It’s almost hard to believe that blatant racism still runs rampant in America in the 21st century.
But it’s complete “Jim Crow” down in Jena, Louisiana that includes:
“a tree for ‘whites only and nooses,
and a black high school student who was involved in a fight with a white student was convicted by an ALL white jury and faces a sentence of 22 years….
Watch the report and see the facts for yourself
So far 26953 people , including myself have signed an online petition to the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Please sign the petition
by clicking here
August 17th, 2007 at 5:24 PM
please do what you can to stop this injustice.
August 20th, 2007 at 7:39 PM
What amazed me was they cut down the tree, like the tree was the problem. What they fail to see is that established intitutionized racism is the problem. The Jena Six case is a public case which indicates what I have been saying for tens of decades now. Black America has become comfortable with the notion of racism, indicated by the fact that the outcry of the opressed has become dull, and black America has no voice in todays America. In fact race was a big factor in white America, as represented by white southern attitudes, in the disrespect the republican presidental canidates, and the race controlled media showed toward the presidental debates which was hosted by the N.A.A.C.P. just months ago. Only ONE of them showed up.
When the Duke lacross case was going on, the media had something on the news on a daily basis, while the Jena Six case has been basicly swept under the rug by them, as if any report by them is a personal inditment against them. White southern America has alway handled their bussines in this manor. I myself is a 55-year old black male who has fought in the streets, and have went to jail many times in my persuit for the equality of treatment for myself and minorities of a daily bases.
I have always contented that once the oppressed lose what they have gainned such a jobs and their homes that the call of the oppressed would become louder, and the movement could move forward. Now we see the economic effect of lost homes and lost jobs by the many hundreds of thousands. Hope as framed by our religious leaders is fine, but being forced to action is best. There are some thing worth going to jail for, and even some to lose ones own life. As In the 1960 and 1970′s it was a mear spark which sparked a call for equality which changed not only America, but a call for democracy thought the whole world.
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:06 PM
An Open Letter To The Jena Six
By Joseph Young
Washington Informer
Dear Mychal,
I keep thinking about you. I also think about the other young men who have fallen prey to racial hatred. Its existence, more than a century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, makes me fearful for your life, your safety. The freedom that it promised was tenuous.
It was not entirely without strength. In the proclamation, issued three years into the Civil War, Lincoln declared, at the urging of Frederick Douglass, that the former slaves would be accepted into the Union Army and navy, making the liberated the liberator. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 black servicemen had fought for freedom and saved the Union.
Your generation, like mine, is being denied this freedom our ancestors risked life and limb, so that we may live as free men and women. You can call them heroes, but they were not thinking of themselves when they displayed courage and self-sacrifice on the battlefields of America.
Today, then, to guard against the impending doom of American civilization, is not only opposition to racism, but also the determination to secure the civil rights for which many Americans have paid a heavy toll. Of all the civil rights, the right to learn is the surest prevention from ignorance. If at any time, children are instructed with anti-black bias; and they are made to learn what is not true and what the dominate forces in their lives want them to think is true; there’re guilty of impeding the march toward American civilization.
Astonishing as it is that those students would hang three nooses from the tree at Jena High School as a racial taunt, including calling the black students ‘niggers’; you would think that America would never again want to see a black person hang from a tree, or behind bars. The nooses show that we, Americans, have not come that far from the cruelties and barbarity of slavery as we think. (Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 5,000 people, mostly blacks, met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.) And this also is an unfortunate comment upon the belief that our schools are the great path to progress, the great equalizer. If our schools are the great path to progress, they must be the freest of our institutions, opposed bitterly to the attempt to indoctrinate our children with racial hatred.
Well, Mychal, as you and the others wait behind bars because of a racially biased and an over zealous prosecutor, it is for us on the outside to continue the unfinished work of our fathers, to set you free. All of you were willing to fight racial hatred, and you know people of goodwill are beside you. If the Confederacy couldn’t stop us, the opposition we now face will fail. When history is written your detractors will get little note, but you will be remembered for standing up for what’s best of the American creed. You are part of a legacy in which our slave forebears fought to birth a new nation. You, Mychal, are a child of America’s destiny.
It was Martin Luther King who said if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for he is not fit to live. Freedom is worth dying for. Justice is worth dying for. Equality is worth dying for. A child is worth dying for, because our job as parents is to protect children.
Mychal, when you feel complete frustration and your narrow jail cell is closing in on your spirit and mind; remember the message of the old slave preacher to his flock whose resistance to oppression might have been completely in vain:
“You are created in God’s image. You are not slaves, you are not ‘niggers’; you are God’s children.”
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph