When I saw that video,” said Chambers, “it took me back to that place and time where Black men were getting killed on the streets of Limestone County by law enforcement—and back then it was just swept under the rug.” Steen-Medlock said watching the video immediately reminded her of her three friends who died 39 years earlier. “Those three deputies thought, ‘We have a right to do whatever we want to do’—and that meant putting these boys in a small boat, at night, handcuffed, with no life jackets,” she said. “That’s how they dealt with Black people. If it had been white kids, they would have said, ‘Call your dad to come get you.’ But when you’re Black, you’re not treated like that. You’re guilty.”

“It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” 

This history helps explain why Chambers, Steen-Medlock, and almost every other current or former Black Mexia resident still believe the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Chambers said she has spoken with witnesses who told her they were scared to testify forty years ago. “I don’t know if you live in a small town in the South,” she said, “but a lot of powerful people in town control others with things like mortgages and loans.” Echols said, “Back in those days, there was a fear of the sheriff’s department. A lot of guys may have had some problems with the law, so they didn’t come forward.” 

The foreperson of the grand jury, Ray Anderson, said that jurors discussed the handcuffs at length and subpoenaed Beachum to testify about their presence, but Beachum never showed up. At the time, that spoke volumes to Anderson. “I was never presented enough evidence of handcuffs,” he said. “If I could’ve proved murderous intent, I would have been the first to vote on it. I would have said, ‘We need to make an example—right here.’ ” Now, almost forty years later, Anderson doubts the grand jury got the whole story. “I still feel there was a lot of stuff that didn’t come out.” 

Most white officials involved in the case maintain that there was no evidence the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Instead, they cite other factors that could have caused the three to drown. “I’ve taught swimming for years,” said Cannon, the attorney who represented Drummond. “If you’re fully clothed and it’s dark and you’re not oriented correctly, then you panic. You easily panic. I was surprised that any of them got back.”

Daniel Keeling was ten in 1981, and he grew up in Mexia hearing about the handcuffs as a statement of fact. The drownings left him so unsettled that he eventually pursued a career in law enforcement, where he hoped to improve the field from within. Keeling also hoped that he might uncover the truth behind his hometown’s most controversial case. 

“Supposedly Drummond took the handcuffs off,” said Keeling, who spent over seven years as a deputy in Hunt County and six more as a deputy constable in Dallas and now works as a corporate security manager. “Well, usually when you’re making an arrest, you put handcuffs on a subject and don’t take them off until you get where you’re going. Did the pressure come down on him to change his story? The blue shield is real. And telling the truth could ruin your whole career.” 

What really happened that night? Keeling’s search convinced him that the answer will never be known.

Around Mexia, locals don’t talk about the drownings much anymore. “This is still very raw for a lot of people,” said Steen-Medlock. “They want to forget it ever happened.” The city boasts several colorful murals depicting local heroes and historical figures, but there’s no memorial for Baker, Freeman, and Booker—not at the park, not anywhere in town. There is also no official record of the 1982 trial in either Dallas or Limestone County because the officers had their records expunged. Legally, it’s as if they were never even arrested.

These days, most Black Mexia residents celebrate Juneteenth at home with family and friends. Some hold block parties; others attend events in nearby towns. Many use that week for family reunions, with faraway aunts and uncles taking vacation time to come home to Mexia. But most don’t go to Comanche Crossing. 

None of the officers involved in the drownings agreed to speak with Texas Monthly for this story. Archie, who retired from his job as a security guard, lives close enough to Lake Mexia that he can see it from his porch. Drummond retired from a career running a fencing company; he declined when reached for comment, adding, “I’ve done that. It’s been a long time and it’s still relatively fresh on my mind, believe it or not.” 

Elliott did not respond to several interview requests. Ronnie Davis, an old friend who hasn’t spoken with him in decades, said the deputy took the incident hard back in 1981. “He looked really bad when I talked to him a week after,” Davis recalled. “It was bothering him that lots of people thought he did it on purpose. No. It had nothing to do with prejudice. Nothing at all.” 

After the trial, Elliott moved to College Station and began a decorated career as an investigator with the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, where he solved the twelve-year-old cold case of a murdered local real estate agent. At Elliott’s retirement ceremony in 2018, one colleague lauded him as a zealous loner, and another noted his “perseverance, integrity, respect, and trust.” Elliott was hanging up his badge because he had been elected as a justice of the peace for Brazos County. To Mexia residents who’ve never forgotten the drownings, the thought that life simply moved on for Elliott and the other officers is maddening. “They got away with murder!” said Edward Jackson, who went to school with the three teens. “Nothing happened to their lives or careers.” 

Jay Wallace, the fourth teen in the car, also declined interview requests for this story. Friends of his say that Wallace, now 58, has never talked to them about that night. “I can just imagine what he’s feeling,” Proctor, who grew up with the teens, said. “What’s going on in his head is ‘That could have been me.’ ”

As the officer in charge that night and the one who initiated the arrests, Elliott has usually been considered most responsible for the tragedy. In 2001 Simmons, the prosecutor, told the Texas Observer that Elliott was viewed as a “wild man” and not well-liked by fellow officers. More recently, Simmons said, “I think Kenny was trying to make a name for himself as a hotshot officer, but if you look back on it, why on earth would you have done that?”

A big part of a deputy’s job is learning to deal with crowds, Keeling said. “The way I was taught, you ask yourself the question ‘Do I really need to make this arrest? Are they breaking the peace? Are they causing harm to others?’ If not, let it go.” Keeling added that he remembers the pressure he felt early in his career. “I know the weight of being a young officer—you have to prove yourself. I think it was basically an ‘I’ll show you who I am’ mentality. I think it was one officer’s fault, and the other two backed him. 

“Hopefully he’s atoned for whatever the hell he did.”

Pamela, her sister Evelyn Jean, and Patricia Baker under their family oak tree at Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For the first time since her brother’s death, Pamela Baker visited Comanche Crossing on Juneteenth last year. The official festivities had been rescheduled as a virtual event due to COVID-19, but a group of locals set up a few stands and gathered at the park, and Baker met some friends there. She hadn’t wandered the grounds in decades, and now she found herself walking down the caliche road and past the merry-go-round and the dance hall. She pointed out to one of her friends the oak where her grandmother used to serve fried chicken and biscuits to hundreds of fellow campers. The counter her grandfather built was long gone, but the tree still stood. Baker perused the vendor stalls and bought a purse and a plate of fried fish before settling on a bench by the lake. She looked out at the water. Before long, she was crying. 

The Nineteenth of June Organization has reached out to Baker about holding a memorial for the three teens this Juneteenth, and she’s thinking about going back. She talked with her children about possibly getting together around the old oak and even rebuilding her grandparents’ counter. Her ancestors celebrated emancipation on this same land while living through their own unthinkable tragedies, and she figures it’s time she did so too. “I don’t think it’ll ever be like it used to be,” she said. “I wish it would, ’cause this is history for us. This is something we should build back up together.”

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Ghosts of Comanche Crossing.” Subscribe today.

The above article was published here.

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Every Juneteenth, as soon as Pamela Baker got to Booker T. Washington Park, she’d race to the merry-go-round, squeeze through the swarm of shrieking kids, grab one of the shiny rails, and hold on tight. After a few minutes, she would jump off and dart up the steps of the nearby dance hall to survey the throngs below. She and her brother Carl would weave through the crowd, looking for cousins from Dallas and Houston they hadn’t seen since the previous year. Eventually, her whole family would congregate under an oak tree their ancestors had claimed as a gathering place a century before, in the years after news of the end of slavery reached Texas. 

“Every year, this is where we’d be,” Baker said. It was a cold January day, and she sat in a purple pew in the park’s open-air tabernacle. Baker, sixty, wore camo pants, a hoodie, and a knit cap. She had come from work and looked tired as a heavy rain beat down around her. The park sits along Lake Mexia (pronounced “muh-hay-ah”), about thirty miles east of Waco. For generations, African Americans made pilgrimages to this spot to celebrate Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day. They came from all over the country to hear the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, to worship, to run and play in the green fields, to dance in the creaky pavilion, to eat barbecue and drink red soda water, to sleep under the stars. Locals referred to the park by its name from an earlier time: Comanche Crossing. Juneteenth here would run for days on end. It was like a giant family reunion, held on hallowed ground. 

The merry-go-round at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Baker grew up in nearby Mexia, and each June, her family would camp around that same towering oak. In the early sixties her grandfather built a wooden countertop around the trunk, and every June 19, her grandmother and members of her grandmother’s social club would fry scores of chickens in an old black washpot—enough to serve a few hundred people who’d stop by to sit, eat, and reminisce. “Juneteenth meant everything to us,” Baker said. As a kid, she looked forward to the holiday all year long. 

Until she didn’t.

“After what happened with my brother,” she said, “we weren’t interested in coming out here anymore.” 

Forty years ago, on June 19, 1981, not far from where she sat now, her brother Carl and two other Black teenagers drowned while in the custody of a Limestone County sheriff’s deputy, a reserve deputy, and a probation officer. The Baker family was devastated—as was the entire town of Mexia. The deaths became national news, with people from New York to California asking the same question as those in Central Texas: Why had three Black teens died while all three officers—two of them white, one Black—survived?

Over the years, whenever a highly publicized incident of police brutality against a Black person occurred, many in Mexia would think back to that night in 1981. This was never more true than last summer, when outrage at George Floyd’s murder, captured on video in broad daylight, sparked one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. As millions of demonstrators took to the streets, Mexia residents were reminded of the drownings that once rocked their community and forever changed their hometown’s proud Juneteenth celebration, which had been among the nation’s most historic. 

Four decades later, Baker still grieves for her brother. “It never goes away,” she said quietly, sitting in the pew, surrounded by the ghosts of her ancestors. “I miss everything about Carl—just seeing his smile, his dark skin with beautiful white teeth, walk into the house after work. I wish I could see him come up out of the water right now, but I know I can’t.”

She paused and looked toward the lake. “My brother,” she said, “he didn’t deserve that, what they did to him.”

Pamela Baker sitting in the park tabernacle on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

James Ferrell was at Comanche Crossing on June 19, 1981. It was a clear, warm Friday night, and Ferrell, a tall 34-year-old who sported a scruffy beard and a cowboy hat, had led a trail ride to the park from nearby Sandy. He sat with his brothers, cousins, friends, and their horses, drinking beer, telling stories, laughing. They could hear music coming from the pavilion and see a line of cars creeping over the bridge onto the grounds, while pedestrians who had parked two miles away on U.S. 84 hiked through the gridlock. The moon was almost full, and the air smelled of grilled burgers, fried fish, and popcorn. 

Sometime after ten, three law enforcement officers clambered into a boat on the other side of the lake and pushed off. Lake Mexia is a shallow, dammed stretch of the Navasota River in the shape of an M; the park sits near the lake’s center, where the water is about two hundred yards across. The Limestone County Sheriff’s Office had set up a command post on the opposite bank. The deputies rarely patrolled the park after sundown, but on this night they did. Because the bridge was bottlenecked, they cut across the lake in a fourteen-foot aluminum vessel. They were led by sheriff’s deputy Kenny Elliott, 23, who’d been on the force for about a year. The Black officer, reserve deputy Kenneth Archie, was also 23 and a former high school basketball player from Houston. The third man was David Drummond, a 32-year-old probation officer who planned to check on some of his parolees.

The boat hit the shore, and the men climbed onto the bank, which was muddy from recent rains. Though the three officers wore street clothes, they stuck out in the nearly all-Black crowd of roughly five thousand. “Police have a special way of walking,” recalled one bystander. They stopped at the concession stands to buy some soft drinks, then moved on. Young lovers walked through the crowd, eating cotton candy. Elderly men and women, many wearing their Sunday best, perched on benches talking to old friends. Everywhere the officers walked, they saw tents and campers with families gathered around. Some folks were dozing, some were playing dominoes, some were drinking beer or whiskey. Some were smoking marijuana, and as the officers passed, they either snuffed out their joints or hid them behind their backs. “When they came up,” Ferrell said, “we just put it down. They never said nothing. They walked off.” 

As the trio approached one of the park’s small caliche roads, they came upon a yellow Chevrolet Nova stuck in traffic. Inside were four local teenagers: Carl Baker, Steve Booker, Jay Wallace, and Anthony Freeman, whom friends called “Rerun” because he resembled the hefty character from the sitcom What’s Happening!! As Elliott shone his flashlight through the windshield, he saw the teens passing a small plastic bag of what he took to be marijuana. It was just after eleven, and in the time since he’d crossed the lake, Elliott hadn’t acknowledged similar violations of the law. Now, though, the deputy ordered the four out of the car and made them put their hands on the roof while the officers patted them down and searched the interior. 

A bridge over Lake Mexia.Photograph by Michael Starghill

They found the baggie of weed and a joint, which they confiscated. Wallace would later say that the officers “didn’t act like they knew what they was doing; they kept asking each other what they should do.” The crowd began to take notice. As far as anyone could remember, there had never been an arrest at the park during Juneteenth festivities. 

Elliott made the decision to take Baker, Freeman, and Booker into custody. Days later, Wallace would tell the Waco Tribune-Herald that the officers found drugs on Baker and Booker, while Freeman was arrested because the car belonged to him. Wallace was spared because “they didn’t find anything on me.”  

At least two and possibly all three of the teens were handcuffed; some witnesses said Baker and Booker were cuffed together, while others recalled each being restrained individually. Onlookers didn’t like what they saw, and some began to curse at the officers. Rather than walk the teens through the crowd, over the bridge, and around the lake, the officers opted to go back the way they came. 

When the group reached the boat, Elliott climbed into the back by the motor. Next were Booker and Baker, then Drummond and Freeman. Archie, who weighed more than two hundred pounds, sat in the bow. There were no life jackets, and the combined weight of the passengers exceeded the boat’s capacity by several hundred pounds. 

Elliott started the motor. The craft had no running lights, and as it crept forward, water started pouring in. Drummond yelled back to Elliott, who couldn’t hear him over the engine; Drummond yelled again, and this time Elliott turned it off. By then, they had traveled about forty yards. As the boat slowed, more water rushed in, and the craft submerged and flipped over. All six began splashing wildly in the ten-foot-deep water. 

Elliott shouted for the others to stay with the boat while he swam to shore for help. As soon as he reached water shallow enough to stand in, he fired his gun into the air, in what he would later say was an attempt to summon assistance. Soon after, he was joined by Drummond. Out on the water, Archie, who wasn’t a good swimmer, clung to the boat “like a spider,” one witness said. 

The teens were nowhere in sight. 

Mexia High School yearbook photos of Anthony Freeman, Carl Baker, and Steve Booker.Gibbs Memorial Library

While a boater pulled Archie out of the water, Elliott and Drummond ran across the bridge to the command post to report what had happened. Someone called the fire department, and before long a search party was on the lake. As campers watched from the shore, firefighters in three boats threw dredging hooks into the water. Onlookers hoped against hope that the teens had been able to swim to safety.

Around 2 a.m., the crowd’s worst fears were realized. A body was found near the bridge, tangled in a trotline. An observer, David Echols, said the rescuers positioned their boats between the body and the civilians and spent twenty minutes pulling it out. “They were shielding the bank where we couldn’t see.” 

The body was Baker’s. The searchers brought him back to shore, where they took a couple of hours to regroup before returning to the lake at dawn. All the while, Juneteenth campers kept watch. Mexia was a small town where just about everybody knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker. They were country boys who had grown up playing at the local pool and in this very lake, although Freeman was scared of water, and his mother said he “couldn’t swim, not one lick.” Baker and Booker, however, were known to be excellent swimmers. “Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

“Carl was like Mark Spitz,” said his friend Rick Washington. “He could dive in the pool and swim underwater and come up at the other end.”

How could Elliott, Archie, and Drummond survive while all three teens were presumed lost? Many witnesses had seen the teenagers marched through the crowd with handcuffs on. Had the handcuffs stayed on in the boat?

About 1:30 p.m., another body was found near the bridge. Three rescue boats formed a circle around it, blocking observers from making out the crew’s actions. “They took a while before they pulled the body out,” said a reporter who covered the search, “but we couldn’t see what they were doing.” What they were doing was retrieving Freeman’s body from the water. 

The apparent secrecy fueled more suspicions, which intensified as the search for Booker continued. The next day, his body floated to the surface not far from where the others had been found. By then, many in Mexia who’d heard about the drownings believed that the teens had been handcuffed when the boat flipped. A hot-dog vendor named Arthur Beachum Jr. told a reporter about seeing Baker being removed from the water. “I saw them pull the body from the lake and it still had handcuffs on it. One officer took them off and put them in his pocket.” 

Sheriff Dennis Walker denied this to the press. “It was a freak accident,” he said. “All of what they’re saying is untrue.” Reserve deputy Archie told a reporter that two of the teens had been handcuffed together but that the cuffs had been removed before Baker, Booker, and Freeman were led into the boat. According to the Dallas Times Herald, Archie also said that if he’d been in charge, things would have been different: “I probably would’ve pulled the marijuana out and put it in the mud puddle next to the car and sent the suspects on their way.” (He later denied saying this.) Sheriff Walker said, “This could turn out to be a racial-type deal.”  

That was an understatement. Reporters and TV crews from Waco, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston arrived in Mexia. By Sunday, the drownings were national news. “Youths Allegedly Handcuffed,” read a headline in the New York Times. The NAACP sent a team of investigators and demanded the Department of Justice conduct an inquiry. Someone from the DOJ called the sheriff on Monday morning and was given directions to the sheriff’s headquarters in Groesbeck, the county seat. The FBI came too.

Richard Dockery, the head of the Dallas NAACP, examined Baker’s body and told reporters he thought that the position of the young man’s hands—wrists together, fingers curled—meant he had been cuffed. Initial autopsies of Baker and Freeman, done in Waco, found no bruising or signs of struggle, prompting Booker’s mother to announce she was taking her son’s body to Dallas because she wouldn’t get “anything but lies” from Waco pathologists.  

Reporters rang the sheriff around the clock, and Walker later complained that the attention “severely hampered” his investigation. “The press has been calling me day and night from as far away as Chicago and New York,” he said. “I had to leave the house to get a couple of hours of rest.” Mexia’s mayor called the coverage “sensationalized,” while many white townspeople felt torn between defending their home against its portrayal as a racist backwater and acknowledging the wrong that had been done. “I was at a laundromat yesterday,” a white waitress told a reporter from Fort Worth, “and usually everyone gets along alright, but yesterday some of the Blacks were kind of testy . . . and I don’t blame them.”

The drownings had exposed a deep rift in Mexia, one that went back generations and couldn’t be smoothed over. “My God, this has turned the whole town upside down,” a local man told the Waco Tribune-Herald, “and those three boys ain’t even in the ground yet.” 

The pavilion and tabernacle at Booker T. Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

Rick Washington was in the Navy in June 1981, stationed aboard the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa in the Philippines, when a shipmate handed him a newspaper. “Wash,” he said, “ain’t this where you’re from? M-e-x-i-a, Texas?” Washington, then twenty, read the headline about a triple drowning. Then he saw the names. “I just broke down like a twelve-gauge shotgun. Steve, Carl, Rerun. They were my best friends.”

Now sixty, Washington is the pastor at Mexia’s Greater Little Zion Baptist Church, and every day he drives past places where he and his friends used to play. “We would eat breakfast, leave home, come home for lunch, leave again, be home before the streetlights came on,” Washington said. “We were almost never inside.” They would ride bikes, play football and basketball, hunt rabbits, swim at the city pool, and explore the rolling, scrubby plains. 

Washington, like everyone else in Mexia who knew Baker, Freeman, and Booker, remembered them as typical small-town teenagers. Baker was short, handsome, and athletic. He liked hanging out at the pool—he was such a good swimmer that the lifeguards sometimes asked him to help out when it got busy. He’d graduated from Mexia High School the previous year and was working at a local cotton gin. He was nineteen, with an easy charm and a voluminous Afro that had taken months to grow out. 

Anthony Freeman, the youngest of the three at eighteen, was an only child of strict parents. He played piano, performing every week at the church his family attended. “He was a very bright kid,” said Shree Steen-Medlock, who went to high school with Freeman. “I remember him trying to fit in and not be the nerdy kind of guy.” He had graduated that spring, and he and Baker planned on going to Paul Quinn College, then in Waco, in the fall. 

Nineteen-year-old Steve Booker was the group’s extrovert. “He was flamboyant, like Deion Sanders,” said his friend John Proctor. Booker was born in Dallas and raised on his grandparents’ farm in Mexia, where he helped to pen cattle, feed hogs, and mend fences. He loved basketball and grew up shooting on a hoop and backboard made out of a bicycle wheel and a sheet of plywood. Once, playing for Mexia High’s JV team, he hit a game-winner from half-court. In 1980 Booker moved back to Dallas, where he graduated high school and found work at a detergent supply company, but he’d returned that week to celebrate Juneteenth.

The Mexia where the three grew up was a tight-knit city of roughly seven thousand, about a third of whom were Black. Kids left their bikes on the lawn, families left their doors unlocked, and horses and cattle grazed in pastures on the outskirts of town. Boys played Little League, and everybody went to church. Mexia was known as the place near Waco with the odd name (which it got from the Mexía family, who received a large land grant in the area in 1833). City leaders came up with a perfect slogan: “Mexia . . . a great place to live . . . however you pronounce it.” Football fans might have heard that NFL player Ray Rhodes grew up there; country music fans knew Mexia as the home base of famed songwriter Cindy Walker. 

The VICA Building Trades club at Mexia High School in 1979, which included Carl Baker, Anthony Freeman, and Jay Wallace.Gibbs Memorial Library

Black Texans knew Mexia for something entirely different: it was the site of the nation’s greatest Juneteenth celebration. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when Union general Gordon Granger stood on the second-floor balcony of the Ashton Villa, in Galveston, and announced—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation—that enslaved people in Texas were, in fact, free. Word spread throughout the state and eventually reached the cotton-rich region of Limestone County. Formerly enslaved people in the area left plantations and resettled in tiny communities along the Navasota River with names like Comanche Crossing, Rocky Crossing, Elm, Woodland, and Sandy. 

They had to be careful. Limestone County, like other parts of Texas, was a hostile place for newly freed African Americans. In the decade after emancipation, the state and federal governments had to intervene in the area on multiple occasions to stop white residents from terrorizing Black communities. Historian Ray Walter has written that “literally hundreds of Negroes were murdered” in Limestone County during Reconstruction.

The region’s first emancipation festivities took place during the late 1860s, in and around churches and spilling out along the terrain near the Navasota River. “If Blacks were going to have big celebrations,” said Wortham Frank Briscoe, whose family goes back four generations in Limestone County, “they had to be in the bottomlands, hidden away from white people.”

Over time, several smaller community-based events coalesced into one, gravitating to a spot eight miles west of Mexia along the river near Comanche Crossing. There, families would spread quilts to sit and listen to preachers’ sermons and politicians’ speeches. Women donned long, elegant dresses, and men sported dark suits and bowler hats. They sang spirituals, listened to elders tell stories of life under slavery, and feasted on barbecued pork and beef. 

In 1892 a group of 89 locals from seven different communities around Limestone County formed the Nineteenth of June Organization. Six years later, three of the founders and two other men pooled $180 and bought ten acres of land along the river. In 1906 another group of members purchased twenty more acres. They cleared the area, preserving several dozen oak trees, alongside which members bought small plots for $1.50 each. The grounds were given a name: Booker T. Washington Park. 

The celebration continued to grow, especially after oil was discovered in Mexia, in 1920. Some of the bounty lay under Black-owned land, and money from the fields gave the Nineteenth of June Organization the means to build the park’s tabernacle and a pavilion with concession stands. During the Great Migration, as Black residents left Central Texas for jobs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they took Juneteenth with them, and word spread about the grand festivities along the Navasota River. Every year, more and more revelers came to Comanche Crossing, bringing their children and sometimes staying the entire week. Some built simple one-room huts to spend nights in; others pitched Army tents or just slept under the stars. During the busiest years, attendance reached 20,000. 

James Ferrell’s Black Frontier Riding Club on a trail ride to the Juneteenth celebration at Comanche Crossing, year unknown.Courtesy of James Ferrell

On the actual holiday, it was tradition to read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, along with the names of the park’s founders. Elders spoke about the holiday’s significance, and a dinner was held in honor of formerly enslaved people, some of whom were still alive. “You instilled this in your children,” said Dayton Smith, who was born in 1949 and began attending Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing shortly before his first birthday. “It had been done before you were born, by your parents and grandparents. Don’t forget the Emancipation Proclamation.Your parents didn’t come here every year just because. They came because of the Emancipation Proclamation at Juneteenth.”

Kids would grow up going to Comanche Crossing, then marry, move away, and return, taking their vacations in mid-June and bringing their own kids. “It was a lifelong thing,” said Mexia native Charles Nemons. “It was almost like a county fair. If you were driving and you saw someone walking, you’d go, ‘Going to the grounds? Hop in!’ ” 

At the concession booths, vendors would sell fried fish, barbecue, beer, corn, popcorn, homemade ice cream, and Big Red, the soda from Waco that became a Juneteenth staple. Choirs came from all across the country to sing in the tabernacle. Sometimes preachers would perform baptisms in the lake, which was created in 1961, when the river was dammed. 

The biggest crowds came when Juneteenth landed on a weekend. Renee Turner recalled attending a particularly busy Juneteenth with her husband in the mid-seventies. “My husband was in the service, and we couldn’t even get out,” she said. “He had to be back at Fort Hood that Monday morning, and so I remember people picking up cars—physically picking up cars—so that there would be a pathway out.” Everyone, it seemed, came to Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing. Daniel Keeling was an awestruck grade-schooler when he saw Dallas Cowboys stars Tony Dorsett and Drew Pearson walking the grounds. “If you were an African American in Dallas or Houston,” Keeling said, “you made your way to Mexia on the nineteenth of June.” 

Even as Mexia’s Black residents took great pride in the annual Juneteenth festivities at the park, back in town they were still denied basic rights. Ferrell, who started spending the holiday at Comanche Crossing as a kid in the fifties, recalled life in segregated Mexia. “Up until the sixties, you still had your place,” he said. “If you were Black, you drank from the fountain over there, whites drank from the one over here, and if I went and drank in the fountain over here, well, I got a problem.” Back then, many Black residents lived near a commercial strip of Black-owned businesses called “the Beat,” along South Belknap Street, where they had their own movie theater, grocery stores, barbershops, juke joints, cleaners, and funeral home. When white and Black residents found themselves standing on opposite street corners downtown, the Black pedestrians had to wait for their white counterparts to cross first. “We couldn’t walk past each other,” said Ray Anderson, who was born in 1954 and went on to become Mexia’s mayor. “And if it was a female, you definitely better stay across the street or go the other way. You grew up knowing you couldn’t cross certain boundaries or you’d go to prison—or get hung.”

For years, the only law enforcement at Lake Mexia during Juneteenth consisted of a few well-known Black civilians. One was Homer Willis, an older man who had been deputized by the sheriff to walk around with a walkie-talkie, which he could use to radio deputies in case of an emergency. In the late seventies, more rigorous licensing requirements made such commissions a thing of the past, and the sheriff set up a command post across the lake where officers would hang out and wait. They stayed mostly on the periphery, helping to direct traffic and occasionally crossing the lake to break up a fight. 

Until June 19, 1981, when, during the peak hours of one of the biggest Juneteenth celebrations in years, three officers piled into a small boat, started the motor, and cruised across narrow Lake Mexia. 

The concession stands at Booker T. Washington Park.Photograph by Michael Starghill

When Baker and Freeman’s dual funeral was held in Mexia, so many mourners planned to attend the service that it had to be convened at the city’s largest church, First Baptist. Even so, the 1,400-seat space couldn’t accommodate them all. Baker and Freeman were remembered as kind young men who never hurt anyone and never got in trouble. At one point, Freeman’s mother, Nellie Mae, broke down, fainted, and had to be carried out. She insisted on returning for one last look at her only child before she was rushed to the hospital.

The district judge in Limestone County, P. K. Reiter, hoped that a swift investigation would defuse the escalating racial tensions. “We need to clear the air,” he said, announcing the opening of a court of inquiry, a rarely used fact-finding measure intended to speed up proceedings that would normally take months to complete. The court lacked the authority to mete out punishment, but it could refer cases for prosecution. Reiter asked the NAACP to recommend a Black lawyer to lead the inquest. The organization sent Larry Baraka, a 31-year-old prosecutor from Dallas. Baraka arrived in town two days after Booker’s body was found. 

Limestone County had never seen anything like this. News helicopters flew into Groesbeck from Dallas and Fort Worth, landing in the church parking lot across the street from the courthouse. It was summer in Central Texas, and the courtroom, which lacked air conditioning, was crammed with 150 people; reporters filled every seat in the jury box. A writer from the Mexia Daily News wrote that the room was loaded with a “strong suspicion of intrigue, deep pathos, heavy remorse, and indignation.” 

The main issue was the handcuffs. Eighteen witnesses testified, including Drummond, the probation officer. He insisted that the officers had brought just one pair of handcuffs, that only Baker and Booker were handcuffed to each other, and that the cuffs had been removed before they got into the boat. A witness who’d been on a nearby craft—a Black woman from Dallas—told the court that she saw the officers remove the restraints from two men who’d been handcuffed together. The fire chief testified that no cuffs were found on the bodies as they were pulled from the lake. 

Other witnesses contradicted the officials’ version of events. Beachum, the hot-dog seller, again said that he saw cuffs taken off Baker’s body after it was retrieved from the lake, but he also admitted to drinking almost a fifth of whiskey that day. Another said all three were handcuffed—and that Elliott was drinking beer and his eyes were “puffy.” The local funeral home director, who had seen some two hundred drowning victims in his seventeen-year career, said that the position of Baker’s hands indicated that the teen had been cuffed. “It’s highly unlikely you will find a drowning victim’s hands in that position.” 

At the end of the three-day proceeding, Baraka told reporters that the evidence suggested the teens were not handcuffed in the boat. He believed the officers had acted without criminal or racist intent, but he added that they had behaved with “rampant incompetence” and “gross negligence.” The boat was overloaded and there were no life preservers, so the officers could still face criminal charges.

For Mexia’s Black residents, the court of inquiry had cleared up nothing. They rejected the testimony of both Drummond and the fire chief and suspected a cover-up. Whites in Mexia also criticized the officers’ judgment. “You put a gun on someone’s hip, and it goes to their head,” former district attorney Don Caldwell told a reporter. “The evidence in this case doesn’t add up. It was a terrible act of stupidity, and somebody is going to have to pay the fiddler.” 

That fall, Limestone County attorney Patrick Simmons, together with a lawyer from the state attorney general’s office named Gerald Carruth, took the court of inquiry’s findings to a grand jury. They hoped the panel would indict the officers for involuntary manslaughter, a felony. Instead, the jury came back with misdemeanor charges for criminally negligent homicide and violating the Texas Water Safety Act. If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams, a spokesperson for the Comanche Three Committee, an advocacy group formed in response to the drownings. 

Defense attorneys argued that the officers couldn’t receive a fair trial in Mexia, so they requested the proceedings be moved. A judge in Marlin, about forty miles away, said he didn’t want it, not after “statements in the news media by certain persons created an atmosphere in this county that is charged with racial tension to the point that violence is invited.” The case was moved to San Marcos, where another judge punted. “No one wants this,” Joe Cannon, the attorney defending Drummond, told a reporter. “It’s a hot potato.” Finally, Baraka, who had by then joined the prosecution, convinced Dallas County Criminal Court judge Tom Price to preside over the trial.

If found guilty, the officers faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of $2,000 per teen. “I could get that much for starving my dog,” said Kwesi Williams.

Price, who was eight years into a four-decade judicial career, would later call the Mexia drownings the biggest case he ever handled. “It was a hard, emotional trial,” he said. “Three young kids who died for no reason. There was so much tension, and it was so racially mixed up in there. I was thirty-three, thinking, ‘What have I got myself into?’ ”

The trial, which lasted three weeks, was perhaps the highest-profile misdemeanor proceeding in Texas history. Each defendant had his own attorney, and each attorney objected as often as possible, squabbling with prosecutors and spurring Price to threaten them all with contempt. The atmosphere was further strained by the presence of news crews, who swarmed the legal teams and the teens’ families during recesses. 

To convict the officers of criminal negligence, the all-white, six-person jury would need to be convinced that under the same circumstances an ordinary person would have perceived a substantial risk of putting the teens into the boat and avoided doing so. Defense lawyers acknowledged that the officers had made mistakes but argued that their actions were reasonable—that they had needed to use the boat to avoid what they viewed as a hostile crowd. Two defense witnesses said they had seen the officers remove handcuffs from the teens before boarding the boat. Beachum, the witness who told the court of inquiry he’d seen handcuffs on Baker’s body, didn’t testify at trial because the prosecution didn’t call him to the stand. “I think Carruth, Baraka, and I all had problems with his credibility,” Simmons said recently. Instead, the prosecutors centered their case on other facts—from the absence of lights and life jackets aboard the boat to the officers’ reckless decision to overload the craft. “They made mistakes that would shock the consciences of reasonable people,” Baraka told the jurors. 

The officers took the stand and said they had tried to save the teenagers. Archie told the jury that while he clung to the overturned boat, Drummond pushed Freeman toward Archie, who grabbed the thrashing teen by the hair and shirt and pulled him onto the hull. Archie said he tried to maneuver to the other side of the craft while holding Freeman across the top but the teen slipped off, sank, and then bobbed up four times before disappearing. Archie didn’t try to rescue him again because the reserve deputy wasn’t a strong swimmer. Drummond testified that he tried to help Baker but the teen kept pulling him under, so the officer let go and swam to shore. He also said that if he could have done anything to change the situation, he “wouldn’t have made an arrest in the first place.” 

Elliott acknowledged that he and the other officers had erred. He called the drownings “just a horrible accident” and said he’d do things differently given another chance. When Baraka asked Elliott if he thought they deserved forgiveness, the deputy answered, “Under the circumstances, yes.”  

After the closing arguments, the jury took less than five hours to render a verdict: not guilty. The defendants, showing no emotion, were rushed away. Afterward, Nellie Mae Freeman sat on a bench outside the courtroom reading the Bible. “No,” she told a reporter, “justice was not done.” Evelyn Baker, Carl’s mother, said she had expected the verdict. “This is very terrible, but that’s Mexia for you, and that’s Limestone County. The Lord will take care of them.” 

The families found more disappointment when it came to their last remaining legal option: civil lawsuits, in which the deputies and the county could be held responsible for negligence under a much lower burden of proof. Each family sued for $4 million in damages, alleging that their sons’ civil rights had been violated. In December 1983, they settled for a total of $200,000, or $66,667 per teen. 

A local official told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the county’s lawyers felt “very lucky” about the outcome. “We were just sitting on pins and needles hoping it would get as low as possible but we never really thought [the settlement] would get this low,” said Howard Smith, a county judge familiar with the civil case. Attorneys for the county made a lowball offer, and the families and their lawyers accepted it. “I was tired,” Evelyn said recently. “I was hurt, and I never did get to really grieve. They just really ran us through it.” 

The pavilion at the park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For many Black Mexia residents, Comanche Crossing was never the same after the drownings. “It just changed my whole life,” said Steen-Medlock, the teens’ schoolmate. “I never went back to another Juneteenth there.” Many others felt similarly. Attendance in 1982, the year after the drownings, was about two thousand, the lowest in 35 years. It wasn’t just that celebrants were fearful of being harassed, arrested, or worse. Comanche Crossing was sacred ground, land that had been purchased by people who had survived slavery, to ensure that they, along with future generations, would have a place to commemorate emancipation. Now that land had been defiled.

Texas had made Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1980, and celebrations of Black freedom spread to other cities. In 1982 Houston’s Juneteenth parade attracted an estimated 50,000 onlookers. As crowds moved elsewhere, attendance at Comanche Crossing’s Juneteenth ceremonies continued to decline. Arson attacks in 1987 and 1989 caused severe damage to the tabernacle and pavilion, and the structures had to be rebuilt. Concession booths were tagged with racist graffiti.

Many of those who’d grown up with the teens left town. “It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” Over the years, Juneteenth crowds at Comanche Crossing dwindled even more, while the brush along the lake grew thicker and the buildings fell into disrepair. During the past decade, official attendance has sometimes dropped to less than a hundred. When the Nineteenth of June Organization elected former county commissioner William “Pete” Kirven as its new president in 2015, some locals felt optimistic. “I had a lot of hope,” said Judy Chambers, a municipal judge for the city of Mexia and a past member of the organization’s board of directors. She thought the group—and Comanche Crossing—could use some new blood. 

That hope didn’t last. Although the new leadership cleaned up the park’s grounds and installed new light poles and swing sets, it also posted a sign banning alcohol, instituted a 1 a.m. closing time, and increased the law enforcement presence during Juneteenth. The new rules did not go over well. “Juneteenth is not worth going out there,” said a Mexia resident who had attended the festivities since he was a boy. “It’s not any fun. So many police you can’t enjoy yourself. I went in 2018. I didn’t like it. I haven’t been back.”  

Echols, a member of the organization’s board of directors, said that despite the “No Alcohol” sign, members of the public are allowed to drink as long as they use plastic cups. He agreed that law enforcement had gone overboard in 2018 and “was scaring people away” but added that after the group expressed these concerns to the sheriff, the presence was reduced.

Simmons, the prosecuting attorney at the 1982 trial, is now the district judge for Limestone and Freestone Counties. “This was the Juneteenth place, and it’s a shame we lost that,” he said. “At the time, I looked at it as an incident that needed to be prosecuted. I look back on it now and say, ‘What a tragedy. What a shame.’ The ridiculous idea of going over—three guys in a boat—could they rethink it? It was such a tragedy, not just the loss of three young men but the whole Juneteenth.” 

In recent years, awareness of Juneteenth has exploded. Some of that is due to a woman from Fort Worth named Opal Lee. In 2016, when she was 89, she set out to walk from Texas to Washington, D.C., to publicize a campaign to designate Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Last year, Lee collected 1.5 million signatures on a petition in pursuit of that goal, and in Congress, Texas senator John Cornyn and U.S. representative Sheila Jackson Lee filed legislation to take Juneteenth nationwide. The bills didn’t pass, though they have been reintroduced this year.

Perhaps the biggest factor wasn’t a petition or a bill, though, but the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. In the weeks after Floyd’s murder, the Juneteenth holiday became linked with the national protest movement in support of Black lives. On June 19, hundreds of thousands of protesters hit the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., and Houston. All across the country, marchers carried Juneteenth banners as well as signs emblazoned with Floyd’s face and the names of other Black people killed by law enforcement. 

Back in Mexia, locals drew a straight line from 1981 to 2020. “When I saw that video,” said Chambers, “it took me back to that place and time where Black men were getting killed on the streets of Limestone County by law enforcement—and back then it was just swept under the rug.” Steen-Medlock said watching the video immediately reminded her of her three friends who died 39 years earlier. “Those three deputies thought, ‘We have a right to do whatever we want to do’—and that meant putting these boys in a small boat, at night, handcuffed, with no life jackets,” she said. “That’s how they dealt with Black people. If it had been white kids, they would have said, ‘Call your dad to come get you.’ But when you’re Black, you’re not treated like that. You’re guilty.”

“It was all eye-opening to our generation,” said Nemons. “This was the first thing I saw as far as being a real racial injustice. A lot of young Black folks said ‘I’m done’ and moved.” 

This history helps explain why Chambers, Steen-Medlock, and almost every other current or former Black Mexia resident still believe the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Chambers said she has spoken with witnesses who told her they were scared to testify forty years ago. “I don’t know if you live in a small town in the South,” she said, “but a lot of powerful people in town control others with things like mortgages and loans.” Echols said, “Back in those days, there was a fear of the sheriff’s department. A lot of guys may have had some problems with the law, so they didn’t come forward.” 

The foreperson of the grand jury, Ray Anderson, said that jurors discussed the handcuffs at length and subpoenaed Beachum to testify about their presence, but Beachum never showed up. At the time, that spoke volumes to Anderson. “I was never presented enough evidence of handcuffs,” he said. “If I could’ve proved murderous intent, I would have been the first to vote on it. I would have said, ‘We need to make an example—right here.’ ” Now, almost forty years later, Anderson doubts the grand jury got the whole story. “I still feel there was a lot of stuff that didn’t come out.” 

Most white officials involved in the case maintain that there was no evidence the teens were handcuffed in the boat. Instead, they cite other factors that could have caused the three to drown. “I’ve taught swimming for years,” said Cannon, the attorney who represented Drummond. “If you’re fully clothed and it’s dark and you’re not oriented correctly, then you panic. You easily panic. I was surprised that any of them got back.”

Daniel Keeling was ten in 1981, and he grew up in Mexia hearing about the handcuffs as a statement of fact. The drownings left him so unsettled that he eventually pursued a career in law enforcement, where he hoped to improve the field from within. Keeling also hoped that he might uncover the truth behind his hometown’s most controversial case. 

“Supposedly Drummond took the handcuffs off,” said Keeling, who spent over seven years as a deputy in Hunt County and six more as a deputy constable in Dallas and now works as a corporate security manager. “Well, usually when you’re making an arrest, you put handcuffs on a subject and don’t take them off until you get where you’re going. Did the pressure come down on him to change his story? The blue shield is real. And telling the truth could ruin your whole career.” 

What really happened that night? Keeling’s search convinced him that the answer will never be known.

Around Mexia, locals don’t talk about the drownings much anymore. “This is still very raw for a lot of people,” said Steen-Medlock. “They want to forget it ever happened.” The city boasts several colorful murals depicting local heroes and historical figures, but there’s no memorial for Baker, Freeman, and Booker—not at the park, not anywhere in town. There is also no official record of the 1982 trial in either Dallas or Limestone County because the officers had their records expunged. Legally, it’s as if they were never even arrested.

These days, most Black Mexia residents celebrate Juneteenth at home with family and friends. Some hold block parties; others attend events in nearby towns. Many use that week for family reunions, with faraway aunts and uncles taking vacation time to come home to Mexia. But most don’t go to Comanche Crossing. 

None of the officers involved in the drownings agreed to speak with Texas Monthly for this story. Archie, who retired from his job as a security guard, lives close enough to Lake Mexia that he can see it from his porch. Drummond retired from a career running a fencing company; he declined when reached for comment, adding, “I’ve done that. It’s been a long time and it’s still relatively fresh on my mind, believe it or not.” 

Elliott did not respond to several interview requests. Ronnie Davis, an old friend who hasn’t spoken with him in decades, said the deputy took the incident hard back in 1981. “He looked really bad when I talked to him a week after,” Davis recalled. “It was bothering him that lots of people thought he did it on purpose. No. It had nothing to do with prejudice. Nothing at all.” 

After the trial, Elliott moved to College Station and began a decorated career as an investigator with the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, where he solved the twelve-year-old cold case of a murdered local real estate agent. At Elliott’s retirement ceremony in 2018, one colleague lauded him as a zealous loner, and another noted his “perseverance, integrity, respect, and trust.” Elliott was hanging up his badge because he had been elected as a justice of the peace for Brazos County. To Mexia residents who’ve never forgotten the drownings, the thought that life simply moved on for Elliott and the other officers is maddening. “They got away with murder!” said Edward Jackson, who went to school with the three teens. “Nothing happened to their lives or careers.” 

Jay Wallace, the fourth teen in the car, also declined interview requests for this story. Friends of his say that Wallace, now 58, has never talked to them about that night. “I can just imagine what he’s feeling,” Proctor, who grew up with the teens, said. “What’s going on in his head is ‘That could have been me.’ ”

As the officer in charge that night and the one who initiated the arrests, Elliott has usually been considered most responsible for the tragedy. In 2001 Simmons, the prosecutor, told the Texas Observer that Elliott was viewed as a “wild man” and not well-liked by fellow officers. More recently, Simmons said, “I think Kenny was trying to make a name for himself as a hotshot officer, but if you look back on it, why on earth would you have done that?”

A big part of a deputy’s job is learning to deal with crowds, Keeling said. “The way I was taught, you ask yourself the question ‘Do I really need to make this arrest? Are they breaking the peace? Are they causing harm to others?’ If not, let it go.” Keeling added that he remembers the pressure he felt early in his career. “I know the weight of being a young officer—you have to prove yourself. I think it was basically an ‘I’ll show you who I am’ mentality. I think it was one officer’s fault, and the other two backed him. 

“Hopefully he’s atoned for whatever the hell he did.”

Pamela, her sister Evelyn Jean, and Patricia Baker under their family oak tree at Washington Park on April 21, 2021.Photograph by Michael Starghill

For the first time since her brother’s death, Pamela Baker visited Comanche Crossing on Juneteenth last year. The official festivities had been rescheduled as a virtual event due to COVID-19, but a group of locals set up a few stands and gathered at the park, and Baker met some friends there. She hadn’t wandered the grounds in decades, and now she found herself walking down the caliche road and past the merry-go-round and the dance hall. She pointed out to one of her friends the oak where her grandmother used to serve fried chicken and biscuits to hundreds of fellow campers. The counter her grandfather built was long gone, but the tree still stood. Baker perused the vendor stalls and bought a purse and a plate of fried fish before settling on a bench by the lake. She looked out at the water. Before long, she was crying. 

The Nineteenth of June Organization has reached out to Baker about holding a memorial for the three teens this Juneteenth, and she’s thinking about going back. She talked with her children about possibly getting together around the old oak and even rebuilding her grandparents’ counter. Her ancestors celebrated emancipation on this same land while living through their own unthinkable tragedies, and she figures it’s time she did so too. “I don’t think it’ll ever be like it used to be,” she said. “I wish it would, ’cause this is history for us. This is something we should build back up together.”

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Ghosts of Comanche Crossing.” Subscribe today.

The above article was published here.

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Are more students going to law school as a reaction to Trump?

Erica Jansson is excited to be in law school.

Fresh off the June 2017 Law School Admission Test, she just completed her first week at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. “The first week has been all about legal writing,” she says, flashing A Lawyer Writes tucked into the crook of her arm as evidence.

Erica works as a legal clerk by day, and attends Southwestern’s evening program at night. She’s also the mother of a two-year old and a real life member of the “Trump bump,” the phenomenon legal scholars have been musing about since the president’s travel bans were rejected by courts early in the year.

The so-called bump is a surmised increase in the number of students applying to law school as a result of the recent valorization of the legal sphere. From immigration lawyers working for free at airports around the country to help refugees to federal judges issuing restraining orders to halt the Muslim ban, the profession is enjoying a boost in reputation.

“I’m going to law school because the judicial branch seems to be the final front against the injustices that we’re currently facing,” Erica says. “I want my daughter to grow up in a more loving and accepting country.”

An immigration lawyer looks on during a demonstration at Tom Bradley International Airport in Los Angeles. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

Erica is part of the nearly 28,000 students who took the June 2017 LSAT. This most recent administration of the test saw the single largest percentage increase of LSAT takers — nearly 20% — in the last eight years.

A history of decline

From 2010-2015, the number of students taking the LSAT to go to law school has steadily declined. The numbers picked up slightly in 2015/16 and 2016/17, but the overall number of test takers was still 60,000 less than the high water mark of 171,514 in 2009/10.

Source: https://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered

Until now, that is.

Between Trump’s travel bans, the recent spate of white nationalist marches, the furor over confederate monuments, and the recent pardon of Joe Arpaio, among other events, it seems clear that the country is in a tumult. Many look to the legal sphere as a force to help impose order on the chaos.

Dean Emeritus Joseph Harbaugh of Nova Southeastern University College of Law recalls: “In the late 60s and early 70s, applications to law school spiked as young people were inspired by the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements to seek justice.”

It seems something similar might be happening now. However, it has been difficult to verify the phenomenon from a quantitative standpoint. Part of this is because law schools won’t see the majority of application numbers based on events of 2017 until the 2018 application cycle. However, as an LSAT prep company, we realized we were in a unique position to quantify what’s happening with prospective law students now. So we polled the thousands of June and September 2017 LSAT students in our courses to find out their motivations to attend law school.

The responses were astonishing

Of those polled, over 52% of respondents attributed recent events, such as the Charlottesville protests, as “moderately influential” to “very influential” in deciding what type of law they’d like to pursue.

Similarly, over 52% listed the Trump presidency as “moderately influential” to “very influential” in their decision to apply to law school.

Finally, when ranking in order of importance the factors that explained why they wanted to become lawyers, students listed “As a response to the current political climate/Trump administration” as third overall out of all possible responses. “Prestigious career” and “high salary” were first and second, respectively.

Even more staggering, however, was that 24% of students polled ranked “As a response to the current political climate/Trump administration” first of six possible answers. Only “Prestigious career” was ranked first by more people.

This last statistic is particularly telling. Prestige is a compelling reason for many people when choosing any career, not just the law. However, aside from this, it is the presidency, the presidency, which constitutes the single highest ranked factor in students’ decisions to apply to law school. If you don’t find that astonishing, ask yourself if such a phenomenon would have occurred under the Bush or Obama terms of office.

So according to our data, the Trump bump is officially a real phenomenon.

Source: http://blueprintlsat.com/2017-survey/ For the full survey, go to http://blueprintlsat.com/2017-survey/. But is the bump a good thing?

Part of the reason that the number of students taking the LSAT and applying to law school has flatlined since 2009/2010 is due to a legal job market that hasn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession. Although “Big Law” firms (those employing 250 or more) in major markets recently upped first year associate salaries to $180,000, the boost hasn’t trickled down to all legal jobs.

In fact, the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) reported in June of this year that the overall median first-year salary was the same as for 2015. However, these statistics hinge on traditional associate-level positions in Big Law firms (70% of respondents for the 2017 survey were from firms with 251+ lawyers).

Not only have salaries not increased appreciably, there are more lawyers vying for firm jobs than there are positions available. NALP explains that “following the Great Recession, the number of entry-level Big Law jobs collapsed. Since then, the number…has risen…but for the class of 2015 there were still more than 1,800 fewer entry-level jobs in large law firms than were there for the Class of 2008.”

With Big Law firm jobs still sluggish, the question becomes: What do the prospects look like for lawyers who are going to law school as members of the Trump bump?

Southwestern Law Professor Michael Dorff explains what types of law such students might practice: “I can imagine such students going into careers in immigration law, environmental law, civil rights law, or even tax law. Those are all areas where President Trump has expressed interest in changing the rules, so they are all areas where legal knowledge would be helpful to those who want to resist those changes.”

Is there a place for students searching for such jobs?

As with the rest of the legal sphere, it appears that public interest jobs — the most applicable category for our Trump bump graduates that NALP tracks — are flattening. According to NALP, “With the ABA creating disincentives for law schools to fund graduate jobs, that number has fallen off…and will likely continue to fall further.”

So although the current political climate might have reinvigorated interest in the legal sphere, the job prospects of those going to law school do not appear to be concomitantly elevated. However, those in the legal profession have noted that students who enter the profession because of a specific desire tend to fare better.

Joseph Harbaugh explains, “I’m not sure whether today’s students are applying to law school as a reaction to the political climate and the Trump administration. But if so, it bodes well for their performance. Students who have a specific reason for attending law school tend to do better in class and are highly motivated to seek meaningful professional employment upon graduation.”

Former Dean of Admissions at the University of Chicago School of Law and CEO of Ivey Consulting, Anna Ivey, concurs: “In this job market for law school graduates, you need to know why you’re going more than ever. Going to law school to find yourself and figure it out when you get there is not a winning formula. You have to hit the ground running from day one.”

Despite the stagnant job market, the silver lining in the Trump bump is that it may be attracting students truly interested in the law, making them better law students, lawyers, and, ultimately, citizens in a democracy that rests on a fundamental system of checks and balances.

As for Erica Jansson, she’s turning in her next homework assignment on Thursday. “This week my first brief is due. In four years I hope to be filing a real one on behalf of a disenfranchised immigrant, child, or citizen. At the end of the day, I’m in law school because this is the way I know I can make a difference.”

In these unsettled times, the hope is that she, and the others like her in law school, will do precisely that.

Are more students going to law school as a reaction to Trump? was originally published on LSAT Blog

[alma6210527122-blog]

Regarding Truth

The ICN's 14 Yearly Meeting, held in Sydney, Australia, off April 28th by means of Might 1st, customarily, delivered a discussion forum for highlighting the work from ICN functioning teams on corporate trusts, mergings, unilateral conduct, organization performance, and campaigning for. In November 2015, Lecturer (and past FTC Administrator) Joshua Wright suggested the FTC's approach is actually halfway in harmony with economical study, specifically, the tradeoffs in between the worth to buyers and culture of the totally free flow and also swap from information and also the creation of brand new services and products on the one possession, from the worth shed through customers from any type of affiliated decline in privacy." However, on balance, FTC enforcement in this field commonly is rather alert and also restrained to cost-benefit considerations.Visit Homepage, you can call us at the web site. jpg" width="311" /> Ultimately, along with talking to the FCC to cut ETFs on phone arrangements, the editorial requests that added range be actually offered to much more competitions." I decipher even more" to imply service providers that do certainly not rhyme with KT&T or with Spurizon." The social expenses of excluding AT&T and Verizon from the next auction will be actually unimportant if merely there was no such point as sphere exhaust. The EC's newest activity could stand for only the recommendation of a Google EC antitrust iceberg," considering that the EC has actually mentioned that this is actually continuouslying investigate various other facets from Google.com's behavior, featuring Google arrangements with respect to the Android os, plus the favourable therapy by Google.com in its overall search engine result of other specialist search services, as well as concerns with regard to duplicating of competitors' internet information (known as 'scraping'), marketing exclusivity as well as undue constraints on advertisers." For today, I pay attention to the pointer, leaving factor to consider of the majority of the iceberg to potential comments, as required. As Cardinal Newman records Mind-calming exercises as well as Devotions, I am generated to perform something or even to be one thing for which no one else is generated; I have a place in God's counsels, in The lord's globe, which nobody else has." Though The lord's methods are hidden and also mysterious, they additionally possess frequency, intelligibility, as well as congruity. This could imply being located by noninclusion, as when a scholar posts a research study along with a productive practice, while concealing that he conducted FIFTY of the same practices that failed, up until by random chance one finally worked, a phenomenon referred to as publication some cases, misinformation is actually evident, in order that anybody may see this. In other cases, that is actually much less therefore. For those instances, the PTP contacts promise signers to count on credible fact-checking internet sites and/or on the medical opinion. On Easter Sunday he visited religion for the final opportunity, vocal singing with the rest of the congregation at the end, 'God, right now let your servant depart in peace for my eyes have found your redemption.' On 25 April he determined his last will and also testament, and also entered his rest and perks on 27 May, at the age from 54 years. This mad desecration from churches, holy places, and also revered craft shows up in human history not only in sixteenth-century England and in Moslem destruction of Christian chapels in the course of the Campaigns yet also in Communist countries that have confiscated chapel property and also decreased parishes to warehouses or properties to offer the state.

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[cccto-semi-pro]

Week 36: Jesus as Israel

RECAP & PREPARING FOR CG

Daily Reading for Week

Matthew 17-18, Psalm 89

Matthew 19-20, Psalm 90  

Matthew 21-22, Psalm 91

Matthew 23-24, Psalm 92

Matthew 25-26, Psalm 93

Matthew 27-28, Psalm 94  

Mark 1-2, Psalm 95

Resources for Week

Read Scripture Video: Deuteronomy, Matthew 1-13, and Matthew 14-28

1. FOCUS OF TIME TOGETHER

To see how Matthew’s Gospel presents Jesus as an embodied representation of Israel, who brings about the end of exile and becomes the true embodiment of what Israel was supposed to be.

2. GROUND RULE / GOAL / VALUE FOR THE WEEK

Value: The value this week is focus. Practice giving all of your attention to the Scripture being read and the discussion questions. Try and notice when your mind is prone to wander, and when this happens, ask the Holy Spirit to refocus you to the reading/conversation at hand.

3. CONNECTION AND UNITY EXERCISE (MUTUAL INVITATION)

What is your favorite story about Jesus that you have read so far?

4. OPENING PRAYER

Have someone open your time in prayer, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal new and beautiful layers to the stories of Jesus you will read together.

5. INTRO TO DISCUSSION

Last week in our YOBL readings, we began the New Testament. For many, this is the part of the Christian Bible we are most familiar with. We discovered that, far from being removed from the Old Testament and Israel’s story, the New Testament is actually written almost entirely using the language of the Jewish Scriptures. Particularly in the Gospels, almost every line and verse contains allusions and echoes of the Old Testament.

This week, we will look at two passages near the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel that specifically and intentionally tie Jesus to Israel’s story. Matthew, perhaps more explicitly than any other New Testament writer, suggests that Jesus embodies Israel’s story in Himself, and also that, in Jesus, Israel’s story has reached its climax. From the very beginning of the genealogy, Matthew begins his Gospel by tying Jesus to Genesis (“This is the genealogy of Jesus” [in Greek, literally “the book of the genesis of Jesus”]). He also ties Jesus to Abraham, King David, and the exile. Basically, the entirety of Israel’s history is written into Jesus’ bloodline! Before we begin reading, here are a few notes on each passage:

Matthew 2:13-18: This section from Matthew’s birth narrative quotes Hosea 11 and Jeremiah 31 explicitly but also has echoes of the Exodus story, with Jesus as Israel (notice God’s description of Israel in Exodus 4 as “my firstborn son”). The Hosea and Jeremiah passages were written to Israel during their exile. Both passages hint at the pain of exile as well as the hope of God ending Israel’s exile and establishing them as a flourishing kingdom again. Both passages contain the reminder that, as Richard Hayes puts it, “violence and exile do not have the final word, for God’s love for Israel will prevail and bring about restoration.” Matthew, by including these quotations and echoes, is suggesting both that, in Jesus, Israel will experience a redemption similar to the Exodus AND that Jesus’ birth signals the potential and long-hoped-for end of Israel’s exile.

Matthew 4:1-11: In this account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness by the devil, Jesus responds three times with a quote from Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a book that records Moses’ final speeches to Israel just as their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness are ending and they are about to enter the Promised Land. In Deuteronomy, Moses exhorts Israel to be obedient and faithful to the Law and covenant which YHWH has given them. As the Old Testament goes on to make abundantly clear, Israel failed to be faithful and obedient, so they eventually fell under God’s judgement by being taken away into exile. In Matthew 4:1-11, Matthew portrays Jesus as a figurative representation of both Moses and Israel. Like Moses, Jesus will lead Israel out of the wilderness, into covenant faithfulness, and the promise land. Like Israel, Jesus is tempted at the end of his time in the wilderness, but UNLIKE Israel, Jesus emerges as the perfectly faithful son who obeys God and embodies Israel as they were meant to be. Jesus fulfills Israel’s intended destiny.

6. LARGE GROUP DISCUSSION Movement 1 :Questions for Basic Understanding:

These questions are to help us interpret and understand the text as it was intended to be interpreted and understood.

Read Matthew 2:13-18 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,   weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children   and refusing to be comforted,   because they are no more.”

Out of all the Gospel writers, Matthew is the only one who includes this story of Jesus’ childhood escape to Egypt. Why do you think Matthew included it?

Questions for Interacting with Scripture:

These questions are to help us slow down to taste and notice Scripture, savor its richness, and meditate on its complexity of meaning.

In Matthew’s narrative of Jesus’ childhood, he quotes from the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah and also alludes to Exodus. Specifically, Exodus 4:22, Hosea 11:1 and Jeremiah 31:15 are referenced. The literary intention of these references is not only to draw from those few specific verses but also to invite us to consider the meaning of the entire passage from which they come. Therefore, we will go back and read not only the verses quoted, but the longer sections of Scripture they are from. As you read, try to recall the point of these passages as well as the significance of the words quoted.

Read Exodus 4:22-23 Then say to Pharaoh, “This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, ‘Let my son go, so he may worship me.’ But you refused to let him go; so I will kill your firstborn son.’”

Read Hosea 11:1-11 “When Israel was a child, I loved him,   and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more they were called,   the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals   and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,   taking them by the arms; but they did not realize   it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness,   with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts   a little child to the cheek,   and I bent down to feed them. “Will they not return to Egypt   and will not Assyria rule over them   because they refuse to repent? A sword will flash in their cities;   it will devour their false prophets   and put an end to their plans. My people are determined to turn from me.   Even though they call me God Most High,   I will by no means exalt them. “How can I give you up, Ephraim?   How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah?   How can I make you like Zeboyim? My heart is changed within me;   all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger,   nor will I devastate Ephraim again. For I am God, and not a man—   the Holy One among you.   I will not come against their cities. They will follow the Lord;   he will roar like a lion. When he roars,   his children will come trembling from the west. They will come from Egypt,   trembling like sparrows,   from Assyria, fluttering like doves. I will settle them in their homes,”   declares the Lord.

Read Jeremiah 31:15-17 This is what the Lord says: “A voice is heard in Ramah,   mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children   and refusing to be comforted,   because they are no more.” This is what the Lord says: “Restrain your voice from weeping   and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded,” declares the Lord.   “They will return from the land of the enemy. So there is hope for your descendants,” declares the Lord.   “Your children will return to their own land.”

Now reread Matthew 2:13-18 once more When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah,   weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children   and refusing to be comforted,   because they are no more.”

How does reading the corresponding Old Testament texts above change your understanding of the passage in Matthew?

By including these Old Testament allusions, what point is Matthew is making about Jesus?

As we said, Matthew’s intention in quoting Jeremiah and Hosea is to make a literary nod to the entire passages which he is quoting from. Though the verses explicitly quoted don’t sound very hopeful, both Jeremiah 31 and Hosea 11 are hopeful encouragements to Israel that God will one day deliver them from exile. Considering this, how do Matthew’s references hint at the mission of Jesus?

Movement 2:Questions for Basic Understanding:

As you read the following sections of Scripture, remember our value of focus. Notice when you are having a hard time giving the passage your full attention and ask the Holy Spirit to remove all distractions so you can fully savor its meaning and beauty.

Read Matthew 4:1-11 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you,   and they will lift you up in their hands,   so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

Upon initial reading of this story, what stands out to you?

Questions for Interacting with Scripture:

Read Deuteronomy 9:25-26 I (Moses) lay prostrate before the Lord those forty days and forty nights because the Lord had said he would destroy you. I prayed to the Lord and said, “Sovereign Lord, do not destroy your people, your own inheritance that you redeemed by your great power and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

Read Deuteronomy 8:2-3 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Read Deuteronomy 6:16-18 Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah. Be sure to keep the commands of the Lord your God and the stipulations and decrees he has given you. Do what is right and good in the Lord’s sight, so that it may go well with you and you may go in and take over the good land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors,

Read Deuteronomy 6:13

Fear the Lord your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name.

Now reread Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you,   and they will lift you up in their hands,   so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

How does Jesus in this wilderness temptation story embody the covenant faithfulness which Israel was meant to live out?

Matthew represents Jesus as the obedient son which Israel was supposed to be. Why is that significant? Specifically, what did Jesus succeed in doing that Israel failed to do?

In this wilderness temptation story, Matthew’s language suggests both that Jesus is embodying Israel (especially Deuteronomy 8:2-3) and Israel’s leader, Moses (Deuteronomy 9:25-26). What does this connection to Moses tell us about Jesus’ authority as true Israel’s true leader?

7. SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION Questions for Examining Ourselves:

These questions are to help us look at ourselves, be aware and honest about who we are in light of our interaction with Scripture and consider any appropriate action.

During our time together, what was your experience of practicing this week’s value of focus? Were there any moments in the reading or conversation where you found your mind drifting or found it hard to focus?

What was it like asking the Holy Spirit in those moments for clarity and focus? Were you aware of how the Holy Spirit was with you during the reading/conversation?

8. CLOSING

Pray for one another, asking the Holy Spirit for humility, wisdom, and joy as you read the stories of Jesus over the next few weeks.