Could someone explain the Jena High School Case to me?

Question

When I was in line I heard some people saying their going to the protest in Lousiana to support the students being accused in the Jena High School case but I got just a gist of what they were saying. Does anyone know anything about this?

Answer 1

Some black kids sat under a tree that normally only white kids sat under (remember, this is the south, racism still here)

As a joke the white kids put a noose on the tree the next day, and obviously a lot of racial tension ensued.  There was a fight between blacks and whites and 6 black kids got attempted murder charges for it, and the white kids-nothing happened to them.  I believe currently all of the charges have been thrown out.

Answer 2

What I know about this case is what I have read in the newspaper, seen on TV news, on NAACP web site, history of Civil Rights in this country.

Los Angeles Times says that the case has sparked outrage around the world that there is a town in the USA that still behaves like the Civil Rights Movement has never happened yet.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/...

The NAACP recently held its 98th annual convention in Detroit.  An emergency measure was passed there to pledge assistance to the Jena Six ... the boys who face life in prison for circumstances that sound like a page out of the history of racial hatred.

There's a petition that will be presneted to the Governor of Louisiana on Sept 19.

They have organized a peaceful march on Jena for Sept 20.  Warning ... under Jena justice, you could go to jail for life if you go on this protest, but a principle of non-violence from Martin Luther King Junior is that when the government is unjust, the people must peacefully fill the jails in silent protest of the wrongful behavior of government.

Jena schools will not be in session on Sept 20, because this racist town expects that because of the outside agitators, it may become a day of unrest.  The current generation of protestors may not be well trained in non-violent tactics when the police dogs and etc. are turned on them.

http://www.naacp.org/news/press/2007-07-...

Jena is a town in Louisiana that somehow got forgot by Civil Rights, so they are living in the dark ages of shameful US history, where there's stuff that people used to do 1/2 a century ago that we today are ashamed that our ancestry was like that.

People were treated like dirt just because of the color of their skin or because others did not like their politics.  There was a concept of someone needs to be "in their place" which means like women's job is to be barefoot and pregnant and keep their mouth out of politics.  It is all very insulting to the concept of America is a country of equality, fair justice etc.  People who did Klu Klux Klan type stuff ... that's like sacrilege to burn symbols of religion, and like treason to do so as a way of terrorizing people to stay "in their place"  but until the 1960's very few people in America saw much wrong with that kind of behavior.

Well Jena justice system is still living in the pre-1960's era of behavior and ethics.

The city is 70% white people, 30% blacks.

The white folks don't want more blacks living there, so they go out of their way to make life unpleasant for the blacks.

At the high school, there used to be a tree in front which a clique of white kids used to sit under, which the school has had chopped down because of this latest series of incidents.

One day some black kids sat under the tree.

They did so with explicit permission of the Vice Principal, after asking permission to sit under "the white tree."

The next day there were nooses hanging from the branches of the tree, a symbol of lynchings, a method of terrorizing blacks in the community, to get them to "stay in their place" which is not to use trees for shade on hot days.

The school knows exactly which students put the nooses there.

Except for a few days suspension, no student got any meaningful discipline or charges against them for the use of the nooses, because Jena is still living in the era before the Civil Rights law where threat of lynchings is "just a harmless prank."  I saw white folks in Jena being interviewed on TV news where they said exactly that.  They thought the white boys who put the nooses in the tree to maybe exercising bad judgement, but it was no big deal, they don't see why any fuss over this.

A school board member is quoted as saying the use of the nooses was merely a bad joke.

The Principal wanted to expel the white boys who started the trouble by hanging the nooses, but he was overruled by the Superintendent of the school system.

Some black students organized a protest, of the noose threat, and of the trees shade being white only.  This was a peaceful non-violent demonstration.

The black kids who were most vocal in the protest were the ones ultimately arrested and at risk of spending the rest of their lives in prison doing hard time.

Some of those kids got beat up by white kids.

No white kid was disciplined or charged with any crime for attacking any of those black kids.

There's a double standard in Jena law enforcement.

It is Ok for white kids to beat up on black kids, but if black kids try to defend themselves, the law books will be thrown at them.

With one exception ... a bunch of white kids attacked one of the Jena six, using beer bottles as weapons.  One of those kids has been charged with simple battery.

The day after the beer bottle assault, a white man threatened some black boys with a shotgun.  The boys wrestled the shot gut away from him.  The boys have now been charged with theft of the shotgun, while no charges against the man for any threats with it.

After the noose incident, and the peaceful protest, a series of scuffles broke out between black and white kids, so an assembly was organized to discuss this.  The local district attorney read the riot act.  He is quoted as saying that with the stroke of a pen, he can have any kid locked up, make their lives disappear.

There was a scuffle in school.  It was a melee with several kids.  One of the white kids, who had been involved in the earlier threat of lynching, and had been involved in the beating up of black kids, and getting away with it.  He got injured, went to hospital to get his cuts bruises treated, was released by doctors after 2 hours, then went back to school, so it is presumed that he was not seriously injured.

Members of that white kid's clique testified as to who it was who caused his injuries.  By "coincidence" it was the black kids who had organized the peaceful protest of the lynching threat.  The only witnesses that it was them that done it, was kids in the clique of the white kids doing the lynching threat.  Other kids, not involved in either the lynching threat, or the peaceful protest, their testimony is that it was NOT the kids from the protest that did the attack, but their testimony not believed by Jena judiciary.

It just seems awful convenient coincidental that the black kids who organized the protest, are the ones accused of beating up one kid who did the lynching threat, and actually carried out some violence threats against black kids.

When teenagers get in a fight, and one of them gets some bruises & facial cuts, and the whole thing is with fists, no knives or guns, it seems a bit of a stretch to charge the alleged attacker with attempted murder & try to put him away for 50 years.

The charges have NOT been thrown out, as another person here stated.  They are still pending.  One 16 year old kid was sentenced to up to 15 years in prison, by an all white jury, but the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana threw out that sentence on the grounds that he should not have been tried as an adult.  That case now goes back to be tried under Juvenile Court.

The other boys are being charged with penalties that can go up to 50 years in prison.

The six charged are:

Robert Bailey Jr., 17, whose bail was set at $138,000;

Theo Shaw, 17, whose bail totaled $130,000;

Carwin Jones, 18, whose bail was $100,000;

Bryant Purvis, 17, whose bail was $70,000;

Mychal Bell, a 16 year-old high school sophomore was charged as an adult whose bail was set at $90,000;

and a still unidentified minor.

NAACP fact sheet on the Jena Six

http://www.naacp.org/news/press/2007-07-...