Last week in Detroit, the NAACP held a mock funeral for the N-word. But a chilling case in Louisiana shows us how far we have to go to bury racism. This story begins in the small, central Louisiana town of Jena. Last September, a black high-school student requested the school’s permission to sit beneath a broad, leafy tree in the hot schoolyard. Until then, only white students sat there.
The next morning, three nooses were hanging from the tree. The black students responded en masse. Justin Purvis, the kid who first sat under the tree, told filmmaker Jacquie Soohen: “They said, ‘Y’all want to go stand under the tree?’ We said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘If you go, I’ll go. If you go, I’ll go.’ One person went, the next person went, everybody else just went.”
Then the police and the district attorney showed up. Substitute teacher Michelle Rogers recounts: “District Attorney Reed Walters proceeded to tell those kids that ‘I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen.'”
It wouldn’t happen for a few more months, but that is exactly what the district attorney is trying to do.
Jena, a community of 4,000, is about 85 percent white. While the black community gathered at a church to respond, others didn’t see the significance. Soohen interviewed Jena town librarian Barbara Murphy, who reflected: “The nooses? I don’t even know why they were there, what they were supposed to mean. There’s pranks all the time, of one type or another, going on. And it just didn’t seem to be racist to me.” Tensions rose.
Robert Bailey, a black student, was beaten up at a white party. Then, a few nights later, Robert and two others were threatened by a white man with a sawed-off shotgun, at a convenience store. They wrestled the gun away and fled. Robert’s mother, Caseptla Bailey, said: “I know they were in fear of their lives. They were afraid that this man was going to shoot them, you know, especially in the back, running away from the scene.”
The next day, Dec. 4, 2006, a fight broke out at the school. A white student was injured, taken to the hospital and released. Robert Bailey and five other black students were charged … with second-degree attempted murder. They each faced 100 years in prison. The black community was reeling.
Independent journalist Jordan Flaherty was the first to break the story nationally. He explained: “I’m sure it was a serious fight, and I’m sure it deserved real discipline within the school system, but he [the white student] was out later that day. He was smiling. He was with friends … it was a serious school problem that came on the heels of a long series of other events … as soon as black students were involved, that’s when the hammer came down.”
The African-American community began to call them the Jena Six. The first to be tried was Mychal Bell, 17 years old and a talented football player, looking forward to a university scholarship. Bell was offered a plea deal, but refused. His father, Marcus Jones, took a few minutes off from work to talk to me: “Here in LaSalle Parish, whenever a black man is offered a plea bargain, he is innocent. That’s a dead giveaway here in the South.”
Right before the trial, the charges of second-degree attempted murder were lowered to aggravated battery, which under Louisiana law requires a dangerous weapon. The weapon? Tennis shoes.
Mychal Bell was convicted by an all-white jury. His court-appointed defense attorney called no witnesses. Bell will be sentenced on July 31, facing a possible 22 years. The remaining five teens, several of whom were jailed for months, unable to make bail, still face second-degree attempted murder charges and a hundred years each in prison.
Flaherty, who grew up in New Orleans, sums up the case of the Jena Six: “I don’t think there is anyone around that would doubt that if this had been a fight between black students or a fight of white students beating up a black student, you would never be seeing this. It’s completely about race. It’s completely about two systems of justice.”
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco gained national prominence during Hurricane Katrina. There’s another hurricane that’s devastating the lives of her constituents: racism. The families of the Jena Six are asking her to intervene. District Attorney Walters says he can end the boys’ lives with his pen. But Gov. Blanco’s pen is mightier. She should wield it, now, for justice for the Jena Six.
Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.
This article appears in Jul 25-31, 2007.
This is horrible news. Racism is obviously a factor in this trial. What can we do about this?
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.”
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph
I am the sister of Carwin Jones, one of the accused. I just want to make a clear point to the people who think that we are upholding what happened with the fight at school. No one is stating that this should have happened, but how can you charge children with such a harsh crime and not expect the world to think it is not racial. Look in our newspaper and you will see that not even those who are caught with drugs, weapons, or even those who have been in the courtroom many of times with bonds or charges this severe.
I would really like to know how Reed Walters sleep at night knowing that he has taken everything away from these children because of a personal vendetta. He has children of his own and I can bet he would make sure their rights are protected just like my parents and the other children’s parents. How can you call yourself human to do this to children and make them part of the countries statistic(especially for black men). He never looked at them and gave a damn about their future. I just want him to know that God see’s all.
Well i’ll tell you what’s the matter just us. This is a shame before our lord jesus christ.This only tell me that the system has failed us and not only failed us but is rotten to the prue core.Just like the 911 ordeal we are to confortable we let any one come in to our govermental system and run it there way, and the law only apply to some of us and not others but i thank god for pulling the cover off this situtation and the same sentance that the pen of that D.A.’s using will be the pen tha bring him to justice. God bless the Jena six.
I was glad to hear the NAACP and other community leaders are supporting those black (African American) families as well as their community. I am an educator and a parent. Parent being first! For current events yesterday, one of my students wanted to discuss the Jena Six. I was not aware of the case until we researched it on the internet. I was devastated by how everything was handled. Why is the school system or DA not mentioning the events that led up to the incident? –The hanging of the nooses, a couple of white students assaulting a black student, the assault of the black boy at a party and the net day the same “grown” white man who attacked him at the party pulled out his gun on him and two friends at a local store. And yes, one event has a lot to do with the other. Truly, what those six boys did was wrong in their part of the “fight” at school, but doing serious jail time for what? -A black eye and a minor concussion. We have sex offenders, robbers, etc. doing less time. Where’s the justice in that? With that said, it is only so much a person will take before he/she can’t take any more. Why did it take so long for this case to get “national” attention? And, I was extremely upset by the Jena’s librarian’s response to the hanging of the nooses at the school when we viewed the clip on http://www.youtube.com. I hope and pray another “Johnny Cochran” takes their case and bring justice to the city of Jena.
yes i,m really upset with the town of jena because they,re just trying to destroy our young black men. and for what, defending their racial background concerning the noose hanging in the tree. also if the white person was so sereverly injuried why did he go to the junction later that night at school? but i want all those young men to know i,m behind them one hundred percent