Essay 4483

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Racism in a small town

At the start of the 2006 school year, an African-American freshman at Jena High School in Louisiana asked if black students could sit under a large shade tree that was a gathering place for white students.

The school principal said yes. Three white kids, members of the school’s rodeo team, had other ideas. They expressed their displeasure by hanging three nooses from the tree, a potent reminder of lynchings in the South.

The principal recommended that the three white students be expelled. The superintendent, Roy Breithaupt, objected. “Adolescents play pranks,” he said. “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”

The students were handed three-day, in-school suspensions -- what you might expect for toilet-papering the school grounds.

It’s hard to believe anyone would consider what those kids did a “prank,” much less a school superintendent in the South. But Jena, La., is showing the nation that racism is alive and well.

African-American residents say that in Jena -- a former mill town of 3,000 people that’s 12 percent black and 85 percent white -- black people are always punished more severely than whites. Events in the last year seem to back up that claim. In November, when a young white man pulled a shotgun on three black students outside a convenience store, he got off scot-free, while the young black man who wrestled the gun away was charged with theft. After a schoolyard fight in December injured a white student -- he was well enough to attend a party later that evening -- six black students were charged with attempted murder.

“I think it’s safe to say some punishment has not been passed out fairly and evenly,” school board member Billy Wayne Fowler told National Public Radio in July. “I think probably blacks may have gotten a little tougher discipline through the years.” But, Fowler said, Jena “is not a bunch of bigots.” People there “wouldn’t mistreat anybody.”

Now the nation is paying attention to Jena, and look what has happened: The attempted murder charges have been reduced. A state appeals court vacated a conviction for second-degree battery against one of the black students involved in the incident.

Thousands of people are expected in Jena on Thursday for a massive protest against the treatment of the students, who have come to be known as the “Jena 6.”

It’s hard to say from Chicago just what, if anything, is appropriate punishment for the students, who could still face jail time.

But it’s easy, even from afar, to see why they and many other people in Jena and around the world think there was a slim chance they would have been treated fairly before the rest of the country started paying attention.