Today, We Wear Black for Jena

Get your out your best black jeans and if you're not already in Jena, prepare for action.

As this day has approached, it's urgency seems to have reached a critical pitch.  Much is at stake for Mychal Bell, Carwin Jones, Theodore Shaw, Robert Bailey, Bryant Purvis and their friend, and that intensity has been matched by 260,000 people signing petitions, 10,000 marching on Jena, and thousands more leading their own events from coast to coast.  With a vibrant coalition kicked off by Black bloggers and ColorofChange.org gaining broad support from the netroots, and now the civil rights establishment, in just over a month, the success of the campaign makes me cautiously optimistic about the rise of a new model for activism around racial justice.

Howard Witt at the Chicago Tribune has a very smart piece on how these actors came together around the call to Free the Jena 6:

This will be a civil rights protest literally conjured out of the ether of cyberspace, of a type that has never happened before in America—a collective national mass action grown from a grassroots word-of-mouth movement spread via Internet blogs, e-mails, message boards and talk radio.

Jackson, Sharpton and other big-name civil rights figures, far from leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up. So, too, has the national media, which has only recently noticed a story that has been agitating many black Americans for months.

Many have done much to see the tentative progress in the Jena case, but my call to action today focuses on what we'll do tomorrow.  This case is far from over.  Though a judge threw out Mychal Bell's conviction, arguing that he should not have been tried as an adult, he remains in jail.  CNN reports that a Louisiana appeals court has ruled the motion to dismiss as "premature," leaving Bell in the jail where he has already wasted a year of his life.  dNA lays it out plainly at TooSense:

Bell has been in jail for over a year now for charges that no longer exist. He was the only one of the Jena Six whose family did not have the financial means to post bail, so he is not a flight risk. He is 17, and he remains in a grown man's prison because what passes for the law in Louisiana thinks, despite the time already served for charges that have now been dismissed, he deserves to remain in jail....Today we wear black because this is far from over.

He also points out the what's happening in Jena isn't an aberration, it's the rule. 

I'm supporting the Jena 6 because they deserve their freedom and the racist criminal justice system that took it away must be indicted.  But I'm also imagining what would happen if every person who wore a t-shirt today or handed out a flyer or wrote a blog post woke up tomorrow and looked for the Mychal Bell in their own backyard.  He, or She, won't be hard to find.What if our outrage, today directed at the small Louisiana town of Jena, extended to parallel injustices in Detroit or Cincinnati or Sacramento or Miami?  What if we viewed this mobilization not as the end of a successful, innovative campaign, but as the moment that catalyzes us into broader and deeper action in every place where we are?  Inside the blogosphere and offline, locally and nationally.

It's just an idea, but I think it might work.

 

                                       

 

   

Comments

[Hamid]

Heh, I don't have my Black jeans anymore but there's plenty of Black in the wardrobe to go around. Always wanted a reason to dress up in all Black and be seen lookin' good in it, and since all my Brothers and Sisters today are gonna be joining us in it, we get to show our solidariy for the Jena Six *and* our fashion sense all in one. Sweet.

The white racists are quaking in their boots b/c they know that African-Americans, Muslims and other people of color will soon be the majority in Michigan and in Deep South states such as Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. And it burns them up.

Already, we're seeing more and more African-Americans and Muslims (most of us Muslims here also African-American) leave states where we're dispersed and powerless-- states like Wisconsin, Ohio, West Virginia (we *know* what happens to us in West Virginia as those white thugs recently showed), Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Iowa, Delaware and California where we're badly outnumbered and too weak-- to move to Michigan, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and some parts of Illinois, where we have a strong historical presence and enough of a demographic status to become the majority within a decade.

Dispersion is the enemy, and so long as we stay dispersed, we'll continue to be pushed around. There's strength in numbers, and concentrating ourselves in these states, our historical core, is the key to gaining a majority and resulting political control. And when we have political control there, we'll no longer have to put up with being treated like dirt, humiliated, being second-class citizens in states where we've lived for so many centuries. We'll be able to stand up and tell the white racists that they don't own us, support our own businesses and finally earn for ourselves the respect we have long deserved. I'm proud that the African-Americans of Louisiana and throughout the nation are converging to help the Jena Six like this, we need to see more of this solidarity.

[worried]

To read a very troubling story about the white supremacist backlash over Jena, go to http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-jena25_websep25,0,7139244,full.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout

[raw dawg buffalo]

nice blog and well said

[chi flat irons]

Hey, your posts have inspired me! - I love the way you directly get to the point, and then work outwards. I’ve been trying to do figure out what I want to say about ,that would allow me to do exactly the same thing.