Thousands Protest Arrests of 6 Blacks in Jena, La.

If Jesse Jackson and President Bush agree on this, you know there's been a serious miscarriage of justice.  It's great to see that the Internet, text messaging and black talk radio have drawn so much attention to this.

“That’s not prosecution, that’s persecution,” the Rev.  Jesse Jackson, founder of the Operation PUSH/Rainbow Coalition and one of the organizers of the demonstration, told a  crowd in front of the LaSalle Parish Courthouse here. “We will not stop  marching until justice runs down like waters.”
 
The teenagers, who have come to be known as the Jena Six, are part of a court case that began in December 2006 when they were accused of beating a white classmate, and a local prosecutor charged them with attempted murder. The beating was preceded by of a series of racially charged incidents  at the school, including the hanging of nooses from the branch of a tree which some students felt was for white students only.
 
One of the accused students, Mychal Bell, 17, was convicted in  June of aggravated battery and conspiracy. Those charges were tossed out by two different appeals courts, most recently last Friday, but Mr. Bell has not been released from jail. Even as demonstrators were continuing to march through Jena, which is about 85 percent white, a state appellate court ordered an emergency hearing to determine why Mr. Bell has not yet been released.
 
So far, Mr. Bell is the only one of the Jena Six to be tried,  but amid pressure from critics, prosecutors have gradually scaled back many of the charges against the five other defendants.
 
Although the incident that brought about the case occurred about a year ago, the story of the Jena teenagers has been slow to become part of the national conversation. After Mr. Bell’s conviction, though, the story spread quickly and carried beyond Jena on the currents of the Internet, text messaging and black talk radio until it became part of a nationwide civil  rights campaign.
 
The matter has even drawn the attention of President Bush, who told reporters in Washington today: “Events in Louisiana have saddened  me.”

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September 21, 2007
Thousands Protest Arrests of 6 Blacks in Jena, La.
By RICHARD G. JONES
www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/us/21cnd-jena.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/us/21cnd-jena.html>

JENA, La., Sept. 20 — In a slow-moving march that filled streets, spilled onto sidewalks and stretched for miles, more than 10,000 demonstrators rallied in this small central Louisiana town today to protest the treatment of six black teenagers who were arrested in the beating of a white schoolmate last year.