Imagine a tiny town so racist that a large, spreading shade tree at the local high school has been recognized for years as a hanging-out spot exclusively for white students.
OK? Now, imagine that a black student decides he wants to break the color line and hang out under the tree. He's nervous, so he goes to school officials to make sure there won't be a problem. The officials assure him that he has every right to relax under that tree, and that it will be fine. The black student then goes and takes a place under the tree.
The next day, three hangman's nooses are discovered hanging from the boughs of the tree.
Racial furor ensues. The principal recommends that the three white students who hung the nooses be expelled, but he is overruled by the board of education and the (white) superintendent of schools, who calls the act a "prank."
Meanwhile, an arsonist torches the high school. Racial skirmishes break out. A white person aims a gun at a group of unarmed blacks. He is not charged, but the blacks are arrested for theft when they disarm him and take his gun. A group of white youths attack and injure a black youth at a white party. They are not prosecuted. Days later, a white student taunts the black youth who was injured. A group of black students then attack the white youth. He suffers facial bruises and a concussion, but is well enough to attend a social function the same night. The black youths, however, are prosecuted and charged with attempted murder and conspiracy, with a potential sentence of 100 years in jail. On the eve of the trial, amid growing outrage, the charges are abruptly reduced to aggravated assault.
The first of the six black defendants, a 16-year-old football star, is convicted of aggravated assault after three hours of deliberation by an all-white jury selected from an all-white jury pool. During the trial, the defendant's (black) court-appointed lawyer challenges none of the white jurors selected and calls no witnesses. The conviction carries a maximum of 22 years in prison. The scheduled sentencing hearing, however, is postponed, again reflecting escalating rage over the case.
The other five black defendants remain in jail awaiting trial.
Welcome to the town of Jena, Louisiana, population 2,971 (as of the 2000 census), where the above events took place between September 2006 and July 2007.
Mychal Bell, the convicted 16-year-old, is still awaiting sentencing, rescheduled for September 20th, 2007. The fates of the remaining five may well rest on national attention generated in the coming weeks and months.
Jena is a town where whites once gave white supremacist David Duke more than 60 percent of the vote. It is apparently one of those tucked-away places where the white citizenry, having gerrymandered the town's black minority (12% of its population) into virtual disenfranchisement with a carefully-drawn ward border around the "black" section, enjoys a sleepy obliviousness to American civil rights happenings of the past 100 years. The Jena town librarian, for instance, who is white,
had this to say to Democracy Now!:
BARBARA MURPHY: We don't have a race problem. It's not black against white. It's crime. The nooses? I don't even know why they were there, what they were supposed to mean. There's pranks all the time, of one type or another, going on. And it just didn't seem to be racist to me.
You get the picture. No need for me to pontificate here about this Lilliputian version of 1950s Selma, Alabama. What needs to happen right now is for people like you and me to make ourselves aware of the heinous goings-on in Jena and to lend our voices, our money and if possible our bodies to the chorus of opposition. A swell of national outrage -- Al Sharpton has already made it to Jena, and so far hundreds have traveled there to march in protest -- has already burst Jena's Jim Crow time capsule. Support for the "Jena 6" is snowballing via the Internet and alternative media. The town fathers seemingly don't know what hit them, and attention is only just beginning to build in the corporate media.
Want to know what is actually going on down there? Interested in supporting those fighting for 20th- (let alone 21st-) century legal standards in this impudent little burg? Here are some places to start:
Watch a
Collateral News report of the sequence of events, from the beginning, that led to the trial of the "Jena 6."
Read a
Democracy Now! transcript of interviews with Jena residents and principal figures in the case.
Watch
an NBC News report on the Jena situation.
Read
an AlterNet update, one of the most recent available, on the latest Jena developments. It also includes an interesting mixture of reader posts, some of them from Jena residents.
Watch
a video of Al Sharpton's speech to a packed and enraged black audience in Jena.
Listen to
an NPR News and Notes interview with a journalist and with the mother of one of the "Jena 6."
Watch
a video segment of Democracy Now! detailing events in Jena.
Sign
an online petition protesting the Jena affair.
Mail a contribution to:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
PO Box 2798
Jena, LA 71342
or email the Committee at jena6defense(at)gmail.com .