*On the march against racism*
September 28, 2007 | Pages 4 to 7
NICOLE COLSON reports from Jena, La., on the massive outpouring for a
demonstration against a case of Jim Crow-style injustice in the "new South."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
FIFTY YEARS ago this month, the world watched as nine Black students braved
a jeering white mob as they walked into the segregated Central High School
in Little Rock, Ark., in the pursuit of an equal education.
The images from that September day in 1957 show the ugly reality of American
racism. Elizabeth Eckford had arrived alone on the first day of school, and
was turned away by the Arkansas National Guard on orders of Democratic Gov.
Orval Faubus. The crowd of whites that surrounded her as she later walked to
a bus stop looked ready to lynch her. All of the nine would face similar
harassment.
Coming after the 1954 *Brown v. the Board of Education* Supreme Court
decision that outlawed legal segregation, Little Rock showed the reality of
racism in the U.S.--that equality before the law mattered little in the Jim
Crow South, and that racism would have to be fought every step of the way to
overcome it.
Today, we're told that America has moved beyond its ugly past--that nooses,
"separate but equal" and "Jim Crow justice" are relics of a bygone era. But
50 years after Little Rock, the case of the Jena 6 is proving that racism is
alive and well.
*What you can do*
For information on the case and ways to show your support, go to the Free
the Jena 6 <http://www.freethejena6.org/> Web site. You can sign a petition
for the Jena 6 <http://www.colorofchange.org/jena/> and find other activist
resources at the Color of Change <http://www.colorofchange.org/> Web site.
Alan Bean of Friends of Justice, a criminal justice reform organization that
has worked on cases of injustice in the South, gave an interview to
the *International
Socialist Review *on "Racism in Jena: The new Jim
Crow."<http://www.isreview.org/issues/55/jena.shtml>
The Jena 6 are six high school students facing decades in prison for their
alleged part in a school fight--which itself followed a series of racist
incidents endured by the small minority of African Americans in this
Louisiana town of less than 3,000 people.
The case has many of the hallmarks of the Jim Crow past--a vindictive white
prosecutor, all-white juries, blatant double standards in punishment.
And, of course, the nooses--hung from a tree in the courtyard of Jena's high
school to intimidate Black students who dared to expect equal treatment.
The story of the Jena 6 has spread around the country and the world, causing
disbelief--and anger. On September 20, that anger found an outlet--with tens
of thousands of people mobilizing around the country to stand up for the
Jena 6.
Hundreds rallied on college campuses in Nashville, Houston, Atlanta,
Cleveland, Toledo, Muncie, Ind., Berkeley, Calif., and beyond. In Allentown,
Pa., middle school students marched. In Chicago, students from the all-male
Hales Franciscan High School on the South Side organized an out-of-uniform
day so they could wear black to show support for the Jena 6. Hundreds more
marched in communities in Detroit, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
And then there was Jena itself. Tens of thousands of people descended on the
tiny town. From early in the morning, protesters came pouring down the
sloping road into Jena. They rallied in the town park and walked to the
courthouse--and to Jena High School to witness the spot where the "whites
only" tree once stood. The tree has since been removed--although the
school's burned-out auditorium, set on fire by an unknown arsonist last
November, remains.
Ashleigh Randle, a student at the University of Michigan, drove 22 hours
with a group of fellow students to stand in the courtyard. "We wanted to
come and stand up for what is right, because we're tired of what's been
going on, the racial injustice," she said.
"People act like racism is in the past, but it's not. It's subtle or it's
blunt, but it's out there. We want people to know that we're tired of
settling for less. I say look around. How can you look at Hurricane Katrina
and say racism doesn't exist?"
Ashleigh's fellow student, Shanika Steen, pointed to the spot where the tree
once stood. "The noose that was hung on the tree. And another one at the
University of Maryland a couple of days ago. You can't look at these things
and say, 'It's not racism, it's just something that happened.'"
Shavette Wayne Jones traveled to Jena from St. Louis with a group of about
60 people. "I came because I have two sons of my own," she said. "I have a
2-year-old and a 9-year-old. My mother and I came together. This could very
well be one of my children."
Among everyone in the streets of Jena that day, there was a determination to
take a stand--if the racism of the Jim Crow days had returned, they would
stand up against it, just like the civil rights marchers of 50 years ago.
The sign Shavette held summarized the mood: "Jena, La., today. Anytown, USA,
tomorrow. Not on our watch!"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE DOUBLE standards that run through the case of the Jena 6 are
unmistakable.
The schoolyard assault that the six Black students are charged with was
preceded by a series of racist incidents, beginning when three white
students hung nooses from a tree in the courtyard of Jena High School. The
nooses appeared the day after some Black students asked for and received
permission from an assistant principal to sit under the tree, traditionally
"reserved" for whites only.
Dismissed as a "prank" by LaSalle Parish Schools Superintendent Roy
Breithaupt, the white students who hung the nooses received in-school
suspensions.
But to Jena's Black residents, the incident was a clear threat. "It meant
the KKK, it meant 'niggers, we're going to kill you, we're going to hang you
'til you die,'" Caseptla Bailey, whose son is also among the six, later told
Britain's *Observer*.
When Black students attempted to address the school board about the noose
incident, they were turned away--with the board apparently deciding that it
had dealt with the issue.
After Black students staged a sit-in under the tree in response to the
nooses, LaSalle Parish County District Attorney Reed Walters was called in
to address a school assembly. According to Black students, Walters said to
stop "fussing" over an "innocent prank"--and then, looking specifically at
them, said: "See this pen? I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen."
In late November, Robert Bailey, a Black student, was beaten up at a party
attended by mostly whites. According to the Louisiana Public Defenders'
Association, police initially refused to let Bailey make a complaint against
his attacker and warned Black students at the party to get "get their Black
asses out of this part of town."
A few nights later, Bailey and two others were threatened by a white student
with a sawed-off shotgun at the town's "Gotta Go" convenience store. The
three wrestled the gun away and fled, but instead of police arresting the
white student who pulled the gun, Bailey was initially arrested and charged
with second-degree robbery, theft of a firearm and disturbing the peace.
At school the following week, a white student, Justin Barker, allegedly
taunted Bailey. After lunch, Barker was knocked down, punched and kicked by
a group of Black students, said to include Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones,
Bryant Purvis, Mychal Bell and another unidentified minor. Barker was taken
to the hospital, though he was well enough to attend a party that night.
As Walters promised, there was instant retaliation for the six Black
students. They were immediately expelled, and slapped with charges of
attempted second-degree murder--punishable by 30 years in prison. Several of
the Jena 6 remained in jail for months because their families couldn't
afford bail, which ranged from $70,000 for Purvis to $138,000 for Bailey.
The injustice didn't end there. Mychal Bell was the first to come to trial.
In June, on the morning his trial began, the charges against him were
reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy. The battery
charge, however, was based on the idea that Bell used a "deadly weapon"
during the assault--according to Walters, Bell's gym shoe.
Bell was eventually found guilty by an all-white jury--which included two
people who were allegedly friendly with the Walters and one who was a friend
of the victim's father. Not only was the jury all-white, but the jury pool
itself didn't contain a single African American.
According to the Jena 6 families, Bell's court-appointed defense attorney
had been trying to cut a plea deal with the DA behind the scenes. The
attorney didn't call a single witness in Mychal's defense or present any
evidence on his behalf.
The charges against Jones, Shaw and Bailey have been reduced to aggravated
second-degree battery and conspiracy. Purvis has yet to be arraigned in the
case and is the only remaining Jena Six member still charged with attempted
second-degree murder.
Bell was originally scheduled to be sentenced on September 20, facing as
much as 22 years in prison. But with the increased media attention and wave
of activism around the case, new lawyers were able to overturn Mychal's
conviction. The trial judge first threw out the conspiracy charge, and,
later, Bell's battery conviction was overturned when an appeals court judge
ruled that he should not have been tried as an adult.
The reversal of Mychal's conviction, however, doesn't affect the four other
Jena 6 members charged as adults--because they were 17 at the time of the
alleged crime and, under Louisiana law, are no longer considered juveniles.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
UNEQUAL "JUSTICE" is nothing new in Jena. Michael Kirkland, who runs a
barbeque stand outside the Christian Saints Baptist Church on the road into
town, has lived in Jena for the past 10 years, "It's a rough town," said
Kirkland. "It's a good town, but it's rough. It's very segregated."
Kirkland rejects the idea that racism is a thing of the past in Jena. "It
happens all the time," he says.
When the superintendent suggested that the hanging of the nooses was a
"prank," Kirkland said, "It shocked the Black community. It didn't shock the
white community because that was what they wanted him to do. He's their
puppet on a string."
As for the incident with the shotgun, Kirkland says, "It was outrageous.
This same guy who pulled the gun, he got away easy. But they charged the boy
who took the gun from him with theft."
Gregory Gibbs, who was raised in Jena and attended Jena High, now lives in
Alexandria. He speaks today of "getting through" and "getting out." Heywood
Williams, who attended Jena High, too, and still lives in Jena, has the same
feelings about the school.
According to Gibbs and Williams, it's not surprising that racial tensions
would flare up at the high school, since kids in Jena attend separate,
racially segregated elementary schools. White children, the men say, go to
Nebo Elementary, while Black kids attend a separate school.
Though the "whites only" tree at Jena High may be gone, there's still the
"Nebo bench," the men say, where only students from Nebo--in other words,
all whites--traditionally sit.
Blacks who have tried speaking out against racism in the past in Jena have
found themselves retaliated against, Gibbs says. "If you get too outspoken
here," he says, "you might show up at work in the morning and find you don't
have a job. So that's what took it so long to come out."
Now, the conditions that Gibbs and others have endured are known around the
world, thanks to the outrage of people who heard about the story--often on
the Internet or from a Black radio station--and forced it into the
mainstream media.
Even George W. Bush was forced to weigh in. Asked about the planned protest
at a news conference, he said the "events in Louisiana have saddened me,"
and advised whoever is elected next year to "reach out to the African
American community." In other words, don't look for any justice from Bush's
Justice Department.
Meanwhile, Louisiana's Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco had declared that the
case was a "local matter," and she doesn't have the jurisdiction to
intervene.
But some Democrats are finding themselves on the hot seat for their failure
to speak out. Earlier in the week, at a meeting in South Carolina, Jesse
Jackson took Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to task for
failing to respond to Jena. "Jena is a defining moment, just like Selma was
a defining moment," said Jackson.
The emotions stirred by the injustice in Jena were clear on September 20,
the date that Mychal Bell had been scheduled to be sentenced, when tens of
thousands of people made the trip to Jena--and demand that the charges
against Mychal and the rest of the Jena 6 be dropped.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHEN THE charges against Mychal Bell were overturned earlier this month,
Jena officials must have breathed a sigh of relief--figuring that the
September 20 demonstration wouldn't draw a big turnout.
They were wrong. At least 50,000 people traveled to the out-of-the-way town,
one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in 40 years.
The night before the protest, in Alexandria, La., a larger town 45 minutes
south of Jena, every hotel and motel for miles around was sold out, filled
with protesters preparing for the next day.
The next morning, buses and cars began arriving in Jena as early as 4:30 a.m.
By 7:30 a.m., the two-lane road into town was backed up for at least a mile
or more. Every available parking space for miles out of town was taken on
both sides of the road.
Hundreds of people--nearly all dressed in black shirts in solidarity--began
the long walk into town as more cars and buses continued on the road. The
arrival of a contingent of hundreds of Black motorcycle riders--organized
through Black clubs across the country--brought cheers and awe.
Days earlier, when it became clear that there would be no stopping the
protest, state officials declared a "state of emergency" in LaSalle Parish,
where Jena is located, in order to ensure that some provisions would be made
for protesters--portable toilets, emergency service, and so on. The Red
Cross was on hand as well, to distribute water and Gatorade--a necessity,
when the temperature climbed to 92 degrees by midday.
On the way into town, people's spirits were buoyed by the size of the
turnout. Signs, banners and shirts bore witness to the distances people had
traveled--from Washington, D.C., Chicago and Atlanta, and across Texas and
Louisiana. Contingents from colleges and Black fraternities, churches and
community groups, and civil rights organizations, continued to pour
in--along with people who had simply heard about the case and been angered
enough to come on their own or with a group of friends.
"Memphis supports the Jena 6," read one sign. "Atlanta supports the Jena 6:
Until the six are free, never are we," read another, pasted on the side of a
van full to overflowing.
One of the passengers, Carnell, was cheering and pumping his fists as he
rode on top of the van while it crawled along in the traffic. He said he and
his friends decided to make the nine-hour drive after hearing about the case
on talk radio. Disbelief gave way to outrage and the desire to do something
to help win justice, he explained.
Johnny Williams, better known as "Big John" and a member of the Buffalo
Soldiers motorcycle club in Alexandria, La., expressed the same sentiments.
"When word got out, it wasn't any problem [getting people together]," he
said. "I wouldn't be anywhere else today. I think it's very, very
impressive. We need it.
On the way into town, a large highway sign pointed buses toward the Ward 10
Recreation Park, where thousands gathered for a rally featuring civil rights
leaders and family members of the Jena 6, to be followed by a march through
town later in the day.
But thousands felt compelled to go in the opposite direction--toward the
center of town, to the LaSalle Parish Courthouse, where Mychal Bell was
convicted, and farther down the road to the Jena High, to seek out evidence
of the "white tree" and stand in defiance of racism.
The courthouse stands on a small hill that was soon packed with people, the
overflow spilling onto the crowded streets below. As a small group of state
police and--it appeared--town officials looked on with stony faces from the
steps, protesters jeered or chanted with raised fists: "Free Mychal Bell,"
"No justice, no peace," "Enough is enough."
In the morning, Rev. Al Sharpton arrived on the courthouse steps with Marcus
Jones, the father of Mychal Bell. "This is a march for justice," Sharpton
said as the crowd broke out into cheers.
"[Rev. Martin Luther] King went to Selma. That wasn't the only place you
couldn't vote. That was the point of action. They went to Birmingham. That
wasn't the only place we didn't have public accommodations. It was the point
of action. Jena is a point of action for the Jenas everywhere. There's Jenas
in Atlanta, there's Jenas in New York, there's Jenas in Florida, and there
are Jenas all over Texas."
Later in the day, Rev. Jesse Jackson made the same point, drawing wild
applause before leading a march from the park to the courthouse. "There's a
Jena in every state in America," he said, mentioning police torture of
African Americans under the watch of Commander Jon Burge in Chicago, the
beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the use of prison slave labor
today at Angola prison in Louisiana.
The message was the same at the high school, where protesters came to see
where the "whites only" tree once stood. Shavette Wayne Jones from St. Louis
remembered her years as a college student at Grambling State
University--when she protested white supremacist David Duke running for
governor of Louisiana.
"I just find it ironic that, here I am, coming back down here after that
many years, to fight for justice to prevail again," she said. "I went to
school in Louisiana for four years, so I know that not only is here in
Louisiana, but it's everywhere. Sometimes it's not as blatant as this, but
all you have to do is live to experience it. It's alive and well."
Helen Comeaux drove five hours from Dallas with her friend Djuna LeBlanc to
attend the protest. "I have seven grandkids, and it just scares me for
them," she said. "We have to stand up now and fight. We have to. This
happens everywhere. I think this is an eye-opener for everybody, not just
Black people. It happens in small towns, big cities, everywhere."
Her friend Djuna added: "We want to let everybody know that we're tired, and
we're not going to let our children be thrown away like that. Enough is
enough."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
TO HEAR town officials tell it, the problem in Jena isn't racism, but
"outsiders" stirring up trouble.
That certainly seems to be the attitude of Reed Walters, the district
attorney. The day before the protest, Walters spoke at what *Democracy Now's
* Rick Rowley called "one of the unfriendlier press conferences I think I've
ever seen."
Walters began by blaming the media for supposedly finding examples of
Southern racism where none existed. Jena, he seemed to suggest, was simply
suffering from an irrational media bias against the small-town South.
"This case has been portrayed by the news media as being about race, and the
fact that it takes place in a small Southern town lends itself to that
portrayal," Walters said. "But it is not and never has been about race. It
is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people
accountable for their actions."
But Walters, who was also the lawyer for the school board when the nooses
were hung, never described how white students were "held accountable" for
their actions.
According to Rowley, "At the end, as someone asked [Walters], 'Why are you
trying to destroy these boys' lives with a stroke of your pen?' he picked up
his folder and scattered microphones across the ground and said, 'It's
obvious that this press conference is out of control.' And he turned around
and ran back inside the courthouse."
Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, who was expelled from
Central High in 1958 in part for spilling food on a group of white boys who
were harassing her, compared Walters' "outsiders" complaint to her own
experience.
"The rhetoric is that 'our Negroes are fine, and y'all people are coming
down here, riling them up,'" she told *Democracy Now's *Amy Goodman in an
interview the day of the Jena demonstration. "That's what it sounds like,
and that's the tragedy. But I also think it's because of hearing that again
that people feel such a sense of alarm."
For many of Jena's Black residents, the presence of "outsiders" is welcome.
When Goodman asked the Jena 6 mother Caseptla Baily, "What do you say to
those who say this is a bunch of outsiders coming in, everything was fine in
Jena before they started marching on our town?" Bailey replied, "Well, I'd
like to say that everything wasn't fine in Jena. That's why the outsiders
are here, and that's why everything has gone so tremendously within the last
few months.
"So I'd like to applaud those people that have come here from the
outside--to come in and to support us and help us and assist us in this
matter. I'd like to say, hats off to those persons."
Gregory Gibbs had the same reaction. "Thirty years late" was how he
described the protest for the Jena 6. "It's been a long time coming," he
said. "We've had so much injustice here. We happened to be raised in it, and
we survived it. But they do it with the legal system now. They almost got
away with it.
Heywood Williams agreed. "There's a level for the whites and a level for the
Blacks," he said. "It's just like back in the '60s, like the way they had
the water fountains--one for the colored, and one for the whites. That's the
way our justice system is set up, on two levels--one for the colored, and
one for the whites. That's the way our school system is set up."
"Living here in Jena, people get along for the most part, but when it comes
down to treating each other fairly, the justice system is one-sided.
"And they let you know who you are. They let you know where you're from and
where you're at. They let you know that you're in Louisiana and that you're
down in the South. They let you know that they prefer their race to be the
dominant race."
If Reed Walters and Jena officials get their way, things will stay the way
they've always been. After Bell's conviction was overturned by the appeals
court judge, Walters vowed to appeal.
And in a sore disappointment for supporters of the Jena 6, a judge rejected
a request by Mychal Bell's lawyer to allow the teen to be freed on bail
while his appeal is heard--effectively keeping him in prison for the
immediate future. A request to remove the original trial judge, J.P.
Mauffray Jr., from the case, was also denied--despite the fact that Mauffray
preceded over a farce that included Bell being improperly charged as an
adult.
The Jena 6 and their families could face other forms of retaliation as well,
On the evening of the demonstration, for example, two teens were arrested
after driving a pickup through downtown Alexandria, with nooses hanging off
the back. Both allegedly had been drinking, and a gun and brass knuckles
were found in their truck.
And in the wake of all the publicity surrounding the case, nooses have been
found at other schools--Andres High School in North Carolina and the
University of Maryland, to name two.
And to top it off, the families of the Jena 6 were targeted for harassment
by a neo-Nazi group that called on its Web site for the Jena 6 to be lynched
and posted some of the families' addresses and phone numbers "in case anyone
wants to deliver justice."
Rev. Sharpton said in a statement that "[s]ome of the families have received
almost around-the-clock calls of threats and harassment...[The fact] that
some person could actually harm or even continue to harass these families
with no effort by law enforcement, will further exacerbate the tensions
around this case immeasurably."
The struggle to win justice for the Jena 6 and challenge the racism that the
case represents is far from over--but the protests on September 20 were an
important step.
"People have been crying out for a long time for equal justice," said
Heywood Williams. "It took Al Sharpton and the coalition groups and Jesse
Jackson and all the other people who came, and they got the world's
attention. This small thing you see right here in Jena, if you allow it to
continue, will spread. If they can get away with it now, they'll do it
again.
"They were going to take those six kids' lives and just ruin them--just
throw them away. That's what [Reed Walters] was intending to do. They've
done it for years and years. That's how we were raised."
But things are different now that attention has been focused on Jena, says
Williams. "I'm glad the people did come because it takes a movement," he
said. "It takes a movement every time. And today we've seen it. They showed
they whole world, and the whole world is showing this system down here that
a change has got to come."
As Michael Kirkland put it, "I hope it's an eye opener--the attention of
America on Jena. The whole world is watching now."
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