Eugene Robinson on the Jena Six
Eugene Robinson penned a must-read column regarding the Jena Six, the scary reality that it flew way below the national media’s radar for so long and how black activists made it a national story.
In case you are anything like Fred Thompson, former Republican senator from Tennessee and 2008 presidential candidate, here’s a refresher from Robinson:
Most people know the outlines of the story by now, but here’s a synopsis: Black students at the local high school sat under a tree that everyone knew was a place where white students usually congregated. White students reacted by hanging three nooses in the tree. Racial tensions escalated from there, including fights in which both black and white students got roughed up, but no one was seriously injured. Local officials, who are white, handled the white offenders with a “boys will be boys” attitude — a few brief school suspensions, basically. Black offenders were expelled from school, arrested and charged as adults with felony offenses, including attempted murder.
The Jena Six sounds like a story from the 1950s but as Robinson notes, this happened just last year. The Washington Post columnist finished with one of my favorite lines from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
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