on the FSU track team and had a prior relationship with Johnson. She said that in early February that year, Johnson took her to another player’s apartment, held her there against her will, and raped her. She then reported it to a coach and twelve days later to the police. At trial, according to the St. Petersburg Times, the woman said she waited because “I was embarrassed, and I wanted him to leave me alone,” and, the paper says, “she also didn’t want to ‘ruin’ Johnson.”[51]
Nine days after the woman reported to law enforcement, Mary Coburn, the university’s Student Affairs vice president, sent her an e-mail. The Orlando Sentinel published that e-mail:
“Even though Travis does not admit this wrongdoing, to avoid embarrassment to himself, his family, the university, and you, Travis has agreed to withdraw from spring semester and not return until August 8 which is football reporting day. He has also agreed to receive counseling and provide documentation to me that this has taken place.” The e-mail also stipulated that “all parties agree to keep this matter confidential” and “not pursue any further legal action.” [52]
It appears that Coburn attempted to make the case go away, and she tried to do it around the football schedule to make sure that the team’s starting defensive tackle didn’t miss a game. Football is big business.
Three days later, the woman pressed charges.
Johnson maintained throughout the investigation and eventual trial that it was consensual sex and that he, having had shoulder surgery weeks earlier and the woman being only slightly smaller than him, could not have raped her.
Willie Meggs, the state attorney, took the case to court. The trial lasted two days, Johnson did not testify, the woman was on the stand for three hours, and it took the six women who made up the jury thirty minutes to find him not guilty. The Sun-Sentinel reported at the time that the woman and her family, as well as Johnson and his family, cried after the verdict was read.[53] Afterward, Johnson’s attorney said the fact that “this case was even brought this far is troubling.”[54] Johnson played for FSU the next season and was drafted into the NFL in 2005, where he played for six years.
When news broke in November 2013 that Willie Meggs’s office was investigating Jameis Winston, Travis Johnson emerged as a vocal critic of the state attorney. Johnson tweeted repeatedly about Meggs throughout November and into December. He called Meggs “the most Racist&Biased individual” and “the Most Corrupt Criminal in all of Florida.” “Willie Meggs will never give anyone let alone a black man a fair shake in the state of flordia he is a media hoe,” read one tweet. He also told Yahoo! Sports, “Facts don’t matter when you are dealing with a guy like Willie Meggs. Willie Meggs isn’t out for the facts . . . At the end of the day, this is still the Jim Crow South. You think, ‘It’s Florida.’ Well, it’s not Florida. It’s South Georgia. Tallahassee is South Georgia.”
Tallahassee is only a twenty-minute drive from the border with Georgia, and much of what surrounds it is rural. The refrain that it is really southern Georgia was one I heard while attending school. The county votes Democrat generally, but often with close margins. And, like most cities in the US South, it has a history saturated with segregation and racism.[55] Tallahassee was the site of a seven-month boycott of city buses in 1956 after two black women were arrested for sitting beside a white woman. The KKK held rallies in the city and burned crosses from the 1940s on. Young black people in the 1960s and 1970s held sit-ins, picketed segregated businesses, and marched through the city.
The past is never left in the past, though. There are ongoing arguments about the school’s mascot, the Seminoles, which has a red-faced man in profile as its main symbol. A social media post at the start of the school year in 2013 referred to black FSU students as “monkeys,” sparking justified outrage and a university investigation. The following year, a lecturer who had been with the university for eighteen years quit after her racist Facebook rant went public. In late 2014, multiple black churches in the rural area around Tallahassee were vandalized within a week of one another.[56] On March 18, 2015, the local paper, the Tallahassee Democrat, reported that the KKK had distributed leaflets in the city.[57] “Imperial Wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Frank Ancona said the fliers found in Tallahassee driveways over the past few days were an effort to spread awareness of the values the organization holds and hopefully draw in new members.” In December 2015, a black student at Florida State wrote a letter to the president of FSU, John Thrasher, after Thrasher’s State of the University address.[58] After a long, detailed list of issues of discrimination and racism at FSU and within the state of Florida more generally, the student wrote, “Acts of racism and intolerance are not, as you claim, ‘isolated acts’ at Florida State; they are the culmination and furtherance of ideals this university has perpetuated for decades.” All of this is probably what Travis Johnson meant when he said that Tallahassee is “still the Jim Crow South.”
As evidence of Meggs’s particular interest in football players, people often point to a 2003 interview he gave to the Sun-Sentinel where he said, “To whom much is given, much should be expected. Sometimes we ought to hold those folks to a little bit higher standard. Thousands of people would give their right arm to play for FSU or Notre Dame or Miami or Georgia, and when somebody messes up doing something stupid, it’s a shame.”[59] The idea that FSU football players are given much is questionable. There is also an implication in the phrase “hold to a higher standard” that the people Meggs is talking about should be brought down a peg. Those can be loaded words in a Southern town in northern Florida, especially when spoken by a white man about mainly black men.
Also, it is not just football players who maintain that race plays a role in how Meggs practices law. In February 2012, Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor said Meggs “just beats the hell out of black folk day in and day out,” prosecuting them at higher rates. In a press release, Proctor wrote that Meggs “prosecutes black officials with great haste and fervor but is hesitant and indifferent to white public officials who commit crimes.”
Willie Meggs might be racist in how he practices law, as Proctor and Johnson say. He might not. In the end, it ultimately may not matter because Meggs, a white Southern man who is an agent of the state, practices law in a system that many feel is racist in whom it labels as criminal and how it punishes them.
III.
This country has a long history of tying blackness to criminality (and vice versa) in ways that have devastating effects in real life: “African Americans make up 13 percent of the general US population, yet they constitute 28 percent of all arrests, 40 percent of all inmates held in prisons and jails, and 42 percent of the population on death row.”[60] What this means is that we find it easier to talk about crime, especially crime as a problem within our larger society, when we have an African American in the role of perpetrator.
In 2014 I met up with Ben Carrington, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas who specializes in sports and race, at a swanky coffee shop in downtown Austin to talk to him about this. Carrington, a native Londoner with a smooth English accent and himself a former semipro footballer in Europe, told me that often “race is the trigger for society to express their moral outrage about another issue.” (In this case, sexual violence.) In fact, he said, when a crime is perpetrated by black people, that “helps to make us more angry because of what [the alleged perpetrators] look like.” Football, Carrington noted, because it employs so many black men and is so popular, reflects a skewed racialized image of violence back into our society. We care about football a lot, we pay attention to what the players do on and off the field, we critique their behavior on and off the field, and when black players are accused, charged, or convicted of criminal behavior, it slots nicely into our cultural imagination regarding black men.
Other experts echo Carrington’s concerns. In September 2014, while working on a piece
