Jena Six
The Jena 6 were six black teenagers convicted in the 2006 beating of Justin Barker, a white student at the local Jena High School. Barker was injured on December 4, 2006, and received treatment at an emergency room. While the case was pending, it was often cited by some media commentators as an example of racial injustice in the United States.
About Jena Six in brief
The Jena Six were six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, convicted in the 2006 beating of Justin Barker, a white student at the local Jena High School. Barker was injured on December 4, 2006, and received treatment at an emergency room. While the case was pending, it was often cited by some media commentators as an example of racial injustice in the United States. Some commentators believed that the defendants had been charged initially with too-serious offenses and had been treated unfairly. A number of events had taken place in and around Jena in the months before the Barker assault, which the media have associated with an alleged escalation of local racial tensions. These events included the hanging of rope nooses from a tree in the high school courtyard, two violent confrontations between white and black youths, and the destruction by fire of the main building of Jena high School. Federal and parish attorneys concluded from their investigations that assessment was inaccurate for some of the events; for instance, the burning of the school was an attempt to destroy grade records. The Jena 6 case sparked protests by people who considered the arrests and subsequent charges, initially attempted second-degree murder, as excessive and racially discriminatory. The protesters asserted that white Jena youths involved in similar incidents were treated more leniently. On September 20, 2007, between 15,000 and 20,000 protesters marched on Jena and other US cities in what was described as the \”largest civil rights demonstration in years\”. The names of those who hung nooses were not publicly disclosed. The school’s investigating committee had concluded that the three young teens had no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history.
It was reported that three white students were responsible and recommended that the board of education overruled his recommendation, and that school superintendent Roy Breithaupt agreed with the recommendation. It has been reported that the punishment was reduced to three days in-school suspension, but the school superintendent was quoted as saying that they were able to return to school and had to have an evaluation before they were allowed to return. A black teacher described seeing both white. and black students playing with nooses, pulling on them, jump-swinging from them, and putting their heads through them that same day. A black male freshman asked the principal whether he could sit under the tree. The principal said the question was posed in a \”jocular fashion” The following morning, students and staff discovered rope noose hanging from the tree; reports differ as to whether there were two or three nooses. According to early reports, black students when outside typically sat on bleachers near the auditorium, while white students sat under a large tree. Some early reporting indicated that students of different races seldom sat together, for instance in the cafeteria, although this has been disputed. Some early reports indicated that the tree in question was not a \”white tree\”, and students of all races had sat under it at one time or another. Craig Franklin, assistant editor of the Jena Times, said the nooseswere hung as a prank by three students directed at white members of theSchool rodeo team.
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This page is based on the article Jena Six published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
