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Strange Fruit in Jena
Louisiana
Case Looks a Lot Like Duke Lacrosse Frame-Up
By Kam Williams
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Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern
breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar
trees.”
—Strange Fruit lyrics by
Lewis Allen |
On August
31st of last year, a small group of black freshman at
Jena High School approached the assistant principal to
ask whether it was okay for them to enjoy the shade
under a big tree located in what had come to be
considered the “white only” section of the schoolyard.
His response was that they could “sit wherever they
wanted.” Relying on those words, they did just that,
trusting that, should any controversy arise, the
administration would support their effort to eradicate
this offensive vestige of de facto segregation.
But Jena,
population 3,000, is a backwards, backwoods Louisiana
town, and when three nooses were found swaying from the
tree the very next day, the African-American community
complained to anybody who would listen that the hanging
ropes amounted to a hate crime given The South’s sinful
legacy of lynching. And although the culprits were
caught, the city’s school superintendent excused the
racist attempt at intimidation by saying “Adolescents
play pranks. I don’t think it was a threat against
anybody.”
So, on
September 5th, the black students organized a peaceful
sit-in under the “white tree” in protest of the slap on
the wrist doled out to the perpetrators. The next
morning, an impromptu school assembly was convened
during which District Attorney Reed Walters icily stared
in the direction of the African-Americans, all sitting
together, warning them not to stage any further
demonstrations. Furthermore, he concluded by leveling
this thinly-veiled threat, “I can make your lives
disappear with a stroke of my pen.”
Starting on
September 7th, the halls of Jena High were patrolled by
the police, and on the 8th the school was placed under
complete lockdown. Several dozen black parents attempted
to address the next meeting of the school board, on the
10th, but all were refused an opportunity to speak
because the board considered “the noose issue” to have
been addressed satisfactorily and fully resolved.
Nevertheless,
over the Fall, confrontations continued to escalate,
mostly a reign of terror on the part of white
vigilantes, including an incident in which black
students had to wrestle a white adult wielding a shotgun
to the ground. But rather than arrest the assailant, the
prosecutor reportedly winked and returned the weapon to
the latter-day Klansman. In fact, the officer of the law
saw no reason to intervene until December 4th when he
charged a half-dozen African-American students dubbed
the Jena 6 with attempted murder after they allegedly
got the better of some whites in a fight in the school
cafeteria.
Mychal Bell,
17, the first of the classmates to go on trial, was
quickly convicted in a kangaroo court by an all-white
jury presided over by a white judge in less than three
hours. Now, he’s facing 22 years in prison. Before DA
Walters follows through on his promise to ruin the lives
of his co-defendants, too, let’s just pray that CBS’ 60
Minutes and the rest of the mainstream media intervene
to question Walters’ motivations and embark on as
earnest an effort to make mincemeat of his career as
they did to disgraced Durham DA Mike Nufong for his
overzealous prosecution of the Duke Lacrosse case.
Stay tuned
for a showdown that is shaping up as a landmark decision
on whether justice in America can be colorblind or if
Southern trees will continue to bear strange fruit.
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Lloyd Kam
Williams is a film and book critic, and an attorney and
a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court
bars.
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Michael Baisden, Ruben
Armstrong among those demanding justice for Mychal
Bell.—Nationally syndicated radio personality
Michael Baisden will join Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin
Luther King, III on Sept. 20 at the court house in Jena,
Louisiana for the 9 a.m. start of a rally dubbed,
'National March For Justice.' Gathered protesters will
demand fair treatment for Mychal Bell, one of the
African-American teenagers awaiting sentence in the Jena
6 Case. Sharpton was contacted by Bell's family to help
bring national attention to the case and to fight for
justice on behalf of the six black students involved. .
. . Sharpton, who has been to Jena twice, arrived last
month with Martin Luther King, III and met with local
leaders, preachers and families of the students. They
visited with Bell in jail and vowed to continue to fight
for him and the others. . . . On Sept. 19, television
talk show host Ruben Armstrong will broadcast live from
Jena and also march the following day, when Bell is to
be sentenced on charges of attempted murder. . . . the
show will broadcast live from Jena, Louisiana in its
entirety and rebroadcast on Sept. 22nd at 12 p.m. CST.
You can watch and listen to this broadcast at
Reuben Armstrong Show.
Eurweb
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Mychal
Bell Injustice
Overturned on Appeal—A
state appeals court on Friday threw out the only
remaining conviction against one of the black teenagers
accused in the beating of a white schoolmate in the
racially tense north Louisiana town of Jena. Mychal
Bell, 17, should not have been tried as an adult, the
state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal said in tossing his
conviction on aggravated battery, for which he was to
have been sentenced Thursday. He could have gotten 15
years in prison. His conspiracy conviction in the
December beating of student Justin Barker was already
thrown out by another court. Bell, who was 16 at the
time of the beating, and four others were originally
charged with attempted second-degree murder. Those
charges brought widespread criticism that blacks were
being treated more harshly than whites after racial
confrontations and fights at Jena High School. Janet
McConnaughey.
Teen's conviction tossed in La. beating
Yahoo.com
14
September 2007
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Strange Fruit Anniversary of a Lynching
August 7,
1930
Eighty
years ago, two young African-American men, Thomas Shipp and Abram
Smith, were lynched in the town center of Marion, Indiana. . . .
Local photographer
Lawrence Beitler took what would become the most iconic photograph
of lynching in America. The photograph shows two bodies hanging from
a tree surrounded by a crowd of ordinary citizens, including women
and children. Thousands of copies were made and sold. The photograph
helped inspire the poem and song "Strange Fruit" written by Abel
Meeropol — and performed around the world by Billie Holiday.
But
there was a third person, 16-year-old
James Cameron, who narrowly survived the lynching
"After
15 or 20 minutes of having their pictures taken and everything, they
came back to get me. . . And I looked over to the faces of the
people as they were beating me along the way to the tree. I was
pleading for some kind of mercy, looking for a kind face. But I
could find none. . . . And that's when I prayed to God. I said,
'Lord have mercy, forgive me my sins.' I was ready to die."
NPR
NPR Transcript
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Floodlines
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the
Jena Six
By Jordan Flaherty
Preface by Tracie Washington
/ Foreward by Amy Goodman
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it
was a tragedy. What followed was a
government-sanctioned travesty. Flaherty, a
white New Orleans resident and journalist,
interviews a number of locals about the
recovery effort, outlining a systemic
pattern that includes restrictions of
service, human rights violations, and
destruction of property targeting the city's
African-American majority. |
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The behavior of the notorious New Orleans police
department towards this community is appalling, but
even more distressing is Flaherty's reporting on the
failure of the federal government to respond to the
needs of its citizens, and their use of paramilitary
mercenaries to enforce a pattern of brutal
occupation. To learn how profoundly the system
failed (and continues to fail) will be extremely
difficult for some readers, and Flaherty pulls no
punches in his quest to uncover failures,
highlighting how the systems in place for rebuilding
(foundation support, non-profit groups, military
intervention) remain woefully inadequate. Readers
will be compelled, depressed, disturbed, and angered
by what they find in this well-written report.
Crucial reading—Publishers
Weekly
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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posted 27 August 2007 /
updated 28 March 2008
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