Jesse Ray Beard, the youngest Jena 6 defendants, was featured on CBS Evening News on Friday evening.  It was a human interest piece about a young man making the most of dramatically altered circumstances.   The crux of the story is that Alan Howard (a pro bono attorney involved in the Jena 6 legal fight) and his wife Patti agreed to serve as  guardians for the young man from Jena.  Here’s the heart of the matter:

Attorney Alan Howard, of the New York firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, represented Jody for free. “I saw a lot of resilience there,” he said. “Passion, charm, and I liked him right away.”

Howard wanted to give him an opportunity. So he turned to the people he trusted most – his family.

“I remember saying that he should come and live with us, Howard’s daughter Jesse said. “I was totally for it, but I never thought it would happen.”

Jody recalls Howard made him a promise:

“That if I stay out of trouble, that he would get me out of Jena.”

Howard made good on that promise, when he and other defense lawyers got the original judge in the case removed because of bias.

Howard thinks that if Jody had remained in Jena, “they would have found a reason to lock him up.”

CBS reporter Harold Dow wonders why an apparently humble, appreciative and intelligent young man is considered a thug in his home town.  Several dozen white Americans answered this question in the comments section.  Jesse Ray is considered a thug, they say, because he beat up a white kid.  End of story.  Although the article specified that only 2 of the 50 eye witness accounts make any mention of Beard’s involvement, the anonymous folks voicing their opinions have no doubt that Jesse Ray was guilty and that he should be spending several decades in prison.

I suspect that many of the comments come from the good citizens of Jena, Louisiana who can be forgiven for holding unusually vociferous opinions.  But many of the folks making the nasty remarks identify themselves as moderate-to-progressive voters who are just sick and tired of black thugs messing with their America. 

Just as troubling is the absence of positive comments. 

I have worked with these young men and, believe me, they ain’t no thugs. 

Why do so many white Americans find it so hard to identify with young black males who protested the hanging of nooses at their high school only to be told that (a) the incident in question was an innocent, non-racial prank and that (b) if they persisted in voicing their displeasure they would face criminal charges? 

To be more precise, DA Reed Walters reminded the young men that “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.”

Those who doubt a prosecutor would make such a bizarre statement to black students in the aftermath of a hate crime should know that, confronted with his alleged remark at a pre-trial hearing, Walters admitted to saying precisely that, explaining that he thought the students should “work things out on their own.”

Well, they did.  They worked things out the way adolescent males work things out: with trash talk and physical violence.  These cases were ultimately settled in a reasonable manner because, had they gone to trial, the truth of my original narrative (and much more besides) would have been revealed in open court.  In particular, it would have become clear that, by their refusal to confront an obvious hate crime, Superintendent Roy Breithaupt and DA Walters set black and white male students on a collision course.

When I googled “Jena 6” the other night, I found 13.5 million documents.  That is not necessarily a measure of positive impact, but it demonstrates that the Jena story captured the attention of the nation as few stories have.  The most positive and practical result thus far is that school administrators across the nation are using the story as a cautionary tale about what happens when school officialsrefuse to confront bold expressions of bigotry and intolerance in a school environment.

Check out the comments section on the CBS website and let us know what you think.