HOMER, La. – Many African Americans in this town figured a racially charged tragedy was inevitable, given what they say has been a long history of racial profiling and harassment by the local police.

Their worst fears turned into reality when 73-year-old Bernard Monroe was shot down on his own front porch by a white police officer who had intruded on a family gathering.

Gone in a flash of gunfire was “Mr. Ben,” a friendly, well-liked retiree with a wife of 49 years and a small army of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“It was bound to happen,” said Gary Daniels, one of Monroe’s nephews. “[Police] have been a force of intimidation for as long as I can remember.”

Monroe was killed on Feb. 20, 2009, outside the humble wood frame house he and his family called home for nearly 25 years. As many as 20 family members and friends, including young children, were socializing in the front yard on a mild winter day. They saw and heard parts of the incident from different vantage points. Some told a local grand jury what they saw.

But almost a year after the shooting, on Feb. 4, the grand jury of eight whites and four blacks declined to issue criminal indictments in the case.

On Feb. 10, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the town of Homer and two officers on behalf of Monroe’s widow and children, alleging that the officers’ negligence and “failure to exercise reasonable care” led to Monroe’s death.

“These officers were out of control when they stormed onto Mr. Monroe’s property,” said Morris Dees, chief trial counsel for the SPLC. “It ended in a devastating tragedy for the Monroe family.”

 

Racial Profiling or Preventative Policing?
Initially, the Homer Police Department maintained that the officers saw what appeared to be a drug transaction in progress, and when the two suspects ran, they followed them to Monroe’s home, according to media accounts. The scenario would later change to one person – Monroe’s son, Shaun – being pursued for reasons that aren’t clear. There were no criminal warrants for Shaun when he parked in the driveway of his parents’ house and went inside. He was never charged with a crime.

Witnesses said the officers, Tim Cox and Joey Henry, followed Shaun into the house. Moments after Henry came out of the house, Shaun ran past him. Henry then shot Shaun twice with a Taser.

Bernard MonroeDuring the commotion, Bernard Monroe rose from his chair in the front yard and walked toward the house to check on his elderly wife. He made it to the porch steps. That’s when Cox, still inside the house, fired repeatedly through the screen door, striking Monroe multiple times in the chest. He died a short time later. None of the witnesses said they heard Cox warn Monroe before firing.

Homer police initially said that Cox shot Monroe because he pointed a pistol at police.

Many witnesses insist the police account is simply not true. They maintain that Monroe was holding a sports-drink bottle and that he kept the gun on his front porch. Some witness accounts have Cox lifting Monroe’s body and almost rolling it over after shooting him. They have another officer holding Monroe’s gun right after the shooting and placing it next to the old man’s body while wearing blue latex gloves. The gun was sent to a lab for fingerprints. The results have not been publicly disclosed. But, according to the police investigation, Monroe’s fingerprints were not on the gun.

Cox had been on the force for 2½ weeks at the time and was making $10.40 an hour. Henry was hired eight months earlier and was paid $9.50 an hour. Both were placed on paid administrative leave following the shooting. They resigned five months later.

Three weeks after the incident, Homer Police Chief Russell Mills, who is white, seemed to say that his department routinely conducts racial profiling. “If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names,” he was quoted by The Chicago Tribune as saying. “I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We’re not out there trying to abuse and harass people – we’re trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear.”

Days later, the Homer newspaper published a lengthy letter from Mills, who is in the final year of his first term as the town’s elected police chief. He accused the reporter of misconstruing what he said and of instilling hate. But he added that if his officers “observe people walking in the area, we will stop them, identify them, find out where they live, who their parents are, how old they are and just what they’re doing in this area if they’re not from here and possibly pat them down.” He called this “preventative policing.”

Dees said it appears that the police chief is promoting racial profiling in the town, with tragic consequences.

“The people of Homer deserve a police force that protects, rather than harasses them,” Dees said. “And the Monroe family deserves justice.”

The Claiborne Parish chapter of the NAACP sent its own investigator to question witnesses after Monroe’s death. Among them was a black man named David Casey, who said that around 4 p.m. on Feb. 20 – the day that Monroe was shot – he and several friends and family members where sitting outside his residence when three Homer police cars pulled up.

According to Casey’s account, Officer Cox asked the group in the yard, “Why are you all sitting around in this yard?” Their reply, “This is family.” Cox searched one of the men, then questioned everyone – asking where they lived and what they were doing there. He took their identification and called in their names. He told the gathering that Mills was tired of drug activity in the “quarters” and that he had told his officers that when they saw four or more African Americans together, “some kind of ‘activity’ is going on.” Cox’s next stop might have been the Monroe home. Witnesses to the shooting say Cox and Officer Henry showed up there at 4:30 or 4:35.

The NAACP identified other blacks who claimed to have been harassed for no reason. William Casey and Jeannette Turner said they were walking down a railroad track one day prior to the shooting when Cox stopped them, asked for identification and searched their pockets. Another man, Stanley Hamilton, told a similar story.

 

Big Man in a Small Town
Bernard Monroe lived most of his life in Homer. A powerfully built man who worked as a lineman for Claiborne Electric Cooperative for 37 years, he enjoyed playing dominos on his porch and watching reruns of “Sanford and Son” in his retirement years. He had surgery in 1997 for cancer of the larynx, leaving him all but speechless. A lifelong hunter and fisherman, he often shot squirrels and other small game. “If he couldn’t eat it, he wouldn’t kill it,” said Shaun Monroe.

Bernard Monroe was married to his wife, Marie, for almost half a century. They had five children, 18 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. Most everybody called him “Mr. Ben.” A lot of folks recall a friendly man who was well liked.

The Rev. Willie Young, who is president of the local Claiborne branch of the NAACP, knew Monroe and his family for years. “He seemed to be a real man,” Young said. “He always provided for his family.”

Many of those family members still live in Homer, 53 miles northeast of Shreveport. It’s a town of about 3,400 as of July 2008 and losing population, according to city-data.com, which analyzes various data to profile cities and towns. About 62 percent of the residents are black. More than 31 percent live below the poverty line, compared to less than 20 percent for the state as a whole. The estimated median household income of $31,430 in 2008 was almost 30 percent less than the $43,733 for the state as a whole.

The heart of Homer’s tiny downtown is a square dominated by the white, columned courthouse that was built in 1860. As in many Southern towns, a statue of a Confederate soldier stands sentry outside. There are few or no commercial vacancies in the square, which includes Rex’s Barber Shop, Klassy Korner Boutique, Homer Beauty Supply and the former Claiborne Hotel, built in 1890 and now home to the Chamber of Commerce and a museum.

But Wal-Mart skipped town more than three years ago, taking with it a big chunk of tax revenue. Left behind: A Piggly Wiggly supermarket and at least three Dollar stores, including two that are less than a quarter mile apart.

 

Homer History in Black and White
Racial discord goes back a long time in Homer and Claiborne Parish.

“Overall, this is a racist community,” said Young, who was a Claiborne Parish deputy sheriff for several years and currently serves on the parish’s police jury, the equivalent of a county commission or board of supervisors elsewhere.

One of the parish’s notable citizens was William “Willie” Rainach, a state legislator who founded the first White Citizens’ Council in the state of Louisiana. The Councils were organized throughout the South in an effort to fight desegregation after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed “separate by equal” schools in 1954.

In a 1959 speech to the state Legislature, Rainach claimed to love blacks, but added, “The breeding in him does not allow him to run a civilization, and I won’t let our civilization go to ruin.” Rainach committed suicide in 1978, four years after being named “Man of the Year” by the Homer Lions Club. He is buried in Homer.

The Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has a chapter in Homer, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s listing of hate groups. Young recalls a couple of Klan rallies at the Confederate soldier statue in the past 15 years. He estimates there are 25 to 30 Klansmen in the area.

Plans were afoot throughout the 1990s to build a plant that would enrich uranium for nuclear power plants just a few miles outside of town along a road straddling two tiny, poor African-American communities. It would have generated a huge amount of radioactive waste. In what was considered one of the first “environmental racism” challenges in the nation, the residents won an eight-year battle to kill the plans.

In the town of Athens, nine miles from Homer, a man burned a cross near the homes of his cousin and her African-American boyfriend and other relatives who approved of their interracial relationship. He was convicted in federal court last month and is scheduled to be sentenced in April.

Most incidents are far more subtle, residents say. Bernard Monroe’s nephew, Gary Daniels, recalls being part of a small group of men who gathered to fix a broken window in a friend’s barber shop. It was daylight hours, they wore tool belts and obviously weren’t breaking in, said Daniels, 49, a consultant to trucking companies. Yet a police officer grilled them like they were criminals, he said. “No African American that tells them anything is telling the truth.”

“We need to put a stop to this”
Some African-Americans and whites in Homer have tried to close the racial divide, Young said. They formed a group in the 1990s called The Bridge Keepers. White members have attended black churches and vice versa in an attempt to better understand each other. For some, there is a long way to go. Young said he was shocked during the 2008 presidential campaign when a few white members, writing on the group’s email list, claimed Barack Obama was a Muslim or the antichrist.

After the shooting of Bernard Monroe, a representative of the Justice Department met with members of the Claiborne Parish chapter of the NAACP at Young’s New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Two Homer police officers – not those at Monroe’s house the day he was shot – parked outside the church during the meeting.

“Our young men are being abused,” Young said. “We need to put a stop to this. This is bigger than me. This is bigger than Mr. Monroe.”

Police Chief Mills recently told the Shreveport Times that he does not teach his officers to use race in their decisions about arrests. “I have more compassion for the people in the city than people realize,” he told the newspaper.

Maybe, but Young said that many African-Americans in Homer feel helpless and hopeless in the aftermath of the grand jury’s decision not to indict anybody in connection with Bernard Monroe’s death. He’s urging them to keep the faith.

“This is one battle we lost,” he said. “But the struggle is ongoing.”
 

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