> Thousands demonstrate in support of "Jena Six"
> By Joe Kay
> 21 September 2007
> Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author
> Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the rural Louisiana town
> of Jena on Thursday to protest the racist prosecution of six
> black high school students.
> The six students face the possibility of over 20 years in prison
> after a fight that injured one white student, Justin Barker,
> last December. The incident followed months of racial tension
> that began when nooses were hung on a tree under which white
> students usually sat for lunch (the "white tree"). The nooses
> appeared a day after several black students sat under the tree.
> The demonstrations were initially timed to coincide with the
> sentencing of Mychal Bell, who was found guilty by an all-white
> jury of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to do
> the same. His conviction was dismissed earlier this month,
> however, when a higher court ruled that Bell, who has been in
> prison since January, should not have been tried as an adult.
> Bell was 16 at the time of the attack.
> District Attorney Reed Walters has pledged to appeal to the
> Louisiana Supreme Court the decision requiring that Bell be
> tried as a juvenile. If this appeal fails, Bell's case will be
> returned to a juvenile court, along with that of another of the
> "Jena Six," Jesse Ray Beard. The other four—Robert Bailey, Jr.,
> Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, and Theo Shaw—still face adult
> charges of second-degree battery and conspiracy.
> As the large demonstration in Jena and more than two dozen
> smaller rallies across the country demonstrate, the case of the
> Jena Six has become the focus of outrage in the US and
> internationally over the patently unjust treatment of the young
> men. The protest is another sign—following mass demonstrations
> last year for immigrant rights and alongside broad popular
> opposition to the war in Iraq—of growing disquiet and
> discontent, which are barely registered in the media and can
> find no outlet in the parties and institutions of the political
> establishment.An article in the Chicago Tribune put the number
> of demonstrators in Jena in the "tens of thousands," with
> estimates as high as 50,000. Most of the demonstrators came by
> bus from across the country. "A seemingly endless convoy of
> buses from black colleges and black churches around the country
> jammed the two two-lane highways leading into the town square,"
> the Tribune reported, "where they dropped off their passengers
> in front of the courthouse."
> The size of the demonstration has taken the media and political
> establishment by surprise. It was organized largely through the
> Internet and by word-of-mouth.
> The background to the case demonstrates the racist character of
> the prosecution. The events leading up to the arrest of the six
> students began on August 31, 2006, when a black student asked at
> a school function whether it was permissible for blacks to sit
> under the "white tree" during lunch. After being told by the
> vice principal that they could sit wherever they wanted, several
> black students decided to sit under the tree.
> One day later, three nooses were found hanging from tree—a clear
> threat recalling the lynching of blacks in the South during the
> Jim Crow era.
> The reaction of the school and the local district attorney,
> Walters, provoked outrage among the black students and
> population of Jena. The three students who were determined to
> have been behind the hanging of the nooses were given a three-
> day in-school suspension. Jena High School's principal had
> recommended expulsion, but the board of education and the
> superintendent overruled him.
> Black students protested the slap-on-the-wrist punishment for
> what amounted to a death threat by staging a protest and sitting
> together under the "white tree." There were several incidents of
> fights between white and black students following the noose hanging.
> An assembly was called to address the issue on September 6,
> 2001, at which Walters was invited to speak. At one point during
> his remarks, Walters, flanked by armed police officers, held up
> a pen, saying, "See this pen? I can take away your lives with a
> stroke of my pen." Walters told the protestors to stop
> complaining about what he called an "innocent prank."
> In the ensuing weeks, several black students and their parents
> attempted to address the school board on the issue, but the
> board refused to place the question on its agenda. On November
> 1, the main school building was set on fire, in what was
> believed to have been an arson attack.
> On December 1, Bailey, one of the Jena Six, and several of his
> friends sought entrance to a party that was attended mainly by
> whites. There was a fight between Bailey and his friends and a
> group of white men who were not students. When police came,
> according to Caseptla Bailey, Robert Bailey's mother, they told
> her son and his friends to "get back on their side of town."
> The next day, Bailey was involved in another fight during which
> a white man pulled a gun. Bailey and his friends were able to
> wrest control of the gun. As a result they were charged with
> theft of a firearm.
> It is within this context of escalating racist provocations,
> fueled by the actions of the school board and the district
> attorney, that the December 4 fight took place in the school
> auditorium. Eyewitnesses report that Justin Barker, a friend of
> the three students who admitted to hanging the nooses, was
> taunting Bailey about the fight a few days earlier. A fight
> ensued between Barker and the black students in which Barker
> suffered a concussion and other injuries, though he was well
> enough to attend a school function that evening.
> The district attorney originally charged the Jena Six with
> attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy. These charges
> were later reduced to attempted aggravated second-degree
> battery. The charge requires the use of a deadly weapon. Walters
> claimed that in kicking Barker, Bailey and the other black
> students employed the "deadly weapons" of the tennis shoes they
> were wearing.
> In addition to the extraordinary charges, the six were given
> high bail amounts—over $100,000 for some.
> Bell is the only student to face trial so far, and there were
> many irregularities in the conduct of the trial itself. The jury
> that was selected was all-white. Bell's father has complained
> that the defense attorney, who is black, hardly put up a defense
> and did not call any witnesses, even though a coach at the
> school has said that Bell was not even involved in the fight.
> The defense attorney instead tried to pressure Bell to agree to
> a plea bargain and testify against the other students, which he
> refused to do.
> The trial of the Jena Six demonstrates that in the United
> States, the stoking up of racial animosity and the violation of
> the civil rights of blacks is hardly a thing of the past. The
> democratic gains made by the civil rights movement of the 1950s
> and 1960s remain fragile, and by no means irreversible. Just
> three months ago, the US Supreme Court ruled that race cannot be
> considered in public school integration plans—an attack on the
> landmark 1954 decision against racial segregation, Brown v.
> Board of Education.
> Notwithstanding the end of Jim Crow segregation, sections of the
> American ruling elite, most particularly those connected to the
> Republican Party, have promoted and cultivated right-wing forces
> steeped in racism. The promotion of racial antagonisms has a
> long history in the United States, and has been used to divide
> workers of different races, pitting them against each other.
> After its massive defeat in the presidential elections of 1964,
> the Republican Party moved consciously to base itself on racist
> elements in the Southern states—a perspective embodied in
> Nixon's "Southern Strategy." This strategy has remained largely
> unchanged, if generally unspoken. As recently as 2002, then-
> Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott expressed regret
> that Strom Thurmond did not win the presidency in 1948, when he
> was running on a segregationist platform.
> The Bush administration owes its victories in the 2000 and 2004
> elections in no small part to discrimination against black
> voters in states such as Ohio and Florida. Behind the recent US
> attorney firing scandal lay an attempt to put in place attorneys
> who would facilitate such machinations and sanction the gutting
> of civil rights enforcement.
> After remaining silent for months on the frame-up of the Jena
> Six, Bush was obliged to address the issue when he gave a
> Washington press conference on Thursday, even as the
> demonstrators were marching in Louisiana. Asked about his
> reaction to the case, Bush merely said that the "events in
> Louisiana... have saddened me." Without indicating his attitude
> to the trial itself, Bush said, "The Justice Department and the
> FBI are monitoring the situation down there, and all of us in
> America want there to be fairness when it comes to justice."
> While the immediate circumstances behind the case of the Jena
> Six raise most prominently the role of race in American life,
> both the underlying cause of the injustice and the underlying
> source of the anger that has provoked mass protest are not
> fundamentally racial in character.
> As the American ruling elite pursues an ever more reactionary
> and anti-democratic agenda, it will increasingly move to resort
> once again to racism as an ideological buttress for its rule. It
> is class interests that are driving the promotion of racial demagogy.
> At the same time, the protest in Jena expressed oppositional
> sentiments building within American society that transcend the
> specific issues that the demonstration addressed. Mounting
> opposition to social inequality and war is fueling what will
> increasingly take the form of mass protest and social struggle.
> The officially-sanctified leaders of the demonstration—Jesse
> Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and others—were largely
> bypassed in the initial plans for demonstrations against the
> prosecutions. Their role has been to direct the growing anger
> into the politically safe channels of the Democratic Party. On
> Thursday, Jackson announced that he was teaming up with
> Democratic representatives Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee and
> William Jefferson to try to pressure the House Judiciary
> Committee to launch an investigation.
> The issues raised in the Jena Six prosecutions cannot be
> resolved within the framework of the Democratic Party, which is
> entirely complicit in perpetuating the social conditions that
> underlie the resurgence of racism in the United States. The
> layer of black businessmen and entrepreneurs represented by
> figures such as Jackson is indifferent to the enormous social
> problems confronting workers of all races.
> All charges against the Jena Six should be immediately dropped.
> Those who should be brought to justice are the individuals who
> orchestrated the racially motivated prosecution of the black students.
> An end to racism and all forms of discrimination cannot be
> realized within the framework of a political and economic system
> based on ever-growing social inequality. It must be based on the
> development of an independent movement of the working class,
> uniting workers and youth of all races, religions and
> nationalities to fight for their common class interests in
> opposition to the capitalist ruling elite and its two-party system.
> See Also:
> The Jena Six in Louisiana: Convictions overturned in Mychal Bell case
> [17 September 2007]
> Racist frame-up in Louisiana: the case of the Jena Six
> [31 July 2007]
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