Jena 6

In September 2006, as the school year kicked off, a black Jena High School student asked the vice principal if he and some friends could sit under an oak tree where the white students typically congregated.

Told by the vice principal they could sit wherever they pleased, the student and his pals plopped down under the sprawling branches of a shade tree in the campus courtyard.

The next day, students arrived at school to find three nooses hanging from those branches. The students involved were suspended from school for 2 day.The nooses sparked alot of racial tension between the students, which would lead to the beating of Justin Baker.

Six students where charged and arrested in the beating of Baker.
Of the six teens arrested, five initially were charged with attempted second-degree murder; charges for four have been reduced as they were arraigned. Charges against the sixth teen, booked as a juvenile, are sealed.

Charges against four of the teens -- Bell, Carwin Jones, Theodore Shaw and Robert Bailey -- have been reduced to battery and conspiracy. Shaw and Jones have not gone to trial. Bailey has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his trial is scheduled for November 26.

Mychal Bell is the only one to have been tried so far. A state appeals court recently threw out his conviction for aggravated second-degree battery, saying he couldn't be tried as an adult. He remained in jail pending an appeal.

An estimated 15-20,000 protesters flocked to the small town of Jena, Louisiana,including Rev.Al Sharpten, Rev.Jesse Jackson , and Martin L. King III.
Many said they are angry the six black students, dubbed the "Jena 6," are being treated more harshly than the white students who hung the nooses. The white students were suspended from school but did not face criminal charges. The protesters argue they should have been charged with a hate crime. The black students face charges of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy in the schoolyard beating.

Sharpten commented by saying,"We didn't come to start trouble; we came to stop trouble," he said Wednesday.
"We're going to walk past the scene of the crime, where this tree was. ... This is a march for justice. This is not a march against whites or against Jena."

A few hours after the rather peaceful protest, Jeremiah Munseun of Alexandria , Louisiana, was arrested and charged with DUI and inciting a riot. The 18 year old and his passenger hung nooses from the back of their truck, and proceeded to circle around the Jena 6 protesters.

The FBI is reviewing a white supremacist Web site that purports to list the addresses of five of the six black teenagers accused of beating a white student in Jena and "essentially called for their lynching," an agency spokeswoman said Saturday Bryant Purvis and an unidentified juvenile remain charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Two other high schools also had incidents of students hanging nooses at school following the Jena 6 protest.

T. Wingate Andrews High in North Carolina ,and Triad High School in Winston-Salem.

It seems that the Jena 6 have stuck a nerve in both white and black people.Things like this can cause a snowball effect. With the memories of Katrina fresh on the minds of African Americans,and these recent event in Jena, its just another reminder that racism is alive and well in America today.

What I'm saying iz...Black people continue to sturggle with racism. While the common answer by White-America is, "Slavery was hundreds of years ago,so get over it." True enough, but noone is talking about slavery, we're talking about racism.There are plenty of African Americans still alive today, who couldnt even drink from the same water fountain as a white person.So yes, slavery is over, but African Americans are still left to deal with the effects and aftermath of slavery which is racism. Are African Americans being terrorized by White Americans?Do they have to worry about terrorist at home and abroad?