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• Jena 6

Jena 6

In a little town called Jena, Louisiana, the white kids and the black kids have co-existed in a voluntary segregation for as long as the school has been legally “ integrated”. The white kids at the high school staked out a tree, the black kids hung out anywhere else.

Until the day came that one of the black kids sought shade under that very tree. The teen had the presence of mind to ask the principal first. To make sure there wouldn’ t be in any trouble.

In literary circles, they call that “ foreshadowing.”

The next day, nooses hung from the tree. Then all hell broke loose. The black kids picked fights with the white kids, and the white kids picked fights with the black kids. A lot of kids got hurt. This is where parents, administrators, and police would step in, and in Jena Louisiana, they did.

A school assembly was called, and Jena District Attorney Reed Walters appeared with local police and spoke to the black students. He allegedly warned the students against further trouble, stating that he could, “ ...make their lives disappear with the stroke of (his) pen…”

Shortly thereafter, there were more fights. A white student threatened the black ones with a shotgun, but the gun was wrestled out of his hands. Six black students were arrested, for, among other things, stealing a firearm. The white student that pulled the shotgun was not charged.

When I began writing for the Champion this year, I wrote an article about the uneven distribution of law enforcement and prosecution. The article was titled “ Justice or Just Us” (April 13, 2007).

In that article, I was particularly angry about the incidents in Paris, Texas. You’ ll recall, that’ s the place where a fourteen year old white girl gets probation for burning down a house, and a fourteen year old black girl gets seven years in prison for a shoving match with a hall monitor at school.

While these locations seem rural and far away, I assure you that institutional or “ stealth” racism and disproportionate justice is more often the rule than the exception.

When I was growing up, racism was a lot easier to identify. People would call me the n-word to my face. There was no question of who was racist, nor was there any shame at the time of being racist.

But times have changed. In many ways we have made progress on our path to equality, but as the above instances show, racism is alive and well flourishing in our bureaucracies and in our criminal justice systems.

Before you think I have made to great a leap in my logic, consider a few practical political consequences of this unjust system:

• Of the 2.1 million inmates today, 910,000 are African-American. Blacks make up 43.9 percent of the state and federal prison populations but only 12.3 percent of the U.S. population. Latinos constitute 12.6 percent of the country’ population, and yet they are 18.3 percent of the prison population. Whites account for 69 percent of the U.S. population and 34.7 percent of those incarcerated.
  
• One of every three black males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.
  
• African-Americans constitute 13 percent of all monthly drug users, but they represent 35 percent of arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions, and 74 percent of prison sentences.
  

As I have preached time and time again, in today’s society, any conviction is a lifelong conviction, in terms of voter disenfranchisement, and income loss through the absence of employment opportunities. I’ ll leave these details for another column.

What the Jena, Louisiana, Paris, Texas and countless other communities like them serve to demonstrate how minorities get to the point of disproportionate incarcerations. Surely the punishments are handed out unevenly, but the problem begins on the front end. It’s when law enforcement officials like police officers and district attorneys make a juryless judgment call to prosecute some, but not others.

In his famous letter from the Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr., wrote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

We’ ve come a long way since Martin Luther King Jr. But as Jena, Louisiana illustrates, and Dr. King taught us, "when evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love. Where evil men would seek to perpetuate and unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring into being a real order of justice.”
Eugene Walker