Cole DeLaune: Minorities still unequal in the eyes of the law

By contrast, Shakur spent much of her childhood in the cauldron of the Jim Crow South. If her biography recalls that of any fellow freedom fighter, it is Peltier. Both grappled from an early age with the net of systematic oppression, the former in 1950s North Carolina and the latter on Turtle Mountain and Pine Ridge. Both endured dubious criminal trials as prologue to their widely contested convictions. And both find themselves either literally or symbolically imprisoned decades after suspicions of police and FBI misconduct initially emerged while white counterparts like Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans received commutations of sentence by President Clinton. One needs only to refer to such disparities to realize that minorities remain unequal in the practical application of the law. When it comes to questions of race, even the revolution, it seems, will not be color blind.