The Loop

Outsiders, all of you.

Your presence here a judgment on us. It was worst last September, when thousands of you descended with the indignation of embittered preachers. Businesses shut down. People stayed home behind locked doors. The silence of those days still lingers, still carries a warning of approaching tumult.

We pray for the people who come to Jena. God loves them no matter what their agenda, although we feel their agenda is misplaced. We pray for our community to be patient. We pray for everything to be back to normal.

Your judgment felt on this January night, by boys looping Oak Street, trolling endlessly up and down and through the center of town. Cruising, you would call it, but in Jena, it’s called “looping.”

The loop starts in the darkened parking lot of Chamlen’s Furniture store where teenagers sit in their idling pickups and lean out their windows, talking on weekend nights. Boys mostly. Some with their arms draped around their girlfriends. Then, as if by migratory compulsion, they slip their gears into drive and turn east through the unlit, empty streets.

The boys roll past the Dollar General Store, Ace Family Hardware, and McDonald’s, where a teenager hands a sack of burgers out the drive-through window. A light illuminates the State Farm Insurance sign. A dog caught in its thin glow lopes past silent display windows. Brandon’s Nails, Reid’s Jewelry store, Honeycutt Drug.

Those white boys acted and we reacted. I’m just saying that’s the way things happen in this little town.

Three minutes from Chamlen’s, the boys turn into the parking lot of Mitch’s Restaurant (Today’s special: the catfish plate) and complete the loop. They pause, adjust their radios, and then retrace their steps like panthers in a cage, back and forth, back and forth all night.

That used to be the whole, limited journey. But lately, it seems the loop has expanded. As if some of the youngsters kept going, looping the whole damn country, and then pulling it with them each time they turned back to Jena. More of you keep coming. And still the loop gets bigger.

Some of you all have returned this week for the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday march on Sunday, haven’t you? You know about the protest by those fellas with the Nationalist Movement, right? A real party, yeah, buddy. Will there be fights? Will blood run? You’ll tar and feather Jena for your own sport, won’t you?

It’s about where we’re at. The South. This is being done to us because of geographics. We’re the South, so outsiders say Jena’s a racist town.

What is so different about Jena from your town?

What god made you judge and jury?

Just who are you anyway?

Crowd Control

In September 2006, nooses were hung from a tree in the high-school courtyard in Jena, Louisiana. The tree was on the side of campus that, by long-standing tradition, had always been claimed by white students, who make up more than 80 percent of the student body. But a few of the school’s eighty-five black students had decided to challenge the status quo by pointing out their de facto exclusion: they asked the school administrators if they, too, could sit beneath the tree’s cooling shade. The nooses were hung in retaliation, as a kind of threat.

Three white students were quickly identified as responsible, and the principal recommended that they be expelled. But Jena’s school superintendent, Roy Breithaupt, who is white, intervened and ruled that the nooses were just an immature stunt. He suspended the students for three days, angering those who felt harsher punishments were necessary. Racial tensions flared throughout the month, and on November 30 a wing of the high school was destroyed by a fire; officials suspected arson. Tensions spilled out of the schoolyard and into the surrounding neighborhoods. One night at a predominantly white party, a young black student was assaulted by a group wielding beer bottles. In another incident, a white Jena graduate allegedly pulled a pump-action shotgun on three black students outside a local convenience store. The teens managed to wrestle the gun away from the twenty-one-year-old.

For the most part, local law enforcement stayed out of the way of these incidents, shrugging them off as testosterone-fueled teenage arguments. This approach shifted abruptly on December 4—more than a month after the black students sat under the “white” tree—when a fight broke out in the lunchroom between a white student and a black student. The white student was knocked to the floor and allegedly attacked by other black students, one of whom was the same student assaulted earlier at the party. The white student sustained bruises and a black eye. He was treated at a hospital and released. According to court testimony, he attended a social event later that same evening.

The black students were not reprimanded with school suspensions or misdemeanor charges, as their white counterparts had been. Instead, five of the six black teens involved were charged as adults with attempted second-degree murder and were given bonds ranging from $70,000 to $138,000. Sixteen-year-old Mychal Bell was prosecuted as an adult and assigned a public defender, a black man, who never called a single witness. Under pressure by watchdog groups, the district attorney abruptly reduced the charges against Bell from second-degree murder to second-degree aggravated battery and conspiracy. The aggravated battery stems from the prosecutor’s contention that the teen’s gym shoes were used as weapons.

Donald Washington, a black US attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, insisted race had nothing to do with the charges against Bell. He said that the hanging of nooses constituted a hate crime but that charges were not brought against those students because they were juveniles. Washington was unable to explain, however, why Bell was prosecuted as an adult by a white prosecutor. While teenagers can be tried as adults in Louisiana for some violent crimes, including attempted murder, aggravated battery is not one of those crimes. An appeals court tossed out the conviction that could have sent him to prison for fifteen years. But the four remaining students who could be tried as adults, because they were seventeen or older, were arraigned on battery and conspiracy charges.

In response to the treatment of the “Jena Six,” more than five thousand protestors converged on Jena last September to express their outrage. The scene was reminiscent of a 1960s freedom march, and many of those old-school leaders, including reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, were in attendance. But there were also some new faces. Young faces. All excited to play a part in what some of them called “our Selma.”

White supremacists did their part to resemble their 1960s counterparts as well. “The best crowd control for such a situation would be a squad of men armed with full automatics and preferably a machine gun as well,” advocated an online blogger on the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network. Another wrote, “I’m not really that angry at the nogs—they are just soldiers in an undeclared race war. But any white that’s in that support rally I would like to . . . have them machine-gunned.” Bill White, an especially virulent purveyor of race hate, posted the home addresses and phone numbers of some of the Jena Six under this headline: “Addresses of Jena 6 Niggers: In Case Anyone Wants to Deliver Justice.”