The Journal

Issue date: 9/27/07 Section: Opinion/Editorial

From across the country, busses poured into Jena, La., to participate in what is being called a modern civil rights movement.

The name of Martin Luther King, Jr. was on the lips of many. In fact, his children were in attendance, as well as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and a virtual list of "who's who" in the modern civil rights movement.

On the surface, it seems a clear case of racism. However, there is more than one side to this story. To simplify this incident as a black-and-white issue, with the bad "white man," and the black "victim" trivializes the lesson of Jena.

The theme of the rally, and the theme of the new civil rights movement, chanted over and over by the marchers is that justice has no color, no exceptions.

"No justice, no peace; know justice, know peace."

We went to Jena as representatives of WU's Media Convergence Club to investigate for ourselves: Kirk Watkins, Anthony Sodd, Jennifer Meinhardt and Mark Albrecht. Three of us are staff members of The Journal, and the fourth is a noted campus activist.

Each of us had our own preconceptions and sought to understand the entire story behind the Jena Six.

Albrecht, a senior media communications major with a minor in cultural anthropology, had to deal with an unexpected reality.

"I felt duped by the media," he said, after speaking to white town members about the Jena Six. "I was really fired up to go to this, and I feel like I didn't get the whole story before."

We came back to WU with a different understanding of the realities of Southern injustice, racism and the difference between what they read and how people live. What was neglected in the media reports were the feelings of the majority of Jena's residents. Their sleepy town was portrayed around the country as a racist leftover of the Jim Crow era, and they felt they were vilified as closet Ku Klux Klan supporters.

The story has been documented extensively in the mainstream media. A tree, which sat in the courtyard of the high school, was nicknamed "white tree" by the pupils at Jena High School and had traditionally been the hang out spot for the white students at the school.

On Aug. 21, 2006, a black student asked permission from school administrators to sit under the tree on a hot day.

The administrators told him that anybody could sit under the tree, so he and some other black students sat under the tree.

The next day, three nooses were hung in the tree.

The white residents we spoke with considered it a tasteless joke. The white students involved were expelled by the principal, but were reinstated by the all-white school board.

The black residents did not get the joke.

"It meant the KKK, it meant 'niggers we're going to kill you, we're going to hang you til you die,'" Capsetia Bailey, a black community leader, said to the BBC.

What followed was a string of racial escalation. In an incident at a convenience store in town, black and white students got into a disagreement.

A white student pulled a pistol-grip shotgun out of his truck and threatened the black students. One black student, 16-year-old Robert Bailey, reportedly wrestled it away from the attacker.

Bailey was charged with theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery and disturbing the peace. The white boy was not charged.

The seminal moment came when a white student named Justin Barker started bragging that Bailey had been beaten by a white man that weekend.

As Barker entered the school courtyard, he was attacked by a group of six black students. He was knocked unconscious and taken to the hospital, where he was treated and released. His injuries seemed grave at the time, but he was able to attend a school function that evening.

The six black students were arrested over the incident and charged with aggravated assault. District Attorney Reed Walters changed the charges to attempted second-degree murder, which carries with it sentences of up to 22 years in jail.

PK, a local white resident (who declined to be named) along with his friends and family, were found in a small gas station just outside the town, away from the protest. He said most of the townspeople had left, anticipating the worst.

"The nooses had nothing to do with a black thing. They hung it as a joke toward an opposing football team," he said. "You're talking about 14 to 15-year-old kids; they don't know any better," he said.

"They ain't telling the whole story on CNN. Those (black) kids definitely deserved to be punished, they needed to be dealt with."

He pointed out several times that Mychal Bell, the only one of the Jena Six who had been tried, was not an upstanding member of the community. According to The Town Talk, the local newspaper, Mychal Bell had been convicted of four other violent crimes before the Jena Six incident.

At the time of the fight, he was on probation for two counts of battery and one count of criminal damage to property.

Still, almost everyone interviewed, black and white, agreed the charges brought against the boys were unnecessarily harsh. On Dec. 4, 2006, Mychal Bell was convicted as an adult and sentenced to 22 years in jail. He was 16. Bell is currently appealing the decision.

"I think 22 years was harsh, but I don't know what sort of punishment they should have got," PK said. "Everybody is treated equally here."

To many outside the Deep South, the idea of blatant racism in the modern day seems preposterous. However, the events in Jena tore open the fresh wounds left over from the not-too-distant past. Desegregation had only reached the town in 1970, and the civil rights movement seemed to have totally passed it by.

Many involved were astounded by the event. Even seasoned journalists were taken by surprise.

Damon Wilder, a photographer for The New York Times could only marvel.

"I'm just here trying to do my job, but this stuff just doesn't happen anymore," he said.

Extremist groups, including the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers and the Communist Party, took the opportunity to pass out propaganda for their causes. Some pamphlets contained horrific images depicting smiling white faces surrounding a lynched black man, emblazed with slogans such as "Free the Jena Six!"

Beyond damaging egos, the small town of 2,600 was physically ill-equipped to hold a protest of more than 10,000 people. Schools in Jena were forced to close, work ceased and all businesses shut down.

The best-case scenario for the townspeople would be a smooth transition from the protest to normalcy. Even so, before the day was half over, the streets were littered with plastic bottles, pamphlets and other trash naturally generated by a large amount of people. What was a clean, quiet town was transformed into a scene like New Orleans after Mardi Gras.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools