The civil rights battle in America remains incompletely fought. Images of the fifties, sixties and seventies are reawakened by this story from Jena Louisiana.
From the description it sounds as if little has changed in the past thirty or forty years in this small town. Integration has come, after a fashion. Housing is still more or less segregated. The schools are integrated but there is no mixing amongst the students. The good jobs still go to whites. The low paying ones, when available, go to blacks.
The trouble started last autumn when black students decided that, after first seeking approval from the head master, they were going to sit in a spot that had previously been reserved for the white folks. Waiting for them they found nooses hanging from the tree that shaded the spot. The white students responsible for what the school authorities described as a prank we given a few days of in school suspension. The black community, rightly seeing shades of the KKK and Jim Crow in action, complained that the punishment was insufficient. Following this there were a number of more violent incidents between white and black students including a black youth who was assaulted by a white schoolmate when he had the temerity to show up at an "all white" party and an incident in which a white student pulled a shotgun on a three black students at a convenience store. Finally in December a group of black students beat up a white student, who allegedly had been taunting blacks, outside of the gymnasium. The white student was hospitalised for a few hours but was seen to be "acting himself" that very evening. So after all of this what charge did the white local district attorney decide was warranted in this particular case? Attempted second degree murder with a possible maximum sentence of 100 years in prison.
The NAACP and the ACLU have taken up the case of the boys and are arguing that the charges are unwarranted and racist in nature. The local whites say that this is not racially motivated and just a case of good old American justice taking its course. The town's mayor, Murphy McMillan says:
From the description it sounds as if little has changed in the past thirty or forty years in this small town. Integration has come, after a fashion. Housing is still more or less segregated. The schools are integrated but there is no mixing amongst the students. The good jobs still go to whites. The low paying ones, when available, go to blacks.
The trouble started last autumn when black students decided that, after first seeking approval from the head master, they were going to sit in a spot that had previously been reserved for the white folks. Waiting for them they found nooses hanging from the tree that shaded the spot. The white students responsible for what the school authorities described as a prank we given a few days of in school suspension. The black community, rightly seeing shades of the KKK and Jim Crow in action, complained that the punishment was insufficient. Following this there were a number of more violent incidents between white and black students including a black youth who was assaulted by a white schoolmate when he had the temerity to show up at an "all white" party and an incident in which a white student pulled a shotgun on a three black students at a convenience store. Finally in December a group of black students beat up a white student, who allegedly had been taunting blacks, outside of the gymnasium. The white student was hospitalised for a few hours but was seen to be "acting himself" that very evening. So after all of this what charge did the white local district attorney decide was warranted in this particular case? Attempted second degree murder with a possible maximum sentence of 100 years in prison.
The NAACP and the ACLU have taken up the case of the boys and are arguing that the charges are unwarranted and racist in nature. The local whites say that this is not racially motivated and just a case of good old American justice taking its course. The town's mayor, Murphy McMillan says:
"Jena is a place that's moving in the right direction...Race is not a major local issue. It's not a factor in the local people's lives."
I presume he left the "as long as the nigras stay in their place" unsaid.
