Jena 6

Jena 6, what happened and how.

What is Jena 6 - The Jena 6 Story.

In Jena Louisiana last fall it so happened that two black students sat in a ‘white tree’ shade, next day these black students saw some nooses hung on the tree. This was what that happened in a school campus that triggered to such incidences. White tree is not a tree with white stem or leaves; it was just a tree where white students alone sat during resting time. The desire of some black students to sit in the particular tree was just their mark of protest of them no allowed to sit there. Those nooses (like those used to hang prisoners) were symbolic of the oppressors’ way of threatening the blacks with dire consequences.

The black students complained the Superintendent of the institution about the nooses that were hung on the ‘white tree’; but he underplayed the whole incident as just prank of teen-agers. Not satisfied by the Superintendent’s action black students went on with their protests. The District Attorney (Reed Waters) who approached the protesters warned them with dire consequences “I can be your friend or your worst enemy....I can take away your life with the stroke of my pen’ were the words the learned Attorney uttered.

Infuriated by all these responses the protests of the blacks went on and several assaults by whites occurred to which the D A showed a blind–eye. Whites constitute 85% of the Jena’s population and they called the shots several blacks were assaulted in the following issues. One day when a white student was injured in a campus brawl between blacks and whites students; justice sprang in to action and arrested those blacks who were involved in the brawl (the injured young man was an active supporter of the boys who hung the nooses and he allegedly called the blacks as niggers a derogatory word). Consequently the main building of the

Jena High School was burned down in an unresolved fire.

The machinery of justice which was so tardy when blacks were assaulted were very ‘efficient’ when this white boy was beaten up and six of the students were brought to book and charged for ‘second degree murder and conspiracy for murder’ which could attract up to 25 years of imprisonment (as they are young men it can be taken as their future lost for ever. Although the murder charge was lifted; the bail conditions set remains crueler than death warrant, the bond to be executed by them range between $ 70,000 to 138,000! The stark reality remains that still blacks remain the most impoverished lot of the locality, it must be taken that they may fail to pay and will be destined to rot in jails.

Jena Six

Robert Bailey – (17)

Theo Shaw – (17)

Carwin Jones – (18)

Bryant Purvis – (17)

Mychal Bell – (16)

An un identified minor.

Jena 6 petition

Team Kerala articles join hands with all the netizens’ whole hearted attempts for an early release of these young people and their early joining of the school. We hope that the values of America will never let these young lives to rot in prison. Along with their early release it is firmly believed that it is only a matter of time the culprits who have led to such a situation may be brought before justice and punished as a warning to those who tarnish the image of their own nation with such mean actions not fit to the chair they occupied.