Texas County’s Racial Past Is Seen as Prelude to Sandra Bland’s Death - The New York Times

"PRAIRIE VIEW, Tex. — When Sandra Bland enrolled in 2005 at Prairie View A&M University, the historically black institution founded here almost 140 years ago, its students were still waging a civil rights war that had ended elsewhere decades before: a legal battle, against white Waller County officials, for the right to vote in the place they lived.

It took years and a federal court order, but the students won. When Ms. Bland returned here the morning of July 9, driving 16 hours from Chicago to interview for a job at her alma mater, the Justice Department had abandoned its court-ordered oversight of students’ voter registration, the campus had its own polling place, and the county had, in one key respect, passed a racial milestone.

Four days later, Ms. Bland was dead in a county jail cell after a routine traffic stop by a state trooper escalated into a physical confrontation not 500 yards from the university’s entrance. And any talk of milestones gave way to questions about whether the county’s checkered history of race relations had set the stage for a tragedy that the authorities acknowledge might never have happened had they followed their own rules."

Texas County’s Racial Past Is Seen as Prelude to Sandra Bland’s Death - The New York Times