PEP, November 2007: Justice for Jena

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

Twenty-thousand Americans marched for justice Sept. 20 in Jena, La., and thousands more nationwide demonstrated and wore black in solidarity with the “Jena Six,” African American high school students charged as adults withattempted murder for fighting with a white schoolmate.

White students who attacked blacks during months of interracial fighting at their school went unpunished, and whites who hung nooses from the school tree to frighten blacks received a token suspension.

Jena’s shocking example of unequal justice sparked the largest civil rights protests in the United States since the 1960s, when blacks across the South demonstrated to end the racist Jim Crow system and win equal access to schools, housing, jobs and the voting booth.

“Whenever I hear about injustice and young black men, I want to lend my support,” said DC 37 staffer Nola Brooker. “Mychal Bell is 17 and got a 22-year sentence — his life is gone,” she said. “As a mother and unionist I had to stand against this injustice.”
Most of Jena’s blacks, about 300 among the town’s population of 3,000, live in the shacks and trailers of segregated Ward 10.

Bias leads to injustice
The marches were organized by the NAACP with supporters including black talk radio’s Michael Baisden, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Bar Association and the Congressional Black Caucus. As protesters converged on Jena, New Yorkers of all races demonstrated at City Hall and in downtown Brooklyn. Members of DC 37 Locals 371, 372, 384, 420, 957, 983, 1549 and union staff joined the rallies or stood outside their workplaces in silent solidarity.

The cases started with the 2006 school year, when young Robert Bailey asked the Jena High vice principal if African American students could sit in the shade of the school’s large tree, where white students traditionally gathered. The principal said yes and Bailey sat under the tree. The next day two nooses, symbols of hatred and violence as threatening to blacks as swastikas are to Jews, were hung from the tree. The three white male students found responsible were treated as pranksters.

When black students protested, Jena District Attorney J. Reed Walters warned them, “With one stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear.”

Tensions grew and fights broke out. In December 2006, a white student was beaten, kicked and knocked unconscious. Six black teenagers, including Bailey and Mychal Bell, were charged as adults with attempted murder. After a public outcry, the charge was reduced to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon — sneakers. Bail ranged from $78,000 to $130,000.

Bell, the first tried, was convicted in less than an hour June 28 by an all-white jury and sentenced to 22 years in prison. The D.A. had kept his promise, ruining the futures and college hopes of the six. “One of my goals in life is to go to college, and that crushed me, to be in a jail cell,” said Bailey.

An appeals court released Bell Sept. 27, with a new trial as a juvenile set for December, but two weeks later Judge J.P. Mauffrey threw him back in jail for 18 months on unrelated juvenile charges. Bell may be 40 before he sees freedom.

The Jena story gained worldwide attention, evoking the ugly Southern heritage of lynching and spotlighting racial bias in America’s criminal justice system, with one standard for whites and another, much harsher, for people of color.

U.S. Attorney David Washington, a Bush appointee, has admitted that hanging the nooses constituted a federal hate crime, but the Justice Dept. has declined to prosecute — because of the ages of the white youths involved.