Race In America: The Jena Six

AS noted: In the fall of 2006, Mychal Bell was a football hero, and his hometown, Jena, Louisiana, loved him for it.”

As his high-school team posted its best season in six years, Bell scored 21 touchdowns, rushed for 1,006 yards, and was named player of the week three times by The Jena Times. The paper celebrated his triumphs in articles and photographs, including a dramatic one in which Bell, who’s black, stiff-arms a white defender by clutching his face guard. But within weeks after the season’s end, Bell was transformed into a villain, accused of knocking out a white student, Justin Barker, who was then beaten by a group of black students. The parish’s white district attorney charged Bell and five others with attempted second-degree murder. Six months later—after the DA had reduced the charges against Bell—a white jury convicted him, as an adult, of aggravated second-degree battery, a crime that carried a possible 22-year prison sentence. By then, he, along with his co-defendants, had been transformed yet again: together, they’d been dubbed the Jena Six and had become icons of a 21st-century civil-rights movement.

Hijacked by the campaigners? Or is race at the root of it all?

Anorak

Posted: 28th, January 2008 | In: Twitterings Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink