9-23-07, 11:29 am

After the collapse of the slave power in the South at the end of the Civil War in 1865, a struggle in the former Confederate states to establish citizenship rights for the former slaves and in effect democratize the region was carried forward. It was beaten back in the last decades of the 19th century by a combination of white racist terrorism instigated largely by the former slaveholder class and allied Southern ruling groups and the acquiescence of the federal government.

By the beginning of the 20th century what existed throughout the South was an open white supremacist dictatorship that segregated Blacks in schools, all other public accommodations, public transportation, lunch counters, bathrooms, drinking fountains, etc while denying the overwhelming majority of Blacks the right to vote, serving on juries, belonging to police forces, or enjoying and practicing other Constitutional rights. This system was enforced by lynch law.

This brutal system kept the South and the great majority of its white population in a state of “underdevelopment” in regard to education, income, and even life expectancy for generations. Racial divisions allowed working-class and poor, rural whites to feel superior without any of the actual economic or political power their elite masters enjoyed.

The Southern Jim Crow version of white supremacy was overturned by the struggles of the civil rights movement, which led a century after the Confederate defeat to the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the abolition of 'legal' segregation in public accommodations, restoration of the right to vote and all civil rights Constitutionally guaranteed to all.

Just as 1865 saw the end of slavery but not the end of a system of racist oppression or tyranny and terror in the former Confederate states, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 heralded the end of de jure segregation and disenfranchisement in the Southern states, but not the end of institutional racism there or in the larger society.

Today, the successors to the segregationist South have become a mainstay in the right-wing dominated Republican Party. They give that party both a large bloc of members of Congress and a large chunk of electoral votes in presidential elections.

While African Americans have not lost the civil rights won in the 1960s, the “new” solid South is a region where the Republicans have a kind of 'home field advantage' rooted in its historical foundation of slavery and segregation (both of which were systems to control labor) and the superstructure of white racism which overlay that foundation.

Even with its progressive activists and important anti-racist and anti-fascist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Highlander Center, or its small but active labor movement, the South today is still where justice is more harsh and unequal, where the death penalty is more likely to be used, where income and education remain relatively lower than the rest of the country, and where the religious right is most influential in a direct way in politics.

This is the context in which the story of the Jena Six, which today is producing mass protest and demonstrations that even the quiescent mass news media are highlighting, should be understood.

The following analysis of events is based on a reading of the federal investigation directed by US Attorney Donald Washington which has been made public, though some of my conclusions are different from Washington's.

In August 2006, a freshman African American student asked the principal of Jena High School for permission to sit under a tree in the school yard that was 'de facto' reserved for white students. When the principal told him anyone could sit where they wanted, he and friends sat under the tree. The next day, there were three nooses hanging from the tree, an act which was a both a crudely obvious threat and a sort of celebration of lynch law as a way to keep Blacks in their place.

When the principal learned the identity of the three white students who had hung the nooses, he recommended they be expelled. But the local board of education and school superintendent quickly over-ruled the principal. The superintendent added ignorance to injury when he said that the act was merely a 'prank' not a 'threat against anybody.'

The incident provoked a series of fights between African American and white students which the principal sought unsuccessfully to defuse at a school assembly in late September. At the assembly, District Attorney J. Reed Walters, invited by the principal to speak to the students, made the situation much worse by warning the students that if they didn't stop fighting over the incident which he called an 'innocent prank,' 'with one stroke of my pen, I could make your life disappear.'

Black students say that Walters was looking at them while making this threat, though he insists he wasn't. Regardless, such a threat might make sense on the old Dragnet television program or in authoritarian fantasies as solutions to problems, but in reality they only inflame situations. And in the predominantly white southern town of Jena, Louisiana, Walters' comment could be taken as nothing less than a racially loaded threat aimed at Black students who might harm 'innocent pranksters.'

As the semester continued, Black students asked to address the school assembly on the noose incident, but were denied that opportunity by the board of education on the grounds that it saw the issue as settled.

Fights continued. On November 30, 2006, the main high school building was gutted in an arson fire, and white and Black students traded charges blaming each other.

By early December there were escalating incidents. On December 1 at a student party that excluded Black students, a group of Black students, including Robert Bailey, showed up leading to a fight where Bailey says he was hit in the head with a beer bottle.

On December 2, Bailey and a group of his friends again clashed with a white student from the party the previous night. The white student subsequently got a shotgun from his pickup truck and allegedly brandished it. Bailey, who allegedly seized the weapon was charged with 'theft of a firearm,' robbery, and disturbing the peace. The white student who produced the weapon was not charged for his role in the altercation.

On December 4, 2006, a white student, Justin Barker, was allegedly attacked by a group of Black students. Robert Bailey was allegedly involved in the fight. There were reports – believed widely by Black students and later denied by Barker – that Barker had been boasting that Bailey had been beaten up in the fight at the party earlier in the week, and that Bailey's alleged actions were revenge for the earlier incident. There is disagreement over the extent of Barker's injuries, but no doubt that he was beaten badly.

What followed is worthy of the old segregationist South. District Attorney Walters, who had previously said 'with one stroke of my pen, I can make your life disappear,' initially charged five other African American students in addition to Bailey with assault and then changed the charge to attempted second degree murder, which could bring with it a 50 year prison sentence.

On June 27, 2007, one of the students, Mychal Bell, a juvenile who had a previous criminal record, was brought to trial and convicted of aggravated second degree battery (which requires assault with a deadly weapon). In an extreme abuse of power, District Attorney Walters contended that Bell's tennis shoes, with which he allegedly kicked Barker, constituted such a weapon. Bell was also tried improperly as an adult.

On September 14, 2007, Bell's conviction was thrown out by a Louisiana Appeals Court judge on the ground that he should have been tried as a juvenile. District Attorney Walters is appealing the decision. This past week, after 50,000 people marched in Jena demanding the release of the six defendants, at a bail hearing, the judge denied bail to Bell. This was the the racist power structure's answer to the thousands who demonstrated.

If Bell's conviction stands, he could be sentenced to as much as 22 years in prison, and indeed Walters' threat to make his 'life disappear' will have come to pass. The district attorney and the judge who denied Mychal Bell bail assume that people who are demanding justice for the Jena Six will go away, which is what the segregationists assumed the civil rights activists would do half a century ago. Civil rights activists proved them wrong then and will prove them wrong today.

Justice demands that the Jena Six be freed from the major criminal charges hanging over them. The Six and the whites who hung nooses on the tree, engaged in fighting, or brandished weapons, should be given fair and equal punishment for their transgressions. Justice also calls for some disciplinary action against the district attorney whose attempted second degree murder and 'reduced' aggravated assault charges (which still hang over the other students who are yet to be tried) in no way fit the crime.

It is interesting to note that the district attorney, Mike Nifong, who prosecuted Duke University lacrosse players on sexual assault charges made by an African American woman which were later dropped has seen his professional career shattered. A campaign against the district attorney, led mainly by right-wing media outlets, charged Nifong with 'liberal bias' and 'political correctness.'

But in the case of the Jena Six, such a campaign to hold the overzealous prosecutor accountable is missing. The hypocrisy of the right-wing media is exposed in its defense of racist acts when aimed at the Black students. The right-wing media has called the hanging of nooses a harmless prank, brandishing shotguns a constitutional rights, and the Jena Six are nothing more than violent thugs.

The hypocrisy on the right goes to the top. President Bush said he was 'saddened' by the events at Jena High, but refused to denounce the lynch law symbolism that instigated the violent conflict or the excessive prosecution that followed.

All Americans should be outraged by the events in Jena. They show us how much ground we have to regain in the struggle against racism in the US, which is indivisible from the struggle for democracy. And they should make it clear in Jena and everywhere else that they are not going to put their heads down, “mind their own business,” and quietly crawl away while justice is trampled upon before their eyes.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor to Political Affairs.

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