Jena Six

Messy Jena Hearing on Capitol Hill

Blow by blow account of pols and preachers grandstanding, showing up late  at crowded hearing.

Media Still Picking Civil Rights "Leaders"

Friends of Justice cite New Republic piece decrying mainstream media abdication of race news judgment to Sharpton and Jackson. Post also sets record straight on who gets credit for getting to the story first.

NPR Picks Up Jena Six Story—

Solid report by NPR southwest reporter Wade Goodwyn starts at the beginning and gives a balanced summary for jumping into what is now a national running story.

Petition for Justice Department Review—

Read this short, simple plea for the US Justice Department to investigate. Very easy to click and sign, if you feel so moved.

Interview With Jena Six Parents—

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now (YouTube)

Perpetrator Becomes Prosecutor—Friends of Justice—7.17.07

Alan Bean describes insulting hate crime added to injury of injustice in Louisiana town.

A Modern Day Lynching—Democracy Now, 7.10.07

Comments

[Brian]

He just made news yesterday. He was arrested for trying to shoplift. Afterwards, he tried to commit suicied. Youths and guns will never mix.

[jane doe]

Damn this letter is pathetic. Another violent young black man being put on the martyr pedestal. Mykel Bell had a long violent criminal record, just like Rodney King and so many other people that civil rights groups try to make into victims. The asian community would never show such love and admiration for the thugs in thir communty, ever notice? Mykel Bell is in deep shit because of his actions and the african american community is determined to set once again an example that it is not acceptable for a young black man to be help responsible for his criminal behavior.

[joseph young]

An Open Letter To The Jena Six
By Joseph Young
Washington Informer
Dear Mychal,
I keep thinking about you. I also think about the other young men who have fallen prey to racial hatred. Its existence, more than a century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, makes me fearful for your life, your safety. The freedom that it promised was tenuous.
It was not entirely without strength. In the proclamation, issued three years into the Civil War, Lincoln declared, at the urging of Frederick Douglass, that the former slaves would be accepted into the Union Army and navy, making the liberated the liberator. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 black servicemen had fought for freedom and saved the Union.
Your generation, like mine, is being denied this freedom our ancestors risked life and limb, so that we may live as free men and women. You can call them heroes, but they were not thinking of themselves when they displayed courage and self-sacrifice on the battlefields of America.
Today, then, to guard against the impending doom of American civilization, is not only opposition to racism, but also the determination to secure the civil rights for which many Americans have paid a heavy toll. Of all the civil rights, the right to learn is the surest prevention from ignorance. If at any time, children are instructed with anti-black bias; and they are made to learn what is not true and what the dominate forces in their lives want them to think is true; there’re guilty of impeding the march toward American civilization.
Astonishing as it is that those students would hang three nooses from the tree at Jena High School as a racial taunt, including calling the black students ‘niggers’; you would think that America would never again want to see a black person hang from a tree, or behind bars. The nooses show that we, Americans, have not come that far from the cruelties and barbarity of slavery as we think. (Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 5,000 people, mostly blacks, met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.) And this also is an unfortunate comment upon the belief that our schools are the great path to progress, the great equalizer. If our schools are the great path to progress, they must be the freest of our institutions, opposed bitterly to the attempt to indoctrinate our children with racial hatred.
Well, Mychal, as you and the others wait behind bars because of a racially biased and an over zealous prosecutor, it is for us on the outside to continue the unfinished work of our fathers, to set you free. All of you were willing to fight racial hatred, and you know people of goodwill are beside you. If the Confederacy couldn’t stop us, the opposition we now face will fail. When history is written your detractors will get little note, but you will be remembered for standing up for what’s best of the American creed. You are part of a legacy in which our slave forebears fought to birth a new nation. You, Mychal, are a child of America’s destiny.
It was Martin Luther King who said if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for he is not fit to live. Freedom is worth dying for. Justice is worth dying for. Equality is worth dying for. A child is worth dying for, because our job as parents is to protect children.
Mychal, when you feel complete frustration and your narrow jail cell is closing in on your spirit and mind; remember the message of the old slave preacher to his flock whose resistance to oppression might have been completely in vain:
“You are created in God’s image. You are not slaves, you are not ‘niggers’; you are God’s children.”
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph

[Joseph Williams]

Oh my!
One would think that in a post-9/11-Patriot-Act-enchanced America that the intitial provocation with the nooses would be considered an act of Domestic Terrorism.

I guess the nation still hasn't come to grips that even Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist. Racism is terrorism too.

Will Bush extend his executive powers/priviledge in Louisiana as he did with Scooter Libby? Or is it because the Jena Six are in Louisiana warrants that he and the federal legions will, again, have a delayed response?