Rallies and Public Outcry over "Jena Six" Recall Civil Rights Movement Protests
Busses loaded with protestors traveling from far and wide to a small town in Louisiana; rallies with 10,000 supporters demanding civil rights; petitions circling the country, collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures; celebrities, musicians and famous activists appealing to national media: for the first twenty days of September, it felt more like 1967 than 2007.
The frenzy of public attention centered on a single group of young men known as the "Jena Six," named after the small town in Louisiana where the six African-American high school students were charged with the beating of a white student on December 4, 2006.
The beating victim was 17-year-old Justin Baker, who sustained several bodily injuries, including a bruised and swollen eye, when a black student knocked him down on the back of the head and five other students joined in kicking Baker on the ground.
Initially, the six black students were charged with attempted second degree murder and conspiracy to commit attempted second degree murder. Five of the students were charged as adults, and one as a minor.
One of the students in particular, Mychal Bell, was the subject of much legal and public scrutiny for the adult charges he was given despite the fact that he was 16 at the time of the assault.
In the eyes of many, the arrests and the subsequent charges were excessive and discriminatory, since white students had not been arrested or charged in earlier incidents at the high school and in Jena that led to the beating. Many particulars about the trials were also criticized, including the jury selection and inadequate defense by the public defender in the Bell case.
Those who voiced their opinions succeeded in drawing attention to the incident on such a large scale that media outlets began drawing comparisons to 1960s protests in the Civil Rights movement. On September 20, in fact, the date that one of the teens was scheduled for sentencing, around 10,000 protestors arrived at Jena to attend a rally against unfair justice and to make demands of the DA and prosecutors.
Much of the city shut down in anticipation of the event, due to accommodation problems with so many supporters descending on a small town with a population of slightly less than 3,000.
Celebrities who attended the event included civil rights activists Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Martin Luther King III, rappers Mos Def and Salt-n-Pepa, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.
The entire Jena Six incident began with a series of racially-charged confrontations between groups of white and black students on the Jena High School campus. Two nooses appeared hanging from a tree on campus, sometimes referred to as "the white tree," when a black student asked if he could sit under it. This led to interracial fighting among the students in several instances, including one that led to the first charges for black students.
In this first criminal incident, a group of black youths arguing with a white youth were threatened with a shotgun, which they wrestled away from him. The three black students were charged with theft of a firearm, along with robbery and disturbing the peace, while the white student who produced the shotgun was not charged.
However, the protests and national media attention have been successful in tipping the scales of justice back to what many see as level.
Charges against three of the Jena Six were reduced to second-degree battery and conspiracy, while Mychal Bell's conviction as an adult was overturned, and he will be retried as a minor with the same criminal defense attorney. The other four charged as adults, however, must remain the same, since they were at least 17 at the time of the beating, the adult age under Louisiana law.
More recently, Bell was granted bail, and was released on $45,000 bond after 10 months in prison awaiting sentencing.
However, many of the activists who appeared at the rally are still not satisfied, and claim they won't be until all the charges are dropped or the white students involved in earlier incidents are also charged for their infractions.
And their cries for absolute justice have not gone unheard, it seems, on the federal level. Representative John Conyers, who is Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has stated that he will hold congressional hearings to decide if civil rights were violated in the Jena Six case.
In addition to the congressional hearings, the outcome of Mychall Bell's retrial as a minor and the sentencing on reduced charges for the rest of the Jena Six will have a significant impact on understanding how racial discrimination and civil rights have developed since the Civil Rights movement into the contemporary era.