The Jena Six: Black High School Students Charged with Attempted Murder for Fight After Nooses Are Hung from Tree

May 9, 2007
"There was White Kids that Hung Up a Noose, But It was Black Kids in the Fight."
Looking for Justice in Jena, Louisiana

By JORDAN FLAHERTY

Speaking to a crowd of demonstrators in front of a rural Louisiana courthouse last week, Alan Bean, a Baptist minister from the Texas panhandle, inveighed against injustice. "The highest crime in the Old Testament," he declared, "is to withhold due process from poor people, to manipulate the criminal justice system to the advantage of the powerful, against the poor and the powerless."

Bean was speaking at a rally organized by residents of Jena, Louisiana. In the space of a few weeks, more than 150 of this small town's residents have organized an inspiring grassroots struggle against injustice. The demonstrations began when six Black students at Jena High School were arrested after a fight at school and charged with conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder. The students now face up to 100 years in prison without parole; in a case that King Downing, National Coordinator of the ACLU's Campaign Against Racial Profiling, has said "carries the scent of injustice."

Local activists say that this wave of problems started last September when Black high school students asked for permission to sit under a tree at an area of the high school that had, traditionally, been used only by white students. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree.

The following week, Black students staged a protest under the tree. At a school assembly soon after, Jena district attorney Reed Walters, appearing with local police officers, warned Black students against further unrest. "I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen," he threatened.

According to many in Jena, tensions simmered in the town over the fall, occasionally exploding into fights and other incidents. No white students were charged or punished for any of these incidents, including the students found to have been responsible for hanging the nooses. Bryant Purvis, one of the Black students now facing charges, explained to me that, after the incident, "there were a lot of people aggravated about it, a lot of fights at the school after that, a lot of arguments, a lot of people getting treated differently."

In the first weekend of December, a Black student was assaulted by a group of white students, and a white graduate of Jena High School threatened several Black students with a shotgun. The following Monday, white students taunted the Black student who was assaulted over the weekend, and one of the white students was beaten up.

Within hours, six Black students were arrested. "I think the district attorney is pinning it on us to make an example of us," said Purvis. "In Jena, people get accused of things they didn't do a lot."

Soon after, their parents discovered that these students were facing attempted murder charges. "The courtroom, the whole back side, was filled with police officers," Tina Jones, Bryant's mother, recalls. "I guess they thought maybe when they announced what the charges were, we were gonna go berserk or something."

At last week's demonstration, family members and allies spoke about the issues at the center of the case. "I don't know how the DA or the court system gets involved in a school fight," said Jones. "But I'm not surprised--there's a lot of racism in Jena. A white person will get probation, and a black person is liable to get 15 to 20 years for the same crime."

Alan Bean, director of an organization called Friends of Justice, began his activism in response to a string of false arrests in 1999 in Tulia, Texas, where he lives. Since then, he has dedicated himself to supporting community organizing around cases of criminal justice abuse in rural Texas and Louisiana. Small towns like Jena--which has a population of 2,500, and is 85 percent white - are often left out of the organizing support, attention, and funding that struggles in metropolitan areas receive.

This disparity was not always the case. Rural southern towns were the frontlines of the 60s civil rights movement. Groups like CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) were active throughout the rural south. And these rural towns have been important sites of homegrown resistance. In 1964, in Jonesboro Louisiana, just north of Jena, a group of Black veterans of the US military formed the Deacons for Defense, an armed self-defense organization, in support of civil rights struggles. The Deacons went on to form 21 chapters in rural Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Outrageous violations still occur in many of these towns. A few months ago, Gerald Washington of Westlake, Louisiana was shot three days before he was to become the town's first Black mayor. Less than two weeks after that, shots were fired into the house of another Black mayor, in Greenwood Louisiana. Jena itself is a mostly segregated community that was also the site of the Jena Juvenile Correctional Center for Youth, a legendarily brutal prison that was shut down in 2000.

Human Rights Watch
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/10/03/usdom11821.htm

October 2, 2005

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End Abuses against Inmates Who Were Evacuated after Katrina
Letter to Secretary Richard L. Stalder, Louisiana

October 2, 2005

Mr. Richard L. Stalder, Secretary
Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections
Post Office Box 94304
Baton Rouge, LA 70804-9304

Dear Secretary Stalder:

We urge you to act quickly to end any and all ongoing abuses against inmates being held at the Jena Correctional Facility. As you know, there are credible reports of severe abuse by some correctional officers against prisoners who had been transferred to Jena from Jefferson Parish Prison after Hurricane Katrina forced their evacuation. Inmates have claimed correctional officers beat them, kicked them, forced their faces against walls sprayed with mace, and wiped their faces and hair in vomit. Given the number of inmates who have said they have been victims of this abuse or have seen others being abused and the consistency of their accounts, immediate action on your part is warranted.

We hope you will immediately and forcefully communicate to the staff at Jena that the Department has a zero-tolerance policy with regard to unnecessary or excessive use of force against inmates, and any officer who violates this policy will be held accountable administratively and, where appropriate, be subject to criminal prosecution.

It is our understanding that you have said you would be sending staff to conduct an investigation. We believe that any investigation should be conducted by the Department’s internal affairs staff in coordination with the state’s inspector general. In light of the criminal nature of what has been claimed, we urge you to ask the police to conduct an investigation as well. The results of such investigations should be made public promptly.

Furthermore, the investigation should not be limited to the nature of any mistreatment inflicted on inmates and determining who was responsible. It should also include whether the staff at Jena have been properly instructed in department policies and whether they have been properly supervised. As you know, the staff at Jena is not not limited to members of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections but includes officers brought in from other jurisdictions to open up, on an emergency basis, a facility that had been closed. Your investigation should also assess whether the department had in place appropriate plans to provide safe and humane housing to thousands of inmates in the event of a massive evacuation such as just occurred.

We recognize that you and your department have faced and continue to face extraordinary challenges in responding to Katrina, taking care of inmates under state jurisdiction as well as those who have been held in local parish prisons before the hurricane. But whatever the exigencies, there can be no excuse for the kind of wanton, malicious treatment reported by the inmates.

We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you to discuss the situation at Jena and our concerns. Our researcher in Louisiana, Corinne Carey, will call your office to follow up on the possibility of such a meeting.

Sincerely,

Jamie Fellner, Esq.
Director, U.S. Program
Human Rights Watch

By Joseph Young
Dear Mychal,
I keep thinking about you. I also think about the other young men who have fallen prey to racial hatred. Its existence, more than a century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, makes me fearful for your life, your safety. The freedom that it promised was tenuous.
It was not entirely without strength. In the proclamation, issued three years into the Civil War, Lincoln declared, at the urging of Frederick Douglass, that the former slaves would be accepted into the Union Army and navy, making the liberated the liberator. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 black servicemen had fought for freedom and saved the Union.
Your generation, like mine, is being denied this freedom our ancestors risked life and limb, so that we may live as free men and women. You can call them heroes, but they were not thinking of themselves when they displayed courage and self-sacrifice on the battlefields of America.
Today, then, to guard against the impending doom of American civilization, is not only opposition to racism, but also the determination to secure the civil rights for which many Americans have paid a heavy toll. Of all the civil rights, the right to learn is the surest prevention from ignorance. If at any time, children are instructed with anti-black bias; and they are made to learn what is not true and what the dominate forces in their lives want them to think is true; there’re guilty of impeding the march toward American civilization.
Astonishing as it is that those students would hang three nooses from the tree at Jena High School as a racial taunt, including calling the black students ‘niggers’; you would think that America would never again want to see a black person hang from a tree, or behind bars. The nooses show that we, Americans, have not come that far from the cruelties and barbarity of slavery as we think. (Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 5,000 people, mostly blacks, met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.) And this also is an unfortunate comment upon the belief that our schools are the great path to progress, the great equalizer. If our schools are the great path to progress, they must be the freest of our institutions, opposed bitterly to the attempt to indoctrinate our children with racial hatred.
Well, Mychal, as you and the others wait behind bars because of a racially biased and an over zealous prosecutor, it is for us on the outside to continue the unfinished work of our fathers, to set you free. All of you were willing to fight racial hatred, and you know people of goodwill are beside you. If the Confederacy couldn’t stop us, the opposition we now face will fail. When history is written your detractors will get little note, but you will be remembered for standing up for what’s best of the American creed. You are part of a legacy in which our slave forebears fought to birth a new nation. You, Mychal, are a child of America’s destiny.
It was Martin Luther King who said if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for he is not fit to live. Freedom is worth dying for. Justice is worth dying for. Equality is worth dying for. A child is worth dying for, because our job as parents is to protect children.
Mychal, when you feel complete frustration and your narrow jail cell is closing in on your spirit and mind; remember the message of the old slave preacher to his flock whose resistance to oppression might have been completely in vain:
“You are created in God’s image. You are not slaves, you are not ‘niggers’; you are God’s children.”
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph

i think its really a tradgedy what has happen in jena high school...i honestly believe that the school teachers should have taken the proper steps in solving the problem the students were having,especially with the racial tension being so intense.it is the year 2007 and still our kids have to deal with this disease which seem to have no cure...it is sad and we as humanb beings not as americans have to do something in making this world a better place

How do we jnow if this is a legite P.O. Box? It has too many loose ends to send support. We need to hear from the mothers and legal team. Are there other ways to support or send support. Why haven't Oprah open awareness about this? Why haven't the hiphop world reach out? What's the problem?

As as whilte man living in New England, this story is an embarrasment and I'm ashamed that I had no idea that racism was so prevelant in this day and age. I've lived in North Carolina and Maine and have never been witness to racism and while I realized there was still some tension around race in the country, the blatant racism found in this story surprised me.

To the people of Jena - why? What about a person's skin color makes a difference? Open you minds and hearts and try to find the good in others - it's there.

I wish the school and the community the good judgement to move forward and make decision that will unite and not divide.

It is sad, but expected, that none of the white students that committed the hate crime have been prosecuted. What it speaks directly to is the fact that racism is still not being confronted where it needs to be --in this country. This situation is a tragic reminder that peace is not really wanted by many.
In this country, and African American must be of perfect posture in the face of crippling injustice. Threatening to murder "black" children is obviously not a problem in the good ole' U.S. of A.

I am from a small town in Arkansas where injustices still lives on this exactly why this isn’t a joke to me. There is segregation in our town and the courts in those parts are against us African Americans. It hasn’t been long since our freedom was given to us and the South is still in a struggle for their equal opportunities as I comment on this situation. Sure, the white boy lost the fight, but didn’t the same incident happen in a previous fight against a black boy? What makes it so different when a white person is on the other side of the fist? The South is a working process, but a change is due. We, as African American, are constantly attacked whether it’s the saggy pants law, which truly violates the freedom of expression right. A lot of people in the African American communities knew that was a law directed to our black brothers. No, I don’t agree with my boys sagging, but I also don’t agree with a lot of other bizarre expression that interest others.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal... – Thomas Jefferson

Now is the time to lift our national policy from quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

although i haven't had the time to read the detail of this case, i pray that this doesn't turn out to be a repeat of the what happened in Alabama so many years ago.

ALL HAIL BARACK OBAMA

those boys didi what they felt they had to do to defend them self against whites