We black Americans seem to need a major event or outrage every so often that revives our mass energies in ways that remind of us the 1960s civil rights movement. In the 1980s we had mass arrests at the South African Embassy to protest apartheid. In the 1990s there was the Million Man March to redeem black fatherhood and proper role modeling. In 2007 we have the “Jena 6.”
Thousands flowed by the busload into tiny Jena, La., last week. They came to march on behalf of six black youths who were originally charged with attempted murder for allegedly beating up a white youth in what many describe as a schoolyard fight in December at the local high school.
The Jena 6 case began months earlier when three nooses appeared in a tree at the high school. That was one day after black students defied a school tradition that designated the tree to be a “whites only” gathering spot. The school principal expelled three white students for hanging the nooses, but the school superintendent reduced the expulsions to a few days of suspension.
After the noose incident, a string of interracial fights, attacks and angry confrontations occurred, mostly off-campus. Tensions in the community grew, particularly among black residents, as young white males involved in the racial incidents received slaps on the wrist, at most, while young blacks received school expulsions or criminal charges.
But what touched off the national uproar was the local district attorney’s decision to charge the Jena 6 students with attempted second-degree murder. The white youth who was beaten allegedly taunted blacks with racial slurs and was a friend of the students who hung the nooses. He was treated and released from a hospital after a few hours.
I don’t make light of anyone’s beating, but the attempted murder charges appeared to be so out of proportion to the crime that a national protest erupted. Initiated largely by black talk-radio hosts and black-oriented Internet bloggers, the protest resulted in the march in Jena, led by Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III.
Suddenly, little Jena became a symbol in the minds of many of every injustice or racial grievance, real or perceived, that black folks have endured in recent years, from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the gross disparities between federal sentences for crack and powder cocaine.
Justice Department statistics show African-American men to be three times more likely than white men to face jail time once they have been arrested. The biggest disparity is among men convicted of aggravated assault, according to the Urban League’s annual “State of Black America” report. It found black men to be sentenced to an average of 48 months in jail, which is almost a third longer than the average sentence received by white men.
But now that the crowds have gone home and Jena is once again a quiet little oil and lumber town, will the big march have lasting significance, like the movement that helped end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela? Or will it be like the Million Man March: a stirring memory and a great applause line for political speeches but not much follow-through?
It was the bad fortune of the Jena 6 demonstrators that they had to share the spotlight with another media eruption, the latest misadventures of O.J. Simpson. Charged with armed robbery in Las Vegas for allegedly trying to steal memorabilia from his glory days, Simpson needed no help from bloggers or talk shows to get wall-to-wall coverage.
Simpson returned to TV screens like a cheap sequel to a movie you’d rather forget. He reminds us of one of America’s most racially divided moments. Simpson’s acquittal on double homicide charges shocked white Americans with something that their black friends, neighbors and co-workers have been long acquainted with: the chilling sense of denied justice.
And for black Americans with an eye for bitter irony, Simpson’s acquittal showed a strange form of progress, at best: America had progressed enough to let a rich black man buy his way out of accountability in the way once reserved for rich white men.
But that’s not a good enough standard of justice. As demonstrated by Sharpton’s fiasco with Tawana Brawley or the recent bogus Duke University rape case, unequal justice doesn’t always tilt against black folks or Latinos. We simply have been statistically more vulnerable to it.
In this increasingly diverse country, Americans should not have to spend another century playing one-downs-manship, competing to see whose race or ethnic group can be the most victimized.
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The best legacy for the Jena 6 march would be a new movement, dedicated this time to the reduction and elimination of unequal justice wherever it appears. I don’t care who leads it, but it shouldn’t be for blacks only.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board. E-mail: [email protected]