Check out this piece by Orlando Patterson in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/opinion/30patterson.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Americans needs to talk.  We need to talk about race, poverty and mass incarceration.  In particular, we need to shift our primary focus from Mississippi Burning-Rosa Parks racism to the new reality: Jena-Mychal Bell racism–what we call “the New Jim Crow.”

I just got back from a Children’s Defense Fund sponsored conference at Howard University dedicated to “dismantling the cradle to prison pipeline”.  The conversation swirled around three topics: institutional racism (the New Jim Crow) and the relationship between poverty and dysfunctional behavior.

On Tuesday, Bill Cosby, Juan Williams (NPR) and Morehouse President, Robert Michael Franklin, talked about the need for personal and community responsibility.  A large audience, swelled by hundreds of Howard University students, applauded Cosby, Williams and Franklin as they lamented the breakdown of family values.  The next night, the same audience roared its support for the Jena 6 (I was on a panel that included four relatives of Jena 6 defendants).  A week before the historic, September 20th rally for justice in Jena, 2500 Howard students crammed into Cramton Auditorium for a rally in support of Mychal Bell, Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Bryant Purvis, Jesse Ray Beard, and Carwin Jones.

The Cradle to Prison Pipeline conference demonstrated that America’s sharpest African American students love Bill Cosby as much as they love the Jena 6.  They don’t have to choose between criminal justice reform and personal responsibility, and they don’t.

Orlando Patterson teaches sociology at Harvard University.  I spent half an hour with him last year talking about the mission of Friends of Justice.  Patterson thinks that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are stuck in what I call the Old Jim Crow paradigm.  His criticism is practical rather than personal.

I endorse Patternson’s critique.  Initially, I was pleased to see America’s most famous black “reverends” entering the lists on behalf of the Jena 6.  Tens of thousands of people weren’t going to make the pilgrimaget to isolated Jena, Lousiana because the Rev. Al Bean issued the invitation.  The Rev. Al Sharpton, working through a long list of radio talk jocks, got the job done.  Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King III helped out as well.  They deserve credit for a remarkable accomplishment.

But there’s a problem–the message is out of focus.  Like everyone (including Orlando Patterson), the reverends are using Jena to advance their agenda.  It’s an agenda that hasn’t changed much in the past forty years, and it needs to change.  How?  Ask the students at Howard University.