Jena Six fight still on

After thousands protest for justice, a Black student is put back in jail

By NICOLE COLSON

ON OCTOBER 11, it was announced that Mychal Bell—one of the Jena Six, a group of Black teenagers in Louisiana arrested for allegedly beating up a white student at the local high school—had his bail revoked at what was supposed to be a routine hearing, apparently because Bell was on probation for an older charge.

“He’s locked up again,” Marcus Jones, Mychal’s father, told the Associated Press. “No bail has been set or nothing. He’s a young man who’s been thrown in jail again and again, and he just has to take it.”

His reincarceration comes on the heels of a mass protest held on September 20, in which 50,000 people, mostly African-Americans, descended on Jena to demand justice for the Jena Six.

By now, the facts of the case are known: On December 4, 2006, six Black teens allegedly assaulted a white student at Jena High School. The six Black students were immediately expelled from school and slapped with attempted murder charges (later reduced to assault and conspiracy) by the local district attorney. In late June, Mychal Bell, the first of the Jena 6 to go to trial, was convicted by an all-white jury. He faced twenty-two years in prison.

The roots of the case go back much further, however—back to the “whites only” tree that once stood in the Jena High School courtyard and the pervasive racism that the small Black population in the town of 3,000 says exists to this day.
In September 2006, Black students, after first asking permission from an assistant principal, tried to sit under a tree in the courtyard of the high school, where traditionally only white students sat at lunch. The next day, three white students hung three nooses from the tree. Rather than being taken seriously as a racist threat, however, LaSalle Parish Schools Superintendent Roy Breithaupt dismissed the incident as an adolescent “prank.” As punishment, the white students received only short in-school suspensions.

To Jena’s Black residents, the nooses were not a prank. “It meant the KKK, it meant ‘niggers, we’re going to kill you, we’re going to hang you ’til you die,’” Caseptla Bailey, whose son is one of the Jena 6, later told Britain’s Observer.
After Black students staged a sit-in under the tree in response to the nooses, LaSalle Parish County District Attorney Reed Walters was called in to address a school assembly. According to Black students, Walters lectured them to stop “fussing” over an “innocent prank”—and then, looking specifically at them, said: “See this pen? I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.”

The tide of racist threats didn’t end there, but instead escalated. In late November, Robert Bailey, a Black student, was beaten up at a party attended by mostly whites. According to the Louisiana Public Defenders’ Association, police initially refused to let Bailey make a complaint against his attacker and warned Black students at the party to “get their Black asses out of this part of town.” A few nights later, Bailey and two others were threatened by a white student with a sawed-off shotgun at the town’s “Gotta Go” convenience store. The three wrestled the gun away and fled, but instead of police arresting the white student who pulled the gun, Bailey was initially arrested and charged with second-degree robbery, theft of a firearm, and disturbing the peace.

At school the following week, a white student, Justin Barker, allegedly taunted Bailey. After lunch, Barker was knocked down, punched and kicked by a group of Black students, said to include Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Mychal Bell, and another unidentified minor. Barker was taken to the hospital, though he was soon released and was well enough to attend a party that night.

Walters made good on his promise, delivering instant retaliation for the six Black students. They were immediately expelled, and slapped with charges of attempted second-degree murder—punishable by thirty years in prison. Several of them remained in jail for months because their families couldn’t afford bail, which ranged from $70,000 for Purvis to $138,000 for Bailey.

Mychal Bell was the first to come to trial. In June, on the morning his trial began, the charges against him were reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy. The battery charge, however, was based on the idea that Bell used a “deadly weapon” during the assault—according to Walters, Bell’s gym shoe. Bell was eventually found guilty by an all-white jury, which included two people who were allegedly friendly with the Walters and one who was a friend of the victim’s father. Not only was the jury all white, but the jury pool itself didn’t contain a single African American.

According to the Jena Six families, Bell’s court-appointed defense attorney had been trying to cut a plea deal with the DA behind the scenes. The attorney didn’t call a single witness in Mychal’s defense or present any evidence on his behalf.
Mychal Bell was originally scheduled to be sentenced on September 20. But with the increased media attention and tide of activism around the case, new lawyers were able to overturn the conviction. The trial judge first threw out the conspiracy charge, and, later, just days before his scheduled sentencing and the date of the protest, Bell’s battery conviction was overturned when an appeals court judge ruled that he should not have been tried as an adult.

The reversal of Mychal Bell’s conviction, however, doesn’t affect the four other Jena Six members charged as adults—because they were seventeen at the time of the alleged crime and, under Louisiana law, are no longer considered juveniles.

The outpouring at the September 20 protest was the result of massive anger at one of the most vicious examples of Jim Crow racism in the modern South. Protesters came from across the South and beyond, on busses organized through college campuses and fraternities, civil rights groups like the NAACP or National Action Center, or simply in carloads with friends or relatives. Many had heard about the case of the Jena Six just days or weeks earlier, through the Internet or talk radio shows popular in the African American community like the Michael Baisden Show.

Again and again, protesters said that they had traveled because the racism of Jena exists in their own communities. “I have seven grandkids, and it just scares me for them,” said Helen Comeaux, who drove five hours from Dallas with a friend to attend. “We have to stand up now and fight. We have to. This happens everywhere. I think this is an eye-opener for everybody, not just Black people. It happens in small towns, big cities, everywhere.”

Shavette Wayne Jones traveled to Jena from St. Louis with a group of about sixty people. “I came because I have two sons of my own,” she said. “I have a 2-year-old and a 9-year-old. My mother and I came together. This could very well be one of my children.” Rev. Al Sharpton told the crowd at the courthouse: “Jena is a point of action for the Jenas everywhere. There’s Jenas in Atlanta, there’s Jenas in New York, there’s Jenas in Florida, and there are Jenas all over Texas.”
In the weeks since the march, attention to the Jena Six has given the case a higher profile and spurred action. High profile names have added their support, including singers David Bowie, who donated $10,000 to the Jena Six defense fund, and John Mellencamp, who released a song about the racism in Jena.

In late September, just days after the march, Mychal Bell was finally released on bail after a Louisiana doctor, who had never met Bell but who heard about the demonstration and case from one of his patients, posted the bail money. In October, DA Reed Walters finally announced—under heavy pressure from Louisiana’s Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco (who had initially refused to take a stand in the case)—that he would no longer seek adult charges against Bell.

But Bell was soon rearrested. Incredibly, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr., the same trial judge who oversaw Bell’s original trial in front of an all-white jury and inappropriate conviction on adult charges, decided Bell had violated his probation for an earlier case. Bell was promptly sentenced to eighteen months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property. As an additional slap in the face, Bell’s parents were ordered to pay court and witness costs.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Jones. “I don’t know how we’re going to pay for any of this. I don’t know how we’re going to get through this.”

According to Al Sharpton, the revocation of Mychal Bell’s bail was payback for the attention that has been focused on Jena and the justice system. “We feel this was a cruel and unusual punishment and is a revenge by this judge for the Jena Six movement,” Sharpton told the Associated Press.

That’s not surprising. For their part, town officials, including Jena mayor Murphy McMillan and District Attorney Reed Walters, responded to the September 20 demonstration by blaming “outsiders” for the trouble in Jena, saying that the town has been unfairly attacked in the press.

For his part, the day prior to the demonstration, Walters told the media that there was no connection between the hanging of the nooses and the eventual fight. “When this case was brought to me and during our investigation and during the trial, there was no such linkage ever suggested,” Walters said in a press conference. “This compact story line has only been suggested after the fact.”

After the demonstration, in an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times, Walters claimed that, had he the chance to do everything over, he would have done everything the same—except perhaps doing more to convince the media why the assault on Justin Barker was more serious. Walters did not say that he would have taken action on the hanging of the nooses. Indeed, he defended his lack of action, writing that, “I am bound to enforce the laws of Louisiana as they exist today, not as they might in someone’s vision of a perfect world.”

Walters also stated, at a press conference days after the demonstration, that it was only divine intervention that had kept the largely Black demonstrators from becoming violent. “I firmly believe that had it not been for the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ last Thursday, a disaster would have happened,” he said.

A considerable racist backlash, both in Jena itself and elsewhere, has also emerged. On the evening of the September 20 demonstration, for example, two teens were arrested after driving a pickup through downtown Alexandria, with nooses hanging off the back. Both allegedly had been drinking, and a gun and brass knuckles were found in their truck.

A rash of noose hangings have also emerged—at Andres High School in North Carolina and the University of Maryland, at the Hempstead Police Department locker room on Long Island, the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and, most recently, outside the door of Madonna Constantine, an African American professor at Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College. That incident was labeled “Jena at Columbia” in a series of e-mails circulated by antiracist organizers.
The families of the Jena Six have also been targeted for harassment by a neo-Nazi group that called on its Web site, after the September 20 demonstration, for its followers to “drag [the Jena Six] out of the house.” Some of the families’ addresses and phone numbers were posted, “in case anyone wants to deliver justice.”

Former KKK leader and one-time Louisiana political candidate David Duke has announced his support for Jena’s white residents, who voted overwhelmingly for him when he ran unsuccessfully for Louisiana governor in 1991.

Additionally, although later disavowing any knowledge of who they were speaking to, both Jena Mayor Murphy McMillan and the alleged victim in the case, Justin Barker, gave interviews to a Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist group based in Learned, Mississippi.

McMillin (who ironically called the recent John Mellencamp song “Jena” “inflammatory”) was asked by Barrett to “set aside some place for those opposing the colored folks.” McMillan reportedly replied, “I am not endorsing any demonstrations, but I do appreciate what you are trying to do. Your moral support means a lot.”

With such a reaction, it’s no surprise that the case of the Jena Six has continued to galvanizing people across the U.S. who want to take a stand against racism.

On October 1, students on dozens of campuses across the country walked out of classes in support of the Jena Six. The national student walk-out was called by hip-hop artists Mos Def, M1 and Talib Kweli, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Change the Game, the National Hip Hop Political Convention, and activists from twenty-five college campuses.

“The prosecution of these young men symbolizes a terrible miscarriage of justice, by punishing students who opposed segregation in their schools and disregarding the threatening acts of others who advocate it,” read the call to action.
As Heywood Williams, who attended Jena High, and still lives in the town today, told Socialist Worker, the spotlight being shined on Jena is a welcome one for many of the town’s Black residents. “People have been crying out for a long time for equal justice,” he said.

It took Al Sharpton and the coalition groups and Jesse Jackson and all the other people who came, and they got the world’s attention. This small thing you see right here in Jena, if you allow it to continue, will spread. If they can get away with it now, they’ll do it again.