Stands for civil rights helped mold Jessamy's approach as city's top prosecutor

By Julie Bykowicz
Sun reporter

November 26, 2005

HOLLANDALE, Miss. // As a teenager in this Mississippi Delta town, she sat defiantly at all-white lunch spots and marched downtown with her classmates to take movie theater seats reserved for whites.

As a college student at Jackson State, she listened in disbelief as police fired hundreds of bullets on campus - shots that thrust that historically black college into the epicenter of the civil rights movement.

And as a newly minted lawyer, she forced Grenada, Miss., to remake its government, giving black residents a greater voice in running the city and prompting threats to her life.

Patricia Coats Jessamy, 57, has been the top prosecutor in Baltimore for a decade now, but the lessons she learned as a young civil rights activist have stuck, molding her sometimes controversial approach to the job.

Jessamy's employees say she doesn't wear her past on her sleeve or use it for self-promotion. But she exudes a maternal demeanor and talks frequently about the value she places on education and tolerance.

It causes "a pain in my heart," she says, to see black men in shackles and chains lined up each morning outside Baltimore's Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse, named for a civil rights leader. "I knew if I wanted things to be different, I would have to make it so."

It was homecoming last month at Jackson State in south-central Mississippi, and a homecoming for Jessamy, too. For the first time in three decades, she walked across the changed campus, her southern drawl growing syrupy as she spoke with fellow alumni.

"It is quite a pleasure," Jessamy said in a lunchtime speech at Jackson State, "for me to be home."

Cotton collects in clumps along the roadways that lead to the rural Mississippi towns where Jessamy was born and raised. Down a gravel road squeezed between farm fields that stretch into the horizon, a green street sign is rusting in a ditch. It reads, "Coats Road."

This is Percy, Miss., the 120 acres of farmland where Jessamy and her five sisters and two brothers were born. They picked cotton and "everything else you can imagine," she says. They played among persimmon trees and potato patches.

Beatrice Coats, an 88-year-old with an impressive memory, remembers sewing clothes for her children and needing to buy only flour and sugar for baking. Everything else, they raised and grew themselves. She nursed Jessamy through a bout with polio as a baby, sent seven of her children to college and buried one of Jessamy's older sisters, who died from multiple sclerosis, in the 1970s. She says her life has been about "doing right for the children."

The family was poor, Jessamy says, but, "I had joy in my childhood.

Each Christmas Eve, Beatrice Coats would take her children to Hollandale to buy 10-cent presents for one another. Daddy would play Santa Claus, Jessamy recalls, and Mama would make 14 or 15 cakes. "People would come out to the country to visit," says Jessamy's older sister, Alveria Crump.

When she was old enough for elementary school, Jessamy was sent to live with her grandparents in Hollandale. Her mother didn't want her to be educated in the one-room schoolhouse in Percy, the only option at the time for rural black children.

Jessamy's grandpa, "Papa Neal," owned a dry-cleaning business on Bee Bee Street, the only paved road northwest of the train tracks that bisected the town into white and black. The black neighborhood came to be called "Jonestown." When he died while Jessamy was in high school, Beatrice Coats moved to town and took over the dry cleaner's.

Back then downtown Hollandale, with its Goldfarb's department store, Booth's drugstore, dime stores, cafes and a theater, was humming. Juke joints bounced on Morgan Street. Three, maybe four, stoplights controlled traffic on the main roads.

During Jessamy's schooling, Principal T.R. Sanders, Howard Sanders' father, kept the children in line with whompings from a strap. They walked single file on the right side of the hallway and never let a scrap of paper litter the school grounds, Jessamy says. In college, fellow students would tease, "You must have come from a military academy."

In 1965, as a 16-year-old in the 11th grade, Jessamy began following her mother's lead in the local civil rights movement. Beatrice Coats had long been involved, helping black residents pay their poll taxes and registering to vote in the 1940s.

"We felt as though this is our little part of he world, and we were contributing our share," Jessamy says of her civil rights involvement as a teenager.

She sat in all-white lunch spots called Coker's and the cafe at the Jitney Jungle grocery store.

When she and other young people took seats on the main floor of the theater, defying the rule that blacks had to sit in the balcony, the white people were escorted out, and the movie - Jessamy says she was so scared that she doesn't remember its name - was intentionally blurred. "We sat with our eyes closed, praying that a bomb wouldn't go off," she says. "But we weren't about to leave."

Her parents joined with other black parents to file a desegregation lawsuit in their children's names under the Federal Public Accommodations Act. They took the case to federal court in Oxford, Miss., and Jessamy, mesmerized by the authority of the lawyers, found her profession.

Howard Sanders, Jessamy's chemistry teacher, had hoped she would go into medicine, "like we encouraged all the smart kids to do." But he sensed that her family's involvement with civil rights would steer her into the law.

"It was very segregated here back then, and it was just beginning to break down when Patricia grew up," Sanders says. "I think that inspired her more than anything else in her life."

When she got to Jackson State, there was a prediction that Patricia Coats, who slept little but talked a lot as a freshman in Alexander Hall, would never graduate, says her best friend and Delta Sigma Theta sorority sister, Mary Ann Bosley.

In a way, it proved true.

A few weeks before senior classes were to end, on a sticky evening in May 1970, dozens of police officers and national guardsmen lined up right outside Jessamy's apartment building. They stomped onto the campus because students' tempers had flared over a buildup of racial tension between the black college students and the white Jackson suburbanites who drove past the campus to and from work every day. When someone hurled a glass bottle that broke at their feet, the heavily armed troops responded with gunfire.

James Green, a 17-year-old high school student who'd been walking home from work, and Jackson State student Phillip Gibbs were killed.

Jessamy and her friends, who'd heard the shots, tried to rush onto campus to see what happened. Police held them back for hours. She says she couldn't believe her eyes when she finally got a look at Alexander Hall. "It was just horrible. This was a women's dorm, and there were bullet holes everywhere. All the windows had been shot out. It was reckless disregard for people."

The school closed for the summer. Jessamy, a history and political science major, received her diplomas in the mail. The first time she wore a cap and gown, she says, was about five years ago when she spoke at an honors convocation at Morgan State University.

"Jackson State figures prominently in who I am today," she told fellow alumni during a speech.

College was life-changing for another reason, too. During her senior year, she gave birth to a little girl, Erika, whom her mother and sisters helped raise so that Jessamy could finish her schooling.

She went on to the law school at the University of Mississippi, "Ole Miss," where out of 18 African-American law students, she was one of two to graduate on time. There weren't any black lawyers, she says. "I was mentored by white men."

One man who came into her life about that time has been with her since. Jessamy met Howard Jessamy at church during her last year of law school. Her more outgoing sister, Nerma, invited him to dinner in Hollandale, and the young hospital administrator brought Patricia Coats a cheese board. "I love cheese," she says, smiling broadly. A love was born, and, four years later, they married.

As a young lawyer working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the mid-1970s, Jessamy sued Grenada, Miss., for violating the Voting Rights Act. The city had been annexing white neighborhoods but not black ones, and Jessamy's lawsuit forced the redistricting of the area in a way that better represented African-Americans.

"I got a call telling me not to come to Grenada because my life was in jeopardy," she says.

As Howard Jessamy's career advanced, the family, including Erika, moved to Flint, Mich., and Kansas City, Mo., before taking root in Baltimore. Jessamy began her career with the state's attorney's office in January 1985 in the economic crimes division.

She advanced swiftly in the office, becoming a deputy state's attorney under Stuart O. Simms and assuming the top prosecutor's job when he left in 1995. She's been easily re-elected ever since and has been mentioned as a potential candidate for mayor or even a statewide office.

Jessamy says her background in civil rights and her Mississippi heritage have made her stronger. "It gives me the courage every day to do the right thing," she says.

When she speaks about her job, whether at a local function or at Jackson State last weekend, Jessamy can sound more like an educator than a hard-nosed prosecutor.

Her motto, "Working together we can make a difference," and her "three-pronged approach to crime: prevention, treatment and law enforcement" convey a less aggressive message than that her counterparts in other big cities and even surrounding Maryland counties.

She regularly entertains groups of students in her office on the second floor of the city's courthouse, quizzing them on Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., the civil rights activist for whom the building is named, and making them promise never to be led into the courthouse in shackles and chains.

That Jessamy is not solely focused on the crime-and-punishment aspect of her job has drawn the admiration of some and criticism from others, who believe a city steeped in drug addiction and drug-related homicides should have a hard-charging top prosecutor.

One of the harshest assessments of Jessamy's style came from Mayor Martin O'Malley, a former prosecutor, who unleashed a profanity-laced tirade against her in January 2001, saying she didn't have the guts to take on tough, sensitive cases. Jessamy held firm - as she did a few years earlier when she refused to prosecute a black police officer involved in a shooting that angered the city - that she would not target people "on the request of a politician or anyone else."

She has criticized city police for not properly articulating their reasons for arresting people, and her office throws out many cases each month giving insufficient evidence as the reason.

Marcella A. Holland, administrative judge of the Baltimore Circuit Court and a former prosecutor, says she understands Jessamy's approach and that it's rooted in an interest in civil rights.

Holland says she wanted to be a defense attorney because she thought that's how she could best help African-Americans. But then-State's Attorney Kurt L. Schmoke, who also hired Jessamy, told Holland that becoming a prosecutor meant that she could hold the fate of a black person in her hands and see what's needed - drug treatment, jail time or another chance.

"Pat picks up on that," Holland says. "She knows that curing some of the problems that bring people to court is the only way to ease the workload."

Jessamy's employees think of her as a protector. The angriest she gets, says longtime prosecutor Elizabeth Ritter, is when she thinks her employees are being unfairly blamed for losing a case or making a bad decision. "She's like a mother defending her lion cubs," Ritter says.

Adds Haven Kodeck, one of Jessamy's deputies: "She'll support you publicly, but behind closed doors she'll have no trouble telling you that you've screwed up."

Holland describes Jessamy's style this way: "She's as sweet as can be, but when she needs to get to the point, she can go right at it. She moves fast. Ever heard of the terminology 'Mississippi Thunder'?"

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