Ya’ll know I don’t normally post full articles I find, but this one needs to be read in its entirety for you to grasp why I am pretty worked up about now (I’ll emphasis/bold the excerpt that really pisses me off).

Teen at heart of US racial protests released from jail

AFP - Friday, September 28

CHICAGO (AFP) - - A US judge released Thursday one of the six black teenagers whose arrest in Louisiana brought 20,000 people to a small town to protest what they see as racial discrimination in the US judicial system.

Mychal Bell, 17, had been jailed since December when he and five other black students who became known as the “Jena Six” beat up a white student at school following months of racial tension in the town of Jena.

“He goes home because a lot of people left their home. And stood up for him,” said the Reverend Al Sharpton, one the civil rights leaders who led the march in Jena last week.

“Let America know, we are not fighting for the right to fight in school … We’re fighting to say that there must be one level of justice for everybody.”

The tension was sparked when a black student tried to cross the schoolyard’s invisible color line and sit under a “white tree.”

Students arrived at school the next day to see three nooses hung from the tree, a stark symbol of the lynching which once terrorized southern blacks.

A series of interracial fights broke out after the school’s administrator dismissed the nooses as an “adolescent prank.”

Tensions were raised even higher in December when the white district attorney charged Bell and the others with attempted murder. While badly hurt, the student they attacked was able to attend a school function that night.

Although those charges were eventually reduced, they were controversial because white students escaped serious criminal charges in two earlier fights they initiated.

“We must have a nation that’s one law for everybody,” Sharpton said.

“There should not be different laws for Mychal Bell than anyone his age of a different color. That’s why we came to Jena and let Jena represent equal protection under the law.”

Bell’s conviction for aggravated second-degree battery was vacated on September 14 by an appeals court which ruled he should have been charged as a juvenile.

In a hearing held the day after last week’s peaceful protest — which Sharpton hailed as the beginning of a movement to protest racial inequalities in the US criminal justice system — a district judge declined to release Bell.

But a juvenile court judge released Bell on 45,000 dollar bail Thursday, Sharpton said.

Bell was the only member of the Jena Six who remained in jail because his parents had been unable to post a previous 90,000 dollar bail.

The local prosecutor, who had vowed to appeal the decision to turn Bell’s case over to the juvenile system because of Bell’s previous criminal convictions, backed down Thursday after an appeal from the state’s governor.

But he further infuriated black leaders when he said during a press conference that the only reason last week’s protest did not devolve into violence was because of divine intervention.

“I firmly believe, and I’m confident of the fact that had it not been for the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ last Thursday, a disaster would have happened,” district attorney Reed Walters said.

The FBI is also investigating threats made by white supremacists who posted the names and addresses of the Jena six on a website urging followers to find them and “drag them out of the house.”

So, according to the “local prosecutor” it was Gawd! that kept the racists from hurting the protesters?

I say to Jena, do like the Latin immigrants (illegal and otherwise) did in a city in New Jersey: Make like a tree and “leave”! And then watch an already tiny city vanish, leaving the racists to blame black folks for leaving them to their own devices and how they just couldn’t understand why no person of color would ever want to move (back) there.

Tags: Mychal Bell, Jena 6

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