Prairie View, Texas, now joins a list of places where African Americans have died after police encounters, and where mainstream assumptions about progress in race relations have been challenged, if not dashed. Here those assumptions have been especially shaky.
PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas — 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.