Searching for justice in Jena

Speaking to demonstrators in front of a rural Louisiana courthouse last week, Alan Bean, a Baptist minister from the Texas panhandle, inveighed against injustice. "The highest crime in the Old Testament," he declared, "is to withhold due process from poor people; to manipulate the criminal justice system to the advantage of the powerful, against the poor and the powerless." As he delivered his message to the crowd, officers from the state police intelligence division watched from the side, videotaping speakers and audience. Bean was speaking at a rally organized by residents of Jena, LA. In the space of a few weeks, more than 150 residents of this small town have organized an inspiring grassroots struggle against injustice. The demonstrations began when six black students at Jena High School were arrested after a fight at school and charged with conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder. The students now face up to 100 years in prison without parole, in a case that King Downing, national coordinator of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Campaign Against Racial Profiling, has said "carries the scent of injustice." Local activists say that this wave of problems started last September, when black high school students asked for permission to sit under a tree at an area of the high school that had, traditionally, been used only by white students. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree. The following week, black students staged a protest under the tree. At a school assembly soon after, Jena district attorney Reed Walters, appearing with local police officers, warned black students against further unrest. "I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen," he threatened. According to many in Jena, tensions simmered in the town over the fall, occasionally exploding into fights and other incidents. No white students were charged or punished, including the students found to have been responsible for hanging the nooses. Bryant Purvis, one of the black students now facing charges, states that, after the incident, "there were a lot of people aggravated about it, a lot of fights at the school after that, a lot of arguments, and a lot of people getting treated differently." In the first weekend of December, a black student was assaulted by a group of white students, and a white graduate of Jena High School threatened several black students with a shotgun. The following Monday, white students taunted the black student who was assaulted over the weekend, and one of the white students was beaten up. Within hours, six black students were arrested. "I think the district attorney is pinning it on us to make an example of us," said Purvis. "In Jena, people get accused of things they didn't do a lot." Soon after, their parents discovered that these students were facing attempted murder charges. "The courtroom, the whole back side, was filled with police officers," Tina Jones, Bryant's mother, recalls. "I guess they thought maybe when they announced what the charges were, we were gonna go berserk or something." At last week's demonstration, family members and allies spoke about the issues at the center of the case. "I don't know how the [district attorney] or the court system gets involved in a school fight," said Jones. "But I'm not surprised, there's a lot of racism in Jena. A white person will get probation, and a black person is liable to get 15 to 20 years for the same crime." Alan Bean began his activism in 1999 in response to a string of false arrests in his town of Tulia, TX. In response, he founded an organization called Friends of Justice and dedicated himself to supporting community organizing around cases of criminal justice abuse in rural Texas and Louisiana. His work is often a vital intervention, bringing experience and ideas to local struggles. Small towns like Jena–which has a population of 2,500, and is 85 percent white–are often left out of the organizing support, attention and funding that organizations in metropolitan areas receive. This disparity was not always the case. Rural southern towns were the frontlines of the 1960s civil rights movement. Groups like CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) were active throughout the rural south. These rural towns have also been important sites of homegrown resistance. In 1964, in Jonesboro, LA, just north of Jena, a group of black veterans of the US military formed the Deacons for Defense, an armed self-defense organization, in support of civil rights struggles. The Deacons went on to form 21 chapters in rural Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, continuing a legacy of defiance that inspired future generations of organizers. Violent confrontations with racial undertones still occur in many of these towns. Shortly after the incident in Jena, Gerald Washington of Westlake, LA, was shot three days before he was to become the town's first black mayor. Less than two weeks after that, shots were fired into the house of another black mayor, in Greenwood, LA. Jena itself is a mostly segregated community that was also the site of the Jena Juvenile Correctional Center for Youth, a legendarily brutal prison that was shut down in 2000. Jena residents formed their own defense committee, without the support of national organizations. They have been holding weekly protests and organizing meetings that have attracted allies from near and far. A gathering last week was attended by allies from other northern and central Louisiana towns, and representatives from the ACLU, NAACP and the National Action Network. Parents questioned why the noose and other threatening actions were not taken seriously by the school administration. "What's the difference," asks Marcus Jones, the father of Mychal Bell, one of the students, about the disparity in the charges. "There's a color difference. There was white kids that hung up a noose, but it was black kids in the fight." Sentencing disparity is a big issue in many of these small town struggles, where many see it as the modern continuation of the brutal southern heritage of lynching. Marcus Jones explains a litany of reasons why the students should not be charged with attempted murder. "The kid did not have life threatening injuries, he was not cut, he was not stabbed, he was not shot, nothing was broken. You talk about conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder, you think about the mafia, you think somebody paid a sniper or something. We're talking about a high school fistfight. The [district attorney] is showing his racist upbringing, and bringing it into the law." For three of the youth, Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw and Mychal Bell, trial starts on May 21. The other dates have not been set yet. I asked Bryant Purvis how this has affected him. "One of my goals in life is to go to college, and not to go to jail, and that changed me right there," he said. "That crushed me, to be in a jail cell." When asked how her life has changed, Purvis' mother described the sadness of having her son taken away from her without warning. "You wake up in the morning and your son is there. You lay down at night and he's there. Then all of a sudden he's gone. That's a lot to deal with."