Donald Washington, Louisiana’s first African-American US Attorney, is stepping down.  Among his greatest achievements, he says, is his handling of the controversial Jena 6 case in 2007. 

If you think Mr. Washington is proud of bringing a serious racial incident to the American public’s attention, think again.  Quite the reverse.  Louisiana owes Mr. Washington a vote of thanks for effectively debunking bogus claims made by people like me.

“There’s a huge story that one day may be told,” Washington said. “To sum up our involvement, the Department of Justice did a great job of ensuring that controversies that happen on school campuses don’t become federal cases unless the facts in evidence lead us in that direction.”

Mr. Washington was under heavy pressure to prosecute the young men who hung nooses from a tree at Jena High School as hate criminals.  I have always supported his restraint in that regard. 

But there’s more.

“As far as the kids are concerned, it is more than abundantly apparent that they never intended for what happened in two disparate and separate events to be linked together and become the focus of a national controversy. And to this day, all of those groups that intended to ferret out any kind of nefarious conduct on behalf of the citizens of the Jena community still have failed to do so.”

If you find that hard to follow, here’s a rough translation: “There was never the slightest relationship between the nooses hung at the High School in September and the schoolyard assault on Justin Barker three months later.”

Since I am the first person to link the nooses and the beat-down, I take Mr. Washington’s comments personally.  That doesn’t mean I disagree with his assessment in every particular.  I never argued that the black football players who assaulted Mr. Barker were consciously avenging the noose provocation.  On September 20th, 2007 I enjoyed a series of conversations with the men and women who rode the buses to Jena from all over the nation.  Most of the folks I talked to believed the assault on Barker followed hard on the heels of the noose hanging. 

Not so.  It’s true that black students were deeply provoked by the noose incident.  The nooses appeared the morning after a black freshman asked if it was okay for black students to sit under the tree at the white end of the school courtyard.  Although black kids were free to visit the tree whenever they chose, everybody in Jena understood that one side of the courtyard was reserved for white kids and the other end was for the black students.  It had been that way ever since Jena schools integrated in compliance with federal law in 1970.  The kid who asked the question was challenging the tradition of a segregated school courtyard.  That was the issue and folks on both sides knew it.

Black kids were angry in the wake of the noose incident; but they weren’t fighting mad. 

The Jena equation doesn’t balance until you factor in the behavior of adults. 

First, the school superintendent announced that the noose hanging was completely unrelated to racism.  Is Mr. Washington, the outgoing US Attorney from the Western Louisiana Division of the Department of Justice, signing off on this bizarre sentiment?

So it seems.

It was the refusal of school officials to acknowledge that Jena High School had a racial problem that sparked the anger of black students.  Now they were fighting mad.  Pushing matches flared up on campus.  Nothing serious, but tension was escalating.  It got so serious that police officers placed the campus on full lockdown.

That’s when the second bull-headed act by a white public official took place.  The principal called all the students to the school auditorium for a special assembly.  True to tradition, the white kids sat on one side of the aisle, the black kids on the other.  Every uniformed police officer in town was in the room.  District Attorney Reed Walters walked to the podium and told the kids to settle down and get a grip.  Then he turned to the kids on the black side of the aisle, pulled out his Parker Jotter and said, “I want you to know that I can end your lives with a stroke of my pen.”

Walters has admitted making this remark.  He says he thought the white and black students should have been able to work things out among themselves.

One thing was certain, the student body wasn’t going to get any guidance from adults.

DA Reed Walters and Superintendent Roy Breithaupt weren’t acting on their own initiative.  They were desperate men doing what they had to do.  They couldn’t address the racial history of Jena without throwing their community into an uproar.  Besides, Reed and Roy were raised in the segregated South.  Their behavior suggests they have never backed away from the racist assumptions at the heart of the Jim Crow regime.  These men weren’t going to tolerate overt racism.  If the white kids had donned sheets and burned a cross on the black end of the school yard, school officials would have taken action.  But anything more subtle than that would be ignored or interpreted as innocent juvenile horseplay.

Justin Barker was best friends with the boys who hung the nooses.  These were country kids who grew up in all-white schools.  When they hit high school, they were bused to the semi-integrated high school in Jena.  It was only natural that these kids were intimidated by black students–especially football players.  But it would be a tragic mistake to single out the kids who hung the nooses for special attention– as Walters and Breithaupt’s bizarre behavior suggests, the noose hangers were reflecting the values of the culture that shaped them.

Tension between the white “noose boys” and the black football players rose steadily during the fall semester–but the altercations were always off campus.  Then somebody set fire to the high school campus–a detail rarely mentioned in media accounts.  Robert Bailey was assaulted at a Friday night dance and this led to a related altercation at a convenience store the following morning.  When school opened on Monday morning, angry confrontations erupted during the lunch hour.  Kids were rehashing the Bailey beat-down and Justin Barker was at the heart of the action.

So, although there is no direct connection between the noose incident and the assault on Justin Barker, it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

Unless, as folks like Donald Washington would have you believe, the Friends of Justice narrative is largely fictional.

Which brings us to June of 2009 when the five Jena defendants still awaiting trial pled guilty to simple battery and were sentenced to a week of unsupervised probation.  When the week was over, the charges were expunged from their records.

Why did Reed Walters allow a dedicated team of lawyers to bargain him down from attempted murder to simple assault?

Because the Friends of Justice narrative was accurate in every detail.  In fact, the carefully-researched truth was far worse.  If Reed Walters had taken a single defendant to trial, the whole sordid story would have come out and crowds of indignant protestors would have returned to Jena.

Walters yielded to the inevitable.  Simple as that.

Donald Washington has another story.  “All in all,” he says, “the federal agencies involved — from the U.S. Attorney’s Office to the FBI to the Department of Community Relations — performed their duties admirably, professionally and thoroughly.”

I won’t quibble.  I was contacted by Carmelita Pope Freeman of the Community Relations Service of the Department of Justice shortly after the Jena story first broke in the national media.  Carmelita wanted to sit down with folks on both sides of the issue and work toward an amicable resolution.  I told her she needed to wait until the legal process was over.  In a recent conversation, Ms. Freeman told me her work in Jena is finally winding up.  I hope she was able to make solid progress.  I hope lessons were learned.  But my fear is that Donald Washington’s take on the situation received the imprimatur of the federal government and everyone moved on.

The last time I spoke to Donald Washington was at a townhall meeting in Bunkie, Louisiana in the summer of 2008.  “I read everything you write,” he told me, “and I’ve got no problem with what you’re trying to do.  Just one word of caution: Be fair.”

I assured the US Attorney that I would be heed his advice.  As I turned away, Mr. Washington’s eyes lit on the diminutive Ann Colomb, a housewife from nearby Church Point, Louisiana.

“I’m sorry ma’am,” Washington said, “but you look awfully familiar.  Have we met?”

“No, Mr. Washington,” Ann replied, “we haven’t met.  I was the woman you put in jail for dealing drugs.”

The US Attorney’s face fell.  “Oh, Mrs. Colomb,” he said, “I am so sorry about what happened to you and your family.  And I want you to know that the men who lied about you and your sons are being punished to the full extent of the law.”

When Ann Colomb told me this story later she wasn’t impressed.  “All they did was give more time to the snitches that had the courage to admit what they done,” Ann told me.  “I don’t blame those poor souls for lying on us; the folks I blame is Don Washington, Brett Grayson and the rest of the those DOJ boys that paid the snitches to lie on innocent people.”

You will be discouraged to learn that federal cases built almost entirely on the uncorroborated testimony of convicted drug dealers are still being prosecuted in the Western District of Louisiana.  Next week, five defendants the feds know as “the Sunnyside Organization” will go to trial in the federal courtroom in Lafayette.  I have been monitoring this prosecution for three years and it looks like a replay of the Colomb fiasco.  More on that when the trial is over.

US Attorneys like Donald Washington serve at the whim of presidents.  Washington was appointed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama wants to move in a different direction.  How different, I wonder?  Does the president know how the Jena situation was resolved?  Does he know what happened to Ann Colomb and her sons?  Does he know what is happening to the Sunnyside defendants even as we speak?  Probably not–he’s a busy man.  But I will do everything in my power to keep him, and you, informed.