Judging from most of the comments (assuming that the commentators are from the Jena area) I’d say that newspaper accounts about the “Jena Six” and about the city itself led me to a conclusion or two about the city that may have been unfounded. If I owe an apology to Jena it is hereby proffered.

My basic point, however, remains unscathed. Racism exists and the only way to combat it. in the long run, is to combat it on the home front, i.e., raising children that see beyond the color of a persons skin. That’s a very slow road to the resolution of the problem and it may be only one of many roads, but its a road that must be ‘traveled’.

The other incidents in Jena were not connected to the noose-handing incident. They stemmed from a fight at a private party. Both black and white students attended the party, but trouble started when a group of uninvited black athletes attempted to crash the party. Rather than call police, one white teenager, who was not a student, beat up one of the students (Robert Bailey) who were attempting to crash the party. Similar fights take place all the time across the Untied States when groups of uninvited teenagers, regardless of race, attempt to crash private parties. The white non-student was charged with assault.

Witnesses support the white student’s testimony in the convenience store incident. The same group of black students who attempted to crash the private party confronted the white teenager—who had attended the party—inside the convenience store and chased him to his truck in the parking lot. He pulled the shotgun to defend himself. His fears seem well-founded since the black students were the same ones who would later beat Justin Barker at Jena High School.

The black students involved in the Barker beating say they were angered because Barker taunted Bailey about losing the fight at the private party. Barker denies he taunted Bailey but claims he was attacked simply because he was at the party. Barker was not one of the students who hung the nooses, and none of the black students involved claimed they were motivated by the noose hanging incidence. The black students followed the white student from the locker room to the school ground. One of the black students hit Barker from behind and knocked him unconscious. As he lay unconscious, one of the black students stood on his head while the others kicked him in the head and body. (It was more than a schoolyard fight. Imagine the outcry if the six attackers had been white and the victim black.) The attack probably doesn’t qualify as a hate crime, because the black students didn’t single out the victim merely because he was white but because, they claim, he taunted Bailey about loosing the fight at the party.

The original charges of attempted murder were dropped before 16-year-old Mychal Bell’s went to trail. The probably reason the local prosecutor want to charge Bell with attempted murder was so that he could be tried as an adult. His conviction on aggravated assault was overturned because the court ruled he should not have been tried as an adult under the lesser charges. He remains in jail because he was on parole from previous convictions, including two cases of battery and two conviction of criminal damage to property. He beat his 17-year-old girlfriend so severely her eye was dislocated from its socket. He was placed on probation until his 18th birthday. All the other defendants also have prior criminal records.

Jena is also NOT “where a black kid can get beat up by white kids because he choose to sit under the wrong tree” because that has never happened there. A black kid did that very thing in Jena and was NOT beat up by white kids.

Also, a hangman’s noose is also prop. Still undetermined is whether the nooses that hung on the tree in Jena were placed by whites to intimidate or by students as part of decorations for an upcoming football game against local rival Cowboys, an opposing football team. The fact that the nooses were painted in school colors gives credance to the football explanation. The noose incident may have been a case of poor timing.

Finally, the prosecutor DID file charges based on the act and prior convictions of the black kids. Two of the six kids are suspects in the ongoing arson investigation. Four of the six have criminal records, including battery, arson, and sexual assault. All had received probabtion as first time offenders, the same as the white kid who received probation as a first time offender. The two kids with no priors are very likely to receive probation as well. I have yet to find the claimed injustice in Jena’s civic processes.

America would do well to back off and allow the good folk of Jena to go about their business.

God bless…