HEMPSTEAD, Tex. — Elton Mathis never expected to be famous when he was elected Waller County district attorney nine years ago, working in an office just 15 miles from the town where he was born. The last two weeks changed all that.
Now Mathis can be seen on television screens across the nation, and his name will forever be linked to Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old black woman who drove here from Illinois for a job interview and wound up dead in the Waller County jail.
Bland’s death earlier this month is shining a national spotlight on a small corner of Texas that was already facing an uncomfortable struggle to come to terms with an ugly history of racism. Lynchings were once rampant in Waller County. And as recently as 2004, Mathis’s predecessor was arguing that students at historically black Prairie View A&M University did not have the right to vote locally.
Mathis casts himself in the vanguard of efforts to change the place, even as he battles his own charges of racism and his staff endures death threats. At 39, he is one of the state’s youngest district attorneys, and he claims to be part of a more “progressive” generation.
“The county’s in growing pains,” Mathis said in an interview. “You have a newer generation that sees things different than possibly our grandparents did. . . . We’re trying to get rid of a lot of those vestiges of the old South that are negative.”
Above all, Mathis says, that means resolving questions about Bland, who was found dead in a jail cell July 13, three days after a Texas state trooper pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change then jailed her on charges of assault. Officials have said Bland committed suicide by hanging, but family and friends have questioned that finding, saying the young woman was delighted by the prospect of working at the university here, where she graduated in 2009.
To Bland’s friends, her arrest was a classic case of “driving while black,” and her death further proof that talk of a more progressive Waller County is just that — talk.
“The difference between now and then is then white people didn’t hide or deny what they did,” said Holice Cook, 37, an old friend who was looking forward to playing pool with Bland. “In this county, they’ve been hanging and killing negroes since the Civil War.”
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