Southern Face Marred By Jena

How is it now possible to approach the tiny little town of Jena, Louisiana., population 3,500 strong? Is this little town somehow an isolated throwback to the Jim Crow era of entrenched racism, or is what recently happened there the by-product of racism at all, or simply the clashing of different teenage factions?

Should there have been national personalities wandering around the little backwater town? Were they trying to make more of this than it really was, perhaps for the sake of their political or public standing, or ratings interest?

On the other hand, could it be that Jena, La., is the inadvertent pimple that reveals to the rest of the nation that the face of the New South is still very subject to the ugly acne of racism? What does some nooses hanging from a tree mean anyway?

Perhaps the corruption of racism is revealing itself so readily in Jena because the cleansing antidotes have been put away in the national closet. No one has been fighting racism for years now, for the simple reason that it was assumed the virus was expunged, eliminated from the body politic.

Can it be that the racist disease has flourished in the absence of the strong medicine of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, and has regained more than a foothold, now once again permeating the body of the South and threatening to spread to other regions?

Is the South quietly segregated again, and if that is so then who is doing anything to reverse it, or even report upon it?

I talked to three Boston black men in their 20s recently. One who hadn’t heard of Jena, said he said he simply doesn’t go down South anymore, because of the "way things are down there." The other men knew about it, just a little. That ignorance of events was in itself interesting, given that the incident was so intensively covered by the national and local media.

The ‘incident,’ of course, involved a "Whites’ Only" shade tree that was violated by a black youth daring to sit underneath it, and that apparently prompted some of Jena’s white youths to decorate the tree with hangman’s nooses.

Up until this point, most Americans believed America had already slain the dragon of racism. But now it seems the beast was only wounded and had retreated to lick its wounds out of sight and mind, except perhaps for those Southern diehards who surreptiously fed and nourished it until it regained enough strength to live openly among them again, as it clearly was doing in Jena.

Can it be that such racist hatred is still bubbling just under the surface of the New South, and is now so strong that it can be publicly manifested by such things as a "Whites’ Only" shade tree?

Not surprisingly, white and black teenagers soon took to fighting each other, sometimes with words and gestures, other times with fists and weapons of one sort or another. But is all of this simply a local misunderstanding easily used and perhaps exploited by people who like to stir things up, maybe like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, who have both run for president and other major offices in the past and clearly enjoy center stage? Martin Luther King III was in Jena, too.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco called for a more reasonable prosecution, albeit a bit after the fact when it seemed only the black youths were going to feel the full weight of the judicial process.

Probably, both hatred and misunderstanding were intertwined in Jena.

Yet however this episode, this terrible incident began, it is a national story and it is appropriate that national political and news figures should become involved. If something like this is left alone, or dismissed as a minor blemish on the southern side of the face of the nation, it is more than a little reasonable to assume that in the near future Americans will be forced to address a more virulent form of the racist disease or risk reliving the 1950s.

A dispassionate look at the situation reveals one disturbing fact: there was no nationwide group present that represented black Americans with any coordinated strength or political power.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama, running hard for president, issued a cautious statement that had more to do with not screwing up his campaign than bringing justice to the six black youths who clearly seemed to have fallen into a greasy cauldron of Southern Fried Justice, reminiscent of the darkest years of Jim Crow politics.

Certainly the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, did make a nod toward Jena, but it is a rudderless ship right now and therefore more or less ineffective on the national stage. The Nation of Islam and the American Civil Liberties Union also showed up to put themselves on record against discrimination, but so what, everyone already knows where they stand.

Will Jena quickly fade from the national consciousness as the varied political and media superstars move on to some other photo opportunity, leaving the racist disease untreated again? Or is all of this truly racism in the first place?

Well, think back a couple of years when Hurricane Katrina ripped the guts out of New Orleans, a Louisiana city not that many miles away from Jena. Suddenly the black-white line became unmistakable. The entire region was literally absent federal help for five unforgivable days. And when a group of largely black residents tried to go over a bridge to find some security, the white police shot over their heads rather than let them cross. This was racism incarnate.

Jena is a sawmill town. Blacks make up 10 or 15 percent of the population, all living in one neighborhood. It’s in the middle of the state. But for years the shade of a large tree adjacent to the high school in that little town was tacitly accepted as available for whites only. And when that unwritten rule was violated, nooses appeared as ornaments on the great tree.

Lynching is profoundly insulting to most Americans and town officials quickly realized a moral crisis was at hand, or at least a crisis of perception. So the school administrators and their lawyers looked in the law books and were somehow unable to find anything with which they could charge the white youths who did the decorating. So what did they do? They gave the three boys who hung the nooses a special school to attend for a brief time.

Oh, they also cut down the tree. Problem solved.

How very comfortably southern; get rid of the tree and all problems will disappear. The young blacks of Jena accurately perceived that this was all there was to the case. Nothing more was going to happen to anyone. So, six of them decided to take matters into their own hands. They bushwhacked a white student named Justin Barker, who was not one of the noose decorators, but a friend of theirs. The blacks beat him.

How badly was he hurt? Well, he went out that same night to a social gathering.

Still, the white lawman in town charged all six of the blacks with attempted murder and charged one defendant as an adult. What this meant in practical terms was that Mychal Bell, who was well under 18 when all this happened, faced up to 100 years in prison.

The charges weren’t very surprising. A couple of days before the beating, a school assembly was held to discuss the suspensions, and school transfers, that had been meted out to the noose decorators, and to warn against any recriminations.

And into the school auditorium, with whites on one side and blacks on the other, strode District Attorney Reed Walters, flanked by police officers. He told the students he could be their friend or their worst enemy. He lifted his fountain pen and said, "With one stroke of my pen, I can make your life disappear."

And in Bell’s case, that is what he tried to do, with a vengeance. Bell was eventually convicted on a lesser charge in an adult court and that was overturned later. In that adult trial, he had an all white jury. His lawyer presented no witnesses. That lawyer was black. The other five of the Jena Six have yet to come to trial. Some have spent months in jail while their friends and families tried to raise bail.

More than a year passed and DA Walters was still was pressing a hard case. But then all the heavyweights rolled into Jena: the governor of Louisiana, Rev. Jackson, Rev. Sharpton,, Rev. King III etc. With all the pressure, Walters backed down. He will have the case sent back to juvenile court where a 100-year sentence is impossible.

At the same time, various columnists and newspeople swarmed over the little southern town. They wanted to know what life is like in Jena, Louisiana. A Newsweek reporter learned from local barber Billy Doughty that he has no prejudice, but he never cuts a black man’s hair because "the white customers, they might say something about cutting their hair with the same stuff."

That Newsweek quote, believe it or not, is from 2007, not 1957.

Clearly, unequivocally, the so-called Jena Six were wrong when they ganged up on the white youth, and just as clearly they are already paying for matching hatred with hatred. But it is easy to understand how racism against them turned them into racists against whites.

This is the warning sign, the ugly pimple on the southern side of the American face. The antidote today is the same as it was fifty years ago: Americans of good will, both white and black, must stand up again against racism. If all the ‘speechifying’ by various political figures, and all the words, spoken and written by the media, result in no true anti-racist motivation among Americans, then it is only realistic to expect that ugly eruptions will ultimately take place all across the face of the nation, and this time will likely leave scars that will not easily be cosmetically hidden.

Jena is providing a new test of America’s soul.

10/07/2007