National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition recently observed that “two of the biggest racial controversies of the last decade—Tulia, Texas and Jena, Louisiana—have one thing in common”. That one thing is the work of Friends of Justice, a grassroots organization that empowers poor people of color to defend their right to due process in Texas and the South. Friends of Justice formed in response to the
infamous Tulia drug sting of 1999 in which 47 people, 39 of them African Americans, were rounded up based on the false testimony of an undercover agent. Friends of Justice emerged as a coalition of defendant’s families and other concerned citizens who believed the defendants were being prosecuted on faulty evidence. Because of the work of Friends of Justice, the Texas Legislature passed the Tulia Corroboration Bill, which raised the evidentiary standards for undercover testimony. Learning from this victory, Friends of Justice began to organize across Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. We are strategically located in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the largest metropolitan area in our region. Friends of Justice was the first organization to investigate a 2007 controversy in Jena, Louisiana, where the hanging of nooses in a public school led to escalating racial conflict among youth. Friends of Justice worked with the affected community to build a coalition around the case and attracted national media attention. In his 2008 book Taking on the System, Markos Moulitsas praised our work in Jena as an innovative model to leverage new media for social change.
