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Confederate Monuments, Small Town Sheriffs: Dispatches from 2020 in the South
Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson, a lawman for the ages, tirelessly guards the Confederate statue in Graham basically day and night with his deputies, assigning sometimes dozens of his deputies to the courthouse detail, threat or no threat, like a true patriot.
It’s Sunday night and there are maybe a dozen people on the square, most eating frozen custard. My son has chosen a root beer float, and I have had him turn his Black Lives Matter shirt inside out because, well, it’s hard to say how things will shake down in Graham. Graham police and sheriff cars ring the courthouse square.
Johnson, who allegedly told his deputies to “bring me some Mexicans” and “go out there and get me some of those taco-eaters,” has been under federal investigation for discriminatory police practices — ones that resulted in Latinx drivers being stopped between 4 and 10 times as often by his deputies than other drivers. At one point even ICE refused to work with him until of course he eagerly worked out a $2.3 million contract to house detainees in Alamance County Detention Center so that ICE could operate out of Alamance County to terrorize families in the surrounding counties where the sheriffs were less open to the agencies incredible and questionable overreach. “I owe it to our state and to our county to…
