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Jena Ignites
a Movement
By Jordan Flaherty
Six courageous families in the
small Louisiana town of Jena sent out a call for justice
that has now been amplified around the world.
Yesterday's mass protests in Jena were unlike anything I
have seen in my life, a beautiful and enormous
outpouring of energy and outrage that may have the
potential to ignite a movement.
The basic facts of the case are by now widely known. In
this 85% white town, where the high school yard was
segregated by race, a Black student asked to sit under a
tree that had been reserved for white students only.
The next day, three nooses hung from the tree. The
white students who hung the nooses received only a minor
punishment, and more importantly, no one in the white
power structure of LaSalle Parish, where Jena is
located, seemed to take the nooses seriously as a racial
incident. There were no lectures to the students on the
meaning of the nooses, or the legacy of racism, slavery
and Jim Crow in the rural south. Instead, the Parish's
district attorney told protesting Black students that he
could take away their lives, "with a stroke of my pen."
He then proceeded to attempt to do just that, charging
six students with attempted murder after a schoolyard
fight later that year.
In the nine months since their children were charged
with attempted murder, the family members of the Jena
Six organized meetings, hosted rallies, sent out press
releases and letters and made phone calls – whatever
they could think of. They were determined to not let
this stand. For months, they stood nearly alone,
accompanied by solidarity visits from activists from
nearby towns and cities in Louisiana and Texas. Many of
their friends and neighbors were afraid to speak out,
and some reported having their jobs threatened. One
white couple who spoke out said they felt pressured to
leave town.
But, in the face of what
seemed like overwhelming obstacles, and with no
organizing experience or friends in high places, the
people of Jena continued to struggle. After months of
silence from the media and from mainstream civil rights
organizations, the first media stories began appearing,
which were widely forwarded by mail, and amplified by
homemade videos. After Mychal Bell's conviction at the
end of June, and stories on Democracy Now and in the
Final Call newspaper, support started growing
exponentially, with hundreds of letters bringing tens of
thousands of dollars in donations. By September, it
became a movement that even the corporate media could
not ignore.
At 5:00am, the buses were already arriving. A full bus
from Chicago emptied out, some people brushing their
teeth as they stepped into the slightly cold pre-dawn
air. They seemed exhausted, but also charged and
energized. Next came buses from Baton Rouge, Los
Angeles and Philadelphia. By 7:00am, reports were
coming in that hundreds of buses were lined up outside
of town, some having been briefly prevented by State
police from entering. Meanwhile, hundreds of people,
from cars and buses and motorcycles, were pouring into
Jena, while many thousands more were gathering in the
streets outside the Jena courthouse. As simultaneous
rallies began in the two locations, thousands of more
people streamed into the city. By 9:00am, there were,
by some estimates, up to 50,000 people in this town of
2,500. Almost every business in town was shut down, many
roads were closed by police checkpoints, and a sea of
protest filled the city for miles.
This demonstration was not initiated by any one national
organization, and there was little coordination between
some of the major organizations involved. The initial
call came from the families themselves, and most people
had heard about the demonstration through local Black
radio stations, especially on syndicated shows like the
Michael Baisden and Steve Harvey shows, as well as
through blogs and youtube (one activist-made youtube
video, recommended by Baisden, has already been seen
well over a million times) as well as on social
networking sites like myspace. As Howard Witt has
pointed out in the Chicago Tribune, "Jackson, Sharpton
and other big-name civil rights figures, far from
leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up.
So, too, has the national media, which has only recently
noticed a story that has been agitating many black
Americans for months."
This decentralization was beautiful, although sometimes
chaotic. As thousands gathered at the rally at the ball
field, which was sponsored by the NAACP, thousands more
demonstrators marched from the courthouse to the Jena
High School, and tens of thousands continued to arrive
and fill the streets around downtown Jena. Because this
movement was without central leadership, there were many
agendas, and also some confusion, as people were unsure
when the march began, or if there was a march, and also
unsure about parallel events, such as an afternoon
hiphop concert at the ball field, which was mostly
attended by people from the local community. People
seemed unconcerned about the lack of clarity, however,
and marched on their own schedule, which led to a more
democratic feel to the day, unlike the more controlled,
and sometimes disempowering, marches that some
mainstream groups have organized in the past.
The t-shirts on display reflected the lack of central
control – every community had made their own t-shirt,
literally hundreds of variations on the theme of Free
The Jena Six, many personalized to reflect their school
or community. Hours of speakers delivered messages of
solidarity and calls to action, from Al Sharpton and
Jesse Jackson to performers such as Mos Def and Sunni
Patterson, while the enormous crowds marched and
chanted, and also simply basked in a truly historic
outpouring of activism. Participants varied from
children and teens at their first demonstration to civil
rights movement veterans. Many people who had never
before been to a demonstration ended up organizing a
delegation or booking a bus for this journey.
While the vast majority of the white community of Jena
chose to stay either indoors or out of town, hundreds of
Black Jena residents proudly displayed their "Free The
Jena Six" shirts, and continued to gather in the ball
field hours after most out of town visitors had left.
White activists from across the US also largely stayed
away from this historic event – perhaps 1 to 3 percent
of the crowd was white, in what amounts to a disturbing
silence from the white left and liberals. This silence
indicates that the US Left is divided by race in many of
the same ways this country is.
Yesterday's march, however, was not about division. It
was a generational moment – the kind of watershed event
that could signal a turning point in our movements. But
what does the gigantic crowd in Jena mean? For some
supporters, it felt like a fulfillment of those months
that the families stood alone – a moment where the world
stood with them, and the power structure backed down.
In the last week Mychal Bell's convictions have been
overturned, and most of the other students saw their
charges lessened. Yesterday was also a moment for
grassroots independent media, who built this story, and
kept it alive until the 24 hour news channels could no
longer ignore it. It was a moment for historically
black colleges and universities to shine - Student
activists organized bus convoys – five or more buses
arrived from many southern schools - which were quickly
filled by a broad range of students.
Yesterday was a moment for the unaffiliated left, for
people everywhere concerned about a criminal justice
system that has locked up two million and keeps
growing. It was a moment for those concerned about
school systems in the US, and especially the policing of
our schools, what activists have called the School to
Prison Pipeline. It was a moment for those that feel
that the US has still not dealt with our history of
slavery and Jim Crow, and our present realities of white
supremacy. Perhaps that is where the power in
yesterday's demonstration lies; if this undirected and
uncontrolled outrage can be directed towards real
societal change, if outrages like Jena can finally bring
about the conversation on race in this country that we
were promised after Katrina, if this united movement to
support these six kids can show that we can unite for
justice and win, then Jena will truly have been a
victory.
As writer
Andre Banks asked yesterday, "What would happen if
every person who wore a t-shirt today or handed out a
flyer or wrote a blog post woke up tomorrow and looked
for the Mychal Bell in their own backyard? He, or she,
won't be hard to find. What if our outrage, today
directed at the small Louisiana town of Jena, extended
to parallel injustices in Detroit or Cincinnati or
Sacramento or Miami? What if we viewed this
mobilization not as the end of a successful, innovative
campaign, but as the moment that catalyzes us into
broader and deeper action in every place where we are?"
If this happens, we can say that it all began with six
families in Jena, Louisiana, who refused to stay silent.
Photos from Jena
Drive Time for the 'Jena 6'
Jordan Flaherty is an editor of
Left Turn Magazine , a journal of grassroots
resistance. His May 9, 2007 article from Jena was one
of the first to bring the case to a national audience.
His previous articles from Jena are online at
http://www.leftturn.org. To contact Jordan, email:
neworleans@leftturn.org. On myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/secondlines.
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posted 22 September 2007 *
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updated 6 November
2007 / / updated 28
March 2008 |
