Jena 6

[George2816]

I don't know maybe he was lost. Its not like you have people show up at protests protesting other things too. Maybe you show me this happening, if it even happened. Given your track record I'll dismiss it until I see it myself.

It was on the TV unless someone recorded it i doubt anyone cares about it. My track record? Sure you can believe bush who says more lies than me?

 

[angrybellsprout]

http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p20-541.pdf (page 1)

Roughly 50% of the American black population is in the south, the rest is spread across the rest of the country.

Would there be a similar population density?

 

[George2816]

Would there be a similar population density?

HAHA thats a good one i remember my first time going into georgia. i told my mother "Their is alot of black people here!" Of course where i was growing up their was only 1 black kid in my school!

 

[angrybellsprout]

Yeah, blacks aren't as such a regular occurance once you get west of where I live.

 

[fishjie]

http://www.postchronicle.com/news/or...12101615.shtml

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...hool-Fight.php

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/28/3447/

The Jena 6 (Jena Six) And Louisiana Racial Tensions
by Mike Baron


Jena 6: Jenna Six, An American Tragedy - Jena is a small highly segregated rural Louisiana town that we published a story about a few weeks ago that many other outlets had ignored. It is now in the news front and center so we thought we would revisit the topic and perhaps introduce it to those who are reading about it for the very first time.

In September of 2006, a black student asked permission from school administrators to seek the cool offering of solice under the shade of a tree that is commonly reserved for the enjoyment of the white students of the school.

School officials allegedly told the Black students that it was ok to sit wherever they wanted and they went ahead and did so. The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, were found hanging from the same tree.

After an investigation, the Jena high school principal determined that three white students were responsible and it was recommended that they be expelled. The expulsions would subsequently be overturned by the white superintendent of schools and issued the students a three day suspension, saying that the nooses were simply "a youthful stunt."

As a result, black students organized a sit-in under the tree to protest the soft treatment given to the white students. African American parents tried to voice their opinions and were repeatedly shot down.

The town's district attorney quickly arrived, flanked by police officers, and told the Black students to stop making such a big deal over the nooses. The school assembly, like the schoolyard where all of this had begun, was divided by race, with the Black students on one side and the white students on the other. Directing his remarks to the Black students, District Attorney Reed Walters said, "I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of a pen."

In November, tension was still high and the academic wing of the school burned in a fire. An attack ensued outside of school where the assailant, a white student, was charged with simple battery after an Black student was punched and beaten with beer bottles.

Hostilities grew.

On Monday, December 4 2006, a white student named Justin Barker got into a fight with Black students. Allegedly, the white student had been allegedly racially taunting the black students in support of the students who hung the nooses and was reportedly taken to the hospital treated and released.

Six Black Jena students (Mychal Bell, Robert Bailey Jr., Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theo Shaw and Jesse Beard) were subsequently arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder. All six were expelled from school. On the morning of the trial, the District Attorney reduced the charges from attempted second degree murder to second degree aggravated battery and conspiracy.

The all-white jury deliberated for less than three hours and found Mychal Bell, the only one charged as an adult, guilty on the maximum possible charges of aggravated second degree battery and conspiracy. He awaits a Sept. 20 sentencing hearing. Mychal Bell faces up to a maximum of 22 years in prison. The cases against the other five Black students are pending.

Third Article

Published on Tuesday, August 28, 2007 by Candide's Notebooks
Louisiana Lynching and The Jena Six
by Pierre Tristam

It’s the sort of story that should be front-page news and fodder for a national discussion: Six black adolescents railroaded by an all-white justice system in a small Louisiana town where terrorizing blacks is still in a day’s entertainment. Instead, between the follies in Iraq, the crack-pottery in the White House and the latest starlet sightings in rehab or in prison or in the buff, the story has barely made the major news organizations’ agenda. There’s been some good reporting in the Washington Post and its affiliates, a few rare mentions on ABC and NBC news programs, and longer reports on NPR and Britain’s BBC. That’s about it. The New York Times, CNN, CBS and Time have yet to devote a word to it even as the usual civil rights showboats - Al Sharpton, the Nation of Islam - have tried to give the story bigger play. Meanwhile, the lives of six young black men are being ruined as the old stereotype of the young black male as presumptive threat regains currency.

Jena is a mostly white town in central Louisiana, population about 3,000. Jena High School (”Student Learning Is Our Top Priority&#8221 serves the town and surrounding communities. It has about 500 students. There was a tree on campus whose shade supposedly belonged to whites only. Last fall during an assembly, a black student asked an administrator whether he could sit under the tree. To some whites in the assembly, the question never should have been asked. The question alone defied the autocratic understanding that commands the power structure of certain environments.

To more civilized people in the assembly, the question never should have been asked because the days when people could command anything by the color of their skin should have been gone, at least regarding something as immaterial as the shade of a tree. That the question had to be asked - and that the administrator dignified it with a straight answer (”You can sit anywhere you like&#8221 rather than detect in it the chasm that enabled it - is indication of how much some places as familiar as the local high school can still be no more enlightened than a madrassa in Karachi.

Several black students soon joined white students under the tree. The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, hung from the tree, an obvious reference to that old pastime of good ol’ Southern towns - lynching. Just as the administration had been blind to the meaning of the question in the assembly, so it was to the meaning of the nooses. It took it as a harmless prank and suspended three offenders for a few days. Blacks didn’t see the nooses as a prank but as a provocation brass-knuckled in not-so-distant history. Tensions immediately rose. The administration made things worse when it invited Reed Walters, the district attorney, and several police officers, to threaten students at will, which he did: “I can be your best friend or your worst enemy,” Walters told the assembly (as quoted in Newsweek), with a focus on black students: “With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear.” Just like old times.

Walters made good on his threat, selectively. When Robert Bailey, a black student who tried to attend a mostly white party, was beaten, his white assailant was charged with simple battery, no jail time. A few days later at school, Justin Barker, a friend of the noose-hangers, supposedly taunted Baker, then was assaulted from the back, knocked to the ground and kicked by a group of six black students, several of whom dispute that kicking took place. According to a Washington Post account, Barker was taken to the hospital, treated for a concussion and a swollen eye, and released. Within hours he was at a class-ring ceremony. For the assault, Reed Walters charged the young black men, now known as the “Jenna Six” - Bailey, Mychal Bell, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theodore Shaw and Jesse Beard - with attempted murder. None had a prior record.

Bell was convicted in July by an all-white jury on reduced charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it. He faces 22 years in prison. The others are awaiting trial. Their case isn’t unusual for the severity of the charges against them. They’re young and they’re black, which means they qualify for that other unspoken rule of America’s shaded justice system: charges and punishment to the hilt. Several recent similar cases abound across the country: Georgia’s Genarlow Wilson, sentenced to 10 years in prison for consensual sex with a 15 year old when he was 17; Georgia’s Marcus Dixon, 19, also a 10-year prison sentence for having sex with an underage white girl; Texas’ Shaquanda Cotton, 16, serving up to seven years for shoving a white teacher’s aid. All those convictions were overturned on appeal. But the individuals’ records remain. Even Bunnell recently had its own rash of young black men harassed and needlessly arrested by the local police department, on charges that didn’t make it past the State Attorney’s smell test. Prison and jail demographics, including Florida’s, further testify to the travesty.

Back at Jena High School, the tree should have been the symbolic heart of any attempt at bridging racist hatreds. Let the tree shade on, minus the repugnance-a living memorial of what can be and what mustn’t be. Instead, the administration a few weeks ago cut down the tree, as if the problem could be sawed off and burned. That’s no solution, especially as the fate of the “Jena Six” still hangs by that tree’s spectral limbs.

its interesting the responses here as opposed to the responses on other forums i post at. i'm gonna guess the majority of people on this forum are white.

 

[fishjie]

haha even more hilarity here:

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2007/09/20/jena-rally-sparks-white-supremacist-rage/

As tens of thousands of people were preparing to make their way to Jena, La., for today’s anti-racism rally, white supremacists were burning up the Internet with furious denunciations, bloody predictions, promises of future violence, and calls for lynching.

“The best crowd control for such a situation would be a squad of men armed with full automatics and preferably a machine gun as well,” is how one person put it on the Web forum hosted by the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network. Added another hopeful VNN poster: “I’m not really that angry at the nogs [a recent variation on an ancient racial slur] — they are just soldiers in an undeclared race war. But any white that’s in that support rally I would like to … have them machine-gunned.”

As the rally began to unfold this morning, it became clear that it would attract huge numbers of people, perhaps even the 40,000 that some organizers had predicted. They came to protest the case of the “Jena 6,” black youths who were charged with serious crimes for an attack on a white youth not long after white teens who had targeted blacks were let off with a slap on the wrist. White supremacists reacted with a strange mixture of anger and admiration for the organizing behind the rally.

But the dominant response was violent rage. “I think a group of White men with AK rifles loaded with high capacity magazines should close in on the troop of howler monkeys from all sides and compress them into a tight group, and then White men in the buildings on both sides of the shitskinned hominids shall throw Molotov cocktails from above to cleanse the nigs by fire,” wrote “NS Cat” on VNN. Another poster fantasized about a terrorist attack in Jena today: “Wouldn’t that be sweet? Gosh darn, wouldn’t that be sweet? Good LORD wouldn’t THAT be SWeeeeEET? Boom, Boom, no more Coon! Well? A White man can dream can’t he?”

“If these blacks want a race war,” added a poster on Stormfront, another white supremacist Web forum, “they will get one. Bring it on.”

In Roanoke, Va., an especially virulent purveyor of race hate, neo-Nazi Bill White, this afternoon posted the home addresses and phone numbers of five of the six black youths who make up the Jena 6 under this headline: “Addresses of Jena 6 Niggers: In Case Anyone Wants to Deliver Justice.” White previously posted the home addresses of Southern Poverty Law Center president Richard Cohen and SPLC cooperating attorney James Boren.

White, the leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party, suggests that readers “get in touch and let them know justice is coming.” Another White posting on the matter doesn’t hold anything at all back: “Lynch the Jena 6.”

rmoore.jpgRobert Moore (right), a well-known neo-Nazi leader from Baton Rouge, La., apparently abandoned plans he had discussed on Stormfront Wednesday to protest the Jena rally, possibly while carrying guns. Instead, he wrote later, “If they DO start rioting and looting and burning and raze the town to the ground, White Pride Construction will be there the next day to help them rebuild.” In fact, Moore’s company, started in 2005, has done a great deal of post-Katrina rebuilding on the Gulf Coast — a truly remarkable thing, given that its name includes a widely known racist slogan.

 

[Leonel]

You know what this whole thing is blown way out of proportion and I'm not going to waste time on it.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

It's touching, that if I say that people should be prosecuted for the actual crimes they committed (not more, no attempted murder if they just beat someone, nor less, they shouldn't just be released) that makes me a racist.

 

[Mark1031]

It's touching, that if I say that people should be prosecuted for the actual crimes they committed (not more, no attempted murder if they just beat someone, nor less, they shouldn't just be released) that makes me a racist.

That simple black and white view of the law just doesn’t hold. If the reports are true then these are the facts I see. The local prosecutor threatened the black kids even before any of this started. There were a number of crimes over the course of a week or so but only the black kids were charged. The beating victim was so slightly hurt that he went to a party on the night of the beating. The prosecutor over charged with attempted murder and as an adult and was overturned on appeal. The kid is still being held w/o bail. This is ridiculously obvious racism. If every fight at my school was prosecuted the entire football team and about 5 teachers would have been in state prison. Prosecutors have huge discression and when they are racist this is what happens. It happens all over the country, that is why there are protests.

 

[mrt144]

The protests were about the black kids getting shafted and how prosecuting them for a crime was racist.

Prosecuting them for attempted murder is either racist, or a spineless reaction to white people the community demanding it. The charges of theft and robbery are iffy to me, but I could live with it.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

According to what I have read, he wasn't "so slightly hurt he went to a party", rather he was barely able to go to an event he had looked forward to for years and had to leave early because of pain.

But then, I'm Caucasian.

 

[Norseone]

Prosecuting them for attempted murder is either racist, or a spineless reaction to white people the community demanding it. The charges of theft and robbery are iffy to me, but I could live with it.

The media has not been explaining the actuality of the situation....6 kids stomp on a kid until he is unconscious...a kid that wasn't even connected to the nooses. Anytime a kid is kicked until unconscious...that could be attempted murder. I don't see how you could say prosecuting the assailants for attempted murder was racist.

 

[Mark1031]

According to what I have read, he wasn't "so slightly hurt he went to a party", rather he was barely able to go to an event he had looked forward to for years and had to leave early because of pain.

Well he wasn't in the hospital. Did he have broken bones, a skull fracture. What were his injuries? If his doctors let him go out I can't imagine they were that severe. And this ignores all the other data. I'm not saying the beating can be defended, I hate any bullying. But unless highshool fights were routinely prosecuted as attempted murder then the most likely conclusion from all the information is that it is racism. Is that really so hard to see.

But then, I'm Caucasian.

So am I why does that matter.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Like I said, based on the description of his injuries this should be prosecuted. Perhaps you have access to different information.

 

[Elrohir]

I can't, and won't say whether Jena is a racist town. I can't say if justice has been done in every area of this case, and given to everyone involved. I definitely think that they should have responded more harshly when someone hung that noose in the school yard.

However, if it is true that these six guys ganged up on this one white kid and beat the snot out of him - hitting him from behind, and kicking him when he was on the ground and unconscious - then there is no excuse for that, and the should go to prison or a long time. If this was two kids fighting it out, or even a similar number of white kids fighting these six black kids, I would be less incensed - but six on one isn't a fair fight, and they knew it. They knew they weren't fighting fair. They weren't interested in justice, they wanted revenge and to seriously hurt someone. I don't understand how people can defend these thugs.*



*If you're saying that they actually didn't attack this kid, and they're innocent, that is a whole other issue. But if you're saying they didn't, but shouldn't go to prison for it, then you're nuts.

 

[Norseone]

Well he wasn't in the hospital. Did he have broken bones, a skull fracture. What were his injuries? If his doctors let him go out I can't imagine they were that severe. And this ignores all the other data. I'm not saying the beating can be defended, I hate any bullying. But unless highshool fights were routinely prosecuted as attempted murder then the most likely conclusion from all the information is that it is racism. Is that really so hard to see.



So am I why does that matter.

...He went to the hospital while unconscious and with a severely swollen face. How does it matter weather he was lucky enough to escape unharmed severely. I am sure his attackers didn't know he was fine when they were beating him. They just stopped when he stopped moving. On CNN they say the teens 'stomped" him. People die in attacks like that often.

In my opinion this is mostly an attempt to try and say "Look how evil white people are!!!" just like the Duke Lacrosse trials. However once the actual evidence shows up from this you can see it is not racism.

The black kid that was beaten up didn't have to go to the hospital, and was healthy enough to participate in the beating on another white kid a few days later. The white kid was beaten for laughing at the kid who was beaten. This is the data i got from wiki and CNN. And on a hot button issue like this i believe wiki 100%. If there is a mistake people will jump on it.

The only questionable part of this case to me is should the kids have been tried as adults..but since that happens all the time i can see why it was done. Sorry people...no racism. Turns out.

Oh, and whoever hung the nooses should be found and charged with a hate crime...but the Jena 6...they shouldn't get off the hook for beating someone nearly to death.

 

[mrt144]

The media has not been explaining the actuality of the situation....6 kids stomp on a kid until he is unconscious...a kid that wasn't even connected to the nooses. Anytime a kid is kicked until unconscious...that could be attempted murder. I don't see how you could say prosecuting the assailants for attempted murder was racist.

Show intent to commit murder with premeditated or in the heat of the moment. the defense could argue that they just wanted to beat the kid up after an verbal altercation. The idea that their intent was to commit murder, their intent was indifferent to the life of the victim is absurd. They could hypothetically be charged with aggravated assault if they used a deadly weapon. They are making an argument that feet with tennis shoes and fists are deadly weapons and I just don't get how you get an attempted murder charge after intent, and deadly weapons are not present.

I honestly believe that over charging like this was racially motivated.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Yeah, if using one's feet is " a deadly weapon", then everything is and we might as well get rid of the distinction. That is very silly. Charge them with assault, if the charges stick great, if not that's fine too.

 

[Norseone]

Show intent to commit murder with premeditated or in the heat of the moment. the defense could argue that they just wanted to beat the kid up after an verbal altercation. The idea that their intent was to commit murder, their intent was indifferent to the life of the victim is absurd. They could hypothetically be charged with aggravated assault if they used a deadly weapon. They are making an argument that feet with tennis shoes and fists are deadly weapons and I just don't get how you get an attempted murder charge after intent, and deadly weapons are not present.

I honestly believe that over charging like this was racially motivated.

It really doesn't seem that hard to prove they intended to kill him if they beat him until he was unconscious...I don't know about premeditation. But usually once someone is on the ground you stop hitting them. Oh and shoes can be a deadly weapon in this instance i think...you can stomp someone to death... easily in fact.

 

[mrt144]

It really doesn't seem that hard to prove they intended to kill him if they beat him until he was unconscious...I don't know about premeditation. But usually once someone is on the ground you stop hitting them. Oh and shoes can be a deadly weapon in this instance i think...you can stomp someone to death... easily in fact.

the fact that the kid was knocked unconscious and the attackers did not continue to beat him after he was unconscious says their intent was to just beat him. if they wanted to kill the kid they could have after he was unconscious.

As for shoes being a deadly weapon, a foot with or without a shoe could stomp someone to death.