Category: Criminal justice reform

McCuien, Madoff and the arts of deception

January 26, 2009January 26, 2009 · 5 Comments ·

The Talented Mr. Madoff

Bernie Madoff has friends and former associates befuddled. How could such a nice, competent guy create so much misery? In this New York Times article, “The Talented Mr. Madoff,” Julie Creswell and Landon Thomas portray the New York financier as a classic psychopath.

In a recent post, “Psychopaths Under Oath,” I argue that American prosecutors are vulnerable to the machinations of psycopathic witnesses. The Madoff story is just another example.

Creswell and Thomas are reluctant to portray Bernie Madoff as a psychopath without consulting expert opinion, beginning with an FBI profiler.

“Some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims,” says Gregg O. McCrary, a former special agent with the F.B.I. who spent years constructing criminal behavioral profiles.

Mr. McCrary cautions that he has never met Mr. Madoff, so he can’t make a diagnosis, but he says Mr. Madoff appears to share many of the destructive traits typically seen in a psychopath. That is why, he says, so many who came into contact with Mr. Madoff have been left reeling and in confusion about his motives.

“People like him become sort of like chameleons. They are very good at impression management,” Mr. McCrary says. “They manage the impression you receive of them. They know what people want, and they give it to them.”

I wish the FBI had consulted Mr. McCrary before they decided to believe every word proceeding from the mouth of a low-level psychopath named Donny McCuien. But the relationship between AUSA Stephen Snyder and Mr. McCuien isn’t all that unusual. Consider this:

Current and former S.E.C. regulators have come under fire, accused of failing to adequately supervise Mr. Madoff and being too cozy with him. “He [Madoff] was the darling of the regulators, without question. He was doing everything the regulators wanted him to do,” says Nicholas A. Giordano, the former president of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. “They wanted him to be a fierce competitor to the New York Stock Exchange, and he was doing it.”

Men like Mr. Snyder are entangled in the webs woven by witnesses like Donnie McCuien because they are dependent on their cooperation. Like Bernie Madoff, Donnie McCuien listened carefully to the authority figures in his world until he learned what they wanted to hear–what they were desperate to hear. . Once that is established, it is simply a matter of saying the precious words in the right order and with the right emphasis.

Gullibility is driven by prosecutorial desperation.

Psychopaths are successful because they are completely unconcerned with the feelings of others–they have no empathy. Because they are only concerned about their own interests, psychopaths are unencumbered by ethical and moral niceties. Which brings us to the second expert cited in the New York Times article.

Mr. Madoff’s confidence reminds J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist, of criminals he has studied.

“Typically, people with psychopathic personalities don’t fear getting caught,” explains Dr. Meloy, author of a 1988 textbook, “The Psychopathic Mind.” “They tend to be very narcissistic with a strong sense of entitlement.”

All of which has led some forensic psychologists to see some similarities between him and serial killers like Ted Bundy. They say that whereas Mr. Bundy murdered people, Mr. Madoff murdered wallets, bank accounts and people’s sense of financial trust and security.

Like Mr. Bundy, Mr. Madoff used a sharp mind and an affable demeanor to create a persona that didn’t exist, according to this view, and lulled his victims into a false sense of security. And when publicly accused, he seemed to show no remorse.

Like Bernie Madoff, Donny McCuien never worried about getting caught. He was so confident in his ability to deceive federal authorities like Stephen Snyder that he continued to run real estate scams while he was telling the government that he knew nothing about the world of real estate.

Because Alvin Clay was willing to do the government’s work after the fact, it has recently come to light that Donny McCuien was enthusiastically scamming buyers, sellers and lenders when he took the stand to speak the words Mr. Snyder longed to hear.

True, McCuien is to Madoff as a minnow is to a whale, but the same principles hold.

Ultimately, McCuien and Madoff were undone because neither man could conceive of personal failure. The technical term is “grandiosity”.

The media can’t be expected to unmask the likes of Madoff and McCuien. Until Madoff admitted (without a shadow of remorse) to pocketing fifty billion dollars of other peoples’ money, journalists had no reason to suspect the man. The New York Times didn’t commission a major investigative article until after the Wall Street magnate had fallen from grace.

Similarly, I haven’t been able to interest the media in the plight of Alvin Clay.

Prosecutors, investigators and S.E.C. enforcers who fear the wrath of a just God must develop a keen nose for psychopaths like Madoff and McCuien. We should probably be paying more psychologists and profilers to check out potential witnesses. The signs of deception are easily spotted once you know what to look for and it is so much easier to clean up the mess before another wrongful conviction or Ponzi scheme goes into the books.

Obama opens the door

January 15, 2009January 22, 2009 · 2 Comments ·

Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint have been barnstorming the country ever since they released their diatribe against the Hip Hop generation, “Come on, People!” They were on a panel at Howard University a week or two after the massive march on Jena. Howard students were polite and defenential toward Cosby and Poussaint, but they were much more enthusiastic a few hours later when I joined several Jena 6 parents on stage.

This all started back in 2004 when Cosby addressed a Washington gala on the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. Instead of honoring the ground-breaking world of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund, Cosby lit into “the lower income folk” in the black community. Black people needed to stop blaming white folks for all their problems, Cosby said. The time had come to move beyond the victim mentality.

Ted Shaw, the newly minted lead counsel for the Legal Defense Fund, followed the Coz to the podium. Scrapping the polite speech he had prepared for the occasion, Shaw launched into an impromptu call for a modern civil rights movement. As a case in point, he cited Tulia, Texas, where, he told the audience, 47 innocent black people were arrested on the word of a racist white police officer. In other words, some poor black people really are victims.

When I ran into Ted Shaw in Jena last year, I reminded him of his run-in with Bill Cosby. I could see the pain in his eyes. No one enjoys mixing it up with a cultural icon.

That hasn’t protected Cosby from the wrath of the black intelligentsia, however. He has been accused of selling out the civil rights movement, for blaming the victim, and for aiding and abetting white conservatives. Michael Eric Dyson’s “Is Bill Cosby Right? Or has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind” may have offered the most scorching critique. (more…)

Obama’s cardinal sin

April 13, 2008April 15, 2008 ·

Barack Obama didn’t realize he was breaking one of the cardinal rules of American political life–never speak honestly about guns, the military or religion. Hillary Clinton knows this rule because she watched her husband live by it through several tempestuous decades of political life in Arkansas and Washington.

Mr. Obama was asked why his campaign was having trouble gaining traction with working people. The Illinois senator was in a relatively intimate setting and he decided, unwisely, to answer an honest question honestly. Working people feel shut out of the political life of the nation, he said. They work hard, but have little to show for it. Factories close, jobs disappear and nobody in Washington seems to be paying attention. “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama wasn’t suggesting that people go hunting when they get frustrated, or that folks turn to God in their hour of need. He was suggesting that when people feel their backs pressed against the wall they separate the world into two camps: the familiar and the dangerous; us and them. They lash out at the immigrants (legal and illegal) who are snapping up jobs that should be reserved for native Americans. Just as they want a few guns in the home to repel intruders, they favor the use of force against America’s enemies.

Most significantly, beleguered people typically embrace a dualistic, us-against-them religious vision. The world is divided into the saints and the sinners; the saved and the damned; the children of light and the children of darkness. America becomes the New Israel, and God protects her because she is the quintessential Christian nation.

Thoroughgoing advocates of this worldview comprise a distinct minority; but in blue collar and lower middle class congregations, this defensive posture dominates, albeit in a somewhat diluted form. Few pastors could survive more than a month or two if they were to denounce this worldview from the pulpit. Republicans get elected by merely hinting that they resonate with this us-against-them religious vision. Preachers and politicians who disagree learn to keep their dirty little secret to themselves.

Hillary Clinton is making the most of her opponent’s faux pas. She was raised with God and guns, she says, and is on good terms with both. Obama is guilty of liberal elitism; he is talking down to the masses.

In 1932, John D. Rockefeller asked Harvard’s William Earnest Hocking to head up a “Rethinking Missions” investigative study. People like Pearl Buck were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the traditional missionary model. They didn’t want to convert people away from their inherited religions; they wanted to encourage creative dialogue between communities of faith. Hocking envisioned a Christianity so big and comprehensive that the citizens of the world could call themselves Christians without rejecting their inherited religious beliefs.

The idea didn’t play well in Peoria. In fact, it created chaos within the mainline Christian denominations that participated in the Hocking-Rockefeller study. From that day to this, every major Christian denomination has had a conservative wing constantly threatening to break away in protest. Some have done it. More evangelical denominations, like the Southern Baptists, have essentially excommunicated all those uncomfortable with the us-against-them religious vision.

This helps explain why most Protestant pastors rarely speak honestly about religion unless the people in the pews are of a common mind. They rarely are. The United Churches of Christ, the liberal denomination to which Barack Obama belongs, endorses an inclusive religious outlook. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s United Methodists are deeply divided. Seminary professors and denominational leaders generally favor gun control, a liberal immigration policy, urge extreme caution in the use of military force, and favor inter-religious dialogue over the traditional conversionist model of missions. My guess is that Hillary Clinton (and her Baptist husband) share these convictions. But wise Methodist pastors and Methodist politicians avoid these subjects.

When a small group of black and white residents stood up to a bogus drug bust in Tulia, Texas, we quickly learned that the criminal justice system is the ultimate expression of the us-against-them vision. The defendants in Tulia were convicted without meaningful evidence because they were already outcasts, pariahs, “those people”, them. Prison is the temporal equivalent of hell.

The cancerous growth of prisons over the past quarter century cannot be explained by crime rates or public safety concerns alone; there is something deeper and more sinister at work. Prison is now reserved for the portion of the population that cannot or will not adapt to the rigors of a highly competitive marketplace in which unskilled jobs have become an endangered species. Our prisons are filled with the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, the drug and alcohol addicted, and high school drop outs. The Children’s Defense Fund talks about a “Cradle to Prison Pipeline” specifically designed for children born into poor and socially chaotic environments.

Ironically, those most deeply affected by the collapse of the old industrial economy who are most likely to favor prison expansion.

Hillary Clinton’s new status as a gun-toting, flag-waving, Bible-thumping American may win her a few votes on April 22nd, but it isn’t likely to convince genuine us-against-them enthusiasts if she is still around for the general election. Bill Clinton dealt with an upsurge of us-against-themism in the 1990s by building prisons and pouring billions of dollars into the war on drugs. The abject failure of these policies has created a backlash and Hillary Clinton now favors a more temperate approach. In both cases, I fear, policy has been driven by political expediency.

By gently and compassionately critiquing the us-against-them mentality, Senator Obama has committed the cardinal sin of American politics. Can he survive? This is a serious question. Ms. Clinton clearly tastes blood in the water and is moving in for the kill. Much depends on whether Mr. Obama can reframe the debate. In America, his options are limited, but I hope he gives it a shot.

Alan Bean

The final word on Jena (and beyond)

April 7, 2008 · 8 Comments ·

Jena, Louisiana still crops up in the media from time-to-time, usually as shorthand for abiding racism. Darryl Fears’ Washington Post feature on the decline of traditional civil rights groups tips the hat to the Jena phenomenon in its closing paragraphs.

When six black teenagers in Jena, La., were being prosecuted as adults last year in the beating of a white classmate, the local branch of the NAACP played a small role in defending their rights, but it was Color of Change.org that secured their release.

Color of Change deserves the accolade. Under the leadership of James Rucker, COC collected hundreds of thousands of signatures for a Jena petition and hundreds of thousands of dollars for the legal fight (every penny of which landed in the right hands).

Unfortunately, no one has won the release of the Jena 6; Mychal Bell is serving the last few months of his sentence and the other five defendants still face trial.

Moreover, the “local branch of the NAACP” was formed a year ago through the efforts of Friends of Justice, Tory Pegram, then of the La. ACLU, and Jena 6 families led by Caseptla Bailey and Catrina Wallace.

In late January of 2007, ten Jena 6 family members and Alan Bean of Friends of Justice drove to Baton Rouge, La. to meet with NAACP leaders. After waiting for three hours, we finally got five minutes with president Ernest Johnson. His message was simple: create an NAACP branch with 100 dues-paying members and we’ll be there for ya’ll.

We held up our end. The state NAACP waited for the story to go viral on the internet and become a staple item in the mainstream media–then they took an interest.

Darryl Fears is right about the endgame–Color of Change and radio personality Michael Baisden had far more to do with bringing 30,000 people to Jena than old-guard icons like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

But how did James Rucker of COC and Michael Baisden hear about Jena in the first place? Rucker was invited to participate by Tory Pegram (now a Friends of Justice board member). Pegram remembered the great work Color of Change had performed in the wake of Katrina and made the critical call.

Dallas-based Michael Baisden learned about Jena from reading the paper, watching television and surfing the net.

I have no problem with high-profile, high-capacity folks riding to the aid of the grassroots folks who do the heavy lefting early on. But I do have a problem with the self-promoting arrogance media celebrities commonly demonstrated in Jena.

James Rucker is a blessed exception. He came to town and worked with the grassroots people while the story was still catching fire.

Michael Baisden and Al Sharpton rolled into Jena in flashy limousines, grabbed a few soundbites from a compliant media, then headed off to Alexandria for a fundraiser. The next day, when concerned citizens from across the nation flocked to Jena, the big boys bickered backstage about who should command the premier venue.

Catrina Wallace, the brother of Jena 6 defendant Robert Bailey, had organized a Hip-Hop concert for local youth. The La. NAACP, afraid that the rappers might go to cussin’, bumped Catrina’s concert to the sidelines. Finally, the NAACP was dissed and dismissed by Baisden and Sharpton. In the end, there were two rallies: one featuring Baisden, Sharpton and friends; the other highlighting Jesse Jackson and the La. NAACP.

The folks who endured two nights on a bus to get to Jena found themselves wandering from one venue to the other, wondering what was going on. In the end, it didn’t matter. Few were aware of the internecine squabbling and a good time was had by all.

It was all good; but it could have been so much better.

Now, folks are wondering what happened to the Jena movement. We all gathered for a big rally; the House Judiciary Committee held a highly-publicized hearing into the matter; then interest dropped like a rock. What was that all about?

Any “movement” that owes its existence to the undeniable power of celebrity will eventually be done-in by celebrity’s impotent downside.

Michael Baisden was flying by the seat of his pants. He didn’t understand what Jena was all about and he never bothered to talk to those of us who had been living the story for half a year. The story got under The Bad Boy’s skin. He was outraged, and his passion translated powerfully to millions of listeners. Baisden called his “family” to join him in Jena for a big rally. The logistical ramifications were enormous. No one had time to ask what came next.

So nothing came next.

Al Sharpton doesn’t investigate civil rights abuses; he waits for other people to get the story to the media, then he swoops in wagging his finger at the evil doers. But Sharpton never knew what Jena was all about. Everything was reduced to his stock storyline: unequal justice for black folks.

Sharpton concluded that the criminal justice system should either try to noose boys as hate criminals or turn the Jena 6 loose. Like any good controversialist, Al doesn’t do nuance.

Because Sharpton is a media celebrity, his take on Jena became the last word.

Make no mistake; Jena is a story about unequal justice. But what lies at the root of this inequality?

Jena is a story about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children. Jena is about racial insensitivity translating into bizarre public policy. Superintendent Roy Breithaupt should have known that nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree were a sign of fear and deep loathing. Relations between the noose boys and certain black football players were bad and steadily worsening. Everybody knew it. The issues needed to be addressed.

Trying the noose boys as hate criminals would have missed the point. These were kids, after all. They needed to be dealt with firmly, fairly and compassionately. They were not responsible for the legacy of Jim Crow racism, but their minds and hearts had certainly been twisted by it. Nothing short of a full program of education addressing all the historical, ethical, and relational issues the Jim Crow South has left in its weary wake would have been sufficient.

But Mr. Breithaupt wasn’t ready to confront Jena’s history, so he tossed his town’s dirty linen into the clothes hamper and hoped it would disappear.

When the noose incident was dismissed as a childish prank, the black community was outraged and the school was placed on lockdown. Reed Walters was called to an emergency assembly. This was another teachable moment, a second chance for someone in authority to address the key issue. Like the superintendent, Mr. Walters dropped the ball.

In a June hearing at the LaSalle Parish courthouse, Walters was asked if he had waved his pen in the air and told the students that he could make their lives disappear with a stroke of his pen. Walters owned up to the remark without hesitation. He thought the black students were overreacting to the handling of the noose incident and he wanted to give them a reality check. Black and white students, Walters told the court, needed to “work things out by themselves.”

This is America’s problem–we are leaving the children to work things out for themselves. When adolescent males are left to their own devices bones are broken and the blood flows freely. Thus it has every been; thus it will ever be. It’s the male code, and it will be followed with tragic inevitability unless the adults in the room step in and do some teaching.

That, Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Baisden, is what Jena is all about.

The real Jena story could have sparked a productive national debate. In fact, despite all the misplaced emphasis and the hollow theatrics, the real story has been told. It could have been told better, no mistake. But Jena has sparked a boistrous and sustained conversation about how we can break the chain of violence that eventually engulfed Justin Barker and Robert Bailey in Jena.

The most articulate response thus far has come from Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, an organization that’s asking the right questions and providing sane and workable answers.

So what’s next for Jena?

It all depends. If Reed Walters takes even one of these cases to trial, Jena will be back in the news. It might not make the front page, but the fires of controversy will be rekindled.

If Reed Walters agrees to a universal settlement involving no additional prison time, there will be a few passing references in the media and the story will quickly fade from view.

Frankly, I’m praying for the second solution because it is in the best interest of the Jena 6, the Barker family and the good people of Jena.

What’s it to be, Mr. Walters? The next move is yours.

But perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “What’s next for Jena?”, we should be asking what’s next for the criminal justice movement. Jena’s name is legion.

Friends of Justice continues to monitor the situation in Jena, but we have moved on. We’re working in Bunkie, Lousiana. We’re playing a bit part in a large coalition working for justice for the Angola 3. And we’re currently researching a case in Little Rock, Arkansas that cuts to the heart of America’s prison problem.

Fasten your seat belts, ladies and gentleman, we’re in for a bumpy ride!

Alan Bean

Friends of Justice

SPLC responds to Walters, getting back to the point

September 29, 2007September 29, 2007 · 2 Comments ·

The Southern Poverty Law Center responds to D.A. Reed Walters’ Op-Ed in the New York Times.

http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=286

San Diego columnist Ruben Navarette critiques the protests in Jena:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/navarrette/20070923-9999-lz1e23navarre.html

Ruben Navarette is a gifted, even-handed columnist. Unfortunately, his
weird treatment of the Jena 6 story illustrates why all the details of this
story must be on the table before any of it comes into focus. Notice that
Navarette doesn’t even mention the noose incident or the official,
“stroke-of-my-pen” response to it. Reed Walters’ bizarre overcharging of
the Jena 6 pales in comparison to his crude attempt to use the power of his
office to clamp down on legitimate protest. In the process, Walters placed
the white country boys who hung the nooses and the black football players
who led the student protest on a collision course that was guaranteed to end
badly.

I wonder if Mr. Navarette has dealt with the image of black and gold nooses
hanging from a “white tree”? Or has he come to grips with Reed’s pen?
Apparently not. These omissions are so appalling they call for an
explanation. What, precisely, is going on here?

Here’s what’s going on: Mr. Navarette is tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse
Jackson, and this case provides the perfect opportunity to get in a few
licks. I probably talked to twenty reporters from across the nation
yesterday, and they all seemed to have it in for Al and Jesse. That’s a
problem for a man in my position. Clearly, celebrities like Jackson,
Sharpton, and Michael Baisden attracted a great deal of attention to this
story. That’s the upside.

But this nickel also has a tails side–America, black and white, old and
young, isn’t responding to the Al and Jesse show anymore. You can celebrate
or lament this fact, but it cannot be denied. Their shtick is growing
stale. The cameras still come running when the household names speak–but
the gravitas is gone.

The celebrities who have latched onto this case have inadvertently messed
with the message. As I just suggested, this has been a story that gets
badly out of focus if essential aspects are ignored. The media is an
entertainment medium. It goes for the graphic images: nooses in a white
tree; Justin Barker’s battered visage. All good stories are driven by
conflict, so the media phoney competitions (which is worse, nooses or
assault?) and “town divided” scenarios in which black residents lament their
communities racist ways and white residents say it ain’t so. That’s hot; it
sizzles.

At its core, this is a story about Reed Walters’ pen; a story about bigotry
and hubris combining to create a toxic environment for Jena’s young
people–black and white. Many CNN viewers were surprised to hear the
LaSalle Parish district attorney explaining how the Lord Jesus Christ tamed
a pack of wild-eyed black superpredators on September 20th. Left to
themselves, Walters suggested, these folks would have run riot–just like
the Jena 6.

My Jena, Louisiana song (available on our home page) has Reed Walters
describing his role thusly: “Sunday morning I’m a church mouse, but Monday
morning at the courthouse, with a stroke of my pen, I’ll make your whole
world end. And all the King’s horses, and all the king’s mean, won’t put
your world back together again. I can do it all; ’cause I’m sitting on the
wall . . . Between the free and the fallen, between the sinner and the
saint; between the is and the ain’t. I can make you crawl, ya’ll, ’cause
I’m sitting on the wall.”

This guy sees himself as the Vicar of Christ in LaSalle Parish. I’m
serious. All power resides in his pen. All opposition to his righteous
reign will be crushed mercilessly. Robert Bailey Jr. and Justin Barker both
fell victim to Reed Walters’ megalomania. Reed got this way because he has
unlimited discretionary powers. Power, as they say corrupts–and Reed’s
power is absolute.

You can’t blame Ruben Navarette for getting the story so very wrong. Blame
story tellers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who are too stuck in the
categories of the old civil rights movement to understand what this story is
about. Mychal Bell ain’t Rosa Parks, ya’ll. Rosa Parks isn’t going to jail
anymore. We can either pretend that Mychal is Rosa, or we can defend Mychal
Bell’s right to due process because he is an American citizen.

That much, Mr. Navarette understands.

Can we get back on message here? I hope so. I spent two months framing
this story before I fed it to the journalists and the bloggers. It hurts to
watch celebrity activists wandering so far off-message. Mychal Bell
deserves better.

The closest thing to being there…

September 24, 2007 · 2 Comments ·

This Youtube video does a great job of capturing what it was like to be in Jena, Louisiana for the protest this Sept. 20th. The video also conveys the deep faith that motivated so many people there to stand up for justice. The film ends with the words, “9-20-07. Today we made history and God was there…Victory has been declared…We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.” Thank you to ManofGod Productions for making this film: (http://www.myspace.com/socrunc4Christ) and thanks to Glittering Generalities for alerting me to this video.

In other news, I guest-blogged on Jena for tpmcafe this afternoon: “A new Civil Rights movement is born in Jena, LA?” Which means I have to eat crow now, because just this morning I posted on Foresight to complain that so many progressive blogs missed the boat on the Jena story.

peace,

Lydia Bean

A New Civil Rights Movement gains traction in Jena, LA

September 23, 2007September 23, 2007 · 6 Comments ·

Executive Director Alan Bean wrote this three-part reflection after participating in the September 20^th rally for justice in Jena, Louisiana. He talks about all the amazing people he met in Jena and describes the experience of participating in a vigil of over 50,000 people in a town of 3,000. What does this massive protest mean for America? Alan concludes that a new civil rights movement was gaining traction in Jena on September 20^th, 2007. But that movement will look totally different from the spectacle that America saw on CNN.

We’ve broken up this reflection on the September 20th protests into three parts:

Part 1: Premonitions of a Movement

On September 20^th, the civil rights leaders of tomorrow weren’t on stage—they were watching from the crowd. They will get their chance—please, Jesus, make it soon. America is desperate for a new civil rights movement led by fresh faces.

Part 2: Sowing the Wind

I recalled that brisk January afternoon when Caseptla Bailey first led me to the tree in the square. “What do you want to see this for?” she asked me. “Caseptla,” I said, “this tree is going to be famous.” I had no idea just how famous Jena’s “white tree” would become.

Part 3: Looking to the Future

The day ended with a Hip Hop concert at the park organized by some of the family members. Artists from across Louisiana drove to Jena to show their support for the Jena 6. The NAACP of Louisiana did its level best to shut down the Hip Hop venue. They were concerned about the n-word, the f-word, and all the rest. The event received little publicity. If the Hip Hop generation is going to take the lead in this new civil rights movement, socially conscious Hip Hop music has got to be front and center.

(more…)

Part 1: A New Civil Rights Movement gains traction in Jena, LA

September 23, 2007September 23, 2007 · 5 Comments ·

Executive Director Alan Bean wrote this three-part reflection after participating in the September 20^th rally for justice in Jena, Louisiana. Alan concludes that a new civil rights movement was gaining traction in Jena on September 20^th, 2007. But that movement will look totally different from the spectacle that America saw on CNN.

We’ve broken up this reflection on the September 20th protests into three parts:

Part 1: Premonitions of a Movement | Part 2: Sowing the Wind | Part 3: Looking to the Future

Part 1: Premonitions of a Movement

The September 20^th rally for justice in Jena was a thing of beauty. Local officials had declared a state of emergency. Businesses were instructed to close. Some buildings were boarded up. The local Methodist Church kept its doors open; the rest of the town was shut up tight. The Methodists had the right idea.

When protesters started getting off the buses in Jena, Louisiana on Thursday morning I decided to get a picture of every T-shirt I encountered. After fifty pictures I threw in the towel. Virtually every contingent from across the nation had produced its own shirt. The background was invariably black, and there was usually some depiction of a noose and a tree.

I found myself flashing back to the day in January when I first met Mychal Bell and Robert Bailey, in the lock-up on the second floor of the LaSalle Parish courthouse. The boys had only been behind bars for a month or so at the time, but they were frightened and stunned by the events unfolding around them. Their eyes were asking, “What is happening to me? Why am I here?”

I don’t see a lot of visions (it’s not a Baptist thing), but that day was an exception. As Caseptla Bailey and I emerged from the courthouse, the entire lawn was covered with people demanding justice. Then it all faded; a momentary flash—a premonition.

On September 20^th, the protestors didn’t just cover the lawn in front of the courthouse; people in black T-shirts stretched for blocks. Hundreds of buses were parked throughout the town. I was too far from the makeshift stage at the courthouse to hear the speakers and, frankly, I didn’t care—the real message was being delivered by the beautiful people who came to Jena to voice their protest.

On September 20^th, the civil rights leaders of tomorrow weren’t on stage—they were watching from the crowd. They will get their chance—please, Jesus, make it soon. America is desperate for a new civil rights movement led by fresh faces.

Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Michael Baisden and the rest swept into town in stretch limousines, delivered their sound bites; then retreated to the relative comfort of Alexandria. Most of the people on the street had endured a harrowing two-day ride in a bus to stand under Jena’s unforgiving sun. But when we all hit the streets, everyone knew this was an historic moment—something unprecedented and unparalleled; a resurgence of the marches on Washington in the early 1960s. I almost expected the scene to be suddenly transformed into the black and white images I remember from television.

But this was not a black and white crowd. White people did travel to Jena for the rally, but this event was over 99% African American. It takes a big fire in the belly to put a person on a bus for two days. When I asked people why they had come to Jena the answer usually started with, “I heard about this story from Michael Baisden, or Steve Harvey or on CNN.” Then came the stories. “My cousin (or my son, or my brother) is doing time back home. What happened to Mychal Bell is happening all over this country.”

Black people understand this; white folks (for the most part) don’t have a clue what is going on in the criminal justice system and don’t want to know.