Schools across the nation are re-evaluating their response to hate crimes on the basis of the tragic events in Jena. Louisiana. This guide published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, provides practical guidance for educators eager to avoid the mistakes made by Jena officials.
Six Lessons from Jena September 27, 2007 — What every school and educator can learn from the events in Jena By Jennifer Holladay The prosecutions of six black teenagers in Jena, La., have captured the nation’s attention, with thousands of protestors (and nearly as many reporters) descending on the small town last week. As school professionals, we must never lose sight of the fact that it all started with nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree. Six lessons we must take to heart:
1. Don’t ignore obvious signs of trouble.In Jena, a black student approached the high school principal and asked, “Can we sit under that tree?'” On campus, it was known as the “White Tree” — a place where white students historically gathered. The principal said they could sit wherever they liked. It was an appropriate response, yet one that overlooked the core issue: Why did students feel like they needed to ask for permission? What did the very question reveal about the school’s racial climate?
2. Examine your school’s climate.You may think your school is “no Jena High” — but do you know for sure? Are there divisions about which you’re unaware? In a survey conducted last year by Teaching Tolerance, the National Education Association and the Civil Rights Project, the vast majority of teachers nationally said their schools were largely free of racial or ethnic tensions. Students, however, paint a very different picture. They describe their schools as “quick to put people into categories,” and one in four report being victimized in racial or ethnic incidents in a typical school year. Race and ethnicity aren’t the only lines of division, either: 70 percent of female students say they’ve been sexually harassed at school; 75 percent of gay students report hearing anti-gay slurs frequently or often at school, and more than a third say they’ve been physically harassed.
3. Take bias incidents seriously.After a few black students sat under the “White Tree,” three white students hung nooses from it. Jena’s white school superintendent, Roy Breithaupt, later told the Chicago Tribune, “Adolescents play pranks. I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.” In truth, the hanging of nooses was no youthful prank; it was a bias incident connoting racial lynchings. As Caseplia Bailey, whose son Robert is among the Jena Six, told Britain’s Observer, the act “meant the KKK, it meant … ‘We’re going to kill you, we’re gonna’ hang you ’til you die.'” By their very nature, bias incidents intend to demean or instill fear in those targeted, and schools must address them quickly, consistently and effectively.
4. Provide forums for meaningful discussion.When bias incidents occur, schools must open lines of communication, not shut down debate. In Jena: After black students gathered around the “White Tree” as political protest, the principal called a school assembly during which he said it was time to put the noose incident behind them for the sake of the school. The district attorney spoke next, flanked by police officers, warning students: “I can end your life with one stroke of my pen” — the equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire. When black parents showed up at a school board meeting, they were not allowed to speak. When they showed up again, board members allowed a spokesperson to address them, but then quickly moved on to other business without addressing the parents’ concerns. In highly charged bias incidents, schools should hold forums for educators, students, parents and community members and issue regular updates about the incident, describing what happened, why the incident was unacceptable and how the school has responded thus far. Schools should invite comments from attendees — and seek their input about ways the school, students, parents and community can work together to resolve the underlying problems.
5. Use bias incidents as teachable moments.Ask teachers to set aside class time to allow students to reflect on what has happened. Because students can influence peer behavior, ask them to write down suggestions for preventing further incidents and promoting respect and to discuss their suggestions in small groups. Because bias incidents often involve the use of bigoted speech (slurs or epithets), conduct lessons to empower students to make respectful language choices.
6. Bridge divisions in the school — and the community. Organize school-wide events to help students get to know one another and learn about respectful behavior. Mix It Up at Lunch Day (Nov. 13, 2007) and No Name-Calling Week (Jan. 21-25, 2008) are excellent events with which to start. Schools don’t exist in isolation, however. If tensions exist in a school, they exist in the larger community, too. Whether through dialogue or other social justice programs, like those sponsored by the National League of Cities, the events in Jena serve as a call to each of us to explore what divides us — and what can unite us. Contact us for permission to reprint these materials. Please reference the title and the name and location of your school/organization in your request. Special thanks to Teaching Tolerance team members Samantha Elliott Briggs, Rod Davis, Tafeni English, Michelle Garcia and Rhonda Thomason, as well as Lecia Brooks, director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center, and Jeff Sapp, professor of education at California State University at Dominguez Hills, for their guidance and constructive criticism on earlier drafts.
Friends of Justice 
Excerpts from the article below. You guys ought to be ashamed of your selves for referencing this con man and his money machine. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel, huh?
The Church of Morris Dees
By Ken Silverstein
Harper’s Magazine, November 2000
How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance
The Center earned $44 million last year alone–$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments–but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.
In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA’s total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald’s corpse.
Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements-such as angry black people-and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get “communities seething with racial violence.” Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us “intolerance against those who are different,” turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin.
Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”
In 1986, the Center’s entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees’s refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center’s programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.” Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that “probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”
Dees’s compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. “You are a fraud and a conman,” the Southern Center’s director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included “your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.”