The story of the Jena Six is one of the more painful examples of racism in recent memory.
In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a “whites only” shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn’t sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn’t care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree….
The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena’s black population didn’t take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could “end their life with a stroke of the pen.”
Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles.
An all-white jury convicted one of the six. Yesterday, an appeals court threw out the conviction.
A Louisiana appeals court yesterday overturned the aggravated-battery conviction of a black high school student who was found guilty of attacking a white classmate after a racial incident that raised tensions in their small town.
The state’s 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that Mychal Bell, 17, should not have been tried as an adult by LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters, and that the trial judge erred in allowing Bell to be tried as an adult on charges of aggravated second-degree battery. Under Louisiana law, teenagers can be tried as adults for certain violent crimes but not battery, the court said.
The closer one looks at the controversy, the more dreadful the details appear.
The media has been slow to pick up on the seriousness of what’s transpired — and, candidly, so have bloggers like me — but it’s an outrage that deserves the intensity of the national spotlight.
The LAT ran an excellent summary today of the situation thus far.
In December, six black boys jumped a white boy at the high school here and beat him while he lay unconscious.
The victim was taken to the hospital, but he was not gravely hurt. He attended a class ring ceremony later that evening.
The black boys were charged with attempted murder, which threatened to put them in prison for most of their lives. The district attorney alleged they’d used a deadly weapon: their sneakers.
The case of the so-called Jena Six has elicited outrage around the world — not only because of the stiff charges brought against the black teenagers, but because of the stark contrast between the way black boys and white boys in the same town were treated.
The assault was the culmination of months of racial unrest in Jena (pronounced JEE-nuh), a former sawmill town of about 3,000 people in the backwoods of central Louisiana. It started at the beginning of the last school year, when a black freshman at Jena High School asked the vice principal during a school assembly whether he could sit under the “white tree,” a gnarled oak on campus where white students gathered to escape the stifling Southern heat. He was told to sit wherever he wanted.
The following day last September, three hangman’s nooses were dangling from the oak’s branches. Two months later, the school was set on fire.
The three white boys who hung the nooses were identified but not expelled or charged with a hate crime; they were suspended for three days. No one has been charged in the arson.
My friends at Too Sense have been offering thorough and excellent coverage of the controversy for months. Stay tuned.