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Civil Rights Battle Took Shape On Web

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By DARRYL FEARS and AVIS THOMAS LESTER, The Washington Post

Published: September 20, 2007

WASHINGTON - Spurred by the Internet and a nationwide urban radio program by a popular disc jockey, tens of thousands of people are expected to descend on a sleepy rural Louisiana town to protest what they say are excessive criminal charges against six black teenagers involved in a schoolyard brawl.

About 500 tour buses bearing thousands of riders were scheduled to depart from cities across the United States early this morning for Jena, La., about 230 miles northwest of New Orleans.

They will join others who will travel by airplane, automobile caravans and motorcycle convoys in what organizers say is a protest reminiscent of the Freedom Rides of the 1960s.

The demonstration was to coincide with the sentencing of one of the defendants. A state appeals court dismissed his battery conviction last week, but organizers decided to go ahead with the rally. In addition, they asked people across the country to dress in black today to show solidarity with the demonstrators.

As of Wednesday, according to the local National Association for Advancement of Colored People and news reports, organizers said they were hoping up to 40,000 people would converge on Jena, a two-lane-highway town of 3,500.

Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has ordered the chief of the state police to work with the LaSalle Parish sheriff on crowd control.

Story Didn't Get Much News Play

The march is one example - the immigration rights protests of last year being another - of how radio, the Internet and word of mouth can create a buzz and a unity of purpose in one of the country's largest subcultures.

The prosecutions in Jena, which at one point included charges of conspiracy to commit murder, and the racial clashes that preceded them received scant news coverage but roared through the Web. Google searches for 'Jena 6' and 'Jena Six' yield nearly 2 million hits.

Michael Baisden, whose nationally syndicated afternoon drive-time show is credited with being a primary catalyst for the demonstration, also has appealed to people interested in the case to wear black today, regardless of where they are.

At first organizers saw the rally as a protest to the sentencing of Mychal Bell, 17, who was tried as an adult and convicted of aggravated second-degree battery by an all-white jury in June.

Last week, a state appeals court threw out that conviction, saying Bell should have been tried in a juvenile court. He was 16 at the time of the altercation and has spent a year in jail and faced up to 15 years in a state prison.

In December, Bell and five other black teenagers - Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theodore Shaw and Jesse Beard - beat a white student at Jena High School, knocking him out and blackening one of his eyes.

The victim, Justin Barker, was treated at a hospital and released after two hours. He attended a class-ring ceremony later that night.

His attackers were charged by prosecutor Reed Walters, who is white, with conspiracy to commit second-degree murder and aggravated battery. The charges were reduced to conspiracy and battery after civil rights activists protested.

Shades Of Old South

What's animating the protesters is not merely Bell's legal predicament but the larger perception that blacks in Jena, who make up 12 percent of the population, are subjected to the kind of persistent racial inequality that once dominated across the Old South.

In a town where whites voted overwhelmingly for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when he ran for Louisiana governor in 1991, one local barbershop still refuses to cut black men's hair.

The trouble in Jena, pronounced Jee-na, started a year ago with a resonant symbol from the Jim Crow past: After black students asked administrators at Jena High School for permission to sit beneath a shade tree traditionally used only by whites, white students hung three nooses from the tree.

The incident outraged black students and their parents but was dismissed by the school superintendent as a youthful prank; he punished the white students with three-day suspensions.

A series of fights between whites and blacks ensued, both on and off the campus. Whites implicated in the fights were charged with misdemeanors or not at all, and the blacks were charged with felonies.

In November, someone burned down the central wing of the high school - an arson for which no one has been arrested.

Then, in early December, Bell and the five other black students were charged after the white student was jumped.

Baisden created a Web site to coordinate a campaign. It filled up with ideas and suggestions until someone suggested reserving buses for a campaign against Jena and other prosecutors who levy what they consider to be overly harsh punishments on black youngsters.

Many black bloggers say the Jena demonstration is really more about a new generation of civil rights activists who learned about the Jena case not from Operation PUSH but from hip-hop music blogs that featured the story or popular black entertainers such as Mos Def who have turned it into a crusade.

'In traditional civil rights groups, there's a pattern: You call a meeting. You see when everybody can get together. You have to decide where to meet,' said Shawn Williams, 33, a former college NAACP leader who runs the popular Dallas South Blog.

'All that takes time,' Williams added. 'When you look at how this civil rights movement is working, once something gets out there, the action is immediate: Here's what we're going to write about. Here's the petition. Here's the protest. It takes place within minutes, hours and days, not weeks or months.'

Information from the Chicago Tribune was used in this report.

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