Three years ago I was standing with two friends outside the courthouse in Scottsboro, Alabama, reading the plaque there about the Scottsboro Boys. A (white) man coming out of the courthouse saw us by the plaque and came over and said "that was a long time ago." My friend replied "not that long; there are people alive who remember."
"Well," said the man, "those boys weren't even from here, anyway. This is just where the trial was."
And of course, that was the point all along. Scottsboro was the town in which nine men and boys were railroaded and tormented in court and in jail because they were black. The crime, even if it happened , was not the outstanding fact. The application or misapplication of justice was.
More recently I'd been assuming that the story of the Jena Six was one that everyone who followed the news knew about. Then last night I talked to my father, who reads a couple newspapers and a couple political magazines and at least this blog, and found out that he hadn't heard about the story until I linked it in yesterday's midday open thread.
So for any other readers of the New York Times who heard about the Jena Six for the first time when they got their morning paper, just so you know.
The Times describes the events in Jena like this:
The Jena High School students, known as the Jena Six, are part of a court case that began in December, when they were accused of beating a white classmate unconscious and kicking him and a prosecutor charged them with attempted murder.
The beating was preceded by racially charged incidents at the high school, including nooses hanging from an oak tree that some students felt was just for white students. The tree has been cut down.
This leaves a few things out. The nooses were not just an "including" - they were the beginning. Whatever racial tensions or outright racism existed in Jena all along, it by all reports came to the surface when the trespass of a few black high school students under a "white" tree was answered with nooses hanging from that same tree. Nor did it proceed directly from nooses to attempted murder.
During the Thanksgiving holiday, someone set fire to the school, reducing the main academic wing to rubble (no one has been arrested, and though a link between what was ruled an arson and the racial discord hasn't been proved, many suspect there is one). The following day, Bailey was punched and beaten with beer bottles when he tried to enter a mostly white party in town. The white kid who threw the first punch was later charged with simple battery and given probation. The next day, Bailey ran into a young white man who was at the party. Bailey and parents of the Jena Six say that when the man pulled a gun on him, he tangled with him and stripped it away. He was later charged with theft of a firearm.
The tension culminated back at school the following Monday. Justin Barker, a white student who says he is friends with the kids who hung the nooses, reportedly taunted Bailey at lunch (Barker denies this). A while later, an African-American student allegedly punched Barker from behind, knocking him unconscious. Then, say white witnesses, a group of black students that included Bailey continued to assault Barker, kicking and stomping on him. (Jena High student Justin Purvis and other black witnesses dispute this.) Barker, who was treated for injuries at a nearby hospital, was released later that day, apparently in strong enough shape to attend a class-ring ceremony that evening. - Newsweek
It is not, in other words, about violence between teenagers. It's about justice unequally applied, about a school system and a legal system (run by a district attorney who told students "I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear.") in which white students could provoke and threaten and beat black students and expect little formal sanction, while black students would face disproportionate punishment.
Nor should those of us not from Jena feel satisfied with the justice applied where we live. As Gary Younge writes in The Nation:
These incidents have turned Jena into a national symbol of racial injustice. As such it is both a potent emblem and a convenient whipping boy. Potent because it shines a spotlight on how race and class conspire to deny black people equality before the law. According to the Justice Department, blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to have their cars searched when they are 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. This would not be a problem for the likes of Kobe Bryant, but in Jena's "quarters" high-powered legal teams are hard to come by.
Convenient because it allows the rest of the nation to dismiss the incidents as the work of Southern redneck backwoodsmen without addressing the systemic national failures it showcases. According to the Sentencing Project, the ten states with the highest discrepancy between black and white incarceration rates include Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York and none from the South. What took place in Jena is not aberrant; it's consistent. The details are a local disgrace. The broader themes are a national scandal. Jim Crow Jr. travels well--unencumbered by historical baggage.
So while it was in Jena, Louisiana, that tens of thousands marched against racism and for justice, neither racism nor the need for justice is confined to Jena, and it's a struggle we all have to take up.