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[ filed under: race-relations rights ] 
Free the Jena ‘Six’ by Michael David Murphy. Six black students at Jena High School in Central Louisiana were arrested last December after a school fight in which a white student was beaten and suffered a concussion and multiple bruises. The six black students were charged with attempted murder and conspiracy. They face up to 100 years in prison without parole. The fight took place amid mounting racial tension after a black student sat under a tree in the schoolyard where only white students sat. The next day three nooses were hanging from the tree. In late June, an all-white jury took less than two days to convict 17-year-old Mychal Bell, the first of the Jena Six to go on trial. He was convicted of aggravated battery and conspiracy charges and now faces up to 22 years in prison. He will be sentenced July 31. Black residents say that race has always been an issue in Jena, which is 85 percent white, and that the charges against the Jena Six are no exception. The case has drawn international attention with the London Observer referring to it as of “stealth racism.” Jena, Louisiana. Also, check out this article in New America Media: comments |
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An Open Letter To The Jena Six
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.”By Joseph Young
Dear Mychal,
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph By joseph young · Posted on Aug 13, 02:07 PM
I’ve just learned about this case from a special report on the BBC’s International News Channel. It’s good to see so many blogs taking up this case of blatant injustice. I hope more and more people will join in as coverage grows. It seems to me very important to increase contact by as many means as possible and to act now to get the defendants out of jail and stop the trial.
William Bain, PhD Student, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
By William Bain · Posted on Aug 18, 03:22 PMAbsolute nonsense for the African-Americans to be charged with ANYTHING!!
Do those “white” kids think that they are superior to everyone else? Why weren’t they charged with intimidation??
What the hell is wrong with people anyway? Racism is apparently alive and well in Jena, LA. It’s not the 1950’s anymore. If you take a look around you, you will notice that it is 2007 and everyone else has come to their senses and moved on. I strongly suggest that you do the same.
By Jim Jeziorowski · Posted on Sep 4, 10:13 AMwhat a double standard in the african american community you want to free thugs, if the roles were reversed and 6 white kids beat up one black kid all these black leader would demand that that they kids be charged with a hate crime…btw why werent they charged with a hate crime the amfrican american community is right this is a injustice.
By bizzy · Posted on Sep 19, 07:56 AM