I'm so sick of people talking about things that they do not understand. No matter what you think you heard on CNN or Fox News, the chronology did not go: Nooses hung in tree ----> Black kids go medieval on white kid's ass. The news programs on TV are incapable of going into details because the average American has the attention span of a goldfish.
Here's what happened.
Last September, around the beginning of the school year, an African American freshman at Jena High School in Central Louisiana asked if he could sit underneath a shade tree in the courtyard where the white students usually congregate. The next morning, African American students came to school to witness three rope nooses hanging from that tree.
Despite calls from the black community for the students responsible for hanging the nooses to be expelled, the school administration judge the event to be nothing more than a “prank”. The white students received a three-day in-school suspension.
This angered many of the African American students, and they spontaneously formed a peaceful protest: the day after the nooses hung, the entire black student population went to sit under the tree. The same school administration that had just called hanging nooses in a tree as a message to blacks to be a “prank” responded to the nonviolent protest by calling the police and the district attorney, Reed Walters.
An assembly was called, during which Walters, surrounded by police officers, reportedly raised a pen above his head and told the black students, “I could end your lives with the stroke of this pen.”
Tensions continued to flare at the school, though much of it was restrained as neither side wanted to negatively impact the school’s football season. Once football was over, however, the tension exploded.
A black student attempted to attend a white party that he had been invited to. He was attacked at the door -- white kids punched, kicked, and threw beer bottles at him. Only one of the whites at the party was arrested. He received a sentence of probation and was asked to apologize.
The next day, heated words were exchanged at a convenience store, which culminated in a 22-year-old white man brandishing a shotgun at a group of black students. The black students wrestled the gun away and called the police. The police came — and charged the black students with stealing a firearm, second-degree robbery, and disturbing the peace. The white student who had originally threatened them with the shotgun was not charged.
The following Monday, one of the white students was loudly bragging and laughing about the black student being beaten at the fight at the party. Later in the school courtyard, six black students attacked him, punching him, knocking him to the ground and kicking him. The white student was taken to a doctor, treated and released with only a concussion and some bruises. He was well enough to attend a social function that same night.
The six black students involved in the fight were arrested and charged with aggravated assault. But District Attorney Walters — the guy with the pen who bragged about ending people’s lives with the stroke of a pen — changed the charges to attempted murder and conspiracy to commit attempted murder. The charges carry a possible penalty of up to 100 years in prison. Some of these have since been reduced, but still carry decades in prison as a sentence.
Only Mychal Bell has had a trial so far. The judge was white, and the public defender was white. The jury pool for the trial was all-white, meaning the jury ended up being all-white. One member of the jury was District Attorney Walter’s former classmate. Another jury member was the mother of one of the prosecution’s witnesses. Another juror is friends with the white victim’s mother.
The public defender did not challenge the all-white jury pool. He did not present any evidence, and he did not call any witnesses.
Bell was found guilty by the all-white jury and faced 22 years in prison until his guilty verdict was overturned because the 16-year-old should not have been charged as an adult. Meanwhile, he has already served 9 months in prison while the whites who attacked the black youth at the party received nothing.
Clearly, this is not just an issue of "someone hung a noose, so black kids attacked them". It's a case of completely uneven application of the law.
