Category: “Social Justice”

Sitting Down in the Middle of History in Bunkie, Louisiana

April 21, 2008April 27, 2008 ·

All the hot button issues were on the table in Bunkie, Louisiana last week.

At seven in the morning I hooked up with a couple of French journalists and headed down to Church Point to pick up Ann Colomb, the central actor in Radley Balko’s excellent feature article. The journalists were interested in doing a Jena story (of course), but I talked them into considering the Colomb and Bunkie sagas as well. After picking up Ann Colomb, we headed north to Jena where we had lunch with Caseptla Bailey. Finally, we all drove down to Bunkie, a little community about an hour south of Jena.

None of this made any sense from a logistical standpoint; but in my mind all these stories are rooted in a common problem: small town authority figures who view poor people of color with thinly disguised disdain.

The march to the Bunkie police station is well covered by Abbey Brown’s informative article in the Alexandria Town Talk. The real action took place later that day in a little private club by the railroad tracks featuring a bar, a dance floor and a pool table. As usual, local church leaders were distancing themselves from anything controversial.

“You know what side of town you on?” a middle-aged Bunkie resident asked me.

“I’m guessing, the black side,” I replied.

“You got that right,” he said. “Everything on this side of them tracks is on the black side; all the money’s on the white side. That’s all you gotta know about Bunkie, Louisiana.”

At about 6:30, the celebrities from Lafayette, Alexandria, Dallas and Baton Rouge arrived in black SUVs. There were a couple of FBI agents, two Assistant US Attorneys from Lafayette, two representatives of the DOJ’s Community Relations Service, and Donald Washington, United States Attorney for the Western Division of Louisiana.

Mr. Washington informed me that he reads my blog. “I thought you might,” I replied.

Bunkie is the third Friends of Justice case that has tested the mettle of the US Attorney: the Colomb case, Jena, and now Bunkie.

Washington got off to a rough start in the Colomb case by suggesting that Ms. Colomb and her three sons were guilty even though the DOJ had decided to drop all charges against them. Fortunately, there are signs that Washington is reconsidering that hasty assessment.

The United States Attorney didn’t fare much better in Jena. Entering the story before a tidal wave of international media attention broke over the community, Washington informed the media that (a) the official response to the noose incident and the prosecution of the Jena 6 was untainted by racial bias of any kind, and (b) there was no meaningful association between the hanging of the nooses and the assault on Justin Barker three months later.

It wasn’t long before Donald Washington found himself in the nation’s capital face-to-face with Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee. The black politicians were outraged by his characterization of the Jena affair and demanded an explanation. The US Attorney kept his wits about him while those around him were losing theirs and impressed observers with his thoughtful answers to vitriolic questions.

Now, in a weird juke joint in Bunkie, Louisiana, Donald Washington looked like a seasoned politician who had learned to parse his remarks for the wider world. By the time the meeting was twenty minutes old it was standing room only and the little air conditioning unit in the wall was struggling to compete with the body heat.

It was difficult to know what to talk about. Local residents facing pending charges were cautioned by representatives on both sides to avoid discussing legal particulars. “If you are represented by counsel,” Donald Washington told the gathering, “you probably shouldn’t be talking to me.”

The issues in Bunkie revolve around charges of excessive force, the alleged falsification of evidence, and warantless searches. One woman informed the meeting that the Bunkie Police Department (usually represented by Detective Chad Jeansonne) had searched her home eight or nine times, always without a warrant. Jeansonne had informed her that he could search her place anytime he wanted without a warrant.

Technically, this is partly true. Officers facing “exigent circumstances” are allowed to search a dwelling without taking the time to get permission from a local magistrate. The operative term is “exigent”. An officer must believe that something dreadful will happen if he waits even a few moments to enter a residence.

For instance, if there is reason to believe that death or serious physical harm may be averted by a warrantless search, officers are permitted to proceed.

But it didn’t sound as if the searches in question qualified. If the woman was telling the truth (and there was no reason to believe she wasn’t) the Bunkie Police Department has some serious explaining to do. If the woman’s experience is an egregious cased of normal practice, the protest staged earlier in the day was fully justified.

Many of the out-of-town activists were convinced that the issues in Bunkie are being understated. “What we’ve got here is a house on fire,” one outspoken speaker from Lafayette told the assembled officials, “and we’re hearing from you that you’re going to get to it.”

Mr. Washington wasn’t sure how to respond to the accusations being lodged against local law enforcement. On the one hand, he didn’t want to discuss criminal cases; on the other hand, he seemed frustrated by the general, non-specific nature of some of the complaints. He had just come from a meeting of respectable Bunkie African American residents who had assailed him concerns about “loud music, sagging pants and drugs.” Whom was he to believe?

Bunkie Police Chief, Mary Fanara had received 68% of the vote in the most recent election, Mr. Washington reminded the crowd. If her police force was out of control, he seemed to ask, why was she so popular?

It was quickly obvious that many aggrieved Bunkie residents didn’t know where to go with their concerns. “You go to Marksville [site of the Parish courthouse] and ask who to call, and they won’t tell you,” one resident complained. “Then you bring a complaint to the police chief and she just laughs in your face. A complaint goes from your mouth to the police chief, to the District Attorney, to the judge and into the garbage.”

“Sometimes, there are bona fide reasons that a person is reluctant to make a report,” Washington acknowledged; “but at the end of the day, you’ve got to make a report. If you say, ‘I can’t report it,’ we’ve got a stalemate that can never be addressed. The state police is an option; but you can also go to the FBI.”

This was the opening Jerriel Bazile had been waiting for. Mr. Bazile’s brother, Larry, had been accused of selling drugs to an FBI agent . . . or to an FBI agent accompanied by a confidential informant . . . or to the agent and a second defendant . . . Chad Jeansonne’s incident reports reflect all three conspiracy theories.

“I myself tried to contact the FBI in Alexandria,” the burly Dallas businessman said. “Larry Lambert would not listen to me. So I called the FBI in New Orleans. They told me I had a legitimate case, but they didn’t want to cross jurisdictional lines. So I called the FBI in Lafayette, and got the same message. So I was forced back to Alexandria where I know Larry Lambert isn’t going to listen to me.”

That said, Mr. Bazile admitted that local residents needed to do a better job of documenting their complaints. The woman who has endured repeated warrantless searches was immediately on her feet brandishing a sheaf of paper work. “You want documentation?” she asked. “I’ll show you documentation!”

Now it was time for King Downing of the national ACLU to ask a pointed question. “What threshold of stories of this sort would warrant an investigation?” he asked. “There’s another form of litigation called pattern and practice.” Downing seemed to be suggesting that people like Donald Washington don’t need the kind of hard facts that would convince a jury if the volume and nature of complaint is sufficiently high.

One of the prosecutors told the group that the Department of Justice had prosecuted one pattern and practice case that he could recall. He thought it was in New Iberia but, “I don’t want to mistake it because it happened so long ago.”

Finally, Donald Washington addressed the elephant in the room. “We’ve heard Detective Jeansonne’s name a lot,” he said, “but detective Jeansonne has been involved in three drug roundups in the past year and we need to establish if we are dealing with backlash.”

This was essentially a restatement of Mary Fanara’s oft-published argument that the only folks complaining in Bunkie are drug defendants and their kinfolks.

King Downing countered with a question about the Bunkie Police Department’s association with federal narcotics task forces. He seemed to be suggesting that the feds may be reluctant to investigate the Bunkie Police Department because the FBI and the ATF (Alcohol, Tabacco and Firearms) are complicit in much of the trouble.

The Larry Bazile case suggests that this might occasionally be true. When, according to Chad Jeansonne’s various reports, a single FBI agent is associated with three mutually exclusive versions of a single drug deal you wonder how that agent feels about it. In fact, you wonder if the agent even exists. How can you ask hard questions about Mr. Jeansonne without embarrassing the FBI?

Finally, King Downing asked the question the meeting had been circling for at least two hours. Turning to the line of public officials seated on stools, Downing said, “What are you going to do when a citizen complaint is contradicted by a police statement? How do you adjudicate between the two; or is it just a wash?”

“It’s not a wash,” Assistant US Attorney Stephanie Fielding assured Downing. “But you have to ask some questions. Was there a witness? Does the report seem unusual? Does this fit what a cop would normally do? It is a process of analyzing the whole situation.”

Todd Cox, an FBI agent from New Orleans, brought the meeting to a close with his first comment of the evening. “I don’t think a case like this could be built on one complaint,” he said. “It’s a building process.” If so, the process appears to be building in Bunkie.

Donald Washington was pointing to his watch. It was well after nine o’clock and the meeting was well into it’s third hour. There appeared to be a consensus that we had covered as much ground as we could cover in one meeting.

I was elated. Donald Washington had brought an impressive array of high-ranking officials to a little two-bit town in Central Louisiana to talk to the local police department, an organization of respectable church people concerned about sagging pants and, finally, a roomful of aggrieved residents and concerned advocates from Louisiana, Texas and New York.

I asked the French journalists for their take on the meeting.

“It was wonderful,” the photographer told me. “It’s just like sitting down in the middle of history.”

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

Christian Broadcasting Network takes on race, inequality and power

September 28, 2007September 28, 2007 ·

Christian Broadcasting Network filmed this interview with Friends of Justice’s Executive Director, Alan Bean. (You may know CBN as the network built by Pat Robertson of the 700 Club.) Notice that the Christian Broadcasting Network gave us the space to talk honestly about the problem of race, inequality, and power in America today. Contrast this with the lukewarm coverage of the allegedly “liberal” New York Times, which ignored the Jena story entirely and then let D.A. Reed Walters write an Op-Ed.

So we’ve got the conservative Christian media letting us talk openly about race, inequality, and power, while the New York Times sticks their fingers in their ears and focuses on “important” news (like, uh, the buzz around Guiliani’s effort to rebrand himself since 9/11.) Congratulations to CBN for stepping up to the plate–shame on the New York Times.

http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/237744.aspx

Clarence Page takes a few determined steps toward a new civil rights strategy in this probing column. We need to get the churches and college students into the fight while minimizing the role of self aggrandizing shock jocks and polarizing prima donnas. The release of Mychal Bell will be a Pyrrhic victory if we can’t swing the support of Middle America behind the Jena 6. Question: can we organize an effective civil rights movement void of celebrities? Could we win justice for the Jena 6 without the support of folks like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Yes, but only if we create a new advocacy model from the ground up. As Clarence Page suggests, we need to stress the principle of equal justice and we need to be racially inclusive. Morally, this is the right approach. Pragmatically, it is the only strategy capable of producing a profound cultural shift.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.page25sep25,0,2383627.story

Last week, Friends of Justice spoke at a conference in Washington D.C. on the “Cradle to Prison Pipeline” sponsored by the Children’s Defense Fund:

http://www.wusa9.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=63312&provider=gnews

The Re-segregation of America

August 23, 2007January 16, 2009 · 7 Comments ·

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.”

Racial Terror 101: Do y’all remember what nooses are FOR?

July 10, 2007July 10, 2007 · 5 Comments ·

I am baffled by all the comments that say things like, “race has nothing to do with this situation, it’s black kids beating on a white kid and they deserve to be punished, just like if white kids attacked a black kid.” As if Mychal Bell had gotten himself into just another schoolyard fight, and we were arguing about whether his punishment was right or not. Let me go on the record: fighting is bad. Don’t fight, children. But people are conveniently forgetting about the whole “hanging nooses” thing. Do y’all remember what nooses are FOR?

When you hang a noose, you say: “we white people are going to torture you black people to death if you don’t stay in your place.” This was a fight provoked by a hate crime. After the school refused to punish this hate crime and take a stand for racial equality, the grownups left the white and black kids to fight it on their own. Then only the black kids were punished for the fight that took place as a result, while the white kids were coddled as innocent victims.

So I’m worried that a lot of (white) people in this country are conveniently forgetting what nooses are FOR. Do y’all remember about what nooses are for? Refresher course: back in the bad old days in the United States, white people used to hang black people in trees and torture them to death. (And this happened all over America, not just in the South, just in case my Northern friends want to act like this history lesson doesn’t apply to them.) So when these white boys hung nooses in a tree at the high school, they were calling down a whole scary history of racial terrorism in America.

That’s why, when a student hangs a noose in your public school, you gotta draw a line in the stand. Because when you allow white students to tell your black students, “N*%%er, we are going to torture you to death unless you submit to us!”, you’re going to invite a whole lot of trouble into your school.

Sheesh. This is like some racist skinhead group wearing Nazi symbols to school, and then drawing a gas chamber on some Jewish kid’s locker, and then the school system acting like that’s no big deal. Would people write in to say “We think those Jewish kids deserve to be punished for fighting those skinheads! We demand justice for those poor skinheads, and the way they’re victimized by those Jewish bullies!” (I’m being sarcastic, but this is not so far from reality: I’ve heard that many older Germans still complained after the Holocaust that THEY were the true victims. Which proves that the human capacity for bad faith is amazing.) Wow, I can just imagine the complaints I’d get on our blog: “It’s just a gas chamber…sheesh! And if you do the crime, you do the time!” Let’s all keep a proper sense of horror about what racial hatred can do. Because when we forget what nooses are FOR, I have to moderate a bunch of silly comments that miss the point.

-Lydia Bean.

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Jena story heats up

June 26, 2007June 26, 2007 · 2 Comments ·

Friends:

Reed Walters has been praying that Mykal Bell would take a plea bargain and the clutch of stories appearing around the world demonstrate why. Monday’s dramatic hearing is being reported in Russia’s Pravda, in South Africa, France, and across the nation. Below, I have pasted Howard Witt’s initial follow-up to his groundbreaking article in the Chicago Tribune. An AP story has also been written (see Google link at the bottom of this post) and is popping up in longer and shorter versions across the country. In short, interest in this trial is remarkably high. CNN aired its Jena segment on Paula Zahn’s NOW Monday evening–the first nationally televised coverage to appear on this story in America. CBS News is also interested.

Mykal Bell is still facing serious charges. As Witt’s article notes, aggravated second degree murder requires the use of a weapon–and a fist doesn’t rate as a weapon in the state of Louisiana. Undoubtedly, DA Walters has a creative prosecutorial strategy in mind.

Mykal Bell isn’t the only person on trial this week: Reed Walters and the little town of Jena also stand before the bar of justice. Whatever the outcome of this trial, Mr. Walters and his supporters will not emerge unscathed–nor should they. The nooses hung in the school courtyard back in late August will receive hardly a mention in the courtroom (Judge Mauffray has already ruled the noose incident legally irrelevant); but the media conflagration is fanned by the bewildering disparity between Jena’s mild response to a hate crime and the community’s inexplicable over-reaction to a violent altercation at the high school in which no one was seriously injured. The only criminal charge that can be sustained in these cases is simple misdemeanor battery. If the forty-some eyewitness accounts of the incident at the school are an accurate indication, the testimony flowing from the witness chair this week will be riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Stay tuned, folks; we’re in for a rough ride.

Alan Bean

Friends of Justice

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Hear an mp3 recording of “Sitting on the Wall”, a song I wrote about Jena, Louisiana.

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-jena_wittjun26,1,3186370.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

TRIBUNE UPDATE

Charge reduced in ‘Jena 6’ case

Change made on day jury was to be picked

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published June 26, 2007

HOUSTON—The district attorney prosecuting a racially charged beating case in the small Louisiana town of Jena abruptly reduced attempted-murder charges Monday against a black high school student accused of attacking a white student, drawing cautious praise from civil rights leaders who contend the charges were excessive and part of a pattern of uneven justice in the town.

Mychal Bell, 16, a former Jena High School football star, and five other black students had been facing the potential of up to 100 years in prison if convicted of attempted murder, conspiracy and other charges for the December beating of the white student, who was knocked unconscious but not hospitalized. The incident capped months of escalating racial tensions at the high school that began after several white youths hung nooses from a tree in the school courtyard in a taunt aimed at blacks.

But as jury selection was about to begin in Bell’s case Monday, District Atty. Reed Walters reduced the charges to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery, which together carry a maximum of 22 years in prison. Walters, who is prosecuting Bell as an adult, also offered the teenager a plea agreement including a suspended sentence, which Bell’s father said the youth rejected.

Trials for the other five accused in the case have been delayed, and it was not clear whether Walters intended to reduce the charges against them as well. Walters did not speak to reporters in Jena or return calls seeking comment.

The case against the “Jena Six,” as the defendants have come to be called by their supporters, received national notice after it was featured in a May 20 Tribune report that detailed how racial animus had divided the mostly white central Louisiana town of 3,000 and erupted into repeated incidents of violence between blacks and whites.

“It certainly looks like the district attorney responded to the scrutiny the media has brought to this case,” said Alan Bean, a civil rights activist in Tulia, Texas, who, along with representatives of the ACLU and the NAACP, has been sharply critical of the charges against the black youths. “I don’t think he’s gone far enough in reducing the charges, but we’re certainly in a better place than we were.”

Bell’s father, Marcus Jones, said Monday that even though his son has been jailed since December and unable to post $90,000 bail, he preferred to take his case to a jury rather than plead guilty to a felony.

“The DA is trying to use my son as a scapegoat for these ridiculous charges,” Jones said. “He knows there’s no proof showing that my son and those other kids were trying to kill that boy. It was a simple high school fight. How can you turn that into attempted murder?”

Darrell Hickman, an attorney for one of the other youths charged in the case, said he expected the charges against the other defendants would eventually be reduced as well. And he asserted that even the reduced charges would be hard to prove.

“I think the district attorney is still overreaching,” Hickman said. “The new charge is aggravated second-degree battery, which requires use of a weapon. There’s no evidence that any weapon was involved.”

hwitt@tribune.com

Google News Alert for: Jena, Louisiana,

Trial set for 2 charged with attempted murder after school fight
International Herald Tribune – France
AP JENA, Louisiana: Five black students are facing attempted second-degree murder charges for beating a white student, the climax of months of racial …
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