By Alan Bean
Reed Walters, the prosecutor at the center of a national controversy five years ago over incidents in a small town Louisiana schoolyard, doesn’t think he did a very good job explaining his prosecution of what became known as the Jena Six.
It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. In 2007 the New York Times invited the LaSalle Parish DA to write an op-ed and the Christian Science Monitor published a curious piece of historical reconstruction written by a Walters supporter at the Jena Times.
In his NYTop-ed, Walters defended his refusal to charge the boys who hung nooses from a tree at the Jena High School with a hate crime. It didn’t take much ingenuity to make the case. Charging the noose boys with a hate crime was always a really bad idea. The kids needed a history lesson on lynch law and the South’s history of racial violence. A few months in prison would simply have left them traumatized and unchanged.
Things got out of hand in Jena because nobody in a position of power could acknowledge that the noose hanging was racially motivated. The nooses appeared the morning after a freshman asked if it was okay for black students to sit under the tree in question. But when the noose hangers insisted they were just acting out a scene from the popular miniseries Lonesome Dove, men like Reed Walters and Superintendent Roy Breithaupt were eager to believe them.
Why?
You don’t talk about the South’s racial history in towns like Jena. That’s why.
It wasn’t that black parents wanted the noose hangers charged with a hate crime; they simply wanted town officials to acknowledge what really happened and to take it seriously.
Instead, when black students staged a school protest and racially tinged fights broke out on the school campus, Reed Walters calmed the situation by threatening to “end the lives” of the protesters “with a stroke of my pen.”
Asked to explain this behavior in open court, Walters said he resented being called to the campus. The students should have been able to work out their differences “on their own.” In other words, the black students had nothing to protest and were merely acting out.
This phase of the story is rarely reported.
I find it curious that none of the civil-rights groups and community organizers who came to the support of Jena’s black community were interviewed for the recent exclusive Associated Press story marking the five-year anniversary. It is more than a bit curious that the AP story was accompanied by six sympathetic pictures of white beating victim Justin Barker but not a single photograph of anyone else.
Essentially, this is a “town heals; life moves on” story.
Is that all there is to say after half a decade? What deeper lessons can be learned from Jena?
White America never understood what the fuss was about. Nooses hanging from a tree didn’t seem all that threatening to white readers; getting jumped by six black thugs did.
The reaction of Black America couldn’t have been more different. When young black males are accused of a crime, there is always a measure of suspicion in the black community. Were all of these kids guilty as charged? And if they were, did a school yard beat-down justify charges of attempted murder, with the defendants’ running shoes serving as the alleged murder weapon?
Black Americans were deeply offended by the noose hanging and they didn’t buy the Lonesome Dove story. No one was asking that the defendants get off with a wrist slap if the state had real evidence of guilt (a big “if” in some cases); but did Louisiana really want to destroy the lives of six young men because racially insensitive white folks responded to a racial crisis with massive denial and threats of prosecution?
Black America approached the Jena Six story with the seasoned insight of a literary critic; most white folks demonstrated the crude naiveté of a sixth grader. Focusing obsessively on a single aspect of a complex narrative, they missed the significance of the story. You couldn’t really blame them; few white Americans have felt the sting of bigotry or witnessed a judicial meltdown up close and personal.
Then Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Michael Baisden arrived on the scene demanding that Mr. Walters prosecute the noose boys as hate criminals. Message: lock everybody up and we’ll be satisfied. That may not be the message the celebrity crowd intended to project but, as Reed Walters’ NYT op-ed suggests, it was the message received.
I’m glad that the seven young men tangled up in this southern melodrama are all doing okay. As the first organizer on the scene, I sometimes wonder if I would have tackled the story had I known how it would turn out. Of course I would. Lives were about to be destroyed for no good reason.
I didn’t want that to happen. I’m glad it didn’t.