Racism and the Brian Nichols Case

By Nicholas Stix The Brian Nichols case is one of those instances of contemporary journalism, in which thousands of man-hours are devoted to talking and writing about a case, in order to try and keep the public in the dark about it. To recap, among other, lesser charges, Nichols is charged with having murdered Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Sheriff’s Deputy Sergeant Hoyt Teasley and ICE Agent David Wilhelm in Atlanta on March 11. Since I have already meditated on racism in relation to the Nichols case, you may wonder why I am going back to the well. The relationship between black racism and black crime is inexhaustible! It would be difficult to do justice to the topic in one book, let alone one article. (During the late 1990s, I shopped a book proposal on black supremacist thought. No one – surprise, surprise! – was interested, even though such a book had a large potential audience.) Due Diligence, Diversity-Style? Brian Nichols had a responsible job at UPS at the time of the killings. If a white job applicant at UPS had had Nichols’ past (including several arrests and bouncing from job to job), red flags would immediately have shot up, and he would never have gotten an interview. Did Nichols use a phony social security number? Or was his hiring, as Mickey Kaus quipped of the hiring of journalistic fraud Jayson Blair at the New York Times, “More evidence of due diligence, diversity-style"? Why was Nichols almost acquitted at his first rape trial, where the jury was hung 8-4, in favor of acquittal? This was not “he said, she said.” He was caught with assault weapons and ten pounds of marijuana. Ah, but he wasn’t on trial for assault weapons and felony possession with the intent to distribute drugs, in addition to rape, sodomy, and kidnapping. And so, the jury in Nichols’ first case had no idea whom they were dealing with. And the prosecutors in the first trial were too lazy to provide the jury with the necessary corroborating evidence to make a case, even though there was no lack of such evidence. In a telephone interview, former Fulton County assistant district attorney Denise A. Sorino told me that in 1996, Fulton County DA Paul Howard inherited an office of some 80 ADAs, most of them experienced and white. He fired most of the white ADAs, and replaced them with black ADAs who were inexperienced and often incompetent. Apparently, DA Howard also believes in "due diligence, diversity-style." Thousands of Fulton County felony cases were simply “lost.” Years after arrests had been made, with witnesses that could no longer be located, and arresting officers that could no longer recall the details of the case, the cases were simply dropped. In many other cases, involving groups such as athletes and pastors, Sorino said that Howard gave them preferential treatment, so that they were never punished for their crimes. "I'm a Warrior" Consider who Nichols killed. Although according to police, he murdered four people, if we view Sgt. Teasley as “collateral damage,” whom Nichols had not wanted to kill, that leaves three victims whom Nichols went out of his way to kill, all of them white: Judge Rowland Barnes, court recorder Julie Ann Brandau, and ICE Agent David Wilhelm. Ashley Smith, Nichols’ white hostage at the end of his flight, said he told her, “I’m a soldier.” He sees himself as a race warrior. DC sniper John Muhammad, who was (and may still be) a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), also clearly saw himself as a soldier, though I don’t know of him saying that. As I have written in the past, black supremacists, including but not limited to the NOI, see themselves as soldiers in a war of racial annihilation. A few years ago, in Far Rockaway, Queens, one of the nation’s most racist black slums, a black ex-con tried to get other black bus riders to help him lynch me, after I had defended his first intended victim, an East Indian driver. When a 6’4” black man the ex-con was counting on disappointed him (the con said, “You got me, brother?” to the giant behind me, who responded “That’s not the way, Brother,” and quoted Scripture), the convict was outraged. Although it was pouring outside, he said, “I don’t like what I’m hearing, so I’m going to walk, because” (slamming himself across the chest with his forearm) “I’m a warrior!” And with that, he marched off the bus and into the downpour, without an umbrella. (By the way, Freedom Allah, who claims to be a member of the Five Percenters, wrote me during March, to complain of my depiction of his group: “Greetings. I just wanted to let you know, in case you did not know, the 5% Nation is not pro black and we are not anti white. We have black five percenters and we have white five percenters. Please do not spread lies about our group in the future. Thank you. Peace” Mr. Allah notwithstanding, I am sticking to my story, whereby the Five Percenters are a violent, black supremacist organization. But I’m an open-minded fellow. We’ll talk. Who knows, maybe Mr. Allah can change my mind.) Violence as an End-in-Itself But what about the black deaths, you ask? Black supremacists have no problem with killing blacks. When Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was building the largest black supremacist movement this nation has ever seen, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, I am unaware of any whites dying at his hands. But if Garvey treated his black enemies badly, he treated his friends worse! Wherever he went, he left a trail of dead black supporters in his wake. The paranoid Garvey projected his own treacherousness onto loyal supporters, who then had to be liquidated. And while the Nation of Islam has murdered anywhere from dozens to hundreds of whites, it has also murdered a great many blacks. (No, I did not qualify my statement, by saying that “members” of the NOI committed murders. Too many members at every level of the NOI have conspired to commit murders or helped NOI murderers evade justice, to speak of the group as anything but a criminal organization. Indeed, genocide is the sine qua non of the NOI.) When I was 14, I ran with a black gang for a few months. The leader, Alan "Poncho" Hankins, once ordered me to beat up a white boy named Brian. Brian was one of the nicest kids in town, but Poncho said, "Beat him, Stix! Beat him, or I'll beat you!" Poncho was scrawny, but crazy. I feared him a lot more than I feared Brian, so I gave Brian a hellacious beating. (A few years later, I ran into Brian and he was nice to me. He may be a saint.) Another time, when I was alone with Poncho in his sister Sarah's apartment, he again ordered me to inflict violence -- on him! He made me twist his feet outwardly as far as I could go, while he lay on the floor, screaming for me to keep going. If I'd been stronger, I might have broken his legs. Subsidizing Racial Revolution At least, the NOI is a private organization. To my knowledge, it is not subsidized by the taxpayer. Yet. But black supremacy has long lived off the white taxpayers whom it seeks to kill. When I was a token white in the federally funded, black supremacist Youth Justice Program (1974-76) for juvenile delinquents, during the summer 1975 program, our middle-class and upper-middle-class youth counselors gave us Sam Greenlee’s novel, The Spook Who Sat By the Door, to read. In Spook, a James-Bond-in-blackface story, “Freeman,”> the first black CIA agent, travels around the country, organizing black street gangs into a guerilla army, which takes over the country in a bloody, racial revolution. When a black police detective friend of Freeman refuses to support the revolution, Freeman kills him without regret. The counselors insisted that not only is Spook great literature (it’s horrible), but that it presents a realistic plan for action. Black supremacists typically rationalize the murder of a black by arguing, ‘He was working for the white man.’ Unfortunately for the black supremacist counselors, Spook had virtually no effect upon my comrades, perhaps because virtually none of them bothered to read it. More PC Political correctness appears in yet three other guises in the Nichols case. 1. Lack of restraint: Incredulous, fortysomething, black Atlantan Tony McCreer told CNN, “Why would you take someone who had already been caught trying to bring in a weapon, without any restraints?” The reason is that criminal justice authorities around the country long ago yielded to pressure from the civil rights lobby to show an exaggerated concern with the dignity of ultraviolent black felony suspects. 2. Too much restraint: In recent years, urban police officers have been trained to engage in such extreme restraint in the use of deadly (or any) force, that many have been killed in the line of duty, as a result. The training is clearly race-based, due to the fear of expensive civil rights lawsuits on behalf of ultraviolent, black felons, anti-police media campaigns, black race riots, and agitations within departments by black counter-police organizations. (Black counter-police organizations are racially segregated groups composed of black supremacists, most of whom were improperly hired in the first place. They were typically hired solely due to being black, in spite of their police test scores and psychological testing and interviews. Black counter-police avoid, if at all possible, arresting black suspects, and sometimes aid and abet black suspects, they racially harass law-abiding white citizens, demand policies that handcuff police and give ultraviolent black suspects license to kill, speak out publicly against their white fellow officers, teach black youngsters that white officers are more of a danger to them than black criminals, and demand and get promotions to supervisory positions for black officers who were unfit to be hired, in the first place. The most notorious black counter-police organizations are the Sentinels in Cincinnati, and the clandestine 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, formerly named 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement Who Care, in New York.) Whites are not rioting or initiating multi-million-dollar lawsuits out of respect for white criminals, and no one in law enforcement fears being accused of racism for abusing the rights of white suspects. Indeed, I submit that the rise in the proportion of violent, black male criminals not only among the black poor but the black middle class, is due not to white racism, but the opposite phenomenon: Black males’ accurate perception of the fear and solicitude that so many white authority figures (including police officers) show them. Had the Nichols incident occurred under the training of say, 1960, Sgt. Teasley might very well be alive today, and Brian Nichols would likely be dead. Sgt. Teasley would simply have shot Nichols dead, and gotten a commendation for doing so. But then, in 1960, no one was “progressive” (read: stupid) enough to give a woman the responsibility of guarding a male defendant charged with violent felonies, and so Sgt. Teasley would likely not even have had to confront Nichols. And while Sgt. Teasley was black, he still went through training in extreme restraint in the use of deadly force. 3. Blood: Another possible factor in Sgt. Teasley’s death, is black racial solidarity. I don’t know how black Atlanta/Fulton County police officers think, but I’ve seen enough and heard enough of black cops in New York to know that many think of black felons as their brothers, and law-abiding whites as their enemies. In 1995, I witnessed a black federal (postal) police officer aid and abet a violent black criminal in escaping prosecution. Black officers tend to show even more restraint in the use of deadly force than their white colleagues. What black New York officers fail to appreciate, however, is that black criminals do not return their love. (Conversely, black officers in Washington, DC, and Prince George’s County, MD have a history of shooting black suspects with a frequency many times higher than officers in New York, suggesting that they do not feel restrained either by pc training or feelings of racial solidarity.) Did He Snap!? Various relatives of Nichols spoke to CNN, including his aunt Regina Dow and cousin Reginald Small. They seemed like decent people, and expressed their condolences for the victims and their families. The relatives (as well as childhood friends) said they didn’t recognize the suspect as the Brian Nichols they knew, and hoped for some psychiatric evaluation to determine how and why he “snapped,” and to protect him from the death penalty. But the evidence suggests that Brian Nichols didn’t “snap” at all. Rather, he behaved himself as long as he lived with his family in Baltimore. But as soon as he left home in 1989 at the age of 18, to attend Pennsylvania’s Kutztown State University, he chose a very different life than the one he had previously led. Since that new life unfurled away from Baltimore, it is understandable that his friends and family would not recognize the man Nichols chose to become. The Brian Nichols of March 11 was not a man who lost his mind, but rather a man who exercised a control over his faculties such as most men will never know. The question remains, as to why Nichols surrendered in Duluth, GA, rather than committing “suicide by cop,” while seeking to take a few more policemen with him. After all, it’s considered a slam dunk, that he’ll get the death penalty. Perhaps Nichols plans on arguing that he is a prisoner of war, and expects black jurors to engage in jury nullification on his behalf. But Brian Nichols is not a soldier; he is a racial terrorist. He may have a good soldier’s discipline and ruthlessness, but not, ultimately, a soldier’s courage. One Fox News personality said that Nichols now cannot kill any more. But that’s not true. Unless and until he is executed, he can still kill people – guards and other inmates -- in a prison or a mental hospital, where he will surely be a hero to black supremacist inmates or patients. This story’s awful epilogue, is that Brian Nichols will be held up variously (and already has been, in some precincts) as a hero and a victim by the black supremacists who have taken over the education and care of poor black children.