Updated Below:
I am helping spread the word in the blogosphere about the Jena Six. I’ve just read a post by Shanikka that turned my blood cold.
The beginning:
On August 31, 2006, a black student at Jena High School asked school administrators whether he could sit under the “white tree,” a shade tree on school grounds that had historically been used only by white students in the largely-segregated town of Jena, Louisiana. After hearing that he could sit wherever they wanted, he did.
The next morning, he and the other Black students of Jena High School were greeted with three nooses hanging from the “white tree.” — in the school colors, I guess to make them more noticeable.
The culprits were identified and received a full three day suspension for their acts, which many Black southerners rightfully see as a terrorist threat. How many nooses were hung from trees to intimidate Black families? How many Black men swung from nooses to teach those uppity coloreds a lesson? There was no mistaking the intention of the nooses hanging in that tree. This was no “prank” by a couple of kids.
What happened next:
Naturally, the Black community got a bit upset. Parents started trying to identify who to complain to. The Black students of Jena High went a different route. They (apparently spontaneously) reached into the wellspring of political action that has served justice well for millenia:
They decided to collectively protest by ALL sitting under the white tree at the same time.
Civil disobedience in an effort to make a point. It’s every American’s right and they did nothing wrong. At least most people with any kind of sensitivity would see nothing wrong. Unfortunately this was a small Southern town- which hasn’t quite made it into the 21st century. They were chastised and actually warned to stop making the nooses “a big deal”.
Jena High’s administration called a mandatory student assembly. LaSalle Parish’s DA, Reed Walters, accompanied by 10 fine representatives of LaSalle Parish law enforcement, came to address the students. Students contend that the DA threatened the protesting Black students with retribution if they didn’t stop making a fuss about the noose incident. He reportedly also said to these young men and women the words that were portends of the nightmare that the Jena Six now face:
I can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen.After this assembly, and the DA’s “laying down the law” students were reportedly put on lock down for the rest of the school week.
They didn’t want anyone to get wind of what was happening in their town. They didn’t want those damned Negroes to get too confident and maybe bring some cameras around. Remember, this was 2006.
Following this there were some incidents, fights, white kids tormenting black kids, and finally the black kids having enough.
On December 4, 2006 - Monday — back at school at Jena High, a white student named Justin Barker, allegedly began taunting Black students, including Robert Bailey, Jr.. He called them niggers repeatedly and expressing support for the white students who hung the nooses and beat up Bailey.[...]
[...]This was the proverbial camel-breaking straw, I guess, for the young Black male students of Jena High School who witnessed it. Justin Barker was apparently knocked out cold with a single punch, and while he was down, allegedly kicked by several black students. He was up and about by the time the police and ambulance arrived. After being scanned, treatened and released at the hospital, he attended his school’s ring party that same evening. He reportedly had to spend the next week on Tylenol.
Justin Barker got his ass kicked. Some would even say he deserved it. Obviously the school wasn’t going to do anything about these little bullies. Their parents weren’t taking them to task. These kids were reverting to behavior seen in 1950’s South. Despicable. Too bad they were in the South though.
I would also like to note that Justin Barker brought a gun to school during the trial of one of these young men and received no more than a slap on the wrist. Another white youth got into an argument with some black youths and pulled a shotgun on them (at a convenience store). The black kids took the gun from the white boy and ran with it. The black kids were charged with theft (after calling police to report what had happened) and the white boy got nothing.
After the fight, the boys who laid the beat down got their own beat down:
For their headache, six black Jena students — Robert Bailey Jr. (17), Mychal Bell (16 - charged as an adult), Carwin Jones (18), Theo Shaw (17), Bryant Purvis (17), and an unidentified 15-year old were each arrested and charged with second-degree attempted murder because of their alleged involvement in the beat-down of Justin Barker. Their bail amounts ranged from a low of $70,000 to a high of $138,000 (for Robert Bailey, Jr.) Most remained in jail for months until their poverty-stricken families could post bond. Mychal Bell and Carwin Shaw have never left jail - neither of their families could afford to bail them out.
The Jena Six were all expelled from Jena High School, their academic careers now officially over.
Mychal Bell was the first to go to trial. What happened at that trial will make your stomach turn.
Mychal Bell’s fate was swift, and once again, predictable — since his public defender put on no witnesses on his behalf, whereas the DA put on 17 witnesses — all white, including young master Barker. Trial was held before a white judge, and an all-white jury selected from an all-white venire, on which sat two friends of the DA, a white witness’ relative, and several friends of witnesses for the prosecution. Mychal Bell’s parents could not attend the trial to support their son, excluded by the rule that normally excludes trial witnesses to avoid tainting their testimony — yet Justin Barker was permitted to attend, despite his also being a witness governed by that rule. A gag order was even placed on Bell’s parents, preventing them from letting the world know that their son was on trial for an aggravated felony only for racial reasons. At trial, 11 white students, 3 white teachers and 2 white school nurses gave varying testimony about whether Mychal Bell did, or did not, do anything to Justin Barker. Justin Barker admitted he did not know whether Mychal Bell even touched him.
But this is Jena, Louisiana. So after only 3 hours of deliberation, Mychal Bell was convicted on July 28, 2007 of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it. He is scheduled to be sentenced on September 20, 2007. He faces a maximum sentence of 22 years in prison. [emphasis added]
To say this is a travesty of justice would be an understatement. This boy’s trial was a crime. The crime for which he was charged was criminal. Instead of hanging these boys from trees, the town of Jena, Louisiana is lynching them through the criminal justice system.
Shanikka is part of the AfroSpear, a collective of black bloggers. They are asking people to post this story on their blogs, contact the media, and whatever else it takes to get the nation’s eye on this circus in Jena. This is my effort to see real justice done and these boys receive punishment’s fitting their crime- as juvenile’s and with their lives still intact.
The noose’s hanging in that tree was an overt act of terrorism against the black students of Jena High School. That alone would constitute mitigating circumstances. Add to that the authorities lack of concern and compassion for the black citizens of Jena and Jena High School, the constant barrage of torment from some of the young (and no doubt old) white folks and you have a real problem brewing. Considering the length of time these boys sat in jail, though, and the mistreatment and blatant racism they’ve faced, I’d consider their time served.
Hat tip Shanikka. Please go to her site and read the linked post.
Update:
Counterpunch has an excellent article detailing some of the campus life at Jena High School.
Marcus Jones, Mychal Bell’s father, described the assembly to Revolution:
“Now remember, with everything that goes on at Jena High School, everybody’s separated. The only time when Black and white kids are together is in the classroom and when they playing sports together. During lunch time, Blacks sit on one side, whites sit on the other side of the cafeteria. During canteen time, Blacks sit on one side of the campus, whites sit on the other side of the campus.
“At any activity done in the auditorium-anything-Blacks sit on one side, whites on the other side, okay? The DA tells the principal to call the students in the auditorium. They get in there. The DA tells the Black students, he’s looking directly at the Black students-remember, whites on one side, Blacks on the other side-he’s looking directly at the Black students. He told them to keep their mouths shut about the boys hanging their nooses up. If he hears anything else about it, he can make their lives go away with the stroke of his pen.”
Not “forced” segregation per se, but definitely “understood”. Still. Yet some still say that race issues in America are unimportant now. Heh.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Sphere: Related Content
Site Tags: Jena-Louisiana, kangaroo-court, Racism-in-America, The-Jena-Six, travesty-of-Justice
Technorati Tags: Jena-Louisiana, kangaroo-court, Racism-in-America, The-Jena-Six, travesty-of-Justice
Powered by FireStats
26 Comments
If nooses on trees isn’t an act of terrorism, then nothing is. That wouldn’t have happened here. Well, unless football was involved, of course. I’ll put this in my shared thing for a while.
BTW, I found at Shanikka’s a link to something called the Ultraviolet Underground. How cool is that?
http://purplezoe.blogspot.com/
I was so flabbergasted that On August 31, 2006, a black student at Jena High School asked school administrators whether he could sit under the “white tree,â€, I had to stop reading for a bit. There’s still segregation in public areas? One has to ask in the 21st century?
Then I read on and it just got worse. How can something like this even begin to happen in today’s America?
According to the nice folks in Jena, LA, it was only a “prank”. Nooses are meaningless, right? Hmmph.
Yes there are still areas understood to be segregated. And the more I read about Jena the more disgusted I get. This started because a child wanted some shade. In 2006. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around how horrible that must have been.
There’s still racism in my town. But it’s not so overt. Black kids are assumed to be trouble makers and white women who have babies by black men are “just asking for trouble”. There was that one incident with that little boy who was convicted (and later exonerated) of killing that little girl (who’s killer is still free). But I cannot imagine what the children in Jena have to go through every day. It’s infuriating. And the justice in that area? It’s like something out of a really bad movie.
A prank??
Last I heard, a prank is putting shaving cream in someone’s shoe or *gasp* freezing their bra.
A noose hanging in a ‘white tree’ send a very clear statement. I’m sure no white student walked past the ‘white tree’ with a noose hanging from it and became fearful.
And what the hell is up with the segregation? Unless my history books fail me (and they often do, but I’m fairly certain in this case the books are right.) Blacks are just as free as whites and can sit where ever they damned well please.
This ’slap on the wrist’ for the white folks is a big mistake and sets a precedence for greater atrocities.
It really pisses me off.
It is quite sad…despite what mainstream America likes to believe, racism and discrimination are alive and kicking. The talk around my city now, is about the youtube video posted as a commercial, featuring a Klansman giving info on Klan march…45 minutes from where I live.
It’s sad that this sort of stuff still goes on. Sadder still is it’s not surprising. If the races had been reversed in any sort of story like this, it would be all over the news. Stories like this remind me why I had to get the hell out of Virginia. There’s still racism in the North, but that kind of blatant racism and no justice, I just can’t stomach that.
I read about this incident some months ago and was very shocked that this is still happening in 2007 America. Thanks for this valuable and well-written post.
They should torch that damn tree and give the south a new symbol.
Seriously chilling that this sort of stuff still goes on. You would have to be some kind of insensitive moron to dismiss the noose as a ‘prank’. Seems, they are. I will keep and ear out for the result of the trial in late September.
An Open Letter To The Jena Six
By Joseph Young
Washington Informer
Dear Mychal,
I keep thinking about you. I also think about the other young men who have fallen prey to racial hatred. Its existence, more than a century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, makes me fearful for your life, your safety. The freedom that it promised was tenuous.
It was not entirely without strength. In the proclamation, issued three years into the Civil War, Lincoln declared, at the urging of Frederick Douglass, that the former slaves would be accepted into the Union Army and navy, making the liberated the liberator. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 black servicemen had fought for freedom and saved the Union.
Your generation, like mine, is being denied this freedom our ancestors risked life and limb, so that we may live as free men and women. You can call them heroes, but they were not thinking of themselves when they displayed courage and self-sacrifice on the battlefields of America.
Today, then, to guard against the impending doom of American civilization, is not only opposition to racism, but also the determination to secure the civil rights for which many Americans have paid a heavy toll. Of all the civil rights, the right to learn is the surest prevention from ignorance. If at any time, children are instructed with anti-black bias; and they are made to learn what is not true and what the dominate forces in their lives want them to think is true; there’re guilty of impeding the march toward American civilization.
Astonishing as it is that those students would hang three nooses from the tree at Jena High School as a racial taunt, including calling the black students ‘niggers’; you would think that America would never again want to see a black person hang from a tree, or behind bars. The nooses show that we, Americans, have not come that far from the cruelties and barbarity of slavery as we think. (Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 5,000 people, mostly blacks, met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.) And this also is an unfortunate comment upon the belief that our schools are the great path to progress, the great equalizer. If our schools are the great path to progress, they must be the freest of our institutions, opposed bitterly to the attempt to indoctrinate our children with racial hatred.
Well, Mychal, as you and the others wait behind bars because of a racially biased and an over zealous prosecutor, it is for us on the outside to continue the unfinished work of our fathers, to set you free. All of you were willing to fight racial hatred, and you know people of goodwill are beside you. If the Confederacy couldn’t stop us, the opposition we now face will fail. When history is written your detractors will get little note, but you will be remembered for standing up for what’s best of the American creed. You are part of a legacy in which our slave forebears fought to birth a new nation. You, Mychal, are a child of America’s destiny.
It was Martin Luther King who said if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for he is not fit to live. Freedom is worth dying for. Justice is worth dying for. Equality is worth dying for. A child is worth dying for, because our job as parents is to protect children.
Mychal, when you feel complete frustration and your narrow jail cell is closing in on your spirit and mind; remember the message of the old slave preacher to his flock whose resistance to oppression might have been completely in vain:
“You are created in God’s image. You are not slaves, you are not ‘niggers’; you are God’s children.â€
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph
Why would someone want to sit where they aren’t wanted??? I would be embarrassed to sit in a place that black people labeled “for blacks”, or even on a bench where another family is sitting—-it’s the same thing. Don’t you get it??! I mean, would you honestly sit on a park bench where a family is sitting and demand to stay there with them. That is nuts!! White people are able to understand this and black people are not!
Opal it is quite clear that you do not understand…… Black or White we have the right to sit where ever we want to. There was no sign that stated this was a place “for white’s only”, it was only implied. So the Black students had a right to sit there, whether they were wanted or not. Why would you let someone make you feel embarrassed about your right to choose where you want to sit. Don’t you get it - This is America - the 21st Century. The Black students could have sat under the tree without permission, it was not private property, it was school property…….But by asking for permission, I am sure they thought it would be okay, well within their rights, which according to school officials, it was okay. It was the White students’ that still had the “Jim Crow” mentality that did not understand that -This is America, and we have the freedom and right to sit where we want to……..Now what’s nuts about that!!
Don’t you get that the tree was the only shade in the school yard? Don’t you get that the white kids were the ones with the problem and the white community made that shade off limits?
That doesn’t make any sense in the context of this story. These kids, and in fact all Blacks in the South 50 years ago, are considered second class citizens. That’s nuts. The fact that someone tried to terrorize them after someone sat under a tree was nuts. I suppose you believe they shouldn’t have protested those nooses either.
You should be thankful that your skin color doesn’t cause people to treat you differently or bar you from such things as sitting on a bench (your very wrong analogy). You should also be appalled that this type of stuff still happens in this country. Of course, I doubt you’ll see the sense in that. By your tone I’m sure you’d be perfectly happy if the old Southern laws still applied. That’s nuts.
By law, they are allowed to sit anywhere. It’s only implied whites only at this point. However, the implication is enforced, as you can see. Fucking sad.
Thanks, swampcracker.
I’m more than a little disturbed that I hadn’t heard this story before. It really should have been in the national spotlight.
Beautiful letter, Joesph.
Thank you.
A-men.
“White people are able to understand this and black people are not!”
It’s easily understood. Your skin is white, and your heart is black.
Charges reduced! Check it out:
Here
Sheesh, Opal. So, because certain people apparently made this ’social gaffe’ of sitting where certain other people didn’t want them to sit, then they get subjected to nooses being tied around the tree and all of the threats of physical violence that this action implies???
And this is OK by you, is it?
The big issue for you is that the white people who usually sit there, don’t want the black people to sit there, is it?
Even though this is communal land?
And even though this informal ‘rule’ of who gets to sit under the tree seems to have been made on a totally racist basis?
If you’ve hit upon the real issue here, then I guess I don’t get it, Opal.
Nice that they’ve reduced the charges, but not by much, it seems. Then there’s this: The six black students were accused of beating and kicking Barker on Dec. 4. A motive for the attack was never established. What???
Thanks! I’m going to do an update eventually.
I also shortened your url for ya.
Pay no attention to Opal. She’s just upset that her favorite seat at the lunch counter was taken all those many years ago. Still hasn’t gotten over it, poor dear.
Hey Jenny, I know I’m a bit late, but I’ve been doing some catch up reading…which I generally don’t comment on, but I’m going to this time.
I grew up around the KKK. No shit. I didn’t like them then, and I don’t like them now. This whole situation reeks with the putrification of the KKK to me.
There was a small village about 30 minutes away from my High School that was alllllll white. I knew an older guy (black) that worked for a furniture store delivering furniture. He and a white guy delivered furniture to a house there one day and had to stop and get gass on the way back into town.
The store owner told the white guy who went in to pay, that he wasn’t going to get any gass as long as he had a nigger sitting on his property. Told him that the black guy would have to go stand out in the street for him to turn the pump on. (remember, this was when you had to go inside and pay before you pump - no swiping you debt card back then).
That kind of stuff happened frequently, though covertly where I grew up.
I was so damn glad to get out of that town I didn’t know what to do with myself….I still go back about once a year to attend to personal business…and I sure as shit don’t miss it.
The reality is…as shown with these men (MEN people, not boys) at Jena…that this stuff still goes on, it’s still there, it’s still covered up, it’s still encouraged, it’s still taught to children - encouraged in them.
In my Middle School, kids would teach other kids how to correctly make a noose. At one time, they could be seen decorating the rearview mirrors of many of the cars around town sporting decorations of feathers and glitter etc. No shit.
We still have such a long way to go……
That sounds like a little town up the road from here. The fucking KKK is still loud and proud. Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.
You know, it just kills me that people still hold these views. I can almost understand an xenophobes view, because they’re against immigrants/non-countrymen/whatever. But black folks have a history here as old as the country itself and really don’t deserve the shit they’re getting here. Makes me ill.