Remember those racist emails chronicled by the Department of Justice in its shocking March report on racial bias in the city of Ferguson, Missouri?
The Washington Post and BuzzFeed have now obtained the actual messages — sent by Ferguson officials — through a public-records request.
The unredacted versions reveal the names of the people who sent and received the emails (former court clerk Mary Ann Twitty, former police captain Rick Henke, and former police sergeant William Mudd), and the accompanying images provide more detail on the racist "jokes" they shared.
A particularly bad one includes a photo of Ronald Reagan holding a chimpanzee, along with the caption "Ronald Reagan babysitting Barack Obama in early 1962."
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(An image in an email forwarded by Ferguson's court clerk in 2011)
The image of Reagan above gives a better idea of what Twitty thought was so amusing when she forwarded along what DOJ described in March as an "April 2011 email depicting President Obama as a chimpanzee."
The Washington Post reports that the Ferguson officials who sent and received the emails were all fired after an internal investigation.
The emails certainly aren't the worst of the DOJ's report, which found that police and court officials regularly violated the constitutional rights of African Americans in ways that go far beyond tasteless jokes — but they are jarring reminders of how some of the people tasked with carrying out justice thought of the citizens of the predominantly black community they served.
