Teacher arrests evoke oldest racial taboos

updated 8:59 p.m. ET March 28, 2007

CLINTON, S.C. - The arrest of two women teachers on charges of having sex with their male students has brought cries of lingering racism in one of South Carolina's most conservative counties and evoked some of the South's oldest and deepest-seated racial taboos.

Both women are white. The boys — six in all — are black.

Some of the black population who make up more than a quarter of Laurens County's 70,000 residents are upset over the handling of the two cases, particularly the release of the teachers on bail.

They say the cases reflect the way crimes by whites against blacks in the segregated South were treated less seriously than other offenses, and blacks who leveled accusations against whites were less likely to be believed.

"If this had been black teachers, they would not be out of jail right now," said Corinnie Young, a 49-year-old bookstore employee who is black.

Some blacks shudder to think what would have happened if the teachers were black men and the students were white girls.

"I can assure you if it were an African-American male who committed such an offense against a white female, history shows us that the charges, the punishment and the sentencing would be totally different," said state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People president Lonnie Randolph. "The system ain't blind when the perpetrator is an African American male or female or when the victim is a white female."

Jerry Peace, the county prosecutor and a white man, said that the teachers are wearing electronic tracking devices and that their release on bail — $125,000 for one, $110,000 for the other — was based not on race, but on the danger to the community and the likelihood that the defendants might flee.

In any case, it would be unusual for someone accused of such a crime to be held without bail. Deborah Ahrens, a visiting professor of criminal law at the University of South Carolina, said of the bail amounts for the two teachers: "For the clients that I've represented in the past that were up for similar offenses, that sounds about right."

Racism still runs through county
Signs of racial tension, old and new, are not hard to find in Laurens County. The school where one of the teachers worked used to be blacks-only. In the town of Laurens, where one of the teachers taught, an old movie theater has been converted into a Ku Klux Klan museum and paraphernalia store called The Red Neck Shop. There, visitors can buy Confederate flags — reminders of the Southern slave-holding states that seceded from the United States in 1861, sparking the Civil War — and bumper stickers, such as one that depicts three Klansmen and reads "The Original Boys in the Hood."

Textile mills were once the chief source of jobs in the working-class area about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of the state capital of Columbia, but the industry went into decline in the 1990s. The main employers now include a maker of plastic coolers and Presbyterian College in Clinton. As of 2003, nearly 15 percent of county residents lived below the poverty line.

And as in many communities, most neighborhoods in the county are either black or white. People of different races find themselves side by side in one of two places: work or school.

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