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 DURHAM, N.C. (AP) - Mayor Bill Bell is black. So are Police Chief Steven W. Chalmers, City Manager Patrick Baker and a majority of the city council. Durham's population is almost as black as it is white. So why is it that some blacks like Preston Bizzell, a 61-year-old Air Force veteran who said he's never experienced racism in his 30 years in Durham, believe justice here is swifter and harsher for a black man than a white one?
Bizzell sat on his bicycle recently and stared at the house where a black stripper claims she was raped and beaten by three white Duke University lacrosse players. He's convinced if the alleged attackers had been students at historically black North Carolina Central University, and their accuser white, "that same day, somebody would have been arrested."
"They wouldn't have spent that money (on DNA tests) over at that black university over there just to make sure they didn't do that," said Bizzell, a resident of the Walltown neighborhood, where some blacks still refer to the Duke campus as "the plantation." "No, no. If them girls had said, `Him and him,' you're going to jail."
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