Many thanks to Wade Goodwyn of National Public Radio (and Craig Franklin of the Jena Times) for making this Weekend Edition piece sizzle.  Franklin insists that no one was paying attention to the Jena story, nor would anyone ever have paid any attention, had Alan Bean stayed in Texas. 

Midway through the almost ten-minute report Mr. Goodwyn filed this morning, Franklin quotes from a document from February of last year in which I predicted that the trophy for the “most racist town in America” would soon be transfered from Tulia, Texas to Jena, Louisiana.  “The awards ceremony,” I said, “is tentatively scheduled for soon after The New York Times, 60 Minutes and other national media outlets wake up to the doings in Jena, Louisiana.” 

Franklin conveniently ignores the next line: “Tulia never deserved the Most Racist Town award, and I doubt Jena (pronounced JEAN-ah) does either.  But, like the Texas panhandle community I call home, the isolated central Louisiana town in the pines seems determined to bring home the trophy regardless off the cost.” 

The good folks in little towns like Tulia and Jena are frequently their own worst enemies.  I can’t help liking these folks.  They take their religion very seriously and most of them are trying to be the best people they can possibly be (something I can’t say for the city slicker cynics who routinely put them down).  These aren’t snarling Southern bigots straight off the set of Mississippi Burning–for the most part, they’re kind, polite and gentle. 

Unfortunately, they are also blind to their own blindness.  A lot of people took DA Reed Walters for just another zealous prosecutor until he announced on CNN that the 20,000 black people who descended on Jena in September would have reduced his town to a smoking ruin had not the Lord Jesus Christ thwarted their evil designs.  “You can quote me on that,” he announced (I have actually paraphrased–but I think I caught the spirit of his weird remark).

Reed Walters never understood that the folks who rode the buses to Jena were motivated by their devotion to the same Jesus he worships.  The experiences of the last year have convinced me of the need for inter-racial dialogue, starting in the churches and moving out from there.  

Craig Franklin makes it sound as if I snuck into Jena under false pretences.  I attended the white First Baptist Church my first weekend in Jena and spent over an hour introducing my unorthodox ministry to pastor Dominic DiCarlo.  The next day I spent a good part of the afternoon with Sammy and Craig Franklin at the Jena Times.  I told them about my work in Tulia and said I intended to advocate for the Jena 6  and their families just as I had stood up for Joe Moore and his friends in Tulia.  I told them that the media could not always be counted on to be fair, so it behooved them to talk Reed Walters into reducing the charges.  They didn’t think that would be necessary.

Wade Goodwyn did an excellent eight-minute synopsis of the Jena story for NPR’s All Things Considered in July that became the most emailed NPR piece for several weeks running.  Goodwyn’s reporting was remarkably even-handed; he just laid out the facts, featuring comments from people on both sides of the developing controversy.  Black bloggers used Wade’s piece as a succinct-yet-thorough vehicle for spreading the word.

Craig Franklin is right about one thing: a lot of fluff and nonsense has been written about his home town.  Wade Goodwyn is effective because he tells it straight.

I am deeply grateful to journalist Sheldon Alberts for this thorough treatment of my work with Friends of Justice.  The media tends to believe that the blatant injustice in little places like Tulia, Texas and Jena, Louisiana naturally rises to public attention.  It ain’t so.  I was supposed to hook up with Mr. Alberts on September 20th in Jena, but the lack of cell phone contact that day made it impossible for us to find each other.  So, last month, he made a special trip to Arlington to interview me.

 Sheldon Alberts is from Melfort, Saskatchewan, a town just down the road from Weyburn, my father’s hometown, so he was deeply interested in the influence of Tommy Douglas in shaping my outlook.  Douglas, for all you non-Canadians, became Premier of Saskatchewan in 1944, and introduced a province-wide heathcare system in 1961 that became the model for Canada’s current medicare system.  Prior to his career in politics, Douglas was pastor of Weyburn’s First Baptist Church and my father, Gordon Bean’s Sunday school teacher.  Although his New Democratic Party never gained power at the national level, Douglas was voted the greatest Canadian of the 20th century.

Although no one, to my knowledge, has ever made note of the fact, the rise of the Cooperative Commonwealth party was the Canadian equivalent of the civil rights movement; an improbable movement focused on justice for the little guy.  At 54 (I’ll be 55 in a few days) I have just recently come the age where I start wondering why I am driven to do what I do.

I should note that three families were involved in overturning the injustice in Tulia: the Beans, the Gardners, and the Kikers.  Charles and Patricia Kiker (my wife, Nancy’s parents), aren’t mentioned below, but they played a pivotal role in that fight.

‘A nose for injustice’

CREDIT: Canadian Dr. Alan Bean has been influential in the investigation of the trial involving six black teenagers who beat a white student in Jena, Louisiana.

JENA, La. — The highway leading into Jena, La., from the west is a narrow, curvy stretch of blacktop surrounded by towering southern pines that block the horizon. In the morning, with heavy fog pressing tight against the treetops, it is a landscape that can inspire a sense of dread.

It was like that last Jan. 26 when Alan Bean first drove into this little oil and lumber town to investigate reports of a brewing race scandal.

Bean, an unassuming 54-year-old Canadian, arrived here knowing only the sketchy details of the town’s troubles. He’d been told of nooses hanging from a tree, of racial clashes between whites and blacks, and of a local prosecutor’s overzealous pursuit of a half-dozen African-American teenagers.

“I had the sense that I should be scared. Had I done this five or six years ago even, I would have been petrified,” says Bean. “There was this fog hanging from the trees and covering the road. It really does create an eerie aspect. But I realized I had become good at this. I knew what to do.”

Bean, the executive director of the Texas-based Friends of Justice, had been invited to Jena by the parents of six black students in a heap of legal trouble.

In December 2006, LaSalle County district attorney Reed Walters had charged the six teens with attempted murder for beating a white student named Justin Barker.

Bean sensed the adult-court charges were excessive. Although Barker was knocked unconscious, he was discharged from hospital within hours of the assault.

After more than a dozen trips to Jena throughout the early months of 2007, Bean linked the attack on Barker to an incident the previous September, when white students hung nooses from a tree black students had asked permission to sit under. It would transform the “Jena Six” from local controversy into an internationally known case that in September spurred the largest civil rights rally in the U.S. since the 1960s.

“Alan was the first one in Jena. He has been there on the ground, repeatedly, on a shoestring budget, talking to witnesses, talking to families, figuring out what happened,” says Richard Cohen, executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Atlanta.

“Alan is like a human divining rod. He has a nose for injustice, and a talent to bring it to light.”

But the story of how Bean came to uncover the Jena Six story is as long and winding as the roads he has travelled in Louisiana.

Born in Calgary in 1953, Bean moved three years later with his family to Yellowknife, where his father was a radio operator for the Department of Transport.

It was there that Bean began hearing his father’s stories about the social gospel of Tommy Douglas, who had taught Sunday school to a young Gordon Bean in Weyburn, Sask.

“Tommy Douglas was my father’s hero,” Bean says. “Even though my father was kind of a fundamentalist Baptist, he had a very progressive Ôhelp the little guy’ view.”

When the family moved to Edmonton in the early 1960s, one of the first things Bean saw on the family’s new black-and-white television was Martin Luther King’s speech at the March on Washington. Although not yet a teenager, Bean felt a calling. “Even now, I cannot talk about King’s ÔI Have a Dream’ speech without becoming emotional,” says Bean.

“When I see systems that are so clearly racist in their effect, if not in their intention, it just makes my blood boil.”

Determined to emulate Douglas and King, Bean became an ordained Baptist minister and preached in churches from Medicine Hat, Alta., to British Columbia.

He moved to the U.S. in 1986 with his wife, Nancy, an American, after becoming disillusioned with the Baptist Union of Western Canada.

The couple eventually settled in the Texas panhandle town of Tulia, population 5,000, where their lives took the dramatic turn that ultimately led Bean to Jena.

Bean and an associate, Gary Gardner, played key roles in bringing national attention to the 1999 arrests in Tulia of 46 men — 39 of them black — in a massive cocaine sting. The arrests were made by an undercover cop hailed in the Tulia newspaper for getting the “scumbags” off the streets.

The Tulia drug case devastated the town’s small black community. One man received a 60-year prison term for allegedly selling one-eighth of an ounce (about three grams) of cocaine; dozens more were convicted and received lengthy sentences.

But what Bean and Gardner discovered was that the undercover detective who broke the case fabricated most of the drug buys, and had himself been arrested on theft charges. No drugs, moreover, were found on any of the defendants. In 2003, Texas Gov. Rick Perry pardoned the defendants.

“We didn’t have any funding. We were basically subsidizing the work out of our family’s savings account,” says Bean. “But a tremendous amount of good came out of it.”

The Tulia case left Bean convinced African-Americans were victims of a “new Jim Crow” segregation — a legal system that routinely over-prosecutes blacks.

“It’s the American reliance on the strategy of mass incarceration as a response to poverty-related dysfunction,” Bean says. Inspired by the results in Tulia, but ostracized by the town’s white community, Bean relocated to Arlington, Tex., where he runs Friends of Justice from his home.

“I think this is a really meaningful way of doing ministry as a Christian pastor,” Bean says. “I never really felt I was accomplishing anything in traditional pastoral ministry.”

Bean’s work in Tulia drew the attention of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which in early 2007 urged him to take a closer look at an obscure case stirring emotions in central Louisiana.

Long before civil rights leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson could even pronounce Jena — it’s JEENA — Bean spent hours in the county courthouse, reading witness statements and interviewing the jailed teens.

The result of Bean’s investigation was a 5,000-word narrative that concluded Justin Barker’s beating was the violent climax of a months-long conflict that began with the noose incident.

More significantly, Bean pointed to prosecutor Walters as a central antagonist. Walters had warned students at a school assembly that he could ruin their lives “with a stroke of a pen,” a threat Bean says the prosecutor carried out by unnecessarily charging the Jena Six with attempted murder.

Armed with his version of events in Jena, Bean contacted Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune and Tom Mangold of the BBC, whose early reports on the Jena Six sparked international media interest.

“We never wanted to say, in Tulia or in Jena, that these people were necessarily guilty or innocent,” Bean says in an interview at his Texas home. “The question is, are they getting equal justice? Are they being railroaded?”

The Jena Six case has been Bean’s greatest success in eight years as a criminal justice reform activist. But he is resented by many white residents of Jena, who reject Bean’s assertion that Barker’s beating was spawned by earlier racist incidents. “Alan Bean is seen as the one who created the illusion of Jena, La., as this racist town,” says Craig Franklin, editor of the Jena Times and a critic of Bean and the Jena Six.

“I am sure that some of the families of the Jena Six hold him in pretty high regard. To the rest of us, his version of events is filled with a lot of untruths.”

Bean stands by his investigation. Moreover, he believes he’s filling a vital role among justice reform activists in the U.S. — ferreting out new facts and crafting public opinion in order to ensure defendants get a fair shake from the legal system.

“Almost never does anybody intervene for drug defendants or people accused of a violent crime at a pre-trial level, where the evidence is still ambiguous and nobody can tell whether they are innocent or guilty,” Bean says.

“Nobody intervenes and says, ÔThis process stinks.’ In places like Jena, it’s important to tell the whole story.”

Prosecutors eventually dropped the attempted murder charges against five of the Jena Six and transferred their cases to juvenile court. The adult-court conviction of one student, Mychal Bell, was overturned.

The Sept. 20 protest in Jena attracted more than 20,000 people. But at the height of publicity surrounding the case, Bean slipped quietly into the background.

The spotlight fell instead on Sharpton and Jackson who — despite having never been to Jena until days before the rally — were eager to take centre stage.

“I realized that when we were able to bring people of national prominence into the story, it would be a cutthroat competition for the microphone,” Bean says. “It was inevitable we would be pushed aside.”

The fire that ripped through Jena High School on November 30, 2006 has never received much attention from the media.  But you can’t understand the chaos that reigned the morning of December 4th unless you smell the smoke in the air.  Who-done-it rumors were circulating wildly through the school the morning before Justin Barker was attacked.  Everyone, black and white, felt violated and vulnerable.  I have always maintained that Robert Bailey would never have been assaulted at the Fair Barn if the school hadn’t been torched the day before.

Jena residents have always assured me that some members of the Jena 6 were responsible for the fire.  I have also been told that Reed Walter’s weird overcharging of Justin Barker’s alleged assailants was rooted in his belief that these students were also responsible for the fire.

No one knows what motivated Mr. Walters to charge the Jena 6 with attempted murder–a charge that could have placed some of the defendants behind bars for over fifty years without parole.  My guess is that the fire at Jena High placed the entire community, Mr. Walters included, in a state of collective post traumatic stress disorder.  In other words, the same affliction that sparked the assaults on Bailey and Barker was behind the overcharging of the Jena defendants.  Like many prosecutors, Mr. Walters has a tendency to charge the max in order to achieve a strong bargaining position for negotiating plea agreements.  Nonetheless, the attempted murder charge required a stronger explanation and, to my mind, the fire, not racism, has always been the best candidate.

Now we learn that the alleged arsonists are a racially diverse group of young males.  My guess is that some of these charges are stronger than others and that, following a process of defendants flipping on one another, some charges will be dropped. 

The suggestion that the fire was motivated by a desire to destroy grade records doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny.  Why were fires set in various parts of the building if the goal was to destroy school records?  Besides, the ringleaders are a bit old to be worried about their high school records.  This was the work of arsonists with a deep grudge against the school.  The nature of that grudge may eventually come to light.  The bi-racial composition of the defendant group suggests that Sheriff Franklin can legitimately claim that racial malice was not a primary factor. 

For the sake of Jena residents I am glad that investigators appear to have cracked this case.  Let’s hope they have real evidence; this case has been hanging like a pall over Jena for well over a year.  We can now lay to rest the unfounded suggestion that the Jena 6 can be tied to the arson.

Abbey Brown’s excellent article is followed by a few illuminating comments from TownTalk readers and accompanied by several photos.

8 face charges in Jena High fire

2006 blaze was not related to ‘Jena Six’ case
By Abbey Brown
abrown@thetowntalk.com
(318) 487-6387

 JENA — A plot to get rid of bad grades and get out of school may land eight people — including three juveniles — in prison for no less than two years. After more than a year, eight people will be charged with arson in connection with the fire that destroyed the main building of Jena High School in November 2006, authorities said Friday.

The motivation for the fire wasn’t racial, as many suspected, but solely to destroy records of bad grades and shut down the school, said LaSalle Parish Sheriff-elect Scott Franklin, who is CEO of the Sheriff’s Office. “Some of the students involved were doing poorly in school and decided that setting the school on fire would be a great way to get rid of their records and not have to go to school for a long time,” Franklin said.

“They did not take into consideration the strong resiliency of the administration, faculty, staff and students of Jena High School, who were back in classes at the campus just three days later.”

The arson is not connected to the “Jena Six” case, none of the six defendants in that case are suspects in the arson, and the arson was not racially motivated, Franklin said. The group of suspects in the arson case is racially diverse.

Investigators had been hopeful that in a community as small as Jena someone would eventually talk, giving investigators a break in the case.

Finally someone did.

An undercover narcotics operation led to information about the suspects in the school arson, Franklin said during a press conference at the LaSalle Parish Courthouse.

Three Jena men have been arrested, and two more men are being sought. The other three suspects are juveniles. All are males.

Four of the eight suspects were students at Jena High School at the time of the fire, and two are currently students at the school, Franklin said.

When Franklin announced the 13-month-old arson case was solved, an audible sigh of relief and applause could be heard from the courtroom packed with Jena residents.

“I’m glad it’s over,” said Sylvia Norris, who works in the LaSalle Parish School System. “We needed closure, and we’re all very excited to hear this news.”

The arrests

The three adults arrested are Marcus Lee, 20, Joshua McGee, 18, and Dakota Graham, 19, all of Jena, according to Franklin. All are still being housed in the LaSalle Parish Jail, pending bond.

The names of the other two adult suspects have not been released because they have not yet been arrested, and the names of the juveniles won’t be released.

Franklin said authorities have good leads on the whereabouts of the two men at large and foresee their arrests in the near future.

All three of the adults already arrested are charged with aggravated arson and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Lee also is charged with three counts of distribution of marijuana, police said, and McGee also faces charges of possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

The felony charge of aggravated arson carries a sentence of six to 20 years in prison with at least two years having to be served without probation or parole, LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters said.

“These are very serious crimes,” he pointed out. “(The District Attorney’s Office) will move forward on this as quickly as possible.”

The school fire occurred on Nov. 30, 2006, and a year after the blaze, investigators said there were still no suspects or new leads in the arson probe.

But when Franklin assumed his position as CEO a little more than a month ago, he implemented a narcotics enforcement operation that included undercover narcotics work. Through one of those undercover operations, information was obtained that led to the naming of four suspects, Franklin said.

With that information, the Sheriff’s Office launched a full-scale investigation using all available resources, leading to even more suspects. The three arrests took place Thursday afternoon.

Information sought

During authorities’ investigation, Franklin said, they discovered that “several students” at Jena High who weren’t involved in the arson had personal knowledge about who did it.

“Let me share this with all the parents — talk with your children if they were at Jena High last fall in the days following the fire,” Franklin said. “If they have any information, it would behoove them to come forward now.”

Franklin said “there is a strong possibility” that those who knew of the arsonists but did not come forward could face criminal charges.

“The arsonists have been revealed, and the time for protecting them or choosing not to get involved is over,” he said. “Again, I warn those that have information — come forward now before officers from our department come knocking on your door.”

The $5,000 Crime Stoppers reward will be paid to the person who led investigators to the suspects, but Franklin didn’t release the person’s name. He also said officials would be calling on the Rev. P.A. “Fox” Paul, a Jena minister who has collected “several thousands of dollars” in reward money, to be paid to the unidentified informant.

‘Always optimistic’

School Board member Dolan Pendarvis said the community is close-knit, has gone through a lot of emotions this past year and is grateful to hear of the arrests.

“I was always optimistic that eventually it would get solved,” he said.

Others in the community had been convinced the crime would remain cold since all attention was focused on the Jena Six case and not the arson. But state and local investigators didn’t give up.

“Even a year later, these kinds of crimes can be solved,” Marc Reech, lead investigator for the State Fire Marshal’s Office in Baton Rouge, said during a late November interview with The Town Talk. And sheriff’s investigators then said they continued to work hard on solving the case.

Reech said investigators knew the fire was arson because the fire started in several different places in the building — in the first-floor office area and in at least one classroom upstairs.

The building was a total loss, and investigators said the majority of the classrooms were gutted.

The main academic building held the math, science, English and art departments, as well as the school’s main offices. The building was demolished this summer, and the spot is now bare.

Tentative plans call for the school to have more classrooms than the old building, just one story and an updated look, Schools Superintendent Roy Breithaupt said. But he stressed that it won’t be here anytime soon and that the process is a lengthy one.

“I’m very glad to hear that those who committed the crimes will be brought to justice,” Breithaupt said after the announcement.

Dec. 4, 2006

After the fire, students returned to what many called “chaos” on Dec. 4, 2006. That was the day that authorities say six black high school students — who became known as the Jena Six — attacked white student Justin Barker. Barker was knocked unconscious and treated at a local emergency room for about three hours.

The incident and the legal system’s response to it thrust the high school and entire community into the national spotlight.

The six were arrested and initially charged with attempted murder, but the charges eventually were reduced.

More than 20,000 marched through the streets of Jena on Sept. 20 to protest what they called unequal justice.

Only one of the cases has made its way through the justice system.

Mychal Bell pleaded guilty to second-degree battery after admitting in court on Dec. 3 that he did hit Barker, knocking him unconscious. As part of his plea agreement, Bell will have to “truthfully testify” in any of the cases involving the other members of the Jena Six.

Bell was sentenced in December to 18 months in a juvenile facility to run concurrently, where possible, with the previous sentence of 18 months that Bell had received for three previous crimes.

The other five members — Robert Bailey Jr., Jesse Ray Beard, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Theo Shaw — have yet to face trial, and no trial dates have been set.

Post a Comment   View All Comments Because white kids hang around blacks kid ,their ways are rubbing off on the white kids are just foolish to blame blacks for this. Where are the parents in this matter,where are the parent to give their children direction in life and leading their kids the right way. It’s evident, the parent these days are doing a horrible job raising their kids(black and white). Until we as responsible parents start guiding and teaching our children how to conduct themselves in the right way, this foolish behavior will continue. The problem is the children are running over the parent and getting away with it. NO PUNISHMENT,NO NOTHING Put that rod on their butt!!!!!!!! Don’t feel sorry for them when their acting up. SHOW THEM WHO IS BOSS They will think you in a long run for caring. The Bible says spare the rod spoil the child Our children are spoil and running over us. So don’t blame the blacks, blame the parents (both black and white) Posted by: smith on Sat Dec 29, 2007 11:00 am Yes there are good and bad in both races Nonviolent Diet. But the majority of bad kids comes from the colored race. The prisons are full of coloreds. Some Caucasian are influenced by the black ghetto values. Those are usually your white trailer trash. Roger your screws are looose.. White trailer trash–they can’t afford the cloths.bling or circus rides. Also you cannot blame the current trends on just the blacks. You must not get out much or know any teenagers. As a kid you must have stayed in a closet (guthook to) or were yall the “nerds” and didn;t fit in. There is a new fad,new toys new everything nowdays–get your head out of the dark space between your legs and grow up. Next time there is a shortage of some grocery item you will probably blame the black race for that–what a shame. Posted by: rreds on Sat Dec 29, 2007 10:56 am to Rodger Ray- what part of the back side of the 1930’s did you come from??? You sound like a racist to me. And I suppose you are Albino meaning you dont have any color in your skin???? Only one suffering from Albinism can truly call another colored——-DUH we are all colored DUH DUH DUH>L.O.L.———L..O..LL. Posted by: freedomforall on Sat Dec 29, 2007 10:33 am Posted by: Nonviolent Diet on Sat Dec 29, 2007 10:29 am I have to agree with Rodger Day on his post. He may be the hardcore racist here, but he tells the truth. Since the white kids started hanging around the colored kids, things have changed. They have taken what were nice cars and turned them into junk circus wagons, started wearing pants that let their butts hang out, wear their hats funny, talk in ebonics, listen to ghetto racket they music, smoke more dope than ever before and get into more trouble than they ever did. The new lifestyle the white kids are living came as the direct result of hanging around with the coloreds. The proof is there, just open your eyes and see it !! Posted by: guthook6 on Sat Dec 29, 2007 10:26 am Post a Comment   View All Comments

Thoughtful treatments of Barack Obama’s “postracial” politics inevitably turn to Jena.  This feature article from the New York Times cuts much deeper than earlier journalistic discussions of the Chicago politician’s racial dilemma.   Consider this quote:

In his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama recalls sitting with a white, liberal Democrat in the Senate and listening to a black, inner-city legislator, whom he identified only as John Doe, speechifying on how the elimination of a particular program was blatant racism. The white colleague turned to Mr. Obama and said, “You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”

Mr. Obama finds a lesson in that moment: White guilt has exhausted itself. Even fair-minded whites resist suggestions of racial victimization. Proposals that benefit minorities alone cannot be a basis for the broad coalitions needed to transform the country, he concluded. Only “universal appeals” for approaches that help all Americans, he wrote in his book, “schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it” can do that, “even if such strategies disproportionately help all Americans.”

True, white guilt has exhausted itself.  Whites have a lot to feel guilty about, but the issues have grown so complex that, as a practical matter, there are few opportunities for pressing that case.  Discuss the ways slavery and Jim Crow racism have been perpetuated in America (particularly in the legal system) with  the typical white American for an hour or two once a week and it would take you half a year to break through the resistance.  Unfortunately, most white Americans aren’t close enough to black Americans for this kind of conversation to even begin.

Herein lies Mr. Obama’s dilemma: he understands Jena from a black perspective, but he can’t press the case without losing white support.  The best response is to call for an improved justice system for all Americans.  The same point could be made in relation to all social programs.  If only a minority of Americans benefit from a proposed solution it will never muster majority support.  That’s the new American reality.  That’s just one of many reasons why only universally applicable solutions to the health care crisis make any sense.

In the meantime, black and white Americans still need to talk–long and hard.  The conversation we need won’t happen in the mainstream media.  Bill Moyers might be able to scratch the surface, and the article below is a good starting place, but the issues are just too complex and personal for most media venues.  Sooner or later, real people need to sit down and talk.  Until that happens, black presidential candidates will have to walk the fine line Mr. Obama is walking.

A Biracial Candidate Walks His Own Fine Line

The incumbent was an aging party loyalist, mayoral confederate and institution in black Chicago. His opponent was younger and white, a reform-minded independent Democrat who had helped Barack Obama in his Senate race two years earlier.

Both sides wanted the support of Mr. Obama, a vote magnet in Chicago. The challenger, Forrest Claypool, 48, had the backing of the major newspapers and a couple of liberal members of Congress. The incumbent, John Stroger, 76, had the party organization, many of the city’s blacks and Mr. Obama’s political benefactor, the State Senate president, Emil Jones.

So Mr. Obama remained neutral. He was blasted in blogs and newspapers for hedging rather than risk alienating people he needed, though others said he had made the only shrewd choice.

“Those relationships are complex,” said Mr. Claypool, who lost the primary race to Mr. Stroger (who never served because of illness) and is now working on Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign. “No politician takes important relationships for granted.”

Much of Mr. Obama’s success as a politician has come from walking a fine line — as an independent Democrat and a progressive in a state dominated by the party organization and the political machine, and as a biracial American whose political ambitions require that he appeal to whites while still satisfying the hopes and expectations of blacks.

Like others of his generation, he is a member of a new class of black politicians. Too young to have experienced segregation, he has thrived in white institutions. His style is more conciliatory than confrontational, more technocrat than preacher. Compared with many older politicians, he tends to speak about race indirectly or implicitly, when he speaks about it at all.

After Hurricane Katrina, he did not attribute the lumbering federal response to the race of most of the storm’s victims. “The incompetence was color-blind,” he said, adding that the real stumbling block was indifference to the problems of the poor. After six black teenagers were charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white schoolmate in the “Jena Six” case in Louisiana, he said the criminal justice system needed fixing to ensure equal justice “regardless of race, wealth or circumstances.”

And when Mr. Obama announced his candidacy in February, he chose the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., a place imbued with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln. He spoke of his work in “Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods” and of ending poverty; race came up only glancingly, as in, “Beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people.”

But the postracial style has its pitfalls.

‘Acting Like He’s White’

Earlier this fall, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, an Obama supporter who ran for president twice, was quoted by a reporter as saying Mr. Obama “needs to stop acting like he’s white” (words that Mr. Jackson has variously said that he would never say and that were taken out of context).

He added, “If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena.”

More recently, Mr. Jackson accused the Democratic candidates except for John Edwards of having “virtually ignored” the plight of blacks. (His son, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, fired back in an op-ed column in The Chicago Sun-Times under the headline, “You’re wrong on Obama, Dad.”)

“A black candidate doesn’t want to look like he’s only a black candidate,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, who ran for president in 2004, said in an interview about Mr. Obama. “If he overidentifies with Sharpton, he looks like he’s only a black candidate. A white candidate reaches out to a Sharpton and looks like they have the ability to reach out. It looks like they’re presidential. That’s the dichotomy.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Obama denied that he had spoken less about race issues than other candidates. But he said he focused when possible on “the universal issues that all Americans care about.” His aim, he said, is “to build broader coalitions that can actually deliver health care for all people or jobs that pay a living wage or all the issues that face not only black Americans but Americans generally.”

He suggested that his critics were comparing him not with Mr. Edwards or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton but with Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton. “That comparison is one that isn’t appropriate,” he said. “Because neither Reverend Jackson nor Reverend Sharpton is running for president of the United States. They are serving an important role as activists and catalysts but they’re not trying to build a coalition to actually govern.”

Mr. Obama’s legislative record does not diverge sharply from that of other black legislators, some who have studied it say. For example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which grades members of Congress on their support for its agenda, gave Mr. Obama a 100 percent score. The difference between him and some others lies more in life experience, approach to politics and style.

And while Mr. Obama’s advisers say he is entirely comfortable with his identity — as he has said, proud to be an African-American but not limited by that — he carries a peculiar burden as a presidential candidate: whether or not he calibrates his words, blacks as well as whites are likely to parse them for anything they might signal about racial issues.

“There is a special expectation and opportunity that we have to talk about the ways race works in America,” said Gov. Deval Patrick, a friend of Mr. Obama and the first black to lead Massachusetts.

But, Mr. Patrick said, “sometimes I think advocates want one note from us. I think our experience in our lives and in our politics has been that there’s much more than the one note — and sometimes a cacophony.”

There was a time when black politicians had little in common with white politicians. They had been educated in segregated schools and historically black colleges; many had entered politics through the civil rights movement, social activism or the black church. Their districts and constituents were overwhelmingly African-American. They were “race men” who had built their careers advocating for blacks.

Winning a Mixed District

They tended to be more liberal and militant than the Democratic Party as a whole, said Michael C. Dawson, a University of Chicago political scientist. They opposed rising military budgets and military intervention abroad, favored economic redistribution and were willing to consider such things as demands for reparation for slavery.

Hanes Walton Jr., a University of Michigan political scientist, said, “Once you got African-American elected officials in the 1960s and 1970s, there was huge demand from the black community about getting things done. Some of these elected officials came on with fairly rough edges because they were making consistent and hard demands. In many ways, that couldn’t be escaped. These elected officials knew that they were elected from the black community.”

Mr. Obama, by contrast, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, far from any center of black life. He graduated from a private prep school in Honolulu, Columbia College and Harvard Law School. Though he has belonged to the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago since 1987, he was not raised in the traditions of the black church, which Ange-Marie Hancock, a Yale political scientist, says “nurtured generations of black politicians” and “that almost exclusive emphasis on race — and race in a black/white framework.”

Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996 — not from an overwhelmingly black district like those that elected early black legislators but from a racially and economically mixed neighborhood, Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago. In a state where Irish-American dynasties dominate Democratic Party politics, he sprang up as an outsider — a former community organizer without party or machine support.

Mr. Obama never fit any easily recognizable model of a black politician during his seven years in Springfield. He was a progressive Democrat who worked with Republicans; a black man whose weekly poker-game partners were white; an independent Democrat whose mentor, Mr. Jones, was one of the most powerful black politicians in the state and supported by the Chicago machine.

In his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama recalls sitting with a white, liberal Democrat in the Senate and listening to a black, inner-city legislator, whom he identified only as John Doe, speechifying on how the elimination of a particular program was blatant racism. The white colleague turned to Mr. Obama and said, “You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”

Mr. Obama finds a lesson in that moment: White guilt has exhausted itself. Even fair-minded whites resist suggestions of racial victimization. Proposals that benefit minorities alone cannot be a basis for the broad coalitions needed to transform the country, he concluded. Only “universal appeals” for approaches that help all Americans, he wrote in his book, “schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it” can do that, “even if such strategies disproportionately help all Americans.”

Mr. Obama has never had difficulty appealing to whites. In his ill-fated 1999 campaign against Representative Bobby L. Rush, a four-term Democratic congressman and former Black Panther, Mr. Obama won the white vote but lost the black vote in a district that was overwhelmingly black. Abner J. Mikva, a former Illinois congressman and longtime supporter, said, “It took him a while to realize that it’s a vote that has to be courted.”

Hermene Hartman, the publisher of N’Digo, a weekly newspaper in Chicago, recalls advising Mr. Obama to talk less about his experience as the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. “What I was saying early on was, ‘Harvard Review will play at the University of Chicago, it won’t play on 55th and King Drive,’” Ms. Hartman said.

Mr. Mikva says Mr. Obama learned to campaign in different ways without changing the substance of what he was saying. He learned to use rhythms, analogies, “quotes that resonate better.” Others say he simply worked hard at becoming better known, consolidating his support among black elected officials, black ministers, labor organizations and community groups, skating nimbly among factions.

Straddling Interests

Mr. Obama’s relationship with Mr. Jackson extends back at least to the early 1990s. Mr. Jackson’s daughter, Santita, was a friend of Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, and was a bridesmaid at their wedding. The Congressional district of Representative Jackson included Mr. Obama’s State Senate district; they have worked together on issues, endorsed some of the same reform-minded candidates against the party slate and sought each other’s advice.

At the same time, Mr. Obama has remained close to his longtime mentor, Mr. Jones — an old antagonist of Representative Jackson, who defeated him for Congress in 1995. Alan Gitelson, a political scientist at Loyola University in Chicago, said, “The skill of Obama is that he’s been able to straddle the two major factions among blacks in Illinois.”

Mr. Obama has also cultivated a working relationship with Mayor Richard M. Daley. Mr. Daley, who backed an opponent of Mr. Obama in the 2004 Senate primary, this year endorsed Mr. Obama for president — around the time that Mr. Obama endorsed Mr. Daley for re-election, annoying some supporters and passing over two black candidates considered unlikely to win.

“I can tell you, having worked for both of them, they are both pragmatists who want to get things done,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist and a longtime consultant to Mr. Daley.

By the time Mr. Obama began running for the United States Senate, he “didn’t have to run as a black candidate,” said Don Rose, a longtime political consultant in Chicago. Illinois had already elected one black senator, Carol Moseley Braun, and Mr. Obama had nailed down overwhelming black support. According to Mr. Axelrod, he ended up with 92 percent of the black vote in a competitive field.

Yet race was a subtext of a television advertisement widely believed to have helped Mr. Obama win, Mr. Rose believes. The advertisement featured Sheila Simon, the daughter of former Senator Paul Simon, a Democrat who was a revered figure in Illinois politics, lionized by white progressives and admired by some conservatives. Mr. Simon, who had worked with Mr. Obama on ethics reform, had intended to endorse him but had died unexpectedly after heart surgery in 2003.

So Mr. Axelrod had asked Ms. Simon to make an advertisement about the similarities between her father and Mr. Obama. He said the commercial might help explain Mr. Obama’s unexpected success in white, working class neighborhoods on Chicago’s Northwest Side, which had been hostile to black candidates in the past. Mr. Rose believes that the advertisement’s subtext, intentionally or not, was gender and race: “It is saying, ‘People, I’m a white woman, and I’m not afraid of him.’”

Dining With Sharpton

In Washington, Mr. Obama made it clear almost immediately that his career would not be defined by his race. One of the first acts of the new Congress was to certify the results of the Electoral College. Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus moved to contest the certification of the Ohio votes. Mr. Obama did not join them. In a hastily arranged maiden speech, he said he was convinced that President Bush had won but he also urged Congress to address the need for voting reform.

In his office, he hung paintings of Lincoln, Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom he calls his heroes.

In recent weeks, Mr. Obama has turned some of his attention to courting black voters. Nine months into his campaign, he held his first fund-raiser in Harlem, at the Apollo Theater, where he said, among other things, he was in the race because he was “tired of reading about Jena.” Then he went on tour with Oprah Winfrey, whom he had gotten to know when she interviewed him after his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Mr. Sharpton, who has yet to endorse anyone, says Mr. Obama began his campaign as “the alternative to guys like me.” But in recent months, Mr. Sharpton said, “he’s been calling us.”

Mr. Obama also arranged to dine with Mr. Sharpton, in the presence of a herd of reporters, before his appearance at the Apollo.

“A portion of black voters want Obama to give them some raw meat,” said Julian Bond, chairman of the board of the N.A.A.C.P. “Because they want so badly to have their concerns addressed and highlighted, and they expect it of him because he’s black.”

Bestselling author, John Grisham has been added to the list of keynote speakers for the upcoming New Baptist Covenant gathering in Atlanta.  Since I will be presenting in a couple of (much smaller) venues at this late-January conference this piece from the Associated Baptist Press caught my attention. 

Convened by moderate Baptists, especially driven into exile when the Southern Baptist Convention lurched to the right in the 1980s, the New Baptist Covenant is an attempt to re-brand the word “Baptist”.  Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore have given their blessing to the Atlanta meeting and it should attract around 20,000 people.

I will be talking about criminal justice reform–hardly a hot topic among Protestant Christians.  Like my wife, Nancy, and my father-in-law, Charles Kiker, I am an ordained American Baptist Pastor.  The American Baptist Churches (formerly known as the Northern Baptists) are a diverse network embracing black, white and Latino congregations.  We are evangelical, liberal and everything in between.  Like most established Christian communions, we spat about hot-button issues like the inspiration of Scripture and homosexuality.  We are Republicans, Democrats and independents. 

For the past several decades, a loose coalition of moderate (that is, not fundamentalist) Baptist leaders have been inching toward a new kind of organized Baptist identity.  They aren’t trying to create a new denomination, exactly; just a safe place for moderate-to-liberal Baptists who are weary of fighting the culture war. 

John Grisham is one of those people.  He will be talking about the justice system.

Author John Grisham joins lineup of New Baptist Covenant speakers

By Greg Warner

Published: December 21, 2007

While the rest of America recoils from a brief love affair with the death penalty, Texas soldier on.  Last year, as Adam Liptak reports in the New York Times, the Lone Star state accounted for 60% of the executions performed in these United States.  That’s right, 60%!

Americans continue to support the death penalty, at least in theory.  But the recent crop of DNA-based exonerations have given the nation pause.  Why are we convicting so many innocent people; and why are so many of the exonerees black?

These questions are being asked in Texas as well.  After all, some of the most shocking exonerations have occurred here.  In fact, new Dallas County DA., Craig Watkins, has reversed the long-established practice of frustrating DNA analysis.  DNA tells us when we’ve nailed the wrong person and reassures us in cases where we got the right guy. 

So, why is the Death business still thriving in Texas?  Politics.  Politicians get votes by out-tuffing the opposition or by appointing “hang-’em-high” judges to appeals courts.  Over the past few decades, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has evolved into a bad joke (see below).

The Texas prison system exploded after an unseemly “I’m tuffer’n you” spat between George W. Bush and Democractic incumbent Ann Richards in the 1990s.  The generally sensible Richards forced herself to believe that prisons were okay because some addicts need enforced rehabilitation.  Bush declared that prison, per se, was rehabilitation.   The result was lots of addicts in the joint but precious little rehab for anyone.

Texas takes pride in its status as the death penalty state.  Curiously, the growing pile of exonerations has, so far at least, had little influence on our appetite for death.  Still, even here, the breezes of reform are beginning to stir.  Shocking revelations about our juvenile justice system and chronic overcrowding in state prisons have raised eyebrows and furrowed brows from Houston to Amarillo.  Is tuff enough?  Maybe our obsession with death and detention isn’t having the desired effect.

Adam Liptak came to my attention when he covered the dramatic Tulia evidentiary hearings in the spring of 2003.  He now has a weekly column in the Times and writes the occasional feature article on the legal system.

U.S. Disparity in Executions Grows as Texas Bucks Trend

Most journalists won’t touch complex stories like Tulia and Jena until the investigative grunt work has already been done.   That’s why I sent my “Responding to the Crisis in Jena, Louisiana” piece to Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune. His work on the Shaquanda Cotton story convinced me that he would “get” Jena.  Only later did I realize that Witt had traveled to Linden, Texas to break the Billy Ray Johnson story.  It was just a minor item on the news wire that Howard thought somebody ought to look into.

In this feature article, Howard Witt returns to Paris, Linden and Jena to see if anything changed once the cameras left town.

Witt’s reporting in the Tribune caught the attention of Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center.  During the civil trial that eventually netted $9 million for Billy Ray Johnson, Dees appealed to the better angels of Linden, Texas.  Instead of painting Mr. Johnson’s tormentors as depraved animals, Dees emphasized the humanity of the victim. 

My wife, Nancy and I traveled to Montgomery to meet with Richard Cohen, Morris Dees and several other members of this well-established civil rights organization.  Dees, remarkably fit at 74, handed me a copy of his biography (recently edited to include his work on the Johnson case) and a DVD featuring television news magazine treatment of the story.

When the same social dynamics crop up in little towns like Tulia, Paris and Linden and Jena you have to wonder if these communities are isolated vestiges of Old South racism or dramatic illustrations of a contemporary national problem.  The aggressive (some would say, grotesque) prosecution of the Jena 6 contrasts with the casual judicial response to the good-ol-boys who left Mr. Johnson for dead on an ant heap.  The treatment of Shaquanda Cotton (seven years of detention for pushing a hall monitor) takes on a shocking aspect when juxtaposed with the lenient treatment of a white girl convicted of arson.

The point isn’t that Shaquanda Cotton or the Jena 6 moral exemplars; the point is that they are not treated like American citizens.

The most insightful comment in Mr. Witt’s restrospective comes from Jena pastor Eddie Thompson.  Asked why so many white folks in Jena seem to feel that blacks and white get along splendidly, Thompson said, “There’s a lot of white people who have not genuinely seen the issue.  If you’re living in the majority, then everything looks fine to you.”

No black-and-white answers

Several months after racial injustices were exposed, some wounds have begun to heal. And some have festered.

Howard Witt: http://www.chicagotribune.com/howardwitt>

Tribune senior correspondent

December 26, 2007

Plotted on a map, the towns of Paris, Linden and Jena line up neatly along a 300-mile diagonal that falls across the Texas-Louisiana border.

But to many African-Americans, that line looks more like a gash across the beneficent face that the New South tries to present to the rest of the nation.

In each of those three mostly white towns, local incidents of perceived discrimination against blacks drew national outrage and civil rights protests after the Tribune wrote stories about them, thrusting their long-obscured racial tensions into the open during a tumultuous year.

Now, Tribune senior correspondent Howard Witt has returned to discover whether the fundamental racial dynamics of Linden, Paris and Jena were altered in any meaningful way after the TV cameras departed and the headlines faded away.

The answer in Linden appears to be yes. In Paris, not much. And in Jena, it’s too soon to tell.

As spotlight dims, shadows remain

The stories read to many like harrowing echoes from the worst days of the Jim Crow South.

In the east Texas town of Paris, amid allegations from black parents that the local schools and courts systematically discriminate against their children, a white judge sentenced a 14-year-old black girl to up to 7 years in a juvenile prison for pushing a hall monitor at her high school. The same judge sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down a house, to probation.

In Linden, Texas, four young white men lured a mentally retarded black man to a party, made him dance for their amusement while calling him vile names and then knocked him unconscious and left him for dead by a trash dump. The black man survived a brain hemorrhage but suffered permanent disabilities; the white men got a slap on the wrist from local juries that regarded them as “good old boys” who made a youthful mistake.

And in Jena, La., a local prosecutor initially charged six black high school students with attempted murder after they allegedly jumped a white schoolmate and kicked him while he lay unconscious. The attack followed months of racial violence set off after three white students hung nooses from a tree in the high school courtyard in what black students saw as a threat directed at them.

Once those hidden stories became public and started ricocheting across the Internet, civil rights leaders, bloggers and the rest of the media trained their sights on the three towns. Activists organized national petition drives, letter-writing campaigns, fundraising efforts and protests.

And the short-term effects of that intense outside scrutiny were profound.

Texas youth officials released the Paris girl, Shaquanda Cotton, from prison in a matter of weeks. Civil rights lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Linden man, Billy Ray Johnson, and won a $9 million judgment against his attackers. And more than 20,000 demonstrators from across the nation journeyed to Jena to stage the largest civil rights march in years.

Long term, however, a question still lingers: For all of the national ferment, are the relations between blacks and whites in these three towns any better?

Linden, Texas The triumph of tolerance

The white mayor who casually referred to black men as “boys” is gone.

An African-American doctor was recently elected to the town council. And Linden officials contributed $10,000 to a new community center built by a black philanthropic group.

Even a controversial mural inside the local post office depicting barefoot black fieldworkers picking cotton — a painting many black residents found offensive — has a new brochure posted beneath it explaining the historical and artistic context of the Depression-era work.

In many ways, Linden no longer resembles the starkly divided town where many white residents once closed ranks around the four white youths who in 2003 assaulted a mentally retarded black man and dropped him beside a garbage dump, unconscious and bleeding in his brain.

Instead, many here say that over the last year a new spirit of interracial cooperation has infused the town of nearly 2,300 people, 78 percent of whom are white and 20 percent black.

But it took the Billy Ray Johnson beating case — and the harsh portrayal of the town in the national media as a racist backwater — to bring that change about.

“The attack on Billy Ray Johnson not only wrecked the life of Mr. Johnson but disrupted the entire town,” said Linden’s new mayor, Kenny Hamilton, a branch manager at a local bank. “But it did make us step back and look at how we are portrayed, and we found it to be undesirable. So we resolved to do some things about that.”

One thing Linden’s voters did this year was turn out of office the local district attorney, whose 2005 prosecution of Johnson’s attackers was regarded by many black residents as half-hearted and ineffective.

Local juries declined to convict the four white youths of any serious felonies, instead finding them guilty of a few misdemeanors. Although Johnson suffered permanent brain damage in the attack, none of the attackers served more than 60 days in the county jail.

Last April, however, another jury hearing the Johnson case reached a far different conclusion. Acting in a civil suit brought on Johnson’s behalf by the Southern Poverty Law Center, local jurors awarded Johnson $9 million in damages against his four assailants.

“At one point in the trial, one of the defendants said that ‘we put it in the back of the truck,’ referring to Billy Ray,” recalled Judi Howell, one of the jurors who heard the civil case. “I can remember cold chills running through me. As far as I’m concerned, that was a $9 million ‘it.’ We wanted to send a message that this was not acceptable in our community.”

The civil jury’s verdict redeemed Linden, many believe.

“That civil verdict was very cleansing for the community, to see that he received justice for what was done to him,” said Rev. David Keener, pastor of the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church. “There was an admission of wrongdoing on behalf of the judicial system.”

Thomas Northcutt, president of the Fairview alumni association, a group of graduates of the segregated school that used to serve blacks before Linden schools were integrated in 1970, is even more optimistic.

When Northcutt approached Linden’s Economic Development Corp. with a request to help the Fairview association build a new community center, the town officials instantly offered a large donation.

“As tragic as it was, the Billy Ray Johnson case united this town,” said Northcutt, a carpenter whose family owns the Linden farm where his ancestors once toiled as slaves. “People are talking to each other more.”

– – –

Update: Billy Ray Johnson

A family dispute over the custody of Billy Ray Johnson erupted after he was awarded the $9 million civil verdict in April. A lawyer and a man claiming to be Johnson’s legal guardian, who are seeking control over the damages award, recently removed Johnson from the Texarkana nursing home where he was receiving therapy and brought him back to Linden to live with his ailing mother and an ex-convict brother. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is investigating the situation.

Paris, Texas False starts, dashed hopes

Springtime in Paris this year looked to offer a new beginning — at least for a moment.

March was rocky, as protesters, civil rights activists and TV cameras crisscrossed the streets amid bitter accusations that this east Texas town of nearly 26,000 systematically discriminates against the 22 percent of its citizens who are black. Paris officials angrily replied that outsiders were twisting perceptions of their town.

But by April, some Paris leaders were counseling reconciliation. The editor of the local newspaper suggested a plaque at the Paris fairgrounds to commemorate the painful history of black lynchings that took place there in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Meanwhile, the Paris branch of the NAACP asked the City Council to convene a special diversity task force to investigate the state of racial relations in the town. Others called for a series of town hall meetings where residents could air their grievances.

By May, however, the outsiders and their unwanted attention had moved on from Paris. And the racial reconciliation proposals were dead.

“The City Council didn’t think that was the function of the city” to establish a diversity committee, said Dr. Joann Ondrovik, a white psychologist who is president of the Paris NAACP chapter. “They thought it’s unnecessary.”

Little has changed in Paris in the nine months since the town was thrust onto the national stage over the case of Shaquanda Cotton, the 14-year-old black girl sent to youth prison for shoving a hall monitor at Paris High School.

Although state authorities released Cotton from prison on March 31, just three weeks after her story became public, and she has been living quietly at home with her mother ever since, her case remains a divisive totem for the town.

Many blacks regard the teenager as a victim of what they perceive as unequal justice and disproportionately harsh discipline meted out to blacks in Paris schools and the local courts — and a symbol of broader economic discrimination that they say afflicts the town. There are no black employees, for example, in the Paris Fire Department and few in other local government jobs.

Racism “is as prevalent today in Paris as it was 50 years ago,” said Nadine Ausbie, a paralegal and former clerk for a local judge who said that for many years she was the only black employee at the county courthouse. “It has never been OK here. It’s still not OK. And it never will be OK.”

Yet many whites see Cotton as representative of nothing more than a troublemaking student who got the punishment she deserved.

“To be honest with you, I don’t see [racial tensions] in Paris,” said Mayor Jesse James Freelen. “It’s outsiders coming in to our community, and they don’t know all the facts.”

Even some black residents who say they agree with Freelen seem conflicted about the issue.

Joe McCarthy, a prominent African-American leader, joined a recent lunch with several white businessmen who called on him to endorse their view that there is no racial discrimination in Paris. And to a point, McCarthy agreed.

But then the discussion turned toward allegations of racial profiling by the Paris police. And McCarthy, a middle-age man who drives a luxury car and served on the City Council from 2001 to 2004, suddenly volunteered how he was pulled over while driving through downtown Paris early one morning.

“I was the only one out at that time of morning, there was only one way you could turn, but the police officer said I had failed to use my turn signal,” McCarthy recounted. “It just rubbed me wrong. Do I look suspicious? He only stopped me because I was black.”

– – –

Update: Shaquanda Cotton

Shaquanda Cotton, now 16, has been living at home in Paris since being freed from a Texas youth prison on March 31. She is not enrolled in school, but her mother says she intends to begin home-schooling so Shaquanda can earn a GED certificate.

Jena, La. The jury is still out

At one end of Oak Street in downtown Jena sits Doughty’s Westside Barber Shop, where proprietor Frankie Morris matter-of-factly explains that he will never cut a black man’s hair because that would soil his combs and clippers and offend the white customers who fill his chairs.

At the other end of Oak Street sits Southern Heritage Bank, where Vice President Thomas Watkins says he would gladly hire an African-American to join his exclusively white staff of 35 if only he could find one who was qualified.

Smack in between the whites-only barber shop and the all-white bank sits Jena’s white mayor, Murphy McMillin, behind his desk at City Hall. Yet the retired oil industry executive says he’s baffled at why tens of thousands of African-Americans journeyed here in September to protest alleged racial discrimination in the town he’s always known as quiet and contented.

“There seems to be harmony among all the races here, so you can see why I’ve been surprised that the nation doesn’t seem to think that’s true,” McMillin said. “There’s a story being told by the national media that says we are very racist. I don’t believe that. But I also don’t believe we are perfect.”

Jena may not think it has a problem. But much of the rest of the nation appears to have made up its mind.

In fact, if there is a ground zero for the Internet-powered civil rights movement of the 21st Century, Jena would have to be it.

The central Louisiana lumber town, with its infamous nooses hung from a tree and its controversial prosecution of six black high school students for beating up a white classmate, seems destined to join Selma and Birmingham in the rarefied lexicon of Southern cities whose very names stand as shorthand for the struggles of black Americans to be treated equally.

Many of the black residents here — they constitute 12 percent of the town’s population of about 3,000 people and live mostly clustered in blighted neighborhoods — say they long ago learned to keep their heads low and not ask for much from Jena’s dominant whites.

“If you walk into a bank in Jena, you don’t see but one black face behind the counter — and we have five banks here,” said Rev. Brian Moran, whose Antioch Baptist Church was vandalized, allegedly by two white men, a few hours after an NAACP meeting was held there in July. “And in any type of business, black customers are treated differently than whites.”

Now, after a measure of introspection forced on the town by all the national attention, a few whites in Jena say they are coming to understand why blacks feel discriminated against.

“There’s a lot of white people who have not genuinely seen the issue,” said Eddie Thompson, a local Pentecostal pastor. “If you’re living in the majority, then everything looks fine to you.”

For his part, McMillin says he’s determined to discover what, if anything, is wrong in his town. In November, the mayor convened a seven-member multiracial “community relations panel” and directed it to closely examine the state of race relations in Jena — a topic the town has never before openly broached.

McMillin said he started with a list of nearly 40 potential committee members.

“We asked, ‘If you find out something you didn’t know before, are you willing to change your mind?'” McMillin said. “Only the ones who said yes were selected.”

The new committee has its work cut out for it. Most of the Jena 6 defendants face court proceedings in coming months, ensuring fresh waves of scrutiny focused on the town. And white supremacists have announced plans to stage a pro-white march through Jena on Jan. 21 — the national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

– – –

Update: The Jena 6

One of the Jena 6 defendants, Mychal Bell, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree battery for the attack on a white student at Jena High School and was sentenced to 18 months in juvenile detention. The others — Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theo Shaw and an unnamed juvenile — have yet to stand trial. The Jena district attorney has opened plea bargain negotiations with each of them.

hwitt@tribune.com

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune <http://www.chicagotribune.com

Jena figures prominently in a number of end-of-the-year-wrap-up stories, most of which are content to recap the basic facts and move on.  This piece from Media Matters highlights comments from prominent media personalities that give Don Imus a run for his “nappy-headed hos” money.  Topping the list is Fox News host John Gibson who was appalled by the sight of over 20,000 black Americans descending on a sleepy little Southern town.

“What they’re worried about is a mirage of 1950s-style American segregation, racism from the South,” Gibson surmised.  “They wanna fight the white devil. … [T]here’s no — can’t go fight the black devil. Black devils stalking their streets every night gunning down their own people — can’t go fight that. That would be snitchin’.”

This comment (like many others chronicled in this article) demonstrates that Gibson has virtually no insight into the thoughts and feelings of African Americans.   Why would twenty thousand people march against black-on-black violence?  You march to change public policy decisions.  That means powerful white males will generally be on the receiving end.  Nothing personal, you understand, it’s just that powerful white males, not black hoodlums, make the policy decisions (or in-decisions) that lead to tragedies like Jena.

Also featured in this chronicle of tasteless, boneheaded remarks, is Bill O’Reilly’s wonderment that black patrons of a Harlem restaurant could behave like normal (white) Americans.  I guess he expected a little bitch-slapping and gun play.  O’Reilly and Gibson make these stupid comments because they have little first-hand experience with black America.  This makes them dependent on the very media stereotypes their ignorant rants perpetuate.

The comments highlighted below are important for the same reason Jena is important–they serve as egregious examples of normal white American perception.  O’Reilly, Gibson et al see white values and etiquette as normative.  To the extent minorities can assimilate to white standards they are accepted as citizens; to the extent they cannot (or will not) assimilate they are written off as thugs, perps and miscreants. 

Misinformation of the Year

It’s still not just Imus

Media Matters for America usually takes the opportunity at the end of the year to name a Misinformer of the Year, an individual or media entity who in that year has made a noteworthy “contribution” to the advancement of conservative misinformation. This year — a year in which Don Imus was removed from his decades-long radio program following a reference to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” (Imus returned to the air in December) — Media Matters has decided to change the focus of the year-end item. The Imus controversy resulted in intense media attention to the subject of speech concerning race and gender. At the time, Media Matters thought it necessary to remind the media that “It’s not just Imus” — that speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity permeates the airwaves, through personalities including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Michael Savage. But offensive and degrading speech is not limited to conservative media personalities and “shock jocks,” although they are, of course, well-represented on any such list. As Media Matters has documented throughout this year, speech that targets or casts in a negative light race, gender, religion, ethnicity, national origin, and sexual orientation can be found throughout the media, and it often bears directly on politics and policy. That speech has earned the title of Misinformation of the Year 2007.

Race or national origin

• Fox News host John Gibson, discussing events surrounding the so-called Jena Six during the September 21 broadcast of his nationally syndicated Fox News Radio show, asserted that the demonstrators who had gathered the previous week in Jena, Louisiana, “wanna fight the white devil.” Gibson aired news coverage of the Jena 6 protests and challenged protestors’ claims that the incidents in Jena were representative of ongoing racism in this country. He said: “[W]hat they’re worried about is a mirage of 1950s-style American segregation, racism from the South. They wanna fight the white devil. … [T]here’s no — can’t go fight the black devil. Black devils stalking their streets every night gunning down their own people — can’t go fight that. That would be snitchin’.”

  Gibson also stated during the October 10 broadcast of his radio show, while discussing an incident in which a student shot four people at his Cleveland high school before killing himself, that “I know the shooter was white. I knew it as soon as he shot himself. Hip-hoppers don’t do that. They shoot and move on to shoot again.”

• Nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage claimed on Martin Luther King Day (January 15) that “civil rights” has become a “con” and asserted, “It’s a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males’ birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn’t qualify for it.”
• On the February 7 edition of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club, host Pat Robertson said that people who have received too much plastic surgery “got the eyes like they’re Oriental” while he put his fingers up to the side of his face.
• Discussing a dinner with Rev. Al Sharpton at the Harlem restaurant Sylvia’s, during the September 19 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, Bill O’Reilly statedthat he “couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.” Later, during a discussion with National Public Radio senior correspondent and Fox News contributor Juan Williams about the effect of rap on culture, O’Reilly said: “There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.” O’Reilly also stated: “I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They’re getting away from the Sharptons and the [Rev. Jesse] Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They’re just trying to figure it out. ‘Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.'” (more…)

Several members of the Congressional Black Caucus are asking Louisiana Governor, Kathleen Blanco, to pardon Mychal Bell and the Jena 6.  Governer Blanco says she can’t issue a pardon without a recommendation from the State Pardon Board.  Since such a recommendation is unlikely to materialize, the CBC’s request is best interpreted as a statement of concern and support.  As such, it is most welcome.  At least it shows that some of the folks who rallied around the Jena 6 in September are still thinking ab0ut the boys two months later.

Meanwhile, the white supremacists who are planning to march on Jena on Martin Luther King Day are now suing the central Louisiana town.  They don’t see why they can’t disrupt the traditional route of Jena’s traditional MLK parade or why they can’t show up on the streets of Jena fully armed. 

After initially welcoming the support of the unapologetically racist Nationalist Movement, Jena mayor Murphy McMillin has recovered his senses.  He isn’t denouncing the Nationalists (who once rallied in support of the cops who beat up Rodney King), but he isn’t sidling up to them either . . . a marked improvement in form, you will agree.

The Nationalist Movement says that if their demands aren’t met they won’t be marching in January; sort of a “my way or we won’t hit the highway” proposition.

That will be just fine with the folks in Jena and everybody else.  The last thing Jena needs is a bunch of jackbooted thugs marching in support of law, order, guns, God, and Justin Barker. 

In the end, neither the Congressional Black Congress nor the Nationalist Movement will decide how this saga plays out.  The only players that matter are the attorneys representing the Jena 6, district attorney Reed Walters, and Judge JP Mauffray.  Don’t expect major developments in the dwindling days of 2007, but January should be an interesting month.

Black Caucus Seeks Pardon for Jena 6

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Members of the Congressional Black Caucus called on Gov. Kathleen Blanco to pardon Mychal Bell and five other teenagers known as the “Jena 6.”

Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said in a letter to Blanco this week that Bell and the other teens have paid their debt to society and should be immediately pardoned.

“They and their families have suffered enough, as has the State of Louisiana and the town of Jena,” the letter reads.

Blanco’s press secretary, Marie Centanni, said Friday in a statement the governor cannot grant a pardon or commutation without a recommendation to do so from the state Pardon Board.

Blanco leaves office Jan. 14. The next Pardon Board meeting is scheduled for Jan. 17.

Fourteen other members of the caucus joined Lee in urging Blanco to support releasing Bell, who was sentenced to 18 months in a juvenile facility on Dec. 3 for his role in an assault last year on Justin Barker, a white student at Jena High School.

An e-mailed request for comment from Blanco was not immediately returned.

Bell pleaded guilty to a juvenile charge of second-degree battery in return for a deal that gave him credit for the 10 months he had already served. Without the deal, the 17-year-old faced being placed in a juvenile facility until his 21st birthday.

Although he has only about eight months left to serve in the case, Bell is serving a separate 18-month sentence for previous juvenile charges unrelated to the Barker dispute. He has about 16 months left on that sentence, which runs concurrently with the sentence in the Barker case.

The charges against Bell and the others sparked a huge civil-rights demonstration in Jena in September. The activists said prosecutors treated blacks more harshly than whites.

Three months before the attack on Barker, three other white teens were accused of hanging nooses from a tree at the high school. The three were suspended from school but were never criminally charged.

LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, in an e-mailed statement Thursday, said the attack on Barker was not just a schoolyard fight “but rather an unprovoked, unforeseen assault on a young man who had nothing to do with the hanging of the nooses.”

Charges against Robert Bailey Jr., 18; Carwin Jones, 19; Theo Shaw, 18 and Bryant Purvis, 18 have been reduced from attempted murder to aggravated second-degree battery. The last suspect was charged as a juvenile and not identified.

James Cone and I have something in common–we both want to start a conversation between black and white Americans in general, and between those who go by the name of Christian in particular.  In late November, Dr. Cone, a theology professor at Union Seminary in New York City, was interviewed by Bill Moyers.  Although I have provided the full transcript of their conversation, I recommend that you listen rather than read.

James Cone was invited to appear on the Journalbecause Bill Moyers heard a sermon on the cross and the lynching tree that professor Cone delivered last year at Harvard Divinity School.  Excerpts from that sermon are woven into the Journal conversation.   The context, obviously, was Jena and the weird proliferation of noose hangings that followed in the story’s wake.  Here’s a quick excerpt.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the current spate of the appearance of the noose again? Up comes this story right here from the suburbs of New York. A noose found in the basement-a locker room of the village police department. The deputy chief of police is black. And then you’ve got Jena and you got what happened at the Columbia, near your office. You think these people who– do you think they understand what that’s the symbol of? Of what actually happened to human beings when that noose was placed around the neck? Or is this just some kind of– you know, some kind of grim game?

JAMES CONE: Well, you know, you don’t have to know all about the Nazi hol– Holocaust to understand what a swastika is. You don’t have to understand all about the history of lynching to know what a noose is. Everybody knows that. Somehow, that– that gets– you don’t have to know that history. It’s in– it’s in American culture. As you say, it’s in the DNA. It’s our– it’s white America’s original sin and it’s deep. Like, for a long time, we didn’t want to talk about slavery. They don’t like to talk about 246 years of it. Then a hundred years of legal segregation and lynching.

Now, you don’t get away from that by not talking about it. That’s too deep. Germany is not going to get away from the Holocaust by not talking about it. It’s too deep. So, America must face up that we are one community. We– you know, if anybody in this society– if anybody is brother and sister to the other, it’s black people and white people because there is a– there is a tussle there that you cannot get out of. It is a– it is deeply engrained in our relationship to each other in a way that’s not with anybody else–

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

JAMES CONE: Because 246 years of slavery, number one. We have built this country. White people know that. Then, after slavery, segregation and lynching, we still helped build this country. So, it’s a history of violence, a history of black people fighting in every American war– even the Civil War.

BILL MOYERS: Like the Jews and the Arabs, right?

JAMES CONE: That’s right.

BILL MOYERS: ‘Cause, I mean, they come out of the same–

JAMES CONE: That– out of the same matrix.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, yeah, and they can’t–

JAMES CONE: And you can’t–

JAMES CONE: You can’t let each other go. I don’t care what you do. And that’s why–those nooses create that kind of response.

Cone tells Moyers that black and white Americans need to have a conversation.  It is “a tussle that you cannot get out of” because black and white Americans “can’t let each other go.”

Reinhold Niebuhr, a Union Seminary theology professor who influenced people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King and a long list of powerful public officials, comes into the conversation a lot.  Niebuhr insisted that if America wants to be a great nation it needs to lose its innocence.  Reinhold Niebuhr, and his equally influential brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, constructed a politically informed theology of the cross between the 1920s and 1960.  They still figured prominently when I attended seminary between 1975 and 1979, but had largely faded from the academic scene by the time I came back for doctoral work in 1989. 

As Cone suggests, Reinhold Niebuhr is staging a come back.  The columns of David Brooks, a conservative columnist with the New York Times, quotes Niebuhr frequently.  If black and white Christians want to engage one another in serious conversation, James Cone argues, we can’t ignore the history of slavery and lynchings.  For that to happen, white Christians have got to abandon the myth of American innocence.  Here is where Niebuhr can help more than any contemporary theologian or social analyst.

I wish the conversation didn’t need to move through such dangerous territory, but I fear it does.  Until white Christians are ready to handle the truth in all its stark ugliness we will remain estranged from black America.  Tragically, as the typical white response to Jena demonstrates, we’re not ready for the truth and I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

So how do you get a conversation started when one conversation partner insists that all the critical issues remain off the table?  Damned if I know; but that’s the challenge.

November 23, 2007

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL. Our subject in this hour is one you don’t hear discussed very often in politics or around the dining table. It’s buried so deeply in the American psyche that rarely does anyone bring it front and center. Our silence on it is one reason we have so much difficulty coming to terms with race in America. I’m reluctant to raise it even now, because it’s anything but a comfortable subject for television. But I went online not long ago and listened to a speech at Harvard University that I simply can’t forget and I wanted you to meet the man who delivered it.

JAMES CONE: …blacks and whites and other Americans who want to understand the meaning of the American experience need to remember lynching.

BILL MOYERS: His name is James Cone and he has a powerful message about seeing America through the experience of the cross and the lynching tree.

JAMES CONE: ..to make sense out of the cross, the central symbol of the Christian faith, and the lynching tree…

BILL MOYERS: That’s right – the cross on which Christians believe Jesus Christ was crucified in the Roman Empire, and the lynching tree that meant agony and death for thousands of black people. Their connection is the subject of our broadcast. Be forewarned: you will see some disturbing images.

JAMES CONE: Yes, that is a noose…

BILL MOYERS: In the past few months we’ve all seen these chilling reports:

REPORTER: …one in Farmingdale and just yesterday in Roosevelt. Those two…”

BILL MOYERS: Nooses tied to a school yard tree in Jena, Louisiana.

REPORTER: …historically reserved for white students…

BILL MOYERS: Nooses left for a black member of the US Coast Guard.

REPORTER: …at New London, Connecticut…

BILL MOYERS: A noose on the door of a university professor’s office here in New York City.

REPORTER: …here at Columbia University…

VOICE: …because today it’s a noose and tomorrow they trying to put some bodies head in it…

BILL MOYERS: The reappearance of nooses is a haunting reminder of the dark side of American history, when after the civil war black Americans were forced to live in the shadow of the lynching tree. Thousands of human beings, tortured and hanged by the neck until dead.

BILLIE HOLIDAY SINGING Southern trees bear strange fruit… …blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze…

JAMES CONE: …’fruit hanging from the poplar trees’. Billie singing her signature song.

BILL MOYERS: James Cone knows that song well. As one of America’s pioneers of black theology, he has never been able to forget its message, and he wants his students at Union Theological Seminary here in New York City, to remember it, too.

JAMES CONE: …so that the brutal facts of history, keeps that from being a sort of pie in the sky thing. (more…)