|
On
Sept. 20, at least 50,000 people, mostly Black, marched in Jena,
Louisiana, against the racist frame-up of six Black high school students
in that town. The huge turnout is a reflection of the mass base of the
movement, and has inspired those organizing around other cases of
racist violence and legal frame-ups. Below we look at the case as well
as the potential of the movement.
Jena
is a town of about 4000 in LaSalle Parish, about 220 miles northwest of
New Orleans. The town is about 85 percent white.
At
a Jena High School assembly in September 2006, Black student Justin
Purvis asked if he could sit under the schoolyard tree, customarily
reserved for whites. Principal Scott Whitcomb said yes, but the next
morning, three nooses were hanging from the tree. Whitcomb recommended
that the three white students responsible be expelled. He was overruled
by LaSalle Parish school superintendent Roy Breithaupt, who said it was
just a prank, and the students were suspended for three days. Whitcomb
soon resigned.
When
Black students attempted to address the school board they were turned
away. In response a small group of Black athletes decided to sit under
the tree at lunch and were soon joined by the rest of the Black
students.
That
afternoon there was an emergency assembly, with the town’s police in
attendance. As usual, white and Black students sat on opposite sides of
the auditorium. LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters told
students to stop "fussing" over an "innocent
prank."
Staring
at the Black students, he said, “I can be your best friend, or I can be
your worst enemy.” Then, waving his pen, he said: “With a stroke of my
pen I can make your lives disappear.”
In
late November someone set fire to the school’s main building. The next
day classes were cancelled, but a student dance was held - attended
only by whites. When Black athlete Robert Bailey and his friends Theo
Shaw and Ryan Simmons tried to enter, a 22-year-old white man at the
door punched Bailey and then other whites began kicking and punching
him. One hit him over the head with a beer bottle.
The
man who initiated the attack was charged with misdemeanor battery and
put on probation. No one else was charged.
The
next morning, a white man involved in the attack brandished a shotgun
at Bailey, Shaw, and Simmons outside a store. The three wrested the gun
away from him and fled. They were charged with assault and theft (of the
gun). The gun owner wasn’t charged.
The
next Monday, the whites who had hung the nooses bragged that Bailey had
“gotten his butt kicked.” One of their friends, Justin Barker, began
yelling insults at Mychal Bell and his friends. A brawl broke out
between white and Black students.
A
punch knocked Barker to the ground. Several Black students punched and
kicked Barker after he went down. Accounts differ as to who first
punched Barker. He walked out of the hospital after treatment for a
concussion and a swollen eye. Later that evening, he attended a school
function, where his friends said that "he was his usual smiling
self."
Six
Black athletes - Mychal Bell, Carwin Jones, Bryant Ray Purvis, Jesse
Beard, Theo Shaw, and Robert Bailey - were arrested. Walters charged
five of them with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to
commit same. The sixth was booked as a juvenile on sealed charges.
Several of them stayed in jail for months because of high bail.
School-board
member Billy Fowler told Pacifica reporter Amy Goodman that the board
was prevented by their lawyer from seeing a report of an investigation
into the fight. That lawyer was D.A. Reed Walters. After months of pressure, Bell’s
charges were reduced to second-degree aggravated assault and conspiracy
to commit same, but he still faced 22 years in prison. Bell was found guilty by an
all-white jury. His court-appointed attorney called no witnesses in his
defense.
Bell
was to be sentenced on Sept. 20, and groups around the country chose that
date for a national mobilization in defense of the Jena 6. But with
word getting out about the case, his new lawyers were able to get the
conspiracy charge thrown out and got a ruling that Bell should not have
been tried as an adult, thus voiding the battery conviction.
Walters
initially planned to appeal this ruling but a week later announced that
the case could go to juvenile court. Bell was held in jail until a week
after the ruling. Plans for the protest went ahead with the goal of
getting charges dropped for all six. Charges against Jones, Shaw, and
Bailey have been reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and
conspiracy, but Purvis is still charged with attempted second-degree
murder.
Deep-rooted racism
Most
white Jena residents deny the town is racist and blame outside
agitators for the trouble. Fowler claimed the noose incident was just
"a bad joke" but added: "If they'd kept their mouths
shut, they might have gotten those charges taken off." More likely
they would be well on their way to murder convictions. Blacks, in contrast, speak of the
town’s deep-rooted racism. Caseptla Bailey, Robert's mother, who has
been organizing around the case, told the London Observer, “To us those nooses meant ...
‘Niggers, we're going to kill you.’” The Observer noted the absence of
Black employees at businesses on Jena’s main street, and quotes Bailey,
a former Air Force officer with a
business
degree, as saying “I couldn't even get a job as a bank teller.”
Others
spoke of discrimination in school hiring and residential segregation.
Although school authorities have cut down the "whites-only"
tree, the "Nebo bench" - named after the white elementary
school - remains, where only white students sit. Said Jena resident
Gregory Gibbs, "If you get too outspoken, you might find you don't
have a job."
KKK
Grand Wizard David Duke carried LaSalle Parish in his 1991 run for
governor. Louisiana also saw in
January 2007 the shooting death of the newly-elected Black mayor of
Westlake, as well as shots fired into the home of the Black mayor of
Greenwood.
All
this occurs in a state with a long history of racist violence.
Journalist Linn Washington notes that a 1919 report listed Louisiana as
fourth in the U.S. in the number of lynchings. He adds that lynchings
were “a device for social control, ethnic cleansing and economic
theft.”
In
1873 over 100 Blacks were massacred in Colfax, 42 miles west of Jena,
during a post-Reconstruction wave of violence to stop Blacks from
voting. In 1934 a prosecutor in Bastrop, 90 miles north of Jena, told a
mob about to lynch a man that he “sympathized with its attitude.” No
one was charged for the hanging.
Such
violence has not gone unresisted. In fact, it was in Jonesboro, just 60
miles northwest of Jena, where the Deacons for Defense were formed in
1964. The Deacons were Black military veterans who provided armed
self-defense to civil rights workers.
Louisiana
Blacks have also suffered from the ethnic cleansing after Hurricane
Katrina, as denial of aid and even the threat of violence prevented
them from returning to their homes.
Columnist
Gary Younge points out that there is a kernel of truth in denials that
the problem is just Jena. Citing statistics showing higher segregation
and incarceration rates in the North, he says Jena's problem is that
its racism is manifested “with insufficient subtlety.”
In
fact, in recent years nooses have been found far from Jena, in
workplaces from San Francisco to New York. On Sept. 7, one was found at
the University of Maryland, scene of recent organizing against racism
and police brutality.
The
day before the march, in an announcement that union members were headed
to Jena, the AFL-CIO's blog reprinted quotes from a speech by NAACP
Chair Julian Bond detailing ongoing discrimination against Blacks. Bond cited Katrina, the recent
Supreme Court ruling hindering school desegregation (see previous
issues of Socialist Action) and the five million more people living in
poverty since Bush took office. (He didn’t mention the millions thrown
off welfare or laid off under Bush’s Democratic predecessor.)
Says
Bond, almost a quarter of Blacks live below the poverty line versus 8.6
percent of whites. Infant mortality rates are 146 percent higher for
Blacks; chances of imprisonment 447 percent higher; lack of health
insurance 42 percent higher; the proportion with a college degree 60
percent lower.
The
average white American will live five and a half years longer than the
average Black. Blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to
have their cars searched when pulled over, and more than twice as
likely to be arrested. They are more than five times as likely as
whites to be sent to jail and are sentenced to 20 percent longer jail
time.
Journalist
Earl Ofari Hutchinson has documented how the placement of the Jena 6 in
the adult rather than juvenile court system is typical of a broader
problem, with courts and legislatures around the country pandering to a
media witch hunt against Black youth to lock up juveniles quicker,
longer, and without regard to the evidence.
Black blogs build the protest
After
the arrests, Jena residents formed a defense committee and held weekly
protests. For months, while supporters (including whites) faced
threats, their only allies were from nearby towns and cities in
Louisiana and Texas. One of the first was Friends of Justice, a group
formed around the 1999 Tulia, Texas, drug-sting frame-up, in which over
half the town’s Black males were convicted on the word of a corrupt
narcotics officer. National pressure forced Texas’ governor to pardon
most of the defendants four years later.
Soon
the word began to spread through Black blogs, e-mail lists, and on-line
videos. This attracted the attention of Black radio personalities and
newspapers, who would play a big role in spreading the word about the
Sept. 20 march.
Black
bloggers had already shown their skills in spreading the word about
Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old Black girl from Paris, Texas, sentenced
to up to seven years for shoving a hall monitor. The same judge had
given probation to a 14-year-old white girl convicted of arson. After
bloggers bombarded the Texas governor with protest letters, Cotton was
freed.
By
the following May such national groups as the ACLU, NAACP, and Al Sharpton’s National
Action Network began offering help. Donations for the defense and
offers of legal support poured in. Hundreds of thousands of signatures
on petitions and phone calls to officials were organized by a variety
of groups, and on July 31 a rally of 300 was held in Jena, with
simultaneous rallies in other cities.
Students embrace the case
Stephanie
Brown, national youth director for the NAACP, said the case resonates
with college youth because they aren't much older than the six. Protesters had been sharing
information about the case through Facebook, MySpace, and similar
sites. One college senior from Little Rock said he was nervous about
going, but wanted to tell Mychal Bell “to keep his head high and not
give up.”
In
addition to the students who came from traditionally Black colleges,
hundreds more rallied back on campus, and similar numbers turned out at
other schools. Over 1500 from Black colleges Morehouse, Spelman, and
Clark rallied together.
Hundreds rallied at Coppin State, Morgan State, and Hampton.
Large
numbers turned out at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, the
University of Texas-Austin, and Temple University in Philadelphia,
where 700 students raised their fists for six minutes of silence.
A
partial list of other on-campus student rallies includes: hundreds each
in Ohio in Cleveland, Springfield, and Toledo; Muncie, Ind.; various
Nashville campuses (where a white student was told to remove his Jena 6
t-shirt in school); Alabama State U.; East Carolina State; and Little Rock,
Ark., (which that month was
marking the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of its schools).
Over
1000 rallied at UC Berkeley, including residents of its Chicano theme
house, joined by hundreds who had walked out of high schools. Hundreds more
rallied on the streets of San Francisco and at other Bay Area campuses.
Hundreds
of high school students walked out in Stamford and Los Angeles. In
Colorado Springs, dozens of high school students wore black armbands
and held a rally. Students at a Catholic high school in Chicago shed
their school uniforms to wear black. There were also off-campus marches
of hundreds in Cleveland, Detroit, Denver, Portland, Rochester, St.
Louis and Virginia Beach, Brooklyn and Manhattan. About 2500 people
packed a church in Baltimore.
The
success of Sept. 20 has already inspired calls for follow-up actions. A
rally was planned for the Greater Hartford, Conn., area on Sept. 29.
Black students at Western Connecticut State are organizing a forum. As
we go to press, a national student walkout has been called for Oct. 1.
While
the huge march clearly had some legal impact, it also led to more
racist threats. That very evening two teens were arrested after driving
a pickup through Alexandria with nooses hanging off the back. Days
later, a noose was found at a North Carolina high school.
A new civil rights movement?
The
success of the march has led to talk of a “new civil rights movement.”
This is encouraging, but we should remember similar predictions after
Katrina. Some see proof of such
a possibility in the movement’s bottom-up, uncoordinated character and
the lack of control by national groups. But while building on the
genuinely mass base of the defense effort, if we are to prevent its
cooptation and derailment into legalistic or Democratic Party channels,
we need to build a broad united front involving all forces but
responsible to the movement’s ranks.
This
will require the spreading and national coordination of the democratic
committees that have sprung up on Black campuses and elsewhere - a task
for which the informality and speed of the internet are a useful
adjunct but not a substitute.
It’s
also important to look at the historical roots and evolution of racist
repression. Racist repression is not the product of an individual’s bad
attitude. It is a means of control used by the ruling class to protect
its system. It operates through individuals, through mobs, and through
official bodies such as the police or courts. Its intent is to
intimidate the oppressed and to prevent them from uniting with the rest
of the working class.
The
forms and extent of racist repression has varied over time, from
slavery to the end of Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era to the
post-World War II urbanization of Black workers. Everyday repression
occurs in “normal” times, but it also comes in bigger waves.
Given
the racially segregated character of the U.S. economy since colonial
times, any big economic change - depression or expansion, plant
closings or openings - has sparked off waves of repression, as workers
fight the bosses, and each other, to protect past gains or win new
ones.
The
ruling class has also fostered parallel racist norms and institutions
in the social, cultural, and political spheres. And here, too, racist
repression is used as the oppressed try to break out of such norms and
institutions - or attempts are made to force them back in. Repression
is also wielded against workers of any nationality who attempt to
organize across color lines.
The
systemic nature of racist repression explains why campaigns in defense
of its victims, from the Scottsboro Boys to Mumia Abu-Jamal, help
educate about the racist nature of our society. By the same token,
campaigns in defense of workers facing repression for organizing in
defense of the class as a whole, from the Haymarket Martyrs to Big Bill
Haywood, have helped educate about the capitalist system in general.
Jena
shows us two common forms of racist repression: the threat of lynching
and judicial frame-ups. These two have been combined historically, in
varying proportions, with police brutality and murder, race riots, and
repressive and discriminatory laws.
Often the ruling class differs within itself about how to mix
legal and extralegal forms of racist repression. The starkest example
came when industrialization of the South required the death of the
legal forms of Jim Crow, and the reining in of at least its most brutal
enforcers. But even while Jim Crow was being dismantled, repression was
being used to keep down Black workers in cities around the country
fighting for their rights in the 1960s and 1970s. And it was revived as
a means of quieting protest when the gains of those decades were
stripped away.
Just
as the ruling class mixes legal and extralegal repression, so too must
oppressed nationalities and the working class combine legal defense and
mass actions for our own ends, as part of a broader strategy to
confront the systemic roots of oppression and exploitation.
Racist
repression today occurs after the loss of millions of jobs since the
1970s and the dramatic increase in racial economic inequality at the
same time as all workers’ wages and benefits have shrunk. It occurs as the social services won
by the labor and civil rights movements have been drastically cut or
eliminated.
Jena’s
economy shows in microcosm the changes facing the U.S. in general and
the South in particular. Agriculture is still a big part of LaSalle
Parish’s economy. But whereas Jena was once home to some of Louisiana's
largest sawmills, they closed in the
1950s.
Its most profitable industry today is also the least labor-intensive:
oil drilling and services.
Jena-based
Justiss Oil owns interests in or provides services to hundreds of wells
throughout the Southeast. But its revenues and those of other companies
with wells in the Parish have done little for workers in the area,
white or Black: Jena’s per capita income in 2003 was $13,761.
One
former source of jobs will soon reopen, but it’s no cause for
celebration. The Jena Juvenile Correctional Center for Youth, a
notoriously brutal prison shut down in 2000, will reopen as an
Immigration and Customs Enforcement prison to hold detained immigrants
from a five-state area.
This
is the context in which we must forge a movement rooted in the Black
community, especially among workers and youth, but one also able to
call on allies throughout the working class. Particular attention must
be paid at the start to winning over Latino immigrant workers
organizing against ICE roundups, and Arabs and Muslims suffering
detention, harassment, and frame-ups in the “war on terror.”
Drop the charges against the Jena 6! Build a movement in defense
of all victims of racist repression!
|