Some of the best commentary on the Jena 6 situation can be found on the BlackAmericaWeb. Tonyaa Weathersbee asks how District Attorney’s like Reed Walters have such an easy time painting young black males as dangerous thugs. Her answer may surprise you.
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/weathersbee912
Commentary: Jena Six Prosecutor Counting on White Public to Be Complicit in the Racism at the Case’s Root
Date: Wednesday, September 12, 2007
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com
The Jena Six outrage has been in the making for some time. Since the late 1980s, at least. That was about the time when the crack cocaine trade and its accompanying violence consumed black neighborhoods, nightly news broadcasts and white people’s collective fears — fears in which all young black males were cast as super-predators in waiting. Give them a chance, the fear-driven reasoning goes, and they’ll kill someone.
This toxic atmosphere is what gives a prosecutor like LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters the nerve to believe that he can get away with doing the sort of thing that would make Atticus Finch shudder, that he can charge six black teenagers for attempted murder and possibly get them locked up for most of their lives for a schoolyard beatdown.
The brawl, of course, was the culmination of racial tensions that had been building at the teenagers’ high school in Jena, Louisiana for some time.
Basically, black students sat beneath a tree where whites congregated, only to be greeted by nooses.
Not surprisingly, a series of scuffles and confrontations followed. One white student was beaten up. He walked out of a hospital after a couple of hours of being treated for a black eye and a concussion.
But the six blacks who beat him up — apparently after he had been taunting them with racial slurs — won’t be walking out of jail as easily. They may, in fact, face decades in prison.
Even though the attempted murder charge against Mychal Bell, the first defendant to be tried, was reduced to aggravated second degree battery, he still could face 15 years in prison.
That’s because Walters managed to convince an all-white jury that the sneakers that Bell kicked the white teenager with was a deadly weapon.
What kind of racist reaching is that?
Now, I’m not surprised that backwoods Louisiana racism still lives on today, or that an all-white jury will convict black people on exaggerated, science-fiction charges.
What’s scary is how white prosecutors such as Walters have come to believe they can get away with that kind of crap; that people will be more inclined to acquiesce, rather than become outraged, at the obvious fact that the punishment being faced by the Jena Six obviously doesn’t fit the crime.
Or that people will be quicker to see six black youths — youths who had no criminal records — as troublemakers rather than as victims. They were, after all, black kids who were driven to react to the racial harassment that school officials believed they could fix with denial rather than action.
But nowadays, men like Walters count on the public to see Bell and his friends solely through the prism of criminality. And over the past two decades, he’s had a lot of help.
He’s had help from the War on Drugs, which has turned black communities into battlegrounds for police officers and drug dealers alike. The police officers often easily snag a few low-level dealers and users, who tend to be black, for the perp walk and for the cameras.
No matter that if the cops conducted drug stings say, in Lindsay Lohan’s neighborhood, the face of drugs and crime would lighten considerably.
Walters has also had help from the media, which for years has stoked viewers’ and readers’ fears with shallow, non-contextualized coverage of crime in mostly-black neighborhoods; places where crime has moved in because jobs have moved out. Places where black males get caught up in a drug trade in which violence tends to be the cost of doing business.
No matter that whites use the majority of drugs in this country. No matter that when it comes to crime, whites make up more than two-thirds of those arrested, but just a third of those who go to jail or prison.
Walters has also had help from conservative pundits like Bill Bennett, who two years ago suggested on his radio show that the United States could bring down its crime rate by aborting black babies.
Seeing that it’s too late to abort the Jena Six, Walters is going for the next best thing. He wants to put them away for virtually all of their lives.
Hopefully, national outrage will continue to build so that he doesn’t get away with that. But our outrage shouldn’t just stop there.
We should also be outraged at those circumstances that have brushed all black males with the criminality brush. We should be outraged that some prosecutors now count on a white public, whose fears of young blacks have been stoked by the drug war and other kinds of distortions, to be complicit with them in the kind of racism that is at the root of the ordeal of the Jena Six.
And do our best to root it out wherever it exists.
Friends of Justice 
I know that when the civil rights movement began it included all the states in America.
Which somehow Louisana has missed the mark, of taking the “Jim Crow”laws off their books. The legislation in Washington, DC. knows this as well as the representatives of not just Louisiana , but Mississippi and Alabama too. It is not the 1960 ‘s but we are now in years 2007 and moving swiftly . These states can not move forward without a major move of their laws and new regiments to take place there to enforce that we are all equal by our rights as humans according to the Constitution of the United States. No President should be elected until we know that the legislature for Louisana, Alabama, Mississippi etc. Changes the representative for those states that they are suppose to represent. Which it seems, to not care about . They are looking at the tax dollars , not the people of any of the races if this is what is produced from them. Racism is alive and well, and binding the hands of the law that can change the state by a stroke of the pen should be to end the segregation that was fought for hard and long. Instead of some bigot saying he can change the lives of the Jena 6 with the stoke of a pen. Then allowed to do such with witnesses to the action. Just the action and the admissions should be a reason to put him in a federal prison for the rest of his life. The whole town leaders, such as Mayor, Governor and the like should be ousted out. For to allow something like this to happen where people are in an outrage over it, and rightly so. But should be in an outrage that our people are paid well to represent these states and allowed to continue. They speak a game of justice and equality and go in the back rooms and just have a good laugh at the fact that they will be re elected to continue this same old game. Then go to another country and predict that they should become a democracy when, they can not have a complete democracy here with all being equal.
If Hillary Clinton , can make a paper statement to and about the wrongs of the state she should be able to speak out loud about this type of crime. But then again how can she when her own , president and husband which were govenors themselves would but innocent blacks to death in their own states . Death EARS to the slaughters of blacks on death row . Governors did not hear the injustices then and won’t hear it now. WHAT AN OUTRAGE WHAT AN EMBARRASSMENT. there should be a way to shut the whole country down for the beatdown of ignorance for JENA, LA.
This story , is historic but not in the way it should be represented for. HISTORIC as a State going BACKWARDS, and should be forced by the stoke of a PRESIDENTIAL PEN to be brough into modern times.
You are a very ignorant racist. Six thugs beating up a student is not a harmless “schoolyard brawl”, it is a serious crime. The ones inviolvedneed to go to jail.
You claim that the thugs involved did not have prior criminal records, yet that is another lie. He has four, yes four, convictions, including two for violent crimes. That by the time he turned 16. What an upstanding young man he is. NOT!
Jena 6 deserve to go to jail. If they were white students that beat up a black kid while he was unconscious, Al, Jesse and the rest of them would demand their blood. Typical racist double standard in today’s America!