From the New York Times today:
Race and the Spotlight in Small-Town Louisiana
By Maria Newman
Thousands of people are gathering in Jena, La., this morning to protest the jailing of six black teenagers accused of beating a white classmate, in an incident that some see as the culmination of racial strife that started on the first day of school a year ago.
Today’s crowd, led by several local and national civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, plans to march past Jena High School, and past the tree that is now just a stump, cut down by townspeople after it proved to be the trigger for the explosion of tension and violence that has landed this little town in the national spotlight.
The town of 3,500 people has never seen a crowd like this, and law enforcement officials have tried to accommodate the marchers by setting up traffic signals to direct people to the gathering spots, and temporary bathrooms at various points. The Town Talk, a newspaper in nearby Alexandria, details some of the arrangements.
The marchers say they are gathering because the six youths were treated too harshly, while the events that touched off the incident, which they contend were racist, went virtually unpunished. District Attorney Reed Walters denies that any racism was involved in the handling of the case.
The local newspaper, The Jena Times, has put together a chronology of this very complicated case. The account begins in August 2006, during a back-to-school assembly at Jena High School, when a student asked the assistant principal if black students would be allowed to sit under what had been known as the white tree in the school’s courtyard.
“You know you can sit anywhere you want,’’ answered Gawen Burgess, the assistant principal. The next morning, according to the account, two nooses were found hanging from the tree.
Most students did not even see the nooses before they were cut down, Still, school officials suspended three white students for their part in hanging the nooses. After some parents complained about the matter, the United States Attorney’s office and the F.B.I. investigated, but decided not to bring hate-crime charges against anyone.
Over the next few weeks and months, parents and some students continued to complain to officials about the nooses hung on the trees, which they said was an unambiguous gesture of racial intimidation. The news media picked up on the matter. Some white people in the town were quoted saying that the noose business was little more than a youthful prank. Fights erupted in the school, but officials said they were not necessarily related to the tree and nooses. In November, a fire broke out at the high school, which is being investigated as arson.
The high school was closed down for several days, and when classes resumed, in December, another fight broke out during the lunch hour. A white student, Justin Barker, was beaten and taken to the hospital. That is when the six black students were arrested.
Richard G. Jones wrote about the series of events in The New York Times on Wednesday. His first few paragraphs encapsulate what has become a nuanced tale:
“They called it the White Tree. Not because of the color of its leaves or tint of its bark, but because of the kind of people who typically sat beneath its shade here at Jena High School.
And when a black student tried to defy that tradition by sitting under the tree last September, it set off a series of events that have turned this town of 3,000 in central Louisiana’s timber country into a flashpoint over the issue of racial bias in the criminal justice system.
The white student was treated at a local hospital and released; the black students were charged, not with assault, but with attempted murder.”
As Mr. Jones writes, local civil rights groups have objected to the course the case has taken, calling it a “throwback to the worst kind of Deep South justice.”
Five of the black youths were charged as adults, after they allegedly knocked out classmate Justin Barker and stomped him during the school fight. One of the five, Mycahl Bell, has already been tried. He was 16 when the beating took place last December, and in June he was found guilty on second-degree battery charges by a six-member, all-white jury. (More about Mr. Bell in a minute.)
The LaSalle Parish District Attorney, Reed Walters, said in a statement Wednesday, published in the Town Talk, that he wanted to remind those coming into town that they should not forget the boy who was beaten.
“With all the focus on the defendants, many people seem to have forgotten that there was a victim,” he said with Mr. Barker and his parents, David and Kelli Barker, standing close behind him. “The injury that was done to him and the serious threat to his survival has become less than a footnote. But when you’re talking about justice and a criminal proceeding, you cannot forget the victim, and I will not.”
The case has drawn accusations far and wide that the prosecutors are biased.
The rock star David Bowie has gotten into the act, too, by saying he would donate $10,000 to a legal defense fund for the accused black teenagers, who have inevitably come to be called the Jena Six.
‘’There is clearly a separate and unequal judicial process going on in the town of Jena,'’ Mr. Bowie wrote Tuesday in an e-mail statement to The Associated Press. ‘’A donation to the Jena Six Legal Defense Fund is my small gesture indicating my belief that a wrongful charge and sentence should be prevented.'’
Last Friday, the state’s Third Circuit Court of Appeal overturned Mr. Bell’s conviction.
Mr. Bell’s lawyers have argued that their client was not old enough to be tried as an adult and that the maximum penalty that he faced – 22 years in prison – was excessive. In the wake of the growing public furor, prosecutors have reduced the charges against some of the other defendants who are awaiting trial as well.
Had his conviction stood, Mr. Bell was to have been sentenced on today, which is why rally organizers chose this date for their protest. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is also involved, as is the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Schools and many businesses in Jena are closed for the day. And of course, the city is full of television cameras.
