Have we all been bamboozled with media hype about the Jena Six? The town people and school officials, who should know, say yes. They have taken a school yard stomping and turned it into a cause celebre by all the media attention and repetition. The town's people say while their race relations are not unblemished; it is not a town of bigotry the media makes it out to be. The media has added, and changed so many facts in the retelling; it's hard to tell the truth from fiction.
According to interviews with teachers, students and officials at Jena High, in court statements, and in public statements from a U.S.Attorney's office who reviewed the case: The so called “white tree" was the domain of both white and black students. They all gathered there. Two nooses not three were found hanging from the tree by both black and white students. The nooses were cut down because students were playing with them, putting their heads in them, swinging from them, and doing stunts the teachers considered dangerous.
The boys who hung the nooses were found, and instead of the three days we have heard, they were sent to alternative school for a month, after completing that, they were suspended two weeks from school. There was no connection between the September noose and the December attack according to Donald Washington, an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department, who investigated the claim that this might be a racial incident. The jury that convicted Bell was white but only because the black jurors summoned did not show up.
Cleveland Riser a black teacher at Jena High School said,” Getting ahead for blacks has always been hard in Jena, but if you go from where we were 50 years ago to where we are today you can see how far we have come. Wayne Fowler a school board member said,” The black and white students got out of hand. The boys who hung the noose probably should have been expelled, and the attempted murder charges were to severe.
They did knock that boy out cold, they stomped him and could have killed him, but he walked out of the hospital after two hours and went to the school ring ceremony that night." Braxter Hatcher, a black janitor at the school said, "They have always been fair to us at the court house, if you are black they go overboard sometimes." Huey Crockett and his wife Carla who live just out of Jena are black and have called the police numerous times about Bell and other youngsters causing trouble in the community, scratching cars with keys, breaking windows, and spraying property with paint. The police were slow to come out, Crockett says, but as soon as he had a run in with a white boy, they came down on him like a hammer.
Another thing the media doesn't mention is that Bell was out on probation at the time of the incident for two counts of battery and criminal damage to property. His conviction was over turned because he should not have been tried as an adult.
