Early last year newly minted Attorney Gen. Eric Holder Jr. shook things up when he delivered a speech saying Americans were “cowards” when it came to race.
“Though the nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder said at the time.
On Wednesday, his federal prosecutors came smack up against the issue in Detroit, one of the nation’s most racially divisive cities, after a jury deadlocked 11-1 and a mistrial was declared in federal court in a high profile public corruption case involving Sam Riddle, an African American who had served as an aide to ex-City Council member Monica Conyers, the wife of Congressman John Conyers.
The Detroit News reported that only one juror — the only African American on the jury — refused to convict Riddle. And apparently she was not a coward when it came to raising the race issue. The News reported that she told fellow jurors early on in deliberations that they wanted to “hang the black man.”
The prosecution plans to go for a second trial.
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