North America
The Deep South, the white tree, the noose
Published 25 October 2007
Shocking events in small-town Louisiana are confronting white Americans with a poisonous racism they usually ignore.
You have to drive 223 miles north-west of New Orleans and deep into the heart of Louisiana before you finally reach the town, which has a population of just 3,000. "Welcome to Jena," says the signpost. "A Nice Place To Call Home." True, it has a McDonald's and a Wal-Mart if you like that sort of thing; but it is also poor and determinedly white, with an annual per-capita income of less than $14,000, and just 12 per cent of its popu lation is black. That means white people still rule Jena: civil rights reforms have passed it by, and housing, churches and even the cemetery are rigidly segregated. It is part of LaSalle Parish, which back in 1991 cast 4,910 votes for David Duke - a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and admirer of Hitler - and only 2,432 for the previous and future Democratic governor of Louisiana.
Thanks to word of mouth, the unstinting attention of black radio stations and (at last) muted coverage from the mainstream media, however, Jena is fast becoming as disconcertingly symbolic of 21st-century racial turmoil as places like Little Rock, Selma and Montgomery were in the 20th century. On a slow-moving march last month that stretched for miles beyond Jena itself, leaders such as the Reverends Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III linked arms with countless thousands of demonstrators to protest against what they see as the racism, hatred and injustice evoked by Jena. The likes of the rappers Mos Def, Salt'n'Pepa and Ice Cube joined them; and the rock singer John Cougar Mellencamp has already become the Joan Baez of this new era, singing his protest song "Jena" when he performed at the opening game in the NFL season on 6 September.
I will come to the reasons why Jena symbolises what Jackson calls "a defining moment" in the 21st-century civil rights movement shortly. First, however, a brief personal experience. Last year I wrote a long article for the Washington Post about slavery and its legacy of present-day racism, and found myself overwhelmed with emails from readers; two more, in fact, arrived just last week. Besides those from the usual crackpots and from middle-class white folk expressing polite scepticism, the overwhelming majority were from black people, repeating over and over again the same message, something like: "We already knew all about this, but thanks for bringing it to a wider audience."
A foreigner, it seemed, had exposed an issue rarely faced here, in the newspaper of the nation's capital or elsewhere in the white media. I found myself appearing on coast-to-coast black radio shows I didn't even know existed - hosted by black broadcasters such as Michael Baisden and Tom Joyner, whom I later discovered were prominent early voices exposing the Jena scandals - and I realised, after almost two decades of living in the United States and complacently assuming that race relations were steadily improving, that so much of the 13 per cent of America that is black still considers itself ignored, forgotten and unheard in the white world that surrounds it.
"The real question here is why is there such a hunger in America to be lied to about race?" is how Tom Wolfe posed the conundrum two decades ago. Like anti-Semitism, racism in America today is rife but has been driven un derground since the 1964-65 legal reforms that followed the cataclysms of Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery. The statistics speak for themselves: black people are still perceived today as threats, human dangers that have to be kept down and contained, as they were from the earliest days of slavery.
No less an authority than the US justice department tells us that a black man in 2007 is three times more likely to be sent to prison than a white man; half the country's prison population is black, and one in three black men in their thirties has a prison record. A black person is three times more likely to have his or her car searched than a white one, and black people are meted out prison sentences 20 per cent longer on average than those their white peers receive for identical crimes. Whites use illegal drugs more than blacks, but blacks are still 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs offences.
I can already hear the sublimated voices of the James Watsons of this world, whispering that this is all because black people have genetically lower IQs and are more disposed to crime. I invite Professor Watson to leave his Long Island lab and come down to Jena to investigate racial realities for himself - reading, for example, the handwritten witness statements of both black and white teenagers concerned in the so-called "Jena Six" tragedy. Having done so myself, I can say that those of the white youths involved are noticeably even more illiterate.
The saga began on 31 August last year, when a new black teenage pupil at Jena High School named Kenneth Purvis asked an assistant prin cipal if he was allowed to sit under a large oak in the school grounds known as "the white tree" - where only white kids, usually, shaded themselves from the searing hot sun of the Deep South. He was told he could, and duly did so. Next morning two (possibly three) nooses were found hanging from the tree's branches, draped in school colours. The noose is symbol of 4,743 documented lynchings between 1882 and 1968 - hundreds of them, at the very least, in Louisiana.
Three white boys were soon identified as the culprits and the principal tried to expel them, but his decision was overturned by the school's "expulsion committee". Black students staged an impromptu protest under the tree and when police moved in with LaSalle's district attorney, one Reed Waters, a school assembly was called. "See this pen?" Waters asked the kids rhetorically. "I can end your lives with a pen." Waters later denied that he was specifically addressing the black youngsters, but white and black students alike - their outlooks conditioned by generations of racist hatred and violence - had few doubts about whom he was addressing.
Theft of a firearm
Tensions simmered until the end of the football season - one of the few diversions available for Jena teenagers - but on 1 December, five black schoolboys tried to join a Friday-night party in the town attended by both whites and blacks. Seventeen-year-old Robert Bailey, one of the black youths, was immediately attacked outside (with a beer bottle, he said later) by a 22-year-old white man, who was subsequently put on probation for assault.
The next day Bailey and two other black kids from Jena High were in the Gotta-Go Grocery store when a white schoolmate who had been at the party the previous night approached them; the white boy, Matt Windham, says he was threatened by the three others, but acknowledges that he then went outside to his truck to fetch a 12-gauge riot shotgun that had been specially equipped with a black laser sight. Bailey and his two friends wrestled the gun away from Windham but were subsequently charged with theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery and disturbing the peace. Windham was never arrested or charged with anything whatsoever.
Back at Jena High the following Monday lunchtime, a 17-year-old white boy called Justin Barker started taunting Bailey in the school gym for having had his "ass whipped" by a white man the previous Friday night. Moments later, says Barker in his handwritten police statement (and you think I'm exaggerating when I write about the declining standards of US education?), "Me and my girl frend was walking out of the gym and a group of blacks was standing out side the door and when we got out of the door i told my girl frend to tern left to go up the side walk and when I ternt my back to the one of them sad this will teech you to run your Fucken mouth and that was it."
It was certainly a vicious attack: Robert Bailey, his two friends who had been with him at the Gotta-Go Grocery and three or four other black teenage boys now stand accused of ambushing Barker outside the gym and of punching and kicking him unconscious. Barker's girlfriend, in her own handwriting, takes up the story: "When he got nnocked out they still kicked him just as heard! When I saw what was goen on I started yelling . . . I grabed on of there arms and pulled him away! Well, I tryed!" Barker was treated at the local hospital for three hours for concussion, an eye that had swollen shut, and cuts and bruises to his face, ears and hand; but what is indisputable is that he felt well enough to attend Jena High's ring ceremony for departing seniors that evening.
Deadly tennis shoes
Enter, at this point, the sternly unyielding white-authority figure of DA Reed Waters. He promptly charged Bailey and five others with attempted murder as well as conspiracy to commit murder, charges that carry mandatory sentences of ten to 50 years' hard labour with no chance of probation or parole. The black men, ranging in this case from 14 to 18 years of age, represented those ever-present threats that had to be kept down and contained, you see. Waters insisted on charging Mychal Bell, 16, as an adult because he had a police record and had initiated the attack, Waters claimed.
The charges were subsequently reduced to aggravated battery and conspiracy. But Bell's trial last June, the first of the six that was presided over by an all-white jury (none of the potential black jurors turned up, according to the autho rities), still presented Waters with a problem. Legally, a "deadly weapon" had to be used in aggravated battery. Waters therefore argued that the humdrum tennis shoes Bell was wearing at the time of the assault on Barker constituted deadly weapons, an argument the jury found persuasive. Bell was duly pronounced guilty, but appeal courts subsequently ruled that he should never have been tried as an adult in the first place. His retrial is set for 6 December, and trials for the remaining five have yet to be scheduled.
Nooses, those most terrifying symbols of white American aggression during the Jim Crow century that was supposed to have ended in the aftermath of the Birmingham and Selma mutinies, are now proliferating at the homes and workplaces of black people here, there and everywhere. The FBI has set up a special task force to try to stamp down on what is fast threatening to become the 21st-century version of burning crosses or Nazi swastikas. Now that the mainstream media are belatedly paying attention to what has been happening in Jena, so politicians, too, are sitting up. The federal House judiciary committee held its first hearing on the events a fortnight ago. Waters and most Republicans declined to attend.
Bell is still only 17 but has no hope of pursuing the career as a professional footballer that was a very real possibility not so long ago. He was released from prison on 27 September on $45,000 bail after being held for ten months on the Barker charges. Within a fortnight, however, he was back in a cell after yet another Louisiana judge ruled that he had violated his probation on un related charges. Meanwhile, two of the other defendants were greeted with a standing ovation when they appeared on stage at the Black Entertainment Television (BET) Hip-Hop Awards in Atlanta on 13 October: a potent visual symbol of America's racial divisions that would have horrified most white Americans, had they been watching BET.
The outcome of America's civil war (1861-65) was the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments between 1865 and 1870, outlawing slavery, granting full citizenship to everybody born in the US and giving the vote to all (men). The revolts of Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965 led to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, respectively. None of these amendments or acts worked as well as they should have done in ridding America of the poisonous racism that still runs through its bloodstream. But might the 21st-century uprisings in Jena, I wonder, at last lead to truly significant progress?
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