Networked Knowledge - Media Report

[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

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On 20 September 2007 the Sydney Morning Herald reported: Louisiana “Saga of the nooses, the beating and a major small town race flare-up”.

It said it does not happen often, where there's something that catches fire and really creates a mass movement of students. Protesters are converging on a small Louisiana town for a rally in support of six black teenagers accused of beating a white schoolmate. Rights activists say the case has come to represent continued racism in the state, decades after the American civil rights movement. The march - which will include several leading civil rights leaders - could draw tens of thousands of demonstrators, organisers have said.

Black participants said they hoped to rekindle the spirit of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Students from universities across America - including historically black colleges like Morehouse and Spellman colleges and Howard University - were today en route to Jena, a town of 3500. The case has resonated with young people, said Jeff Johnson, an activist and organiser who is covering the Jena rally for Black Entertainment Television. "It does not happen often, where there's something that catches fire and really creates a mass movement of students," Johnson said as he boarded a Louisiana-bound plane in Atlanta.

At the centre of the protests is a group of black teenagers who have come to be called the Jena Six. Months after declining to charge three white Jena High School students who were briefly suspended for hanging nooses in a tree, local prosecutors charged five of the six with attempted second-degree murder in the December beating of a white student. The sixth defendant's case is sealed because he is charged as a juvenile. The nooses, which appeared after a black student expressed interest in sitting under a tree where whites usually congregated, inflamed racial tensions in the town.

The charges against the six teenagers further escalated tensions. Critics allege the cases show authorities in the predominantly white town are disproportionately harsh toward blacks. District Attorney Reed Walters, breaking a long public silence today at a news conference, denied racism was involved. Walters said the suffering of the beating victim, Justin Barker, has been largely ignored. Barker was knocked unconscious, his face badly swollen and bloodied, though he was able to attend a school function that night. "With all the emphasis on the defendant, the injury done to him and the serious threat to his existence has become a footnote," Walters said of Barker, who accompanied the prosecutor but declined to speak. Walters also said the reason he did not prosecute the students accused of hanging the nooses is because he could find no Louisiana law they could be charged with.

"I cannot overemphasise what a villainous act that was. The people that did it should be ashamed of what they unleashed on this town," Walters said.

He said four defendants in the beating case were of adult age under Louisiana law, and that the only juvenile charged as an adult, Mychal Bell, had a prior criminal record.

Bell, 16 at the time of the attack, is the only one of the Jena Six to be tried so far. He was convicted on an aggravated second-degree battery count that could have sent him to prison for 15 years, but the conviction was overturned last week when a state appeals court said he should not have been tried as an adult.

Tomorrow's protest had been planned to coincide with Bell's sentencing, but organisers decided to press ahead after the conviction was thrown out. Bell remains in jail while prosecutors prepare an appeal.

The allegations of racism have angered residents, many saying the march was the result of overblown and biased media coverage.

"This isn't a racist town. It never has been. We didn't even have fist fights when the schools were integrated," said a white man who refused to give his name or comment further.

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