Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for September 21, 2007 THE JENA SIX

Marchers support black teens who were charged with attempted murder

The Associated Press

JENA, La. - Thousands of chanting demonstrators filled the streets of this little Louisiana town Thursday in support of six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate.

The crowd broke into chants of “Free the Jena Six” as the Rev. Al Sharpton arrived at the local courthouse with family members of the jailed teens.

Sharpton told the Associated Press that he and Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and William Jefferson, D-La., will press the House Judiciary Committee next week to summon the district attorney to explain his actions before Congress.

This could be the beginning of a 21st century’s civil rights movement to challenge disparities in the justice system, Sharpton said, adding that he planned a November march in Washington.

“What we need is federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice,” Sharpton told the AP. “Our fathers in the 1960’s had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. We have to do the same thing.”

The six black teens were charged a few months after three white teens were accused of hanging nooses in a tree at their high school. The white teens were suspended from school but weren’t prosecuted. Five of the black teens were initially charged with attempted murder. That charge was reduced to battery for all but one, who has yet to be arraigned; the sixth was charged as a juvenile.

The beating victim, Justin Barker, was knocked unconscious, his face badly swollen and bloodied, though he was able to attend a school function later that night.

Thousands march through streets

Thursday morning, thousands of demonstrators clad in black converged on the local courthouse and a nearby park to protest the disparity in the charged teenagers’ treatment. Thousands more marched along city streets in what at times took on the atmosphere of a giant festival — with people setting up tables of food and some dancing to the beat of a drum.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke to one crowd. Dennis Courtland Hayes, interim president and CEO of the NAACP, was also there.

“People are saying, ‘That’s enough, and we’re not taking it any more,”’ Hayes said.

Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil rights leader, described the scene as reminiscent of earlier civil rights struggles. He said punishment of some sort may be in order for the six defendants, but “the justice system isn’t applied the same to all crimes and all people.”

DA: Race has nothing to do with charges

District Attorney Reed Walters, who is prosecuting the case, said Wednesday that race had nothing to do with the charges.

He said he didn’t charge the white students accused of hanging the nooses because he could find no Louisiana law under which they could be charged. In the beating case, he said, four of the defendants were of adult age under Louisiana law and the only juvenile charged as an adult, Mychal Bell, had a prior criminal record.

“It is not and never has been about race,” Walters said. “It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions.”

Bell, 16 at the time of the December attack, is the only one of the “Jena Six” to be tried so far. He was convicted on an aggravated second-degree battery count that could have sent him to prison for 15 years, but the conviction was overturned last week when a state appeals court said he should not have been tried as an adult.

Blogs draw attention to rally

Thursday’s rally, heavily promoted on black Web sites, blogs, radio and publications, had been planned to coincide with Bell’s sentencing, but organizers decided to press ahead even after the conviction was thrown out. Bell remains jailed while prosecutors prepare an appeal. He has been unable to meet the $90,000 bond.

“We all have family members about the age of these guys. We said it could have been one of them. We wanted to try to do something,” said Angela Merrick, 36, who drove with three friends from Atlanta to protest the treatment of the teens.

Sharpton admonished the demonstrators to remain peaceful, and there were no reports of trouble as of midmorning. White residents in the predominantly white town of 3,000 have largely been reluctant to comment, saying privately that the town was being unfairly portrayed.

“I believe in people standing up for what’s right,” said resident Ricky Coleman, 46, who is white. “What bothers me is this town being labeled racist. I’m not racist.”

Heated discussions

A group of about a dozen white residents and black demonstrators engaged in an animated but not angry exchange during the march. Whites asked blacks if they were aware of Bell’s criminal record, blacks replied that Jena High School administrators mishandled the incidents.

Another white resident, Bill Williamson, 59, said he tried to convince visitors that the town was being treated unfairly and that Mychal Bell belonged in jail.

“I think we changed one man’s mind,” he said. “But most of these people don’t want to hear.”

The demonstrators included large numbers of civil rights movement veterans and college students from across the region who weren’t alive in the 1960s.

Elizabeth Redding, 63, of Willinboro, N.J., said she marched at Selma when she was in her 20s.

“This is worse, because we didn’t get the job done,” she said as she walked up a hill leading to the park rally. “I never believed that this would be going on in 2007.”

Sharpton said Bell, whom he spoke with Wednesday, was heartened by the show of support.

“He doesn’t want anything done that would disparage his name — no violence, not even a negative word,” Sharpton said.

Editorial
Racism in a small town

At the start of the 2006 school year, an African-American freshman at Jena High School in Louisiana asked if black students could sit under a large shade tree that was a gathering place for white students.

The school principal said yes. Three white kids, members of the school's rodeo team, had other ideas. They expressed their displeasure by hanging three nooses from the tree, a potent reminder of lynchings in the South.

The principal recommended that the three white students be expelled. The superintendent, Roy Breithaupt, objected. "Adolescents play pranks," he said. "I don't think it was a threat against anybody."

The students were handed three-day, in-school suspensions -- what you might expect for toilet-papering the school grounds.

It's hard to believe anyone would consider what those kids did a "prank," much less a school superintendent in the South. But Jena, La., is showing the nation that racism is alive and well.

African-American residents say that in Jena -- a former mill town of 3,000 people that's 12 percent black and 85 percent white -- black people are always punished more severely than whites. Events in the last year seem to back up that claim. In November, when a young white man pulled a shotgun on three black students outside a convenience store, he got off scot-free, while the young black man who wrestled the gun away was charged with theft. After a schoolyard fight in December injured a white student -- he was well enough to attend a party later that evening -- six black students were charged with attempted murder.

"I think it's safe to say some punishment has not been passed out fairly and evenly," school board member Billy Wayne Fowler told National Public Radio in July. "I think probably blacks may have gotten a little tougher discipline through the years." But, Fowler said, Jena "is not a bunch of bigots." People there "wouldn't mistreat anybody."

Now the nation is paying attention to Jena, and look what has happened: The attempted murder charges have been reduced. A state appeals court vacated a conviction for second-degree battery against one of the black students involved in the incident.

Thousands of people are expected in Jena on Thursday for a massive protest against the treatment of the students, who have come to be known as the "Jena 6."

It's hard to say from Chicago just what, if anything, is appropriate punishment for the students, who could still face jail time.

But it's easy, even from afar, to see why they and many other people in Jena and around the world think there was a slim chance they would have been treated fairly before the rest of the country started paying attention.