Free the Jena 6!

Just when I was wondering whatever happened to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, he popped up again, accusing Barack Obama of "acting like he's white" – for not making a bigger deal about recent events in Jena, La.

Typical of Rev. Jackson, he's only half right. At the same time, thank God for Jackson because he is half right, and because he raises an issue we should all know about and care about.

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He's wrong about Obama, who has, in fact, condemned what happened in Jena. But Jackson's right about this: Why aren't we more outraged about what's going on down there? And why aren't we hearing more about Jena on the TV news, and less about O.J.?

In case you're as ignorant of the facts as I was until Jackson spoke out, here are the facts: Last fall, at Jena High School in rural Louisiana, black high school students were told they couldn't sit under a certain tree in the schoolyard, nicknamed the "White Tree," because its shade was reserved for "whites only." After they got permission from the principal to sit there anyway, the next morning they arrived to find three nooses hanging from the tree.

Appearance of the nooses only prompted more African-American students to sit under the tree, which set off months of racial tension in the community. Someone set fire to the school's academic wing, reducing it to rubble. A young black student, Robert Bailey, was punched and beaten with beer bottles when he tried to enter a mostly white party. A few nights later, a white man at a convenience store waved a sawed-off shotgun at Bailey and two friends, chasing them out of the store. The next day, a fight broke out at the high school. Mychal Bell, the school football team's star running and defensive back, slugged Justin Barker, a white student who'd been taunting him with racial slurs. Other students jumped in. Barker went to the hospital with superficial wounds, but recovered quickly enough to go out partying that evening.

Enter District Attorney Reed Walters. Weeks earlier, he'd appeared at a school assembly and warned students that he could "make their life disappear with the stroke of my pen." Walters now carried out his threat by charging Bell and five other black students involved in the high school brawl, not with assault, but with second-degree attempted murder. They each faced 100 years in prison. Meanwhile, the three white students who started everything by hanging nooses from the tree were slapped on the wrist with a couple of days of in-school suspension.

Even though he was only 16 at the time, Bell was arrested in December, charged – as an adult – and held in prison until his trial on June 28, when an all-white jury convicted him of aggravated battery and conspiracy. Under Louisiana law, that charge requires a deadly weapon. Prosecutors identified Bell's weapon as – his tennis shoes! An appeals court recently overturned Bell's conviction, but he's still being held in prison while authorities now decide whether or not to try him in juvenile court. His five co-defendants still await trial on the original murder charges.

Meanwhile, life goes on in Jena. A white Baptist minister told Bell's parents that the hanging of nooses by white students is just "kid's play." And Newsweek quotes local barber Billy Doughty as denying he's prejudiced, yet admitting he's never cut a black man's hair because "the white customers, they might say something about cutting their hair with the same stuff." Why, next thing you know, they'll even complain about drinking from the same water fountain, or eating from the same plates at the lunch counter.

And may I remind you this is 2007, not 1957? Yet you and I haven't heard a peep about Jena. Cable news is so busy talking about O.J. and Larry Craig, there's no time to talk about racism, which is alive and ugly as ever in the Deep South.

And we thought we were living in an America where a black man could be elected president? We're not even living in an America where a black man can sit under the same tree as a white man.

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