Three Nooses
UPDATE – 6/28/07 – UPDATE – PLEASE READ
The latest racial assault in Jena, Louisiana began on the morning of September 1st 2006, when three nooses were found dangling from a tree at the local high school. The day before, at a school assembly, an African American student had asked the vice principal if he could sit under the tree – traditionally, a place where only white kids sat.
What happens next is a flashback to the racial injustice brought out into the light during our country’s most turbulent Civil Rights battles. Read on.
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, including the students found to have been responsible for hanging the nooses. Bryant Purvis, one of the Black students now facing charges, states 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, and a lot of people getting treated differently. ZNet Justice in Jena-Jordan Flaherty
To us those nooses meant the KKK [Ku Klux Klan], they meant, “Niggers, we’re going to kill you, we’re going to hang you till you die,”‘ says Caseptla Bailey, a black community leader and mother of one of the accused. The three white perpetrators of what was seen as a race hate crime were given ‘in-school’ suspensions (sent to another school for a few days before returning). The Guardian Racisim Goes on Trial again in America’s deep South-Tom Mangold
“Hanging those nooses was a hate crime, plain and simple,” said Tracy Bowens, a black mother of two students at the high school who protested the incident at a school board meeting.
But Jena’s white school superintendent, Roy Breithaupt, ruled that the nooses were just a youthful stunt and suspended the students for three days, angering blacks who felt harsher punishments were justified “Adolescents play pranks,” said Breithaupt, the superintendent of the LaSalle Parish school system. “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”
Yet it was after the noose incident that the violent, racially charged events that are still convulsing Jena began.
First, a series of fights between black and white students erupted at the high school over the nooses. Then, in late November, unknown arsonists set fire to the central wing of the school, which still sits in ruins. Off campus, a white youth beat up a black student who showed up at an all-white party. A few days later, another young white man pulled a shotgun on three black students at a convenience store.
Finally, on Dec. 4, a group of black students at the high school allegedly jumped a white student on his way out of the gym, knocked him unconscious and kicked him after he hit the floor. The victim — allegedly targeted because he was a friend of the students who hung the nooses and had been taunting blacks — was not seriously injured and spent only a few hours in the hospital.
But the LaSalle Parish district attorney, Reed Walters, opted to charge six black students with attempted second-degree murder and other offenses, for which they could face a maximum of 100 years in prison if convicted. All six were expelled from school.
To the defendants, their families and civil rights groups that have examined the events, the attempted murder charges brought by a white prosecutor are excessive and part of a pattern of uneven justice in the town.
The critics note, for example, that the white youth who beat the black student at the party was charged only with simple battery, while the white man who pulled the shotgun at the convenience store wasn’t charged with any crime at all. But the three black youths in that incident were arrested and accused of aggravated battery and theft after they wrestled the weapon from the man — in self-defense, they said. Chicago Tribune Racial Demons rear heads-Howard Witt
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.” ZNet Justice in Jena-Jordan Flaherty
This case is a screaming illustration of the fact that not only are there people who refuse to accept the end of Jim Crow, but that some of those people wield the government’s power to ruin lives. The court date has been postponed until sometime in June, and there are calls for the District Attorney to recuse himself. That hearing will take place in early June.
Read the latest on the case at Friends of Justice – Deep South didn’t get the Civil Rights Memo
Guardian article reprinted in The Hindu – India’s national newspaper
Upcoming BBC documentary – Race Hate in Louisiana
Read local print coverage in The Town Talk
A local white minister’s take on the case – The Battle Against Racism in Jena, Louisiana
