Category: Jena

Jena on CNN, Dailykos

· 3 Comments ·

Yesterday, the Jena story was featured on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.  Finally, the mainstream media is picking up this story!  This is a great day for our democracy, when the real news cuts through all that celebrity gossip nonsense.   I agree heartily with all the folks who are leaving comments on our site like: “Why haven’t I heard about the Jena story on TV?  I’m so tired of hearing about Paris Hilton while our democracy falls apart!”  Hang in there, now we’re cooking with gas!

And thanks to Blueintheface for posting this excellent update on DailyKos!

peace,

Lydia Bean

The Re-segregation of America

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Last night I was on Bev Smith’s nationally syndicated program with two of the Jena 6 parents. Ms. Smith learned about Jena from an article in Jet magazine (the first media outlet to cover the Emit Till story half a century ago). Bev asked me why the national media has been so slow to pick up on the Jena story. I responded with my usual explanation. The media generally avoids the travails of poor black people; generally it’s the legal troubles of high profile people like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Martha Stewart, Kenneth Lay and Scooter Libby that get the attention. Normally, shows like Law and Order and CSI feature the dastardly deeds of rich white people. Television cameras follow celebrated black defendants like O J Simpson, but stories about poor black people don’t play well in prime time unless the details are particularly lurid. Michael Jackson and Michael Vick get a lot of attention; folks like Jena’s Mychal Bell are ignored.

Given these unpleasant and unyielding realities, the Jena story has received phenomenal coverage. You know a case is getting big when columnists insert the story into a list of well publicized outrages. Hazel Trice Edney, the author of the piece below, mentions the Jena 6 saga in her laundry list of high profile race stories. I’m not familiar with Ms. Edney’s work, but if Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson return her calls she must have a following. In Ms. Edney story about the rapid re-segregation of America, Jena appears as an anomaly or “fluke”. America may be re-segregating; but where but Jena do you find “white trees” and nooses dismissed as childish pranks?

Back in 1976, I occasionally visited the high schools of Louisville, KY in my role as a youth minister. Black and white students were being bused across town on the theory that the lack of racial diversity in Louisville’s schools vitiated the basic assumption behind the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education: separate is not equal. Tensions were high in Louisville in 1976, and burly security guards patrolled the halls and lunch rooms of the high schools. The only fight I ever witnessed was between two black girls. With few exceptions, the white and black students ate and socialized separately. Some of the black students told me they handled the stress of entering an alien world by smoking a joint before getting on the bus every morning.

As a Canadian, carpet-bagging, do-gooder, I tried to bring the black and white students together. My strategy was to hold the occasional Bible study on the black side of town. I remember meeting in the home of a black school teacher in a black working class neighborhood where all the houses were painted and all the lawns were mowed. Nonetheless, the white students were shocked by the deprivation they encountered. Compared to the unbridled affluence to which they were accustomed, this modest 1600 square foot home looked like a tarpaper shack. Black students visiting the white side of town were equally overwhelmed by the obvious wealth gap.

Life in poor neighborhoods is hard. The poorer the neighborhood, the harder it gets. It is hardly surprising that affluent Americans should want to distance themselves from the pain of the inner city. When poor people follow, the affluent keep moving. Recently, we have seen a trend toward “gentrification”. Wishing to live closer to the city center, wealthy people transform squalid tenements into state-of-the-art condos and apartment buildings. As property values rise, poor people are forced to leave the streets and avenues they know as home. Whether rich people are fleeing or invading the heart of the city, the end result is the same: the re-segregating of America. This process is rooted in fear, not hate. The white folks who live on my street in Arlington, Texas don’t hate black people. In fact, if a black family with all the accoutrements of professional standing moved in next door, most of my neighbors would heave a sigh of relief. Now they could say they live in an integrated neighborhood! Integration is still prized as an American ideal-just so long as the minority folk moving in can keep up with the Joneses in dress, speech and the spoils of conspicuous (and tasteful) consumption. We just don’t want to live around poor people. As a practical matter, that usually means we don’t want to live around people of color. Black professionals are little different from white professionals in this respect. But since there aren’t enough black (and brown) professionals to go around, the practical result of people-being-people is segregated neighborhoods and segregated schools.

Last night, Bev Smith asked me a pointed question: why won’t white people acknowledge that racism is a serious problem. “When black people get together,” Smith told me, “that’s all we talk about.” I replied that white people generally define racism in terms of overt, Mississippi Burning, hatred for black people. Since most white people don’t hate black people, they see themselves as part of the solution, even if they live in all-white neighborhoods and send their kids to all-white schools. Cut off from the pain of poverty, white professionals see no evil and hear no evil . . . and as soon as they do, they move.

The price of segregation is an appalling and pervasive ignorance. We don’t think racism is a problem because, frankly, we don’t know any better. I spent most of Monday afternoon in the company of an intelligent, articulate and musically gifted young African American. He had recently graduated from Southern Methodist University, holds a degree from a prestigious university in Austria and speaks fluent German. But he understands the streets. He knows the prisons. His roots in the black community bind him to the pain of poverty. Only half my age, he knows things I cannot know as a white man. That’s how it is. So what do we do to reverse the re-segregation of America? Where does the conversation start? One place it can start is on the Friends of Justice blog. Your comments were precious-please keep them coming. I need to hear you far more than you need to hear me.

Alan Bean

 

____________ http://www.btimes.com/News/article/article.asp?NewsID=13963&sID=3
Mounting Racial Tensions ‘Resegregating’ America, Activists Say
by Hazel Trice Edney, NNPA Editor-in-Chief. Originally posted 8/21/2007 WASHINGTON (NNPA)

More than 100 years since W.E.B. DuBois declared that the “color line” would be the key problem of the 20th Century, civil rights activists and race experts now say the problem of racial tensions are still so pervasive in the 21st Century that some have labeled it as a resegregation. “It’s undeniable that we are resegregating education in a dramatic way and we are also resegregating or becoming more segregated residentially than we were. And so those things are clearly going backward,” says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racial hate activities across the nation. “I don’t think race-relations are doing terrifically well.” Potok says what appears to be a rise in racially charged incidents publicized this year alone coincides with the rise in race hate groups nationwide. * In January, the story was still blaring about comedian Michael Richard’s calling a Black man the N-Word from the stage in a crowded Los Angeles comedy club in November. * Within a few months, now former talk show host Don Imus’ on-air “nappy-headed hos” insult to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team dominated the airwaves and the streets. * Meanwhile, a list of racially charged criminal justice cases began heavily circulating. They include: * The Nov. 25 wedding day killing of unarmed Black man Sean Bell by New York police officers, which sparked protests into the new year; * The case of Genarlow Wilson, 21, who is serving 10 years in a Georgia prison as he awaits the state Supreme Court’s decision on his conviction of consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old White girl that happened when he was 17; * The U. S. Supreme Court’s ruling against race-conscious public school assignments in Louisville, Ken. and Seattle, Wash. that sent a chilling affect over other such plans across the nation; * And the Jena Six case, now at full throttle in Louisiana, where 16-year-old Mychal Bell and five other Black high school students could face up to a combined 100 years in prison after a school brawl that started with them being insulted by nooses hung in a so-called “White Tree.”

Coinciding with consistent news reports on such cases, Potok says the heated immigration debate that railed in the U. S. Senate well into the spring apparently exacerbated negative reaction to the racial climate. He says the perception of the rising number of Black and Brown people in America is directly connected to the rise in hate groups. According to the Intelligence Report, 602 such groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, were documented throughout the U. S. in 2000. That number has now risen by 40 percent to 844 in six years, he says, calling it “quite a significant rise and a real one.” Potok describes, “The reaction of very many people is that, ‘My country is changing all around me. This is not the country that my forefathers built. It must be because those brown-skinned people are coming in and destroying it.” Actual hate crimes and attacks soon follow, he says: “When hate crime gets the worst, it’s when the neighborhood starts to approach sort of a tipping point like 49 percent. But, once you get a significant number of whatever it is, Black people in a White neighborhood, brown people or whatever it is at the 30 or 40 percent mark, then some people start to feel ‘My town’s been stolen from me by these interlopers.'” Some places, such as Jena, where Mychal Bell was convicted by an all White jury in a case with a White judge and a White prosecutor, just appear to be a fluke, Potok says. “The civil rights movement just never made it there.” But, as the cases and the atmosphere of racism mount, activists say Black people can fight back non-violently – and win.

Activist, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has organized community marches in response to all of the most high-profiled criminal justice cases, says community mobilization is still among the most effective responses to racism and injustice. “Unquestionably, the color line was not solved in the 20th Century and it is absolutely facing us in the 21st Century. The difference is there has been in the last decade those who are in our own community who have been tricked into going to sleep and thinking that the relative progress of a few individuals has changed the plight of the masses,” he says. “Therefore, it has emboldened racists to come back out of the closet.” Sharpton says that those who criticize marching and having rallies in response to injustices are shirking what has proven to work. “The civil rights movement worked. They changed the laws that we are fighting to keep…How did they fight them? They fought one battle at a time. They fought Birmingham and then Selma. And those battles have broad ramifications…So, as we fight these battles, we must fight single battles that have broad ramifications. For example, we fought one battle of Imus and the whole industry now, including the record industry, is changing the N-Word and all,” he says. The Rev. Jesse Jackson agrees. “The laws changed, but the culture keeps kicking back,” Jackson says. “We will keep struggling, that’s what we are going to do.” Jackson says the period resurgence of overt racism in America is associated with the fact that an “undercurrent of fear” does not realize the benefits of diversity. “When the color line is dropped you have more talent developed…I think that we are making progress, but we are swimming uphill. We are running, but we are swimming uphill,” he says. “There is a layer of change that’s significant and there’s an undercurrent of resistance that’s surreal. The undercurrent will take you down.”

While Jackson and Sharpton often focus on community marches, Dr. Julia Hare, national executive director of the San Francisco-based Black Think Tank, says mobilized Blacks could take other direct action. “To maintain any kind of supremacy, you’ve got to maintain some kind of inferiority,” says Hare, a psychologist. “The people who put you under this oppression, why should they free you?” Hare says Black people must free themselves by taking direct action beyond marching such as collectively boycotting and removing their money from banks that redline in Black communities and by refusing to deal with stores and businesses that disrespect or fail to hire significant numbers of Black people. She says Black churches, under the inspiration of conscious Black preachers, could play a major role in organizing such targeted protests. Hare says the same strategies could be used to mobilize Black people to “take over school boards” and establish disciplinary and academic policies that could spark progress for Black children. Even as the perceived enemy is racism and White supremacy, another major problem in dismantling racist policies or in changing the racial climate in America can actually come from within the Black community, says Sharpton. He says high profile Blacks who try to marginalize racism in America or downplay it is doing the community a disservice. “When they talk down race, they give a lot of White America a cover into operating in the dark where they can do what they want and it’s no longer front page and front burner,” Sharpton says. “Everybody should be saying what is obvious – that there is a spike in racism from decisions by the Supreme Court all they way down to a Don Imus… And anyone who is saying we are beyond race is deluding the public for their own edification.”

Upsetting White Folks

· 9 Comments ·

Posted by Alan Bean
From Sherrel Wheeler Stewart of Black America Web comes this carefully researched account of Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III’s recent visit to Antioch Baptist Church in Jena, Louisiana.  If you click on the link below, you can hear Rev. Al discussing Jena and other issues of moment with radio personality Tom Joyner. 

Civil Rights Leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are frequently downed as opportunistic self-promoters.  One television station in Alexandria (about forty-five minutes southwest of Jena) received a flood of calls asking (a) why the station was publicizing the activities of men like Sharpton, and (b) why they were giving so much attention to the Jena 6?  The station told its critics that they just report the news; it’s up to the viewer to decide what’s what.

Yet, as a blogger recently noted, Sharpton and Jackson don’t chase the cameras so much as the cameras chase Shapton and Jackson.  From the standpoint of the Jena 6 and their supporters, that’s a good thing.  The news media only covers “happening” stories: that is, stories where something is shaking.  Since there is currently little action at the LaSalle Parish courthouse, we should be glad that Brother Al and Martin Luther King III have deigned to visit this isolated central Louisiana community.

If you listen to Sharpton’s comments on the Tom Joyner show you will realize that the New York preacher is a bit fuzzy on the facts.  That’s not surprising.  Activists like Sharpton live inside a whirling vortex of information and activity.  Everytime they turn around, some staffer is whispering about the latest piece of breaking news.  Leave it to others to get the details straight; Sharpton helps the cause by showing up.

In the story below, I am quoted as saying that Jena’s black community was divided on the Jena 6 issue prior to Sharpton’s arrival.  Let me clarify.  I have yet to speak to a black person in Jena who isn’t outraged by the events of the past year.  But outrage doesn’t always translate into involvement.  Many black residents have a “Let’s not upset the white folks” take on this issue.  In fact, a week after the Jena 6 were arrested, five hundred Jena residents, black and white, held a racial unity rally at the football field.  They joined hands and sang “There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in this Place”. 

But the price of unity was steep–no one, black or white, was allowed to reference the plight of the Jena 6, the “noose incident” or any other real-world event.  As a result, the six young men accused of attempted murder were left to twist in the wind.  When Friends of Justice got involved and the LaSalle Parish branch of the NAACP was organized, only Rev. Brian Moran of Antioch Baptist Church allowed us to meet at his church.  The doors of the five other Baptist churches in the community were locked shut.  Folks were happy to see champions of the Jena 6 when we visited on Sunday mornings–they just weren’t prepared to overtly sanction our struggle.  That would mean getting the white folks upset, and, Lord knows, we don’t want that.

Unfortunately, you can’t confront injustice in little towns like Tulia, Texas or Jena Louisiana without upsetting a lot of white folks.  I am not an agitator.  I take no delight in creating social turmoil.  When the media talks about little southern communities as if they are uniquely racist, I am just as offended as the mayor and the president of the Chamber of Commerce (this isn’t about one isolated community; this is about America). 

Nonetheless, if justice is to roll down like the waters, the feelings of white folks cannot be protected.  Jena’s brand of racism may not be unique; but it is deadly.  The fact that the yankees and Golden State folks sponsor the same two-tier system of justice currently on display in Jena does not justify what happened in September and December of 2006, nor does it justify what happened to Mychal Bell in June of 2007. 

If white folks must be upset I can’t think of a better man to do the honors than the Rev. Sharpton.  Go get ’em, Al!

Alan Bean
Friends of Justice
https://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com
(817) 457-0025

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/bawnews/jenasix815
Sharpton, King III, Other Ministers and Attorneys Offer Encouragement, Services to Jena Six
Date: Wednesday, August 15, 2007
By: Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, BlackAmericaWeb.com
The Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III walked into a jury room Tuesday afternoon at a Jena, La., courthouse, and the face of the teenager seated at the table “just lit up,” said Marcus Jones, the father of that teen, Mychal Bell.

Bell is the first of the Jena Six to be convicted for a Dec. 4, 2006 fight, in which black students were accused of beating a white student following weeks of racially charged incidents in the small Louisiana town.

Problems were touched off after nooses were hung in a tree after black students sat in an area that was a traditional gathering place for white students, around the start of the school year.

The white students who hung the nooses were suspended for three days. The black students who retaliated were expelled and charged with felonies.

“Sharpton told my son, ‘I told you I’d be back,’” Jones told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Martin Luther King III told him he would stay involved in the situation until he is freed.”

Jesse Jackson is scheduled to visit Jena on Sept. 4, according to published reports.
Bell is scheduled for sentencing on Sept. 20. He has been in jail at the LaSalle Parish Correctional Facility since his June conviction on charges of aggravated second degree battery and conspiracy. A bond hearing is set for Aug. 24, and Jones is hoping Mychal can be freed on bond after an Aug. 24 bond hearing.

“He’s has a $90,000 bond. That means we have to come up with about $12,000 to get him out,” Jones said. “But Mychal is encouraged.”

About four other ministers, as well as representatives from the Nation of Islam, visited Mychal on Tuesday.
“They all formed a circle,” said Jones. “They prayed. Before it was over, he cried. I couldn’t help but cry some tears too.”

Bell is a gifted athlete, family and friends say. This time last year, he was getting ready for another good year running the football for the Jena High School football team. In his 11th grade year, college scouts were looking at him as a prospect because he was both a good student and a strong athlete.

School starts in Jena on Friday, and unless things change dramatically, Mychal will not be in school. “When he goes back to school, we’ll have to put him in a private school,” Jones said.

Sharpton made his first visit to Jena last weekend and vowed to return. Alan Bean of Friends of Justice said his involvement has galvanized the community.

“Before the Rev. Sharpton began coming, it seemed like the black community was divided about this issue,” Bean told BlackAmericaWeb. com. “Now, all of the ministers are together.”

Tuesday night, there were more than 200 people packed into the Antioch Baptist Church, Jones said.
In addition to the energy in the religious community, change is also happening in the legal representation for the Jena Six.

Bell had a court-appointed attorney when he was first tried. Since then, family and supporters have pulled together funds to pay for a team of private lawyers to lead his defense. Attorney Lewis Scott, who leads Bell’s defense team, has told BlackAmericaWeb.com he hopes to get the verdict tossed out or be granted a new trial.

Also, the nationally recognized Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama, has stepped in to provide support for the defense of Robert Bailey, Bean said.

“What this means is that we have one of the best criminal lawyers in the state on this case,” he said.
Bell is the only one of the six to already face trial. The others — Robert Bailey Jr., Bryant Purvis, Carwin Jones, Theodore Shaw and another student who has not been identified because he is a juvenile — still await trial.

Parents of Justin Barker, the student who was beaten, have said in broadcast interviews that they consider the beating attempted murder.

During Bell’s trial, District Attorney J. Reed Walters argued that the shoes used to kick Barker after he was knocked unconscious constituted weapons. He also said that because Bell took part in an attack with others, that was a conspiracy.

The national attention and visits from people like Sharpton and King have helped boost the interest in the case.
“To think that people who really don’t know us are coming to this country town to help,” said Jones. “That’s something. That’s what we needed.”

View from the Bench

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A guest post from C. Victor Lander, Presiding Judge of City of Dallas Municipal Court:

**************************************************************************

View From The Bench – Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere

By C. Victor Lander

**************************************************************************
When I first started writing about the situation in Jena, Louisiana,
I made it clear that I was not going to let you forget about it.  It is
truly amazing how quick we are to say, “That’s terrible”, and then go about
our business, oblivious to the ramifications of the lack of justice
somewhere as close to us as the state next door (remember that we took in
30,000 Louisianans after Katrina, so it’s not so far away).  Well, when I
said I’m not going to let you forget, I meant it, and so I report again for
you on the Jena 6.

You remember the Jena 6, the 6 black high school students from Jena,
Louisiana who were arrested, expelled from school, and charged with
attempted second degree murder for getting into a fight with a white student
who had taunted them because they protested the hanging of three nooses on
the “white tree” at Jena High School.  The charges were reduced to second
degree aggravated battery and conspiracy, and one student, Mychal Bell, who
was a 16 year old sophomore at the time but still tried as an adult, was
convicted by an all white jury (the required deadly weapon being young Mr.
Bell’s tennis shoes) and now awaits sentencing.  On the day of Mr. Bell’s
jury trial, 50 potential jurors appeared for jury service, every last one of
them white.  The all white jury selected deliberated less than 3 hours
before finding Mr. Bell guilty of aggravated second degree battery and
conspiracy.  The sentencing of Mr. Bell has been postponed from its previous
setting of July 31, 2007 to September 20, 2007, and Mr. Bell now sits as an
inmate in the LaSalle Correctional Center (he can be reached by writing
Mychal Bell, Inmate, A-Dorm, LaSalle Correctional Center, 15976 Highway 165,
Olla, LA 71465-4801).  Bail for the others students has been set at from
$70,000.00 to $138,000.00, clearly excessive and designed to keep them
incarcerated for as long as possible.  Remember the names of these young men
– Robert Bailey, Jr., 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis,
17; Mychal Bell, 16; and a still unidentified minor.  You will see and hear
these names again.

If Mr. Bell gets the maximum sentence on September 20, he will be forced to
serve 22 years in prison for standing up and opposing the white power
structure of clearly racist Jena, Louisiana.  The hanging of these nooses
was not a youthful prank, as stated publicly by LaSalle Parish District
Attorney Reed Walters.  This action by the white students of Jena High
School was a hate crime, pure and simple, and the perpetrators of this hate
crime have gotten away completely free (they got 3 days in-school
suspension) while the protesters of this hate crime face decades in prison.
Something is seriously wrong in Jena, Louisiana – and by extension, anywhere
we allow injustice to continue.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Office of the NAACP
will be participating in a mass demonstration and protest in Jena planned
for September 20, 2007, and I encourage everyone who can do so to find their
way to Jena to show your support (go to http://www.naacp.org
<http://www.naacp.org/>  or to http://www.colorofchange.org
<http://www.colorofchange.org/>  for more information).  Thanks to the Rev.
Alan Bean of the Friends of Justice (https://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com
<https://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/> ) (who was introduced to me by my
pastor, the Rev. Dr. Frederick Douglas Haynes, III), I can continue to give
you information about the Jena 6 and keep this issue in the front, rather
than in the back, of your mind.

As long as I have breath, I will continue to bring this and other similar
situations to the attention of the public, until “justice rolls down like
water”.  In the words of Dr. King, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere.”  Don’t you ever forget that today it’s Jena, but
tomorrow it could easily be Dallas, or Arlington, or your home city – and
your son or brother could easily be next.  The best way for evil to triumph
is for good men to do nothing.

C. Victor Lander serves as Presiding Judge of City of Dallas Municipal Court
Number 7, and has served in that position full time for over 10 years.
Judge Lander can be reached at victor.lander@sbcglobal.net.

Newsweek Checks In

· 1 Comment ·

Those who have read my “Jena is America” piece will understand why this major article in Newsweek focuses obsessively on “the most racist town in America” theme. The unearthing of another “town that time forgot” will please the audience; asking what Jena tells us about the criminal justice system would not.

The authors of this piece have talked to most of the primary actors involved in this story, and they have uncovered some interesting background information. But this is essentially another re-telling of a now-familiar story.

Now here’s the good news: the story is being told by Newsweek! The Tulia story, although it became a major staple, was never covered by America’s primary news magazines until a year after the last legal dog died.

The Newsweek article (pasted below) suggests that no one was interested in the Jena 6 until Mychal Bell was convicted at the end of June. Not so. The media has responded to this story early and often. The Chicago Tribune, the BBC, CNN (three times) and some excellent blog coverage ain’t bad for a start. Media attention to this kind of story builds gradually. Each story emboldens all the media outlets who, heretofor, have been too timid to touch a story about black guys accused of beating up a white guy. Who knows, the New York Times may one day find the nerve to cover the Jena 6.

We can’t call this a national story until it has been covered by the major television networks, America’s flag ship newspapers, and news magazines like Time and Newsweek. We are at least half the way there, and Friends of Justice couldn’t be happier.

Media coverage, per se, doesn’t mean much. But Friends of Justice has discovered that the criminal justice system functions very differently when folks are paying attention. We have a two-tier criminal justice system, and poor folks like the Jena 6 suffer the indignities of tier 2 justice. For instance, Mychal Bell was represented by an attorney who called no witnesses and inserted not a single pin into the government’s legal balloon.

There will be no repeat of the Mychal Bell fiasco. Competent legal counsel, coupled with the growing interest of the major media, means that the Jena 6 will enjoy Tier 1 justice from here on out. As a result, Reed Walters and business-as-usual Jena justice will be forced to answer to the court of public opinion.

When things get too embarrassing for the state of Louisiana, folks in high places will put an end to this legal melodrama. That will be good news for the Jena 6 and the good people of Jena. I only pray that, in the process, America will learn something about the sorry state of its criminal justice system. Jena, be it ever so racist, is just one more symptom of a national disease.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20218937/site/newsweek/page/0/

Racial Tensions Rip Apart Tiny Jena, La.
As the new school year approaches, Jena, La., is struggling to move beyond the racial strife that ripped it apart and left the futures of six students in disarray.
By Gretel C. Kovach and Arian Campo-Flores
Newsweek
Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue – It began with a seemingly innocuous question. At an assembly during the first week of classes last fall at Jena High School in rural Louisiana, Kenneth Purvis, a junior, asked the vice principal if he could sit under the shady boughs of an oak tree in the campus courtyard. “You can sit anywhere you like,” the vice principal replied. Soon thereafter, Purvis and several black friends ventured over to the tree to hang out with some white classmates. According to the school’s unspoken racial codes, however, that area was reserved for white kids; Purvis is black. Some white students didn’t look kindly on the encroachment: the next day, three nooses hung from the oak’s branches.
That provocation, which conjured up the ugly history of lynch mobs and the Jim Crow South, unleashed a cycle of interracial strife that has roiled the tiny town of Jena. In the ensuing months, black and white students clashed violently, the school’s academic wing was destroyed by arson and six black kids were charged with attempted murder for beating a white peer. (The “deadly weapon”: tennis shoes they supposedly used to kick the white student knocked unconscious by the first punch.) One of those black students—Mychal Bell, the only one of the “Jena Six” to stand trial so far—was convicted by an all-white jury in June on lesser felony charges of aggravated second-degree battery and is awaiting sentencing. He could face 22 years in prison. In the wake of that judgment, a host of national figures—from the Rev. Al Sharpton to the Nation of Islam to the American Civil Liberties Union—have descended on the town to inveigh against racial injustice.
Billy Fowler, a white school-board member, has pledged that when the new school year starts, “we’re not going to see black and white anymore. It’s going to be right or wrong.” But, says the Rev. Raymond Brown of Christians United, which has been working with parents of the Jena Six, “Jena does not want to come up to the 21st century. They are living deep in the past.”
Decades of suppressed racial hostility spilled forth at the appearance of those swaying nooses. Word spread quickly that day; before long, scores of black students congregated under the tree. “As black students, we didn’t call it a protest,” says Robert Bailey Jr., one of the Jena Six. “We just called it standing up for ourselves.” School officials convened an assembly in early September, where local District Attorney Reed Walters appeared, flanked by police officers. “I can be your best friend or your worst enemy,” he told students, warning them to settle down. “With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear.” A visit to the school, along with the fact that the three white boys who admitted to hanging the nooses were only dealt a few days’ suspension, further inflamed the African-American community. “It felt like they were saying, ‘We can do what we want to those n—–s’,” says Marcus Jones, Bell’s father.
Things reached a boil later in the semester. During the Thanksgiving holiday, someone set fire to the school, reducing the main academic wing to rubble (no one has been arrested, and though a link between what was ruled an arson and the racial discord hasn’t been proved, many suspect there is one). The following day, Bailey was punched and beaten with beer bottles when he tried to enter a mostly white party in town. The white kid who threw the first punch was later charged with simple battery and given probation. The next day, Bailey ran into a young white man who was at the party. Bailey and parents of the Jena Six say that when the man pulled a gun on him, he tangled with him and stripped it away. He was later charged with theft of a firearm.
The tension culminated back at school the following Monday. Justin Barker, a white student who says he is friends with the kids who hung the nooses, reportedly taunted Bailey at lunch (Barker denies this). A while later, an African-American student allegedly punched Barker from behind, knocking him unconscious. Then, say white witnesses, a group of black students that included Bailey continued to assault Barker, kicking and stomping on him. (Jena High student Justin Purvis and other black witnesses dispute this.) Barker, who was treated for injuries at a nearby hospital, was released later that day, apparently in strong enough shape to attend a class-ring ceremony that evening.
Walters, the D.A., responded swiftly and severely. He charged six black students—Bailey, Bell, Theo Shaw, Bryant Purvis (Justin and Kenneth’s cousin), Carwin Jones and an unidentified juvenile—with attempted second-degree murder. “Nobody tried to kill anybody,” says Tina Jones, Bryant’s mother. Their lethal weapon: the tennis shoes. (“You kick someone repeatedly in the head and that can be serious—deadly,” says Barker’s father, David.) So far, only Bell has been convicted on the lesser assault charges, for which he faces sentencing next month. No trial dates have been set for the other five, all of whom have been released—though three of the five spent months in jail until their families could raise enough money to pay the high bonds. Blacks in Jena seethed at what seemed to be flagrant inequities in the justice system: while Bailey’s white assailant at the party got off with battery charges and probation, the Jena Six were hit with
attempted-murder charges. Barker “didn’t even stay in the hospital overnight,” says Jones, Bell’s father. “The D.A. is a racist. There’s just no other way to explain it.” (Walters declined to comment, but his supporters say he would not intentionally treat a black person unfairly.)
Racial enmity has deep roots in Jena, a former sawmill town in the central part of the state that struggles to live off the oil-and-gas industry. Like many parts of Louisiana and eastern Texas, Jena was “entirely bypassed by the civil-rights movement,” says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Though there is more of a racial mix now, African-Americans—who make up about 12 percent of the town’s 3,500 residents—are concentrated in an area called “the country,” a mix of tidy brick homes and rusted trailers. You won’t find many of them in the middle-class white neighborhood with tall pines and manicured lawns known by blacks and whites as “Snob Hill.”
Many whites in Jena deny that the town has a race problem. Frankie Morris, a barber at Doughty’s Westside Barbershop, says: “There’s a bunch of country boys around here. They’re not prejudiced.” But Morris’s boss, Billy Doughty, has never cut a black man’s hair because “the white customers, they might say something about cutting their hair with the same stuff,” he says. Few have experienced the racial strain more than Marci and Chris Johnson, one of Jena’s few interracial couples. When Marci, who is white, broke the news to a friend that she was dating a black man, the woman warned her that Marci would be ostracized. “It was true,” she says. “I don’t have one friend. They all stopped talking to me.” Chris, a cousin of one of the Jena Six, adds, “I’m glad people are going to see how Jena really is, how racist this town is.”
In this context, it is hardly surprising that views of the Jena Six controversy are skewed by race. Many whites claim that some of the black students had prior disciplinary problems. Or, whites say, the black kids were athletes who felt overly entitled. African-Americans argue that whites don’t grasp how fraught a symbol the noose is. “It sent a message of hate for your race of people,” says Caseptla Bailey, Robert’s mother. “It said, ‘Stay the hell away or you’ll be killed’.” Still, some blacks didn’t want to challenge the status quo. “They said, ‘Oh, you’re going to make them white folks mad’,” says Caseptla.
But she and other Jena Six parents began mobilizing. They reached out to the NAACP and formed a local chapter. They began meeting at Antioch Baptist Church, the only house of worship that offered them a gathering spot. And they sought to galvanize townspeople, eventually organizing a march on the parish courthouse that drew a few hundred supporters. But as recently as June, they still hadn’t managed to elicit much national attention. “No one would listen,” says Caseptla, now president of the local NAACP chapter.
That changed with Bell’s conviction in late June. The ACLU, which had been monitoring the case since March, coordinated volunteer organizations with legal expertise. So far, the civil-liberties group hasn’t taken legal action. If it determines that rights have been systematically violated, it may sue. Earlier this month Sharpton and other civil-rights leaders gathered in town. At a press conference, Sharpton said, “Six young black men … [face] an overly oppressive charge in a manner that speaks to a South we thought we left in the last century.”
Despite the sudden attention, the students face troubling outlooks. Now Bell has a team of private attorneys to handle his appeal—his court-appointed trial lawyer, Blane Williams, did not call a single witness to defend him. (Williams maintains that the prosecution did not prove its case.) And no matter how this ends up, he may never earn the college-scholarship offers that were likely headed his way as one of Louisiana’s top football prospects. For the remaining five, all they can do is wait for the D.A.’s next move. One of them, Bryant Purvis, is now staying in Texas with his uncle, Jason Hatcher, a Dallas Cowboys football player who grew up in Jena. Purvis sounds lethargic and withdrawn, says his mother, Tina Jones. The murder charges “will forever follow him wherever he goes.”
Meanwhile, Jena is struggling to find its way forward. “Outsiders need to stay away,” says Fowler, the white school-board member. “Let local black and white people sit down and solve these problems.” He’s hoping the coming school year will be a fresh start. Students have endured a summer of racial conflict, but when they return, the charred remains of their school building will have been hauled away. The oak tree at the center of the storm is now gone; last month it was chopped down and converted into firewood by a timber company the school hired. “I watched that tree grow,” says Ray Hodges, who planted it about 20 years ago. “It was planted as a tree of knowledge. But guess what it became? It became a tree of ignorance.” Jena’s residents can only hope that something more promising grows in its place.
With Eve Conant
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20218937/site/newsweek/page/0/

Jena is America

· 7 Comments ·

 

The case of the Jena 6 is being spun as a crude vestige of Mississippi Burning racism. From the blogs to the mainstream media, the Jena story is framed by a noose.

 

So, what’s the problem? After all, this is a story about old style Southern racism, isn’t it? Well yes . . . in part, at least. Unfortunately, when the part is taken for the whole we might be hearing the truth; but we aren’t hearing the whole truth. Sometimes only the whole truth can help us. This is one of those times.

 

Let’s face facts. The “Jim Crow is alive and well and living in Jena, Louisiana” message has been phenomenally effective. Letters, emails and donations have been pouring in from New England, New York, California, Old England, France and Canada; in short, from everywhere the American heartland (and the Old South in particular) is regarded as a breeding ground for small-minded bigotry.

 

Tragically, these howls of outrage are completely justified. Men like DA Reed Walters and Superintendent Roy Breithaupt bungled “the noose issue” back in August of 2006 because they couldn’t call a hate crime by its proper name. Place yourself in their position and their behavior, despicable though it is, becomes understandable.

 

To deal with the noose issue in a responsible manner, Reed and Roy would have been forced to acknowledge the obscene southern legacy of racial violence. By implication, they would have been tracing an unbroken line between chattel slavery, post Civil War “night riders”, lynching and the whole ugly panoply of Jim Crow laws that shaped southern culture until the late 1960s.

 

Reed and Roy couldn’t call the nooses a hate crime without admitting that a generous slice of the Southern heritage pie is lamentable. They would have been forced to say, in effect, “The nooses hanging from the tree in high school courtyard represent a tradition of racial hate and violence that all God-fearing residents of LaSalle Parish must repudiate and deplore.

 

Reed and Roy couldn’t do it. So they papered over the crumbling wall of bigotry and hoped nobody would notice. Worse than that, they warned black student who refused to live with the status quo that they would face dire consequences. There is no defense for this behavior.

 

Reed and Roy dropped the ball precisely because they were functioning as public servants charged with upholding, defending and reinforcing local values and mores. Their wheeling and dealing was driven by the prevailing moral market place. Any other course of action would have called down howls of protest from prominent white residents. Reed and Roy were acting in the public interest as defined by influential people in their social world.

 

So, what’s my beef?

 

I’ll try to explain. Tour the prisons in the general vicinity of San Francisco, Boston and New York City and you would see the same social world you would encounter in a typical prison in East Texas or Central Louisiana? In both cases, young black males would be grossly over-represented. If the coastal folks are so much more enlightened than their benighted brethren and sistern in the fly-over zone why are their prisons jammed with the same kind of people?

 

You probably won’t find “white trees” and nooses in New York and Los Angeles—that’s a Southern thing. But you will find the same kind of racial profiling regime that insures that young black males are disproportionately watched, hassled and arrested by the police; and you will discover that the over-prosecution of young black males is just as rife in our coastal paradise as it is in our southern purgatory.

 

That’s what Friends of Justice calls “the New Jim Crow”; and it ain’t just a Southern thing. Jena is America.

 

Could I have sold this story to the media as a New Jim Crow story? No, I couldn’t. To date, the mainstream media denies the existence of such a phenomenon.

 

Friends of Justice specialize in truths that don’t play well on prime time because a misdiagnosed disease cannot be cured.

 

This is a story about ugly vestiges of Old Jim Crow racism—a predominantly southern problem that is gradually, and mercifully, fading. But this is also a story about the New Jim Crow—a frightening new disease that is spreading like a metastasizing cancer.

 

Make no mistake; I want to win justice for the Jena 6! But in the process, I will be drawing repeated attention to the ease with which poor black males are targeted for prosecution in our nation.

 

That isn’t a story we are likely to see in the mainstream media any time soon. Media people face the same dilemma that haunted Reed and Roy—they can’t get too far ahead of the zeitgeist personified by their editors. Paradigm shifts rarely begin with public officials and they don’t incubate in the mainstream media. But a paradigm shift is exactly what America needs, so that’s what I will be writing about in the days to come. Stay tuned.

 

~Alan Bean

Friends of Justice

If you appreciate the work of Friends of Justice in Jena, please consider making a donation to fund our grassroots organizing!  You can donate online here, or send a check to the address below.

Friends of Justice
3415 Ainsworth Court
Arlington, TX 76016
806-729-7889 or 817-457-0025

Jena (finally) makes the Washington Post

· 2 Comments ·

Congratulations, Mr. Fears.  You are the first writer for a “paper of record” to do a story on the Jena debacle.  And not a bad story, at that.  All the major elements are here and folks from both sides of the issue are allowed to have their say (supposing you can find white folks in Jena willing to speak to the media these days.  Thank God for Billy Fowler–the only white person in Jena with the guts to speak to the media). 

The reader comments at the end of stories on Jena are always revealing.  There is always some ignoramus who says, “So what’s the big deal with nooses?  It’s a free country, ain’t it?”

You see a lot more of this in Louisiana papers, but it shows up even on the web edition of the Washington Post.  Those who fail to grasp the horror black people experience at the sight of a noose in a tree cannot understand this story and are not qualified to comment on it.  Unfortunately, most of the folks in a typical Jena jury pool fit this description.

Now that the WP has checked in, what about the New York Times?  They were first in Tulia, but seem determined to be last in Jena.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/03/AR2007080302098.html?hpid=moreheadlines

La. Town Fells ‘White Tree,’ but Tension Runs Deep
Black Teens’ Case Intensifies Racial Issues

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 4, 2007; A03

JENA, La. — Here in the woodsy heart of Louisiana, town leaders were looking for a fresh start, a way to erase the recent memory of Jim Crow-like hangman’s nooses dangling from a shade tree at the local high school. So they cut the tree down.

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Sharpton does Jena

· 3 Comments ·

Al Sharpton was in Jena yesterday to speak at Trout Creek Baptist Church.  Sharpton’s primary contribution to the fight is to put some steel into the backbones of Jena’s more trepidatious black residents–the folks who, up till now, have been unwilling to attend our public meetings.  We witnessed the same fear-rooted reserve among Tulia’s more respectable African American citizens. 

Mary Foster’s telling of the Jena story goes something like this: white kids hang nooses; black kids get pissed off and beat the crap out of white kids.

 This version of the story leaves out several crucial developments and encourages a fruitless debate over the relative demerits of hanging nooses and a one-sided school fight.  The reader concludes that “two wrongs don’t make a right” and moves on.

 The real problem, as Sharpton realizes, is our two-tier system of justice: one tier for the Scooter Libbys, the Paris Hiltons, the Duke Lacrosse players, and the noose hangers; another tier for unconnected poor people.  Calling it black justice and white justice is a bit over the top–but just a bit.  Visit any prison or jail and you will immediately understand that our two-tier justice system disproportianately affects African Americans.

 Friends of Justice calls this two-tier system “The New Jim Crow”.  Poor whites are victimized by this new regime even more than middle class blacks, but the real losers are poor, uneducated black people who can’t afford a real attorney.  Juries see a low-status defendant and ask what this one did; the presumption of innocence simply doesn’t apply.

 I would have preferred to see Al Sharpton throwing his weight behind these kids five months ago; but we’ll take any support we can get, and we’ll take it when we get it.  “Did you think you were going to lock up our sons and stain their names, and we would do nothing?” Rev. Sharpton asks.  Well, forgive me for blowing my own horn, but that’s precisely what would have happened if Friends of Justice hadn’t alerted the world to this case.

 On the other hand, I can’t do what Rev. Sharpton did yesterday in Jena.  I have spoken from the pulpit of Trout Creek church about the plight of the Jena 6.  The response was warm and respectful, but I didn’t get the kind of reaction Al received, and I never will.  We need people like Al Sharpton in this fight even if, as his detractors claim, he is just chasing the cameras so he can be in the picture.

 We also need Jesse Jackson, the Congressional Black Caucus and any other prominent group or individual willing to travel to Jena.

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/louisiana/index.ssf?storylist=louisiana

In racially tense La. town, Rev. Al Sharpton takes the pulpit

8/5/2007, 3:14 p.m. CDTBy MARY FOSTER

The Associated Press

  

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Criminal Justice reform hits the Silver Screen

· 3 Comments ·

http://www.eurweb.com/story/eur35385.cfm

Paramount pictures is going ahead with its Tulia movie starring Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton. The project appeared to be on the rocks when the Carl Franklin, the original director, walked away. Now, with John (Boyz in the Hood) Singleton signing on as director, “Tulia” is back on track.

The Tulia drug sting of 1999 transformed me from a Baptist minister into a criminal justice reform activist (although I still see myself as a pastor). Friends of Justice emerged as the organized resistance to the prosecution of 46 Tulia residents (39 of them African American) on the uncorroborated testimony of an unsupervized and corrupt undercover officer. You won’t learn about Friends of Justice from watching the Tulia movie, of course; but we were the folks that turned a routine drug prosecution into a national scandal.

I sometimes cringe when I ponder what Hollywood might do with the Tulia story. The silver screen has never let the facts get in the way of a good story, and I’m sure “Tulia” will be no exception. On the other hand, the movie (should it ever reach the theaters) should give Friends of Justice an opportunity to tell our story and share our vision.

Several people have asked me why the media generally tells the Jena 6 story without reference to grassroots organizing. You rarely hear about the work of the LaSalle Parish NAACP (founded, against all odds, in response to DA Reed Walters’ bizarre behavior). You don’t learn how Friends of Justice framed the story for the media and brought the ACLU and other organizations into the fight. You don’t read about the tireless efforts of Tory Pegram of the La. ACLU, or the work of King Downing of the national ACLU office.

Grassroots organizing is deleted from the story for two reasons: time constraints, and the law of dramatic parsimony. Every playwrite knows the importance of keeping the dramatis personnae to a minimum; too many characters and the narrative becomes murky and confusing . Which is why Friends of Justice has never figured prominently in the media rendition of the cases we have been involved in, even when our involvement has been critical. The Tulia movie will be no exception.

Unfortunately, the casual viewer concludes that the system effectively identifies and deals with legal outrages like Tulia and Jena. It doesn’t. The crucial role of grassroots organizing, media relations, and coalition building is not generally appreciated. As a result, the average citizen has no idea how many Jenas and Tulias go down with hardly a flicker of protest because no one outside the system is paying attention.

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/07/31/carl-franklin-to-direct-snitch/

My moaning notwithstanding, the stars of Hollywood are aligning in a most fortuitous fashion. Director Carl Lewis, the original director of the Tulia movie, may be taking on a movie loosely based on the excellent 1999 Frontline feature, “Snitch” (also the title of the projected movie). Eight years on, “Snitch” remains the only serious media treatment of a serious problem.

In March of 2006, Ann Colomb and three of her sons were convicted of running a crack operation out of their FHA home. The case was built entirely on the uncorroborated testimony of federal prison inmates. Thanks to the intervention of Friends of Justice, and the miraculous appearance of two whistle-blowing federal inmates, the charges were dropped after Ann and her sons had spent three months in prison.

In making it as easy as possible to bust genuine drug dealers, we have made it just as easy to convict innocent people like Ann Colomb and her sons. Snitches are rewarded for telling the story the government’s way, and punished for inconvenient testimony. The snitching issue is currently the subject of congressional hearings–a very promising sign. Hopefully, the “Snitch” movie will bring attention to yet another serious problem with the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is so broken that nothing short of a complete paradigm shift will save us. Thanks to little grassroots organizations like Friends of Justice, stories like Tulia, the Colomb case and Jena keep piling up. One of these days people are going to pay attention.

If you appreciate the work of Friends of Justice in Jena, please consider making a donation to fund our grassroots organizing!  You can donate online here, or send a check to the address below.

Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

Alan Bean

Friends of Justice
3415 Ainsworth Court
Arlington, TX 76016
806-729-7889 or 817-457-0025