ALAN BEAN is the executive director of Friends of Justice, a criminal justice reform organization formed in response to the infamous Tulia, Texas, drug sting of 1999, in which over half of Tulia’s Black males were arrested and convicted on the uncorroborated word of a corrupt and racist undercover narcotics officer. Bean, a local Baptist minister, played a key role in organizing to expose the Tulia travesty and working to free the defendants. National public pressure eventually forced Texas Governor Rick Perry to issue a pardon to thirty-five of the Tulia defendants in August 2003.
Learning from this victory, Friends of Justice established Operation Blind Justice, organizing in affected communities across Texas and Louisiana to restore due process protections to poor people of color.
Most recently, Friends of Justice has turned its attention to Jena, Louisiana, where six Black high school students were put on trial, and so far one has been convicted, for allegedly attacking a white student. The case is now getting national attention. The ISR’s JOE ALLEN spoke to Bean about the Jena case.
TELL US about the recent events in Jena, Louisiana.
THE TRAGEDY in Jena began in late August 2006, when a Black student, Kenneth Purvis, asked the principal of Jena High School if he could sit under a tree in the school courtyard—a tree traditionally reserved for white students only. He was told he could sit wherever he liked because “it’s a free country.” The next morning, three nooses hung from the tree. Three white students admitted to hanging the nooses, but they insisted they had intended nothing sinister; the nooses, they said, had been inspired by watching a frontier justice scene from Lonesome Dove.
LaSalle Parish school superintendent, Roy Breithaupt recommended to a disciplinary committee that a few days of in-school suspension was adequate punishment for what he termed a juvenile prank.
Outraged by this decision, Black parents gathered at a local Baptist church to consider their options. The following day, during the lunch hour, a small group of Black athletes decided to sit under the tree en masse. Moments later, every Black student at the school had joined them. Many white students took offense at this impromptu sit-in and the situation became very tense. Jena High School is approximately 85 percent white and 15 percent Black.
That afternoon, the school principal called an emergency assembly in the school auditorium. In accordance with custom, the white students sat on one side of the auditorium and the Black students sat on the other side. Every police officer in Jena had been asked to attend the assembly, dressed in full uniform. District Attorney Reed Walters told the students that the unrest at the high school had to stop. Turning his attention to the Black side of the auditorium, Walters said, “I can be your best friend, or I can be your worst enemy.” Then he pulled a pen from his suit pocket and waved it with a dramatic flourish. “I want you to understand,” he said, “that with a stroke of my pen I can make your lives disappear!”
The circle of white students responsible for hanging the nooses was overjoyed by the lenient discipline the noose-hangers had received and by the district attorney’s unveiled threat. The situation at the school was so tense in early September that the entire campus was placed on lockdown. Newspapers in Alexandria, Shreveport, and Monroe gave the unrest in Jena front-page coverage and television news crews gave the story extensive play. White residents fumed. In their eyes the whole noose business was being blown out of proportion.
During the next few weeks, several sporadic (and largely inconsequential) clashes between the Black male athletes who had led the protest sit-in and the circle of boys responsible for hanging the nooses took place. But the tension gradually dissipated. The Jena Giants football team, led by offensive sensations Mychal Bell and Carwin Jones, was having its best season in years. The Alexandria paper even ran a feature on Bell and Jones called, “Double trouble.”
Then, late one Thursday night in late November, somebody (we still don’t know who) set fire to the central academic building at Jena High School. Classes were cancelled on Friday, but a previously scheduled student dance at a social center called the Fair Barn went on as scheduled. By all accounts, it was a whites-only affair.
After receiving a cell phone invitation from a white girl, Black athlete Robert Bailey and his friends Theo Shaw and Ryan Simmons asked the woman at the Fair Barn door if they could attend the dance. As soon as his foot crossed the threshold, a twenty-two-year-old white man asked, “Are you Robert Bailey?” Without waiting for an answer, the young man struck Robert full force on the jaw. Seconds later, white students joined the attack. Robert was kicked, punched, and hit over the head with a beer bottle. Adult chaperones broke up the fight and the next day the young man who attacked Robert was charged with misdemeanor battery. No one else was charged.
The next morning, Robert Bailey was exiting a local convenience store with the same friends he had been with the night before. Several feet away, one of the young white men who had battered Robert the night before was walking toward the door. The young man saw Robert and his friends and quickly retreated to his truck and was soon brandishing a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun. Theo Shaw and Ryan Simmons took cover behind parked vehicles, but Robert Bailey wrestled with the white man for control of the weapon. When Theo and Ryan came to his aid they were able to wrestle the shotgun away. Then, not knowing what to do with the weapon, they ran off with it.
Eventually, Robert, Theo, and Ryan were charged with assault and theft of less than $500. Their would-be assailant wasn’t charged with anything.
Monday morning, the tension at the school was palpable. With the academic wing destroyed, makeshift classrooms were created in the school gym and in the library. Not all the bells were working properly and confusion was rife.
Worse yet, the circle of white boys who had dreamed up the noose-hanging stunt, were crowing about how Robert Bailey had “gotten his butt kicked” at the Fair Barn on Friday night. According to eyewitness reports, a white student named Justin Barker “got up in the face” of Black athlete, Mychal Bell. Barker was good friends with the boys responsible for the noose incident. Eventually, Barker stomped off, hollering insults at Mychal Bell and his Black friends and giving them the finger.
When the lunch hour was over, a tight throng of students exited the gymnasium. “There’s the white mother fucker that was running his mouth,” someone shouted. A punch was thrown, and Justin Barker hit the sidewalk with a thud. Seconds later, several Black kids punched and stomped the white student as he lay unconscious on the ground.
When the scene cleared, Justin Barker was taken to the hospital by ambulance. He was badly bruised, his face was swelling and he was bleeding from the nose and one ear. Hospital personnel determined that Justin’s injuries were not severe and released him. No bones had been broken, no ribs had been cracked, no teeth were missing, and there were no cuts that required stitches. Later that evening, Justin Barker, looking like a kid who had been in a school fight, attended a ring ceremony.
By the end of the day, six Black athletes, Mychal Bell, Carwin Jones, Bryant Ray Purvis, Jesse Beard, Theo Shaw, and Robert Bailey were arrested. Soon, District Attorney Reed Walters was announcing that the six students were charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit same. The maximum sentence: twenty-five to one hundred years, without parole. Black parents were reminded of the district attorney’s warning three months earlier: “With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear.”
Everybody expected Mychal Bell to take a plea bargain. Although he was still a junior, some of the top football schools in the nation were actively courting the electrifying running back. A plea bargain would have put him back on the streets in a matter of months. But in late June, Bell amazed the judge, the district attorney, and his own court-appointed attorney when he maintained his innocence and insisted that the case go to trial.
The charges were dropped to second degree aggravated assault and conspiracy to commit that crime, but the maximum sentence was still twenty-two years in prison. A few days later, after a trial in which the defense called no witnesses, an all-white jury convicted Mychal on all counts. A sentencing hearing was called for July 31 [editor’s note: it was subsequently moved to September 20].
It is likely that Mychal Bell wasn’t involved in the assault on Justin Barker. True, Barker had provoked Bell with his insults—some students report that Mychal had been called a “nigger” before Barker gave him the finger. But the vast majority of eyewitnesses either didn’t see who hit Justin Barker or identify another assailant.
In fact, a school coach who claims to have witnessed the attack insists that Mychal was not the student who struck Barker. Naturally, this witness wasn’t called by the prosecution. Amazingly, the coach wasn’t asked to testify by the defense. If court-appointed attorney Blaine Williams gave the defense of his client a moment’s reflection it certainly didn’t show at the trial.
But the guilt or innocence of the defendants is not the primary issue here. The incendiary situation that sparked four days of racial violence in early December in Jena, Louisiana, was created by the very man who is now prosecuting these cases: District Attorney Reed Walters. Had Walters and Superintendent Roy Breithaupt called a hate crime by its proper name, the students of Jena High School wouldn’t have been forced to resolve issues far beyond their competence or understanding.
The Jena case is about a district attorney making good on his threat to destroy the lives of six talented young Black men. First, he created conditions that would inevitably lead to racial violence. Then, through a process of selective prosecution and gross overcharging, Mr. Walters attempted to make an example of the students we call the Jena Six. Not surprisingly, this case has horrified the nation.
WHERE DO you see the case going from here?
ON THE surface, things look bleak. But I have long asserted that the criminal justice system is radically transformed when the level of public scrutiny rises beyond a certain threshold. So long as defendants can be defined as heartless thugs, they are remarkably easy to convict. But when defendants like the Jena Six are revealed as flesh-and-blood human beings with faces, faiths, families, and futures, no one wants to see them railroaded.
Thus far, the Jena case hasn’t made much of an impact in the mainstream media. Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune has written a few stories, an excellent documentary has been produced by Tom Mangold for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Paula Zahn’s NOW has featured the Jena case repeatedly. But people who get their news from leading dailies like the New York Times and the Washington Post or from the CBS Evening News, haven’t heard of the Jena Six. That is about to change. Within the next week or two this story is going national.
But the remarkable thing is that, without much national media coverage, this story has caught fire on the Internet. Bloggers really love this story. Actually, they really hate it. The behavior of men like Superintendent Roy Breithaupt and District Attorney Reed Walters has outraged people across America. Money has been pouring into the Jena Six Defense Fund. People are asking how they can get involved. We are calling on folks to descend on Jena for Mychal Bell’s sentencing hearing.
When a story becomes a national scandal defense attorneys flock to the defense of the victims of wrongful prosecution. Now that the plight of the Jena Six is well known in civil rights circles, skilled attorneys from across the nation are lining up to get involved. I’m not sure who will be the next defendant tried, but one thing is certain—the next trial will be war.
My hope is that the Louisiana attorney general will take these cases out of the hands of an incompetent bigot like Reed Walters, radically reduce the charges, or drop the charges altogether.
WHAT IS Friends of Justice all about and how did it start?
FRIENDS OF Justice was formed in response to the infamous Tulia drug sting in 1999. It took us four years to win justice for the victims of a corrupt undercover operation. By the time the fight was done we realized that what had transpired in our little town was simply an egregious example of business as usual.
In the Tulia fight, we created a scandal by bringing together a coalition of civil rights groups, framing the case for the media, and organizing the affected community in Tulia. We learned how to change the narrative, how to humanize defendants, how to “sell” a story to the media, and how to try a case before the court of public opinion. The common wisdom was that what happened in Tulia was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke. But Friends of Justice didn’t see any reason why the recipe that worked so well in Tulia couldn’t be replicated elsewhere.
You can’t do our kind of work unless you are willing to cross racial, religious, and cultural barriers at every turn. Charles and Patricia Kiker, my parents-in-law, had worked hard to integrate a traditionally white congregation in Kansas City before retiring to Tulia. This experience proved invaluable. Gary Gardner, a rotund farmer from a little town northeast of Tulia, called himself a racist redneck—and his racial vocabulary backed up the assertion. But Gary was a brilliant strategist who believed in equal justice under the law. I owe him an enormous debt.
But the key to our success is a fundamental willingness to listen to the victims of injustice. We let them teach us the basic elements of the story; then we reassemble the parts into a compelling whole. The life experience of the affected community blends with the verbal skills of a preacher to produce a crackerjack story. But it all begins with listening. People rarely listen to poor people, but I have learned amazing things from folks like Freddie Brookins in Tulia, Ann Colomb in Church Point, Louisiana, and Caseptla Bailey in Jena.
Of course, we have to begin with a particularly horrendous set of facts; a gross injustice where the unfairness and racism of the system is patently obvious and undeniable. But stories like Tulia and Jena rarely surface on their own. These scandals must be created.
First and foremost, you need a group of motivated and articulate defendants or family members. One or two good spokespersons will generally suffice—but these folks can’t always be found. The Jena story has become a national nightmare because of the passion and conviction of the affected community.
Friends of Justice was the first organization to respond to the call for help in Jena. Other civil rights groups had been monitoring the situation since the noose incident surfaced in the autumn of 2006, but nobody had an intervention strategy. As a matter of stated policy, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Legal Defense Fund, and the Southern Poverty Law Center don’t do criminal law. For a long list of good reasons, they prefer to file civil suits on behalf of the victims of injustice and overt racism. Thank God for that. The downside is that when poor people of color are awaiting trial their appeals for help generally go unheeded. It’s not because people in the civil rights community don’t care; it’s because the prevailing wisdom holds that civil rights lawsuits have far more impact than criminal cases.
Friends of Justice came to Jena intent on recreating the game plan that worked so well in Tulia. We recruited Tory Pegram of the Louisiana ACLU. We helped the community organize a chapter of the NAACP (getting 100 members out of a Black community of 350 was an amazing feat). We started asking prominent members of the civil rights community to throw their weight and prestige behind the Jena Six. As the story spread by word of mouth, talented people (most of them under thirty) started showing up in Jena to shoot documentaries and write stories for prominent blogs.
Most importantly, I spent dozens of hours doing interviews in the Black and white communities in Jena, poring over old copies of the local newspaper in the library, and rummaging through legal documents at the courthouse. When I felt I had a firm grasp of the essential facts, I wove them into a chronological, this-led-to-that narrative. When I was finished, a story about a roaming gang of Black thugs had been transformed into a story about how a blatantly racist reaction to a principled protest ended in tragedy. I argued that the perpetrator of the real crime in Jena was now prosecuting these cases. I gave the media the facts and the framework they were looking for.
Friends of Justice can’t do all of this ourselves, of course. Our job is to provide a compelling narrative and an overall strategy, then we put out the call for assistance. It’s sort of an “if we build it, they will come,” approach to activism. If the facts are sufficiently horrifying, a few sticks of kindling quickly become the kind of roaring conflagration you see in Jena.
More recently, we have been working behind the scenes to draft top-flight attorneys into the legal fight. At the same time, we continue to lure the major media closer to the fire we have built. Beyond a certain point, the process is self-sustaining.
I do most of the on-the-ground activism and my daughter, Lydia, a PhD student at Harvard, handles the lion’s share of the development and outreach. She runs our Web site, writes grants, and reaches out to potential funders and potential allies. During the past year, Lydia has played a large role in formulating and articulating our strategy. Our work calls for exceptionally innovative thinking—and that’s Lydia’s strength.
HOW DID you become involved in criminal justice issues?
PEOPLE ARE often surprised to learn that a Baptist minister morphed into a criminal justice reform activist. The transformation really isn’t that surprising. It all began when the local paper in Tulia, Texas, referred to the forty-six people rounded up in a drug sweep as “scumbags” and a cancer on the community. When I expressed my outrage at this rush to judgment at a Sunday school class at the local Baptist church, I was informed that the defendants were scumbags who were all going to prison. After class, a local school board member informed me that the sting was Tulia’s way of getting Black males who were “messing with” white females out of town.
I experienced a crisis of conscience. When we learned that the cases were all based on the uncorroborated word of a single (and singularly corrupt) undercover officer the crisis deepened. Once the Tulia story blew up in the press I became an outcast. It was quickly obvious that I would never be called to another church—at least not in a 100-mile radius of Tulia.
My wife, Nancy, was teaching school at Tulia High School when the Tulia controversy erupted in the national media. Her life became virtually unbearable. Most teachers treated her like a pariah. We decided we could either leave Tulia or we could stand and fight. Our two boys, junior and senior high school students at the time, told us we couldn’t back down. “If you don’t fight this thing,” they told us, “nobody will.”
So we organized Friends of Justice and have never looked back. Last year, we invested most of our time overturning a bizarre case in Lafayette, Louisiana, in which an innocent Black family was convicted on federal drug conspiracy charges on the uncorroborated word of convicted and self-confessed drug dealers. It has taken a full year to draw serious media attention to that case—but we fully believe it will eventually become as big a scandal as the Tulia and Jena cases.
MANY PEOPLE look at the Jena and Tulia cases and see them as “hangovers” from the past, as examples of Jim Crow justice. How do you look at them?
IT ISN’T hard to see the blatant racism in play in places like Tulia and Jena. When public officials treat the hanging of nooses in a tree as a juvenile prank you know you’ve crossed over into a Jim Crow twilight zone. But it is a big mistake to focus exclusively on the Mississippi Burning racism involved in these stories. The painful fact is that, even in places like Milwaukee and New York City where overt racial prejudice is not nearly as obvious as it is in towns like Tulia and Jena, poor people of color are routinely victimized by the criminal justice system. Black people visit the jails and prisons of America and say, “This isn’t justice—this is just-us!” And they’re right.
Friends of Justice uses the term “the new Jim Crow” to describe the largely invisible social mechanisms that account for the gross overrepresentation of young Black males in the prison system. If you are poor, Black, and can’t afford a good attorney, you will be convicted unless you can prove innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. It doesn’t matter how shaky the evidence is: if innocence cannot be demonstrated, guilt will be assumed. In other words, for poor folks (Black poor folks in particular) the presumption of innocence is replaced by a presumption of guilt.
And this is just as true in the supposedly enlightened North as it is in the Deep South.
HOW CAN people get involved with Friends of Justice?
FRIENDS OF Justice is currently in the process of relocating to Arlington, Texas, part of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. I wish we had the capacity now that we plan to have a year from now. I would love to show up in Jena, Louisiana, with several vanloads of Black and white Baptists from Dallas. Southern folks use religion to justify their bigotry. Friends of Justice believes in fighting fire with fire: countering bad religion with good religion.
The best way to get involved with Friends of Justice at this point is to go to our Web site, learn about our work, and make the most generous contribution you can manage. Big dreams don’t come cheap. Secondly, check into the Friends of Justice site for regular updates on our work in Jena and other places. If you can come to Jena, Louisiana, for the sentencing hearing in September, let us know. If that doesn’t work for you, don’t worry, there will be plenty of opportunities to travel to Jena, and later to the state capitol in Baton Rouge, in support of the Jena Six.
What you can do
Donate to support the legal defense fund:
Friends of Justice
3415 Ainsworth Court
Arlington, TX 76016
806-729-7889 or 817-457-0025
Learn about protests, check for updates, and donate online at:
http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com
Mychal Bell who has been behind bars since December 2006, has asked to receive letters from supporters. Please write to:
Mychal Bell
Inmate, A-Dorm
LaSalle Correctional Center
15976 Highway 165
Olla, LA 71465-4801
