The Jena Six Hate Squad

The cases written about were used by propagandists and subversives to cause hate and violence. They were very successful. The liberals are the American left who may be sincere and innocent in their beliefs but heavily influenced by subversives using Antonio Gramsci's approach to destroying civilization. Marx was going to do it from the bottom up. Antonio advocated doing it from the top down. It is The Long March Through The Institutions is the infiltration of politics, education, law, religion and every other nexus of influence. Their major assault was on the media. The BBC is theirs. We never see their little shrines dedicated to Lenin but they are just symptoms. Mr Clough is telling us about two battles which are part of the campaign.



From   Jena 6 - review and update

The Jena Six Hate Squad

As the year 2006 dwindled to an end, America’s aging civil rights apparatus and its Amen chorus in the liberal media were in total disarray. For over a year the forces of liberal academia, liberal television and radio and the usual spotlight-grabbing racial racketeers had been united in a common cause: to utterly destroy the lives and reputations of three white Duke University students who had been falsely accused of numerous lurid sex crimes by a drug-hungry, heavy-boozing part-time stripper and prostitute named Crystal Gail Mangum, who had a history of mental disturbance and a history of criminal misconduct for things like assault and grand theft auto.

For over a year, those black radio shows Al Sharpton calls “the drums of the contemporary black community” beamed black perspectives to loyal black audiences, airing heartfelt exchanges between black hosts and black callers about the alleged humiliations of Crystal Gail Mangum, who was unfailingly sanctified as a “student” and “a mother of two” (later three, father unknown). For a year, thousands of average black folks had gone on the airwaves and exposed their most deep-seated psycho-sexual fantasies about white folks and slave times and the frightening lurking boogeyman of “exploitation.”

When the lying Crystal Mangum and the rogue prosecutor of Durham County, Michael Nifong, were finally undone by telephone records, time-stamped digital photos, surveillance-camera images, taxi logs, eyewitness accounts and lots of DNA evidence, a big fraction of black America was left embarrassingly exposed as a people sadly obsessed by weird sexual fantasies and a severely twisted vision of the nation in which they live today. This is the same black America that not so long ago was loudly celebrating ex-con Eldridge Cleaver as an heroic figure of black defiance. In his autobiography Soul on Ice, Cleaver confessed to forcibly raping many white women. By his own twisted logic he concluded that raping white women was a form of social protest and “an insurrectionary act.” Interracial rape in America is, hands down, a black man’s monopoly; white-on-black rape is as rare as the most obscure of sexual perversions – virtually zero by statistical standards, while black-on-white rape has been epidemic for decades. But blacks have a need to see themselves as a noble people. If they aren’t actually doing anything noble they can at least claim to be noble by virtue of their suffering at the hands of those white folks who possess “that low-down dirty nature,” to borrow a quote from the popular rapper Sister Souljah.

The spectacular collapse of the Duke Rape Hoax left the black community, the racial racketeers and the entire liberal press corps cut off in mid sentence. Their poisonous rhetoric was left hanging in the air as the falsely accused defendants emerged as poised and stoic victims of ingrained black racism and liberal class bigotry. The folks who depend on myths of black victimhood to prop up their notions of black nobility were deeply chagrined. Not since a grand jury investigation unmasked Tawana Brawley, her mother Glenda and their advisors C.Vernon Mason, Alton Maddox and Al Sharpton as liars and hoaxers had the liberal bigots been so deflated. Again and again they had tried to make some obscure incident a neon metaphor for race relations in America, only to discover, again and again, that there had never been an incident – only some liar with a deeply personal motive. The profiteers of racial discord desperately craved another incident they could exploit for political gain, one that would distract attention from their squalid defamations of the forty-six white Duke lacrosse players. Their next best hope popped up fortuitously in the little Louisiana town of Jena, about 230 miles northwest of New Orleans. The natives pronounce it JEE-nuh. Jenna is the president’s daughter.

School Daze in Jena
The last day of August in 2006 was otherwise unremarkable in the one-time sawmill town of Jena. There was a student assembly in the high school auditorium. When the school principal asked if there were any questions a black freshman asked in a joking manner if he could sit under “the white tree.” The principal tossed back that students could “sit wherever they wanted.”

As a matter of habit, mostly-white friendship groups had taken to congregating under a shade tree near the school building. The school’s mostly-black friendship groups were comfortable gathering on the bleachers near the school auditorium. There was nothing exclusionary about this arrangement – teachers and administrators attested that students of all races had sat beneath what some blacks called “the prep tree.”

On the morning of September first it was evident that someone had draped two hangman’s nooses from a limb of “the prep tree.” Far from being intimidated by the nooses, both black and white students began “playing with them. Pulling on them, and putting their heads through them,” recalled a black teacher, who was an eyewitness. (AP, 9/23/07, Todd Lewan) The nooses were gone by eight that morning, after the staff got wind of the student hijinx.

When the three white pranksters who had hung the nooses were identified, the principal wanted to impress upon them that their prank was offensive and an affront to school community cohesion. The principal recommended that the ropesmiths be expelled from school. The local board of education believed that expulsion would be excessive, given that no property was damaged, that there had been no infliction of bodily harm and that the motive of the pranksters was unknown. There was talk that the noosegram was meant for a few of the tree’s usual white habitués. School superintendent Roy Breithaupt concurred with the board’s recommendation. As an alternative discipline the three troublemakers were isolated in an alternative school for nine days, spent two weeks on suspension, served Saturday detentions, were compelled to attend Discipline Court, were referred to Families in Need of Services and were compelled to undergo evaluation before permission was granted for their return to Jena High classes. The school authorities did not take this breach of school discipline lightly, but neither did they misapprehend it to be the work of hate-driven racists. There was no criminal prosecution because the legislators of Louisiana never got around to making rope displays, no matter how obnoxious, a criminal offense.

As the small tale of the prankster’s one-hour display of two nooses spread across the old sawmill town in LaSalle Parish and then beyond the town limits, it became a tall tale, and taller still, as rumor and falsehoods inflated it to the dimensions of a myth. Soon it would become what the racial profiteers were hunting for: a story that would get lots of people stirred up, get their blood pumping and get the cash flowing.

The stately oak tree by the high school had been stigmatized as “the white tree.” This majestic plant became a tourist attraction, especially for touring journalists. Even Europeans came to gawk at it before filing reports reassuring other Europeans that America hadn’t really changed since the bad old days. Having wearied of this negative attention, the school authorities had the beautiful tree cut down, cut up and hauled away on the last day of July (’07).

In the days that followed the noose display, police were summoned several times to quell interracial fights between Jena High students. At the urging of the Jena police, LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters addressed a Jena High assembly on September 6th, 2006. Walters was not a happy man: he had been pulled away from a pressing case to speak to a bunch of unruly youngsters who, even as he stood before them, were paying him scant attention. Some white girls “were chit-chatting on their cell phones” Walters recalled. When he spoke he was blunt and impatient: “I can be your best friend or your worst enemy,” he told all of them. “With a stroke of a pen I can make life miserable on you or ruin your life. So I want you to call me before you do something stupid.” He gave them fair warning that he was concerned about the rising level of violence and that he would vigorously prosecute anyone who committed a crime of violence in Jena.

Matters took a turn for the worse on the last day of November 2006 when an arsonist(s) torched a wing of the Jena High School’s main building. The flames gutted that part of the school and it had to be demolished. The arsonist(s) remains unidentified. Blacks and whites pointed accusing fingers across racial lines.

So, as December began, the one-hour noose-display lay a quarter year in the past – three full lunar cycles – in the past. Racial harmony at Jena High had improved as the Jena Giants enjoyed a winning football season, thanks to efforts by its black players, among them Mychal Bell and Carwin Jones. The local paper called them “double trouble.” The town seemed to be returning to placid normalcy. That’s when things went all to Hell.

The Jena Six Wolf Pack Attacks
Monday, December 4th, 2006 had been an unremarkable school day at Jena High until the moment that Justin Barker, 17, stepped into the school courtyard. At that moment the white student was ambushed by six cowardly blacks who attacked Barker from behind without warning.

According to forensic experts the first blow must have caused a violent rotational acceleration of Barker’s skull that sent his brain crashing against his skull wall and inducing immediate brain damage. The white student lost consciousness instantly and collapsed, which sent his skull crashing against the pavement.

According to eyewitnesses, the gang’s ringleader, Mychal Bell, and his thug posse went to work enthusiastically and viciously stomping Mr. Barker’s skull and kicking his face and head as hard as they could kick. Because the attack on Barker was relentless, there is no reason to believe that it would not have continued until Justin Barker was dead. The beastly assault on the unconscious student was finally interrupted by a brave Good Samaritan. The unconscious victim was rushed to a hospital.

Enough was Enough
 The savage ambush attack on Barker torpedoed the town’s best efforts to restore interracial harmony at Jena High. The district attorney had come to Jena High and personally put every student on notice that there would be a vigorous prosecution of anyone who committed another breach of the peace. Nonetheless, Mychal Bell had assembled a goon squad and ambushed a student who was no threat to them and Bell did it on school property during school hours. The attack was cowardly and relentless; it was not a crime for profit – the motivation was hatred. This was a hate crime, and therefore particularly odious in the eyes of the law. It was heinous. From all appearances it was an attempted lynching, which my dictionary defines as “an execution without due process of law” – no rope is required: the victim is just as dead if he’s stomped to death by six hate-fueled thugs.

Crime and Punishment
 The brutalization of Justin Barker was the third and most shocking of three breaches of the peace in Jena – all of which were provoked by teenage black males acting in concert.

 Three days before the wolf-pack attack on Barker, on Friday, December 1st, 2006, six black youths attempted to crash an invitation-only party at the local Fair Barn. When they showed up at 11 p.m. without invitations they were politely told by a woman that the party was for people on the guest list. The six persisted; they announced that they were friends of some of those invited, as though that entitled them to all the food, refreshments and entertainment provided by the host. A white male, who was not a Jena High student, interceded. Words were exchanged and a fight ensued. When the fight petered out, the woman sent the white guy and five black students on their way. These five blacks were soon in another fight with some white guys who were not students. The police rolled up and Justin Sloan, a white guy, was charged with simple battery. One of the black party crashers was 16-year-old Robert Bailey, Jr.

The next incident occurred the following day outside the town limits when Matt Windham went shopping at the Gotta Go convenience store and gas stop. According to Windham, he was intimidated and chased by three black teenagers: Ryan Simmons, Theodore Shaw and the same Robert Bailey. Windham said he dashed to his vehicle and retrieved a shotgun which he hoped would keep his attackers at bay. They wrestled the firearm away from Windham. No shots were fired. The three blacks told a different story. The police listened to both stories and then interviewed uninvolved eyewitnesses. Based on the testimony of the disinterested witnesses, the police charged Simmons, Shaw and Bailey with theft of the firearm and conspiracy to commit a robbery.

The savage attack on Barker occurred two days later, on Monday. Barker’s attackers were Mychal Bell,16, Carwin Jones,18, Bryant Purvis,17, Jesse Ray Beard,14, and, once again, Theodore Shaw,17, and Robert Bailey, Jr.,17. With the exception of Jesse Ray Beard, all of these jerks were old enough to be tried as adults in the state of Louisiana. From the beginning, the authorities believed that Mychal Bell was the ringleader and architect of the in-school stompfest. Bell was a star player on the Jena High football team and a hulking giant who loomed larger than most adults in Jena. Bell was accustomed to throwing his weight around.

The district attorney considered the high degree of premeditation, the overwhelming power of the attack force, the total absence of any immediate threat to, or provocation of, the attackers, the low animal cunning of the surprise attack and the pitiless nature of the attack, which would have continued but for the intervention of a lifesaving bystander. Several eyewitnesses testified that they saw Mychal Bell strike Justin Barker. This was a hate crime that would have killed Barker if he had not been rescued. The thug posse had acted as a lynch mob, though the district attorney never used that characterization. District Attorney Reed Walters charged Mychal Bell as an adult with the crime of attempted murder.

The Crybaby Chorus
There was an immediate howl from the liberal media and the left-of-center civil rights professionals. This gust of hot air made man-made global warming seem almost plausible. The libs didn’t like the high bail; they didn’t like the felony charge. Presidential hopeful Barack Obama demonstrated his unworthiness of high public office by stupidly declaring that the Jena Six “have earned the mantle of Rosa Parks.” Huh? The thuggish Jena Six had launched a horrific surprise gang assault on an unsuspecting high-school student. Rosa Parks, by contrast, was a modest and diligent champion of American civil rights. Before her memorable bus ride, her five minute trial and her petty fine, Rosa Parks was the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. Years before, she had lent her efforts to freeing the Scottsboro Boys. Rosa defended civil rights; the Jena Six had literally stomped on someone’s civil rights. Given the liberals’ penchant for steamy hyperbole it was predictable that the notorious Scottsboro case would be hauled out of storage. Writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jonathan Tilove opined: “The youths, known as the Jena Six, have emerged as an international cause celebre, latter-day Scottsboro Boys, exciting outrage and organizing on their behalf and trying Jena itself in the court of public opinion.” Such blather is almost as dopey as Jesse Jackson standing in front of the Jena courthouse and invoking the memories of Selma and Little Rock.

Let’s review: the Scottsboro Boys were young black vagabonds who were accused of raping two homeless white women with whom they had shared a ride in a railroad freight car. One of the women, Ruby Bates, later recanted her rape accusation with the explanation that she had feared being charged herself with a morals violation. The train had stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. The whole story is too long to retell here; suffice it to say that the testimony at trial was weak and contradictory and that the ingrained biases of the jurors swayed their verdict.

If any recent miscarriage of justice invokes memories of the Scottsboro Boys it’s the hideous Duke Rape Hoax in which three white Duke University students were falsely accused of gang rape, sodomy and battery by a drug-addled prostitute with a history of mental disturbance. During their 395-day ordeal the white guys were defamed, vilified, expelled from college and convicted in the pages of every liberal publication. Chanting demonstrators declared them to be racist rapists. And all across America thousands of average African Americans dialed their favorite black talk-show hosts and spilled their inner-most fantasies about rape and bondage and interracial lust and what Jesse Jackson called “the special fantasies of exploitation.”

When the mask of victimhood was finally ripped from the lying accuser, a lot of black folks were left feeling uncomfortably exposed: they had revealed far too much about themselves; the whole Duke shoutin’-and-stompin’ anti-white revival had ended as a colossal embarrassment. The Duke students had emerged as the victims of racial and political bias – and much more akin to the Scottsboro Boys than the Jena Six head stompers who had committed an outrageous crime in front of lots of witnesses.

When the facts didn’t satisfy their craving for self-pitying victimhood, some blacks resorted to reinventing history. For example, at the Avenging the Ancestors website the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition offers uninformed readers lots of misinformation. In a webpage titled “Jena 6 = Scottsboro Boys” the black avengers try to make a side-by-side comparison of the Scottsboro and Jena Six cases. It’s mostly falsehoods. The avengers say of the Jena Six case that “Whites and Blacks fought.” That’s false: a single white victim was struck unconscious in a cowardly surprise attack and then smashed repeatedly. The black avengers assert that “A white claimed to have been assaulted by Blacks.” Claimed? Justin Barker was savagely battered by the Jena Six thug posse in full view of witnesses. Mychal Bell admitted striking Barker.

The avengers fret that “The Black defendants were jailed because they could not afford the unconstitutionally high bail.” That’s rubbish. The bail was appropriate to the felony charge of attempted murder. They pout that “The first Black defendant was tried by an all white jury . . .” In truth, LaSalle Parish had sent jury-duty notices to a racially-representative group of potential jurors, but all of the potential black jurors shirked jury duty. Mychal Bell’s jury was all white by default; the Parish had made a good-faith effort to create a racially-diverse jury pool – but they don’t drag in jurors off the street.

The black avengers claim that “The Black defendant’s lawyer was totally inept, having called no witnesses . . .” Here’s the truth: Mychal Bell was represented by public defender Blane Williams, himself a black man. Williams didn’t call any witnesses because the available witnesses were in agreement that they had seen Bell strike the victim. Bell admitted striking Barker. Bell was obviously guilty of a serious crime. The charge against Bell had been reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. Williams wisely advised Bell to accept a plea bargain.

The black avengers then stoop even lower by claiming that “The whites – one of whom had a shotgun – received no or very little punishment, but the Blacks – who had no weapons – faced charges . . .” Nonsense. There were no “whites” in the Jena Six case; there was only the single unarmed white victim. The avengers are dragging in events from separate altercations that occurred two days before the high-school attack in an effort to confuse the public. In that other case, uninvolved witnesses said the single white guy was accosted and chased by three blacks and that the white guy used a gun to keep his pursuers at bay.

In desperation, some black moralists reached back three full lunar cycles to the one-hour noose display to make the case that the Jena Six are victims of unequal justice. In their minds the boorish rope prank was the moral equivalent of the goon-squad attack by six muscular thugs behaving like Klansmen in blackface. I ask you, is a noose without a lynch mob really the moral equivalent of a lynch mob without a noose, especially when twelve flailing feet can do the killing?

The Jena Six had committed a hate crime. Hadn’t blacks been campaigning for years for tougher hate-crimes legislation and tougher hate-crimes prosecutions? Here was a golden opportunity to take a stand against hate-crimes and the “black community” did a dramatic turnabout for the sake of tribal solidarity. Excusing black hate-crime perpetrators has a long history. Long before he came to Jena to dispense his signature brand of bullhorn diplomacy, Al Sharpton had advised blacks that “We must not reprimand our children for outrage when it is outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.” In other words, the white devils make them do it. Kenneth Clark gets closer to the bone when he tells us in Black Ghetto that black hostility and discrimination against whites is understandable because “to a Negro, every white person is, in a sense, a symbol of his own oppression.” Got that? Just by being white you’re a symbol of oppression, just like a noose is a symbol of oppression. Rip down the nooses; rip down those white people; it’s all the same when you’re head is lost in Symbol Land.

Rap activist Sister Souljah, whom Jesse Jackson assures us is a voice representing the feelings and hopes of a whole generation of young blacks, uses her “voice” to spread the message that whites are inherently evil and that black people are justified in killing them: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clearly, her voice has been heard. The lyrics of her album 360 Degrees of Power promote the “total destruction” of the white race:
“They say two wrongs don’t make it right,
But it damn sure makes it even.”

There’s that theme again: getting even. That was the prevailing attitude at vigils held on behalf of the Duke Rape Hoax accuser, where blacks openly expressed their desire to see the white defendants punished even if they didn’t commit the crime because, in their minds, it would even the score for historical insults to some other black women.

The recurring theme among the Jena Six defenders was the notion that the black thug posse was just getting even for something or other. This is tribalism at its worst. The “black community” isn’t so eager to embrace the perpetrator of hate crimes when the perps aren’t black. For example: Back on June 7th, 1998 a seven-time black convict living on disability checks accepted the offer of a ride from three white men, one of whom he knew. Instead of taking James Byrd, Jr. home, the tree drunken bigots parked behind a convenience store where ex-con John King beat James Byrd with a bat. One of the three cut Byrd’s throat. Mr. Byrd was tethered to the pickup truck with a length of chain fastened around his waist. Forensic evidence suggests that Byrd was alive as he was dragged behind the truck and had been struggling to keep his head elevated. Mr. Byrd died abruptly when his body snagged in a roadside culvert, severing his right arm and head from his body. Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer and John King dumped James Byrd’s mutilated remains in the town’s black cemetery. A search of the area turned up a lighter with a KKK symbol and a wrench with Lawrence Brewer’s name on it.

Jasper’s district attorney knew King and Brewer to be outspoken bigots. The DA declared Byrd’s death to be a hate crime; he called in the FBI less than a day after Byrd’s remains were found.

At trial, John King said that he had joined a white-supremacist gang in prison after he had been gang raped by black inmates. Lawrence Brewer testified that he too had joined a white prison gang for his own self-preservation. Shawn Berry claimed that King and Brewer were entirely responsible for Byrd’s death; nonetheless he was an accomplice to the crime. A Texas jury sentenced King and Brewer to death. Shawn Berry received a life-long prison sentence.

This case brought a howl of indignation from the black community. Jesse Jackson took the opportunity to focus attention on the existence of white-supremacist gangs in the prisons, as though black-supremacist prison gangs were not worth a mention.

The lynching of James Byrd, Jr. was thrust back into the spotlight two years later, during the 2000 presidential campaign. It was then that the NAACP’s National Voter Fund accused George W. Bush of implicit racism for not promoting special hate-crime legislation when he was governor of Texas. James Byrd’s daughter was recruited for a Democrat radio pitch in which she assured voters that when George W. Bush declined to endorse special hate-crime laws she felt just like her daddy had been lynched all over again.

Mr. Bush had the crazy idea that because all three bigots had been charged with capital murder, the highest felony level in Texas, and because two of the bigots had been sentenced to die and the third bigot would rot in prison until his death, Texas had pretty much punished the bigots as much as the law would allow. Texas couldn’t kill them deader than dead or imprison them longer than a single lifetime, but Byrd’s daughter and the NAACP wanted tougher laws, as though they could wish the dead defendants back to life and then kill them all over again. Back then the liberals were pushing hard for super-severe punishments for hate-crimes perpetrators. But suddenly, when the perps were black and the victim was white, these same folks were whining that the Jena head smashers were the victims of unequal and excessive punishment.

There was a concerted effort by the civil rights professionals and the liberal media to minimize the threat to Justin Barker’s life. There was also a campaign to portray the Jena Six as martyrs of racial injustice or, at worst, rambunctious choir boys. Here’s a typical example from the prestigious Washington Post: “Mychal Bell, the first of the six to be tried, is scheduled to be sentenced in September. He was convicted in July by an all-white jury on reduced charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it. Like his co-defendants – Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theodore Shaw and Jesse Beard – Bell had no prior criminal record.”

Please note how Washington Post staff writer Darryl Fears highlights the “all-white jury” but declines to inform his readers that jurors were selected at random by a computer and that 100% of the black folks summoned to do their civic duty managed to duck jury duty. That final sentence is simply an outrageous lie.

Mychal Bell is a notorious thug and a sadist; he cares little for the rules that define a civilized society; he is heedless of the rights of others. His own lawyer, Alan Bean, described Bell as “a bully,” and offered that Bell probably should have been benched by his football coach. Before his conviction for his vicious ambush attack on Justin Barker, Bell had been convicted of four other crimes of violence. It was because of Bell’s ample criminal history that the LaSalle Parish judge denied Bell’s request for a reduction of bail. The Washington Postwriter was careful not to mention any of this, saying only that “. . . civil rights advocates say the reduced charges were still excessive and did not fit the crime.”

Three months before the December 4th ambush attack on Barker, Bell had committed two violent crimes while still on probation for yet another battery he had committed on Christmas Day of 2005. He was adjudicated (convicted) the following September third on a criminal property damage charge for a property crime he committed on July 25th, 2006. Mychal Bell had been placed on probation until his 18th birthday – January 18th, 2008. Therefore, Bell was violating his probation when he repeatedly stomped on Justin Barker’s face.

Though Louisiana law says “bail may be allowed” during the period between conviction and sentencing if the maximum sentence is more than five years imprisonment, the code permits an exception “when the court has reason to believe, based on competent evidence, that the release of the person convicted will pose a danger to any other person or the community.” Clearly, Bell had little self control; he had a history of assaulting people, like the girl he smashed in the face with his big ham of a fist. Bell was the ringleader of a mob attack that could easily have killed Justin Barker.

Judge J.P. Mauffray of the 28th Judicial Court explained those aspects of the Louisiana code that influenced the size of Bell’s bail:
1. The judge was impressed by the gravity of Bell’s offense. “It is a serious offense because it is a crime of violence,” the judge observed.
2. The weight of the evidence against Bell was considerable.
3. Bell’s previous criminal history, which included three crimes Bell committed while on probation. Bell had been given the benefit of the doubt and he had tossed his second chance into the gutter.
4. The judge saw Bell as a menace to the community because of Bell’s demonstrated penchant for violence – as evidenced by his five convictions for crimes of violence.
5. The judge took note that Bell was currently out of the slammer on bond from a previous felony arrest and that he had three other cases awaiting disposition.

Judge Mauffray wisely observed that “Past behavior is the best prediction of future behavior.” Bell was clearly unable or unwilling to get his antisocial tendencies under control.

 The very liberal Washington Post didn’t mention any of this to its readers. Instead, the Post sought to trivialize the bodily injury done to the white victim:
“The white teenager, Justin Barker, 17, was knocked out but walked out of a hospital after two hours of treatment for a concussion and an eye that was swollen shut. He attended a ring ceremony later that night.”

That doesn’t sound the least little bit serious. But take a moment to look a little deeper . . .

Concussion: Another Name for Brain Damage
The world-renowned Mayo Clinic does not mince words: “Every concussion, no matter how mild, injures your brain.” The Clinic website explains that all concussions interfere with the way the brain works and can affect memory, judgment, reflexes, speech, balance and coordination. The symptoms of concussion may linger for weeks . . . or much longer. Symptoms include headache, dizziness, nausea, slurred speech, sleep disturbances, sensitivity to light and noise, mood changes and cognitive impairment.

Though the liberal media dismissed Justin Barker’s injury as trivial by unfailingly remarking that he attended his high school’s ring ceremony that evening, Justin himself explained that “I waited eleven years to go to it. I wasn’t going to let that get in my way.” Even so, he left the festivities early because of extreme pain. His face was grotesquely misshapen by swellings; he suffered the loss of vision in one eye for three weeks. Barker also suffered from recurring headaches and memory loss, which are classic symptoms of concussion-related brain injury.

The human brain is the consistency of gelatin. Inside the skull the brain floats in a bath of cerebro-spinal fluid that cushions it from jolts. A sudden acceleration of the skull, as from a violent impact, can cause the skull to collide with the brain causing nerve-fiber tearing and bleeding in and around the brain. A common complication is post-concussion syndrome in which concussion symptoms persist for weeks or months. A concussion doubles a person’s risk of developing epilepsy within five years of the injury. Anyone who has suffered a concussion is vulnerable to “second impact syndrome” in which an incompletely healed brain may be even more severely damaged by a second impact.

The same New York Times that had been diminishing the harm done to the victim of the Jena Six was more forthcoming in an October 2nd ‘07 article about sports injuries. This article quotes 16-year-old Hannah Stohler, who had suffered three concussions as a high school soccer player. The newspaper described Hannah who “sat beside the piano she could no longer play, in the living room that spun like a carousel, in the chair in which she tried to read but could not remember a word.” The liberal Times remarked on her “winter-long haze of headaches and dizziness and depression that few around her could comprehend.” This is the same newspaper that dismissed Barker’s injuries as trivial simply because he was ambulatory. Hannah Stohler was ambulatory; why wasn’t the Times trivializing her injury?

The Times goes on to tell us that “. . . post-concussion syndrome is an increasing concern because of the lingering effects of dizziness, lethargy and the inability to concentrate which may deprive teenagers of months of education.” Hannah Stohler laments that “I was a freak at school who could only do half days and had to go home all the time. I didn’t feel like myself – ever. I was miserable. It takes the life out of you.”

Sarah Ingles sustained a concussion playing high school basketball. She missed six weeks of school. Nausea and dizziness overwhelm her now whenever her head is bumped. Kate Pellin had lingering headaches for five months. She still has trouble reading and transposes numbers when attempting math. “I don’t want to have Alzheimer’s when I’m 40,” lamented a tearful Pellin. “I want to know who my husband is. Who my children are. I never knew this was such a concern. In the long run, I’ll be glad I stopped [athletics] now.”

These are touching true stories. It’s revealing that the liberal Times is so concerned and so forthcoming when those damaged by concussions are the daughters of the upper middle class and so dismissive of concussion injury when the injured person is the son of working-class parents in a tiny old sawmill town down in Louisiana.

Some high school sports programs are participating in the IMPACT computerized concussion evaluation system. IMPACT (Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing) is a 20-minute test that measures functions such as brain processing, memory and visual motor skills. It is taken pre-season to establish a baseline datum for each athlete’s neuro-cognitive abilities. If the athlete suffers a concussion he/she will take the test again to determine the degree of mental impairment. According to the Newark Star Ledger the IMPACT program exemplifies “a more aggressive approach on the part of athletic and sports medical professionals to get kids, their coaches and parents to take concussions more seriously or risk potentially lifelong damage and, in some cases, death.” The American military has a similar program that records the mental abilities of soldiers before they are sent into combat. If a soldier suffers a concussion he will be retested to determine the nature of his brain injury.

This is a far more grim and sober assessment of concussion-related brain injury than anything reported by the liberal media in stories about the Jena Six. Justin Barker had sustained his first concussion when Mychal Bell launched his sneak attack. Then Barker’s skull crashed against the pavement of the school courtyard. After that, all six of the hate-drenched goons went to work stomping and kicking Barker’s face and skull as forcefully as their athletic training would allow. There is no reason to believe that this bestial attack would have stopped short of Barker’s death. Barker was saved by a brave rescuer. The Jena Six had done all they could to inflict the maximum amount of damage on Justin Barker’s face, skull and brain.

Young people, people Barker’s age, tend to fare worse from concussion than older folks. Certified athletic trainer Phil Hossler tells us that “The adolescent brain tissue is more immature than an adult’s brain tissue. Immature brain tissue bruises easier and holds onto symptoms longer.” Justin Barker is now struggling with chronic post-concussion symptoms.

So let us see the assault on Justin Barker for what it was: a cowardly felonious life-threatening surprise attack by six thuggish conspirators. Their gleeful and depraved stomping of an unconscious person’s head was ample justification for charging all six of the conspirators with attempted murder.

Before moving on, I would make mention of something called the Eggshell Skull Doctrine, the principle in law that says every criminal must accept his victim as is. If, for example, during the commission of a robbery the robber pushed the victim and the victim fell to the ground striking his head against the pavement and the victim later died from that blow to his head, the robber could not weasel out of a charge of felony murder by claiming that the victim had an unusually thin skull – an eggshell skull. If the proximate cause of the victim’s fall was the robber’s push, then the robber is at fault for the victim’s death, even if the victim was unusually fragile. In the Jena Six mob assault there were six robust young men who kicked the victim’s brain every which way with all the energy they could muster. Any one of these head traumas could have resulted in fatal internal bleeding, blindness, deafness or lifelong paralysis for Justin Barker. It was only dumb luck that saved all six of the Jena Jerks from charges of homicide and conspiracy to commit homicide. People die from slipping on ice and striking their heads just once. Christopher Reeve was paralyzed because his head was snapped around just once.

As it is, Barker suffers from the effects of post-concussion syndrome. For that injury he is deserving of an ample civil settlement from the families of the wild-in-the-streets Jena Six. And I ask you, if six strapping white teenagers had ambushed Rosa Parks and knocked her unconscious and then enthusiastically kicked her in her face and stomped all over her head and body, would the “civil rights establishment” have scoffed at a district an attorney who called their shoes deadly weapons? Would the Washington Post mischaracterize the attack as “a schoolyard brawl”? If Martin Luther King had been rescued from a nasty stomping by six Klansmen, would the black websites have dismissed the attack as just a “schoolyard smackdown”? Maybe they don’t recognize the attack on Barker as a hate crime because they secretly sympathize with Barker’s attackers.

A Few Words from Reed Walters
The cloud of misinformation swirling about the Jena case prompted LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters to clear the air in an OP-Ed commentary in the New York Times (9/26/07). The DA explained that . . .
 “For 16 years , it has been my job as the district attorney to review each criminal case brought to me by the police department or the sheriff, match the facts to any applicable laws and seek justice for those who have been harmed . . .”

He sympathized with folks who were perturbed by the high-school noose display:
 “I cannot overemphasize how abhorrent and stupid I find the placing of the nooses on the schoolyard tree in late August 2006. If those who committed that act considered it a prank, their sense of humor is seriously distorted. It was mean-spirited and deserves the condemnation of all decent people.

“But it broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none.

“Similarly, the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, who is African American, found no federal law against what was done.

“A district attorney cannot take people to trial for acts not covered in the statutes. Imagine the trampling of individual rights that would occur if prosecutors were allowed to pursue every person whose behavior they disapprove of.

“The ‘hate crime’ the protesters wish me to prosecute does not exist as a stand-alone offense in Louisiana law. It’s not that our Legislature has turned a blind eye to crimes motivated by race or other personal characteristics, but it has addressed the problem in a way that does not cover what happened in Jena. The hate crime statute is used to enhance the sentences of defendants found guilty of specific crimes, like murder or rape, who chose their victims based on race, religion, sexual orientation or other factors.”

Reed Walters patiently explained why the assault on Justin Barker was not the typical schoolyard fight:
“Imagine you were walking down a city street, and someone leapt from behind a tree and hit you so hard that you fell to the sidewalk unconscious. Would you later describe that as a fight?

“Only the intervention of an uninvolved student protected Mr. Barker from severe injury or death. There was serious bodily harm inflicted with a dangerous weapon – the definition of aggravated second-degree battery. Mr. Bell’s conviction on that charge as an adult has been overturned, but I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record.

“I can understand the emotions generated by the juxtaposition of the noose incident with the attack on Mr. Barker and the outcomes for the perpetrators of each. In the final analysis, though, I am bound to enforce the laws of Louisiana as they exist today, not as they might in someone’s vision of a perfect world.

“That is what I have done. And that is what I must continue to do.”

Flocking to Jena
The Associated Press reported that “tens of thousands of protesters rallied yesterday [9/20/07] against what they see as a double standard of prosecution for blacks and whites.” They had been bused in from colleges across America; the historically black colleges were well represented. They came from Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Howard U., Hampton U. and Southern U. Hotels were booked as far away as Natchez, Mississippi. Local officials in the small town did their best to provide portable toilets, water and medical facilities to assure the comfort of the out of towners.

The Reverend Al Sharpton met with Mychal Bell at the courthouse and relayed that Bell was heartened by the show of support and hoped it would remain peaceful. “He doesn’t want anything done that would disparage his name – no violence, not even a negative word,” said Sharpton of Mychal Bell, a violent sadist with a string of battery convictions on his rap sheet.

The Associated Press was almost weepy:
“Old-guard lions like Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton joined scores of college students bused in from across the nation who said they wanted to make a stand for racial equality just as their parents did in the 1950s and ‘60s.”

Jesse Jackson “likened the demonstration to the marches on Selma and the Montgomery bus boycott.”

“Demonstrators gathered at the local courthouse, a park, and the yard at Jena High where the tree once stood. (It was cut down in July.) At times the town resembled a giant festival, with people setting up tables for food and drink and some dancing. . .”
“State police could be seen chatting amicably with demonstrators at the courthouse . . .”
“President Bush said he understood the emotions and that the FBI was monitoring the situation.
“ ‘The events in Louisiana have saddened me,’ the president told reporters at the White House. ‘All of us in America want there to be, you know, fairness when it comes to justice.’” (AP, 9/21/07)

This mostly-black revival meeting had been heavily promoted on black blogs, black websites, black talk radio, Facebook, MySpace and the black press. They had come to show solidarity with one of their own. It was a welcome opportunity to do something ritualistic in large groups; it was a chance to luxuriate in nostalgia for the righteous crusades of yesteryear.

Tina Cheatham, 24, was representative of many in the crowd. According to National Public Radio, “Cheatham missed the civil rights marches at Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and Little Rock, Arkansas, but she had no intention of missing another brush with history. ‘It was a good chance to be part of something historic since I wasn’t around for the civil rights movement,’ she said. ‘This is kind of the 21st century version of it.’”

As I said, they came to Jena to luxuriate in nostalgia. The photo with the AP story shows a sea of black faces. The caption says, “Marchers from across the nation fill a street in Jena.” One guy is holding up a big placard emblazoned with the words “They stood for us, now we stand for them – Free Jena 6.” It made as much sense as anything at the Jena demo. In truth, Mychal Bell and his thug posse never stood for anything but hatred and low animal cunning. Bell is a demonstrated coward and a sadist. His sidekicks are just the sort of jerks a punk like Bell would naturally attract. Bell is enamored with the black gangsta lifestyle which he emulates and praises on his Internet homepage.

 Jena isn’t the sleepy little “town that time forgot,” as it has been depicted by so many liberal scribblers. Jena is, in fact, a town like most other towns: a town with radios and televisions and computers and satellite receivers – which is to say, a town that has been badly polluted by the morally vacant offerings of the black entertainment conglomerates. Their channels foul homes with daily discharges of trash-talking rappers, thuggish poseurs, trampy hos, loveless lust, drugs by the ton and lots of casual violence. It’s the imagery of one possible black lifestyle. Unfortunately, it is a popular black lifestyle.

The Jena Six confirmed their attachment to this ruinous subculture when Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis made on-stage guest appearances at the BET Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta on October 13, 2007. When the two skull stompers came on stage, the black audience gave them a standing ovation and Emcee Katt Williams joked, “They don’t look so tough, do they?” Each of the cowardly ambush artists gave a speech thanking their families, their sidekicks and “the Hip Hop Nation.” The two punks were photographed striking poses on the red carpet.

Black Mephistopheles
Alfred Sharpton had come to Jena because he couldn’t stay away: if the big Jena demo had come and gone without him people might have gotten the idea that demonstrations could happen without his blowhard hyperbole. And besides, Jesse Jackson would be there and Sharpton couldn’t remember when he wasn’t competing with Jesse for the mantle of Premier Civil Rights Person. When Sharpton called the prosecution of the Jena Six mob attack “the most blatant example of disparity in the justice system” the attendees bobbed their heads as though they had never before heard him say that. None of them caught the irony of their taking moral instruction from this genuinely evil man. The “Reverend” Sharpton (total number of minutes spent in divinity school: zero) is, after all, an impresario of the black lynch mob.

Back in 1995 Sharpton had chosen to make himself a driving force in a campaign against Freddy’s Fashion Mart on 125th Street in Harlem. The proprietor of the clothing store had offended Sharpton by attempting to expand his business into space then occupied by a black sub-tenant. Sharpton turned this local dispute into a racial holocaust. He organized a picket line outside of Freddy’s and left things in the care of his lieutenant, Morris Powell. The picketers ranted against the “Jew bastards” and “the blood-sucking Jews.”

Sharpton and Powell made numerous appearances on the black radio stations WWRL and WLIB, the stations Sharpton calls “the drums of the contemporary black community.” Powell openly threatened the Jewish owner of Freddy’s: “We gonna see that this cracker suffer.” Morris Powell darkly threatened that “this street will burn.”

The “drums” had done their job. One of Sharpton’s picketers forced his way into Freddy’s Fashion Mart and shouted: “I will be back to burn the Jew store down!” Before he could make good on his threat, another Sharpton protester named Abubunde Mulocko burst into the store with a loaded .38 caliber pistol and shot three white people. Then he shot a Pakistani whom he mistook for a Jew. Then he torched the store and burned alive five Hispanics, a Guyanese and a black security guard whom the protesters had vilified as a “cracker lover.”

It was a hate crime; there was no doubt of that. It was an execution without due process, which is to say, a lynching, and Alfred Sharpton had his bloody fingerprints all over it. It wasn’t the first black lynch mob Al Sharpton had inspired.

On an evening in August 1991 the three-car motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the Grand Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch, was returning from the Rebbe’s weekly visit to the graves of his wife and his father-in-law. The first car in the Brooklyn motorcade was an unmarked police car; the Rebbe Schneerson was in the second car; the last car was a station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh.

As the station wagon entered the intersection of Utica Avenue and President Street a Chevrolet Malibu approach and collided with the station wagon, sending it careering off the roadway and onto the sidewalk where it struck two seven-year-old cousins, Angela and Gavin Cato.

When the Jews tried to help the injured Guyanese children they were attacked by black bystanders. Officers from the 71st Precinct were dispatched to the scene. An ambulance from the Hatzolah Ambulance Service arrived at the scene before the City ambulance. Hasidic Jews offered immediate medical assistance to everyone. As the one hundred fifty black bystanders grew more hostile, the police ordered the Jewish men and their ambulance to depart out of concern for their safety. A City ambulance rushed Gavin Cato to Kings County Hospital where he died soon after his arrival.

Immediately, a false rumor began to circulate that the Hatzolah ambulance crew had saved the Jews and left the injured black children to die on the sidewalk. Blacks began to throw rocks and bottles at Lubavitchers on the street. Then the unrest erupted into a full-blown rampage, with blacks shattering windows, setting fires and looting stores. Gangs of blacks roamed the streets attacking Jews and shouting “Heil, Hitler!”

At 11:20 p.m., a mob of about fifteen young black men shouting “Get the Jew!” swarmed over an uncomprehending Hasidic scholar named Yankel Rosenbaum, who was stabbed repeatedly. Yankel died at Kings County Hospital hours later, after identifying Lemerick Nelson as is attacker. Nelson was carrying a bloody knife when he was apprehended. Nelson confessed that he had stabbed Yankel Rosenbaum.

That same evening another black wolf pack murdered an Italian American named Anthony Graziosi, whom the mob mistook for a Jew. By dawn, one child, Gavin Cato, had died because of a traffic accident and two white men, neither of whom knew anything of this accident, had been lynched by black mobs.

Black gangs ran amok in the streets of Crown Heights for four days, while the city’s black mayor, David Dinkins, attended the U.S. Open tennis matches in Forest Hills and the city’s black police commissioner, Lee Brown, let the riot continue without police intervention. The dapper David Dinkins, whom Al Sharpton had once reviled as insufficiently black, as a “nigger” and “a whore,” repeatedly referred to the violent nomadic predators as “demonstrators,” even as they were demonstrating racist bigotry and their utter contempt for law and decency.

Three thousand blacks turned out for the Gavin Cato funeral. At the graveside, Al Sharpton addressed the throng, making certain that black folks understood what their attitude ought to be. He vilified the Jews as “diamond merchants;” he legitimized black hostility toward the Jews. The crowd ate it up.

The 1993 Girgenti Report commissioned by Governor Cuomo said the Crown Heights riots were characterized by “aggression of one group against another” and “criminal activity . . . was targeted against the Hasidic community in a way rarely witnessed in New York history.” In short, thousands of blacks had indulged themselves in a four-day orgy of violent racism.

In the end, stores had been looted and torched, cars had been overturned and burned, 188 people had been injured and two white men had been lynched by rampaging racist blacks. Black commentators never mention the murdered Mr. Graziosi because his death upsets the symmetry of a brainless equation that exists only in their own minds: “Gavin Cato is dead; Yankel Rosenbaum is dead; everything is even,” which is nonsense. Gavin Cato was one of more than six hundred New York City residents killed in traffic accidents in 1991. Yankel Rosenbaum, by contrast, was lynched by a mob of hate-filled black folks. Anthony Graziosi was also lynched by black racists because he “looked like a Jew.” Black commentators fudge the historical record: they sweep the lynching of Anthony Graziosi under the rug and then they fret about why the driver of the car that hit Gavin Cato was never prosecuted. Here’s the reason: Yosef Lifsh was the hapless occupant of a vehicle that was forced onto the sidewalk by another rogue vehicle – driver unknown. Getting hit by another car is not a crime, but lynching people is a crime. The same sort of twisted tribal group-think permeates the Jena Six imbroglio: blacks are distressed that the members of a thwarted lynch-mob attack are being prosecuted, while the three white jerks who dangled nooses from a tree limb are not being prosecuted. Here’s the reason: battery is a crime; conspiring with others to savagely stomp someone is a crime; attempted murder is a crime, but trimming trees with knotted plant fibers is not yet a crime in the state of Louisiana. In another setting, the noose knotters might have been charged with incitement to riot or disorderly conduct, but the schoolyard was vacant when the nooses were hung – there were no potential rioters. The nooses were pulled down an hour after they were discovered; the few students who saw the nooses played with them for amusement.

A smart man can do a lot of evil without violating black-letter law. Al Sharpton’s inflammatory speeches on radio and at rallies served only to poison race relations and to swell the ranks of the rioters. Again and again, in Crown Heights and at Freddy’s Fashion Mart he proved himself to be an impresario of lurid ethnic violence.

Lemerick Nelson was charged with the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum in October 1991. The 12-member jury included only two whites and no Jews. The evidence against Nelson was overwhelming: the victim had identified Nelson as his attacker; Nelson was in possession of the bloody knife; Nelson had confessed to stabbing Rosenbaum. But this jury was not inclined to send a black kid to prison for the murder of a mere Jew. In a clear case of “jury nullification” they found Nelson “not guilty.” Then a bunch of the black jurors went out to a restaurant with Nelson and his lawyers and all of them partied together all night long. They were a foreshadowing of the O.J. Simpson jury. Tribalism was triumphant. Back then black folks were not pouting about “unequal justice.” In some larger sense they felt they had “gotten even.” Vengeance is the mother’s milk of tribalism.

Even before the Crown Heights pogrom Al Sharpton had championed another de facto black lynch mob. On the evening of April 19th, 1989, under a full moon, a large contingent of young black men trooped into New York’s Central Park and began a series of felony assaults on people they encountered. Among their victims was a white woman who became known world-wide as the Central Park Jogger. The black tide swarmed over her. She was savagely gang raped, sodomized, beaten to a bloody pulp with a length of iron pipe and left for dead in a deep coma. Such wolf-pack attacks were common enough to have acquired their own slang name: New York’s “minority youth” called their pastime “wilding.”

As calls poured in from wilding victims, the cops swooped in and swept up some of the perps. Even before they confessed to the crime during official interrogation sessions, they were laughing and bragging about their crimes while in the cop cars and in the holding cells. There were plenty of ear witnesses. At trial they were condemned by their own confessions and the accusations of their fellow perps. There was lots of finger pointing.

This hideous mob attack certainly deserves to be called a hate crime. Shattering the woman’s skull and leaving her to die in a lake of her own blood was certainly not an act of love. To any objective observer, the black mob made a concerted effort to murder their victim. They were, in fact, a black sexist lynch mob and probably a racist lynch mob also.

And who came rushing to their rescue, vilifying the police and offering the rapists a public-relations makeover – it was America’s master of charismatic racism, the Reverend Al Sharpton. Based on no evidence whatsoever, Sharpton declared that the victim’s boyfriend had raped and beaten her almost to death. Sharpton’s bused-in protesters assembled at the courthouse and screamed that the nearly-murdered victim was “a whore.” They shouted her name again and again. They chanted, “The boyfriend did it! The boyfriend did it!” As an extra slimy touch Sharpton brought the interracial-rape hoaxer Tawana Brawley to the trial of the Central Park rapists and introduced her to the confessed sex criminals. Sharpton did his best to minimize the horrible injuries of the victim, who required years of convalescent care; he requested that she be examined by a psychiatrist. Said the Rev.: “We’re not endorsing the damage to the girl . . . if there was this damage.” What can one add? The man is an unwashed toilet with legs.

This is the same Al Sharpton who rushed to Jena to do public relations for the cowardly ambush attackers. The black protesters loved Al Sharpton – not because he was good, but because he was reliably tribal. The single unwavering theme of Al Sharpton’s life has been racial patriotism. Sharpton explains his motivation in his autobiography: “Those people, blacks, are my people. I set out to serve them when I started preaching at the age of four, and that is all that I’ve ever wanted to do.” He proudly adds: “I’m totally financed by the black community,” which makes him immune to the criticism of any other community.

Says Sharpton, “I always knew how to attract attention; I grew up attracting the attention of the crowd. I grew up understanding the psychology of standing out. And I understood the emotions of people.” Playing on the emotions of the black lower class is Sharpton’s chosen occupation. The fact that his chosen constituency tends to be poorly educated, chronically uninformed and wedded to a common unhistorical mythology suits the Reverend Al’s game plan perfectly. Sharpton knows that the black community will never imagine the Jena Six to have been a racist lynch mob, because it’s a community that loudly denies that it is even possible for a black person to be a racist. When white people are being lynched by black mobs in the heart to New York City what are black people going to believe, their beloved tribal mythology or their no-good lying eyes?

Stompin’ on White Folks for Fun and Profit
There was an easy way for the Jena Six to avoid all the inconvenience of a trial and the discomfort of imprisonment: abstinence. Some folks call it “impulse control” or “anger management” or “Just don’t do the crime, stupid!” But not a single liberal commentator, activist or congressperson has called the Jena Jerks on the carpet for actually committing a hate crime. They don’t even acknowledge that it was a hate crime – as though these muggers just forgot to rob the unconscious Justin Barker after they tried to kick his brains out.

With so many enablers helping the rompin’ stompin’ Jena sextet to reinvent themselves as the real victims, it wasn’t long before the teens caught on to the fact that victimhood could be very profitable. Their first soft touch was a 42-year-old black physician named Stephen Ayers who was moved by a protester’s version of events in Jena. Doctor Ayers had treated the marcher, who came away from Jena with sore feet. “I was concerned about what was going on up there and thought the district attorney was a bit harsh in his treatment of Mr. Bell,” said the kindly doctor, who posted $5,400, the required 12% bond necessary to spring Mychal Bell from the slammer. Bail had been set at $45,000 because Bell was a repeat violent offender who had planned and committed yet another violent assault while on probation for previous offenses. Under the circumstances, the bail was not excessive. “I thought it was overkill,” quipped Ayers.

The NAACP announced that it was collecting cash for the Jena Six legal defense fund but the donation link on their website funneled all donations to the NAACP’s own donation bucket. When black bloggers objected to this slush-fund setup, the NAACP put up a dedicated Jena-Six donation link, several days later.

An article in the Chicago Tribune (11/11/07) tells us that “Michael Baisden, a nationally syndicated black radio host who is leading a major fundraising drive on behalf of the Jena 6, has declined to reveal how much he has collected. Attorneys for the first defendant to go to trial, Mychal Bell, say they have yet to receive any money from him.”

And: “There are definitely questions out there about the money,” said Alan Bean, director of a Texas-based group Friends of Justice, who was the first civil rights activist to investigate the Jena 6 case. “I hate to even address this issue because it inevitably will raise questions as to all of the money that has been raised, and that is going to hurt the defendants.” Really? And why would that be a bad thing?

To date, contributions for the Jena Six total at least half a million dollars. The parents of the rogue teens have all refused to talk openly about how they are spending the estimated quarter million dollars of donation cash in a bank account that they now control. Hints of what these folks were up to surfaced on the Internet, including photos and videos of Jena 6 redneck Robert Bailey mugging before a webcam with his mouth stuffed with hundred-dollar bills and his bed smothered in greenbacks.

Of all the groups raking in cash for the Jena gang only one has given a full disclosure of how it operates. The group calling itself Color of Change pulled in $212,000 using an Internet campaign and has posted images of cancelled checks and documents to support its claim that all but $1,230 was paid out to attorneys for the Jena teens.

After that, Mychal Bell’s father popped up on Michael Baisden’s popular radio talk show and accused Color of Change founder James Rucker of using the funds unwisely. Baisden offered that Rucker “sounds shady to me,” even though Bell’s dad could provide no evidence to support his accusation. Then Baisden announced his own Jena 6 fundraiser and his intention to raise one million dollars. The NAACP, which collected ten thousand bucks from English rocker David Bowie and another ten grand from others, said it was winding down its fund raising for the Jena 6 and would give the money to the defense attorneys, after making a few deductions.

The total amount of money in play is unknown because so many contributors ignored front groups and gave their money directly to the defendants’ families. Lots of folks raised money on the Internet by selling Jena Six T-shirts or invoking the Jena 6 cause. Most of that money has vanished without a trace. The quarter million in the families’ shared account comes to $41,666 per family in a six-way split. That’s more than three times the average Jena resident’s per capita annual income of $13,761. It’s a sweet temptation.

The most obvious reason for concealing donations would be to avoid paying civil damages to the victim. Every liberal scribbler has tried to minimize Justin Barker’s injuries by emphasizing the fact that he was ambulatory that evening. In truth, people walk in and out of emergency rooms with horrific injuries every day. The fact that Barker was determined to attend his high school ring ceremony is in no way a medical diagnosis of the extent of his injuries. Justin left the ceremony early because he was in so much pain. His face and eye were damaged; he displays the classic symptoms of post-concussion syndrome, which is to say, brain damage. As soon as the last of the Jena Six have been given a criminal sentence there will be enough documented evidence to proceed with civil trials of the Jena hate squad.

Considering the injuries inflicted on the ambushed victim, the extreme premeditation, the cowardly six-on-one power imbalance, the fact that the crime was committed on school property in broad daylight in front of lots of witnesses and the fact that it was a hate crime, getting civil convictions should not be too difficult. A civil judgment of $50,000 against each of these punks would be modest compensation by contemporary standards, so that’s $300,000 right there. Any sensible jury would find an award of all the money so far collected by the Jena gangsta posse to be scant compensation for the harm they have inflicted. Civil judgments are good for at least ten years.

The Trials
The autumn of black bombast rose in a crescendo of formulaic breast beating by the usual capering demagogues; it splashed across Jena like a cloud burst and then it faded away as the last bus of the nostalgia-driven faux freedom rides bumped and backfired out of town. The Jena Six had been useful to the black community as unwitting characters in a bigger drama intended to distract our nation from the shameful excesses of The Hideous Duke Rape Hoax, during which the psychosexual underpinnings of a shared black mythology had been hung out like soiled underwear for all the world to examine. After that, the black community had tried to regain its self-respect by making a very big deal about the prosecution of five teenage outlaws who had been bundled together as a hit squad by a sixth hulking teen who was so out of control that he was pounding the snot out of the townsfolk while on probation. The black community further diminished its declining national stature by choosing to champion this particular gang of thugs. These guys were not hapless victims; they were not the Scottsboro Boys. They were trouble. Their trials were almost a footnote to the grandstanding in little Jena.

The first to go on trial was Mychal Bell. Though he was 16 at the time of his latest crime, he was charged as an adult because of his considerable criminal history and because he was the architect of a criminal conspiracy. His trial began on June 26th, 2007 with District Judge J.P. Mauffray, Jr. presiding. On that first day, District Attorney Reed Walters reduced the charges against Bell from attempted murder to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit the same. An aggravated battery requires the use of a weapon, but the jury didn’t have to stretch their imaginations to understand that shoes could be deadly weapons when the victim had been rendered defenseless by a surprise blow to his head and was lying motionless on the ground beneath the twelve stomping feet of six muscular athletes. Witnesses testified that they saw Bell strike Justin Barker. Bell’s attorney, Blane Williams, who is also an African American, urged Bell to accept a plea bargain.

Bell was convicted on the battery charge. The judge set September 20th, 2007 as the date of sentencing. A request to lower Bell’s $90,000 bond was denied because of his violent past; he was already on probation for pounding someone on Christmas Day of 2005 – then he was convicted of another violent assault and two counts of criminal property damage while on probation. An inside source tipped ESPN that one of the battery counts was for smashing his big fist into the face of a teenage girl.

Judge Mauffray upheld Bell’s battery conviction but vacated the conspiracy conviction on the ground that Bell should have been tried as a juvenile on that count. On September 14th, 2007, Louisiana’s Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Bell’s battery conviction, holding that the charge was not among those for which a 16-year-old could be tried as an adult. Judge Mauffray denied a request for bail while Bell’s appeal was pending. An attempt by Bell’s new legal team to have Judge Mauffray removed from the case came to naught.

On September 26th, 2007, Governor Kathleen Blanco announced that Mychal Bell would be retried as a juvenile. Bell was released on $45,000 bond after a distant well-wisher posted the required 12% cash payment. The dangerous Mister Bell was released and monitored with an electronic tracking device and supervised by a probation officer.

On October 11th, 2007, Mychal Bell entered juvenile court expecting one more routine hearing. To his surprise, after a six-hour hearing, Judge Mauffray sentenced Bell to 18 months in a juvenile lockup for two counts of battery and two more counts of criminal destruction of property. All of this was old baggage from Bell’s earlier gangsta activities.

“He’s locked up again,” said Marcus Jones, the man identified as Bell’s father in the newspapers. “No bail has been set or nothing,” said the dumbfounded dad. Bell’s parents were ordered to pay all court costs and witness costs, according to Al Sharpton.

A defense motion to dismiss the charges against Bell for the Barker stomping on the grounds of double jeopardy was denied by Judge Mauffray. Bell’s second trial for his attack on Barker was scheduled for December 6th, 2007.

Typically, juvenile trials are closed to the public, but the Associated Press and 24 other news organizations lodged a lawsuit to pry open the legal process and get full access to Bell’s case. On December third the AP disclosed that Mychal Bell “is close to a deal that would allow him to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and avoid a second trial . . .” The next day the AP announced that Bell had “pleaded guilty Monday [the 3rd] to a battery charge that could result in his release from a detention center in about eight months.”

Under the deal, Bell pled guilty to second-degree battery in return for an 18-month sentence and got credit for the ten months he had been in slam. It was a sweet deal for Bell: he had been facing juvenile lockup until his 21st birthday. The Jena townsfolk would have been safer if the court had been less lenient. As a cosmetic bonus, the court ordered Bell to pay court costs “plus $935 to Mr. Barker’s family, testify if his codefendants in the Barker attack stand trial, undergo counseling and be reintegrated into the school system . . .” (AP, 12/3/07).

This is nuts! Bell should never have been allowed on school property again. Stomping a classmate warrants permanent expulsion. The judgment of $935 is chickenfeed. Bell’s family shares control of a bank account bulging with a quarter million dollars of donated cash. Bell’s tiny fine teaches him the wrong lesson.

On September 4th, 2007, the charges against Carwin Jones and Theodore Shaw were reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit the same. Robert Bailey, Jr. was charged the same way on September 10th. The trials of these three and that of Bryant Purvis will take place in adult court because they were all adults under Louisiana law at the time of the ambush attack against Justin Barker. Purvis was arraigned on battery and conspiracy charges on November 7th, 2007; he pled not guilty. His trial is set for March 24th, 2008. He is now living in Texas – he would not tell the Associated Press exactly where. He says he’s concentrating on his studies . . . and basketball.

Charges against the sixth teen, Jesse Ray Beard, have been sealed. This punk will be tried in juvenile court because he was 14 when he joined The Little Lynch Mob that Couldn’t.

Losing the High Ground
The big Jena shindig of September 20th gratified the emotional needs of many people, but in the aggregate it was a theatrical event – a piece of political theater. In Jena, America bore witness to the black community’s scramble to retake the moral high ground after its embarrassing deflation during the Duke Rape Hoax debacle. For them, the doings in little Jena were a welcome distraction, an eagerly awaited opportunity to get back to the business of correcting wayward white people.

Typical of the torrent of finger-wagging holier-than-thou sermons from black liberals was one that appeared in the Newark Star Ledger under the title “Desegregating shade trees everywhere” (9/30/07, p.1). It was written by African American Anita L. Allen, who bills herself as The Moralist. She’s a Ledger regular and a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Allen is adamant that “In 21st-century America there is no good reason our children should face the stigma – or privileges – associated with single-race shade trees.” She means well, but her facts are not factual. Black teachers at Jena High recalled that classmates of every race associated under the shade tree but, being human, these young people tended to congregate in friendship groups based on common interests. The African American students at Jena High tended to congregate at the school’s bleachers near the school auditorium. They were not compelled to gather there; they chose to meet their friends at the bleachers. Has a single black “moralist” complained about the “stigma – or privileges” associated with single-race bleachers? Of course not. Black folks love their comfort zones.

When the federal government informed historically black colleges, such as Spelman and Morehouse, that they would loose their tax-exempt status if they did not admit non-black applicants, there was a flurry of anxious concern in the black media that these havens of black culture would be contaminated by people with alien perspectives.

Ms. Allen admonishes white folks that “Jena parents, teachers and school administrators should have viewed the white-only shade tree as a serious problem.” Where is her heartfelt concern that black parents, teachers and black school administrators don’t view “black colleges” as “a serious problem?” Blacks would be infuriated by a proliferation of high school clubs or college fraternities and sororities that restricted their memberships to people of the white race or promoted “white culture” or “white pride.” School authorities would move to crush such groups and to punish the students involved. It is certain that school funding of these groups would be withdrawn.

And yet . . . when the promoters of school-based apartheid are black, then all de jure blacks-only organizations are re-imagined in the liberal mind to be “support groups” or “safe havens” or nurseries for the preservation of endangered black cultural modalities or something equally dopey. All of these familiar black student organizations with their school’s smiling approval and their school’s financial support are exclusively one-race-only comfort zones to a degree that the Jena shade tree never was.

What are the chances that the black students who rolled into Jena in buses from Spelman and Morehouse and dozens of other schools will return to their school-based comfort zones and demand that the “shade trees” of blacks-only fraternities and sororities and blacks-only student groups be cut down in the interest of enhanced racial togetherness? In the pinched little universe of self-imposed black apartheid, where only whites can be racist and all blacks share the nobility of victimhood, there is no incentive for blacks to see whites as anything but the cause of all their shortcomings. As the sainted Sister Souljah said, whites are just those vile beings with “that low-down dirty nature.”

From this dark perspective it’s easy for blacks to imagine that the brutal stomping of an unconscious white student by six hate-drenched black athletes was no big deal – certainly not as significant as the symbolism of a knotted rope. For a people who depend so heavily on nostalgia for their collective identity, symbolism looms larger than mere reality.

But remember this: in over forty statements taken regarding the assault on Justin Barker not a single person – not one of the Jena Six – mentioned the one-hour noose display even one time. District Attorney Reed Walters recalled: “When this case was brought to me and during our investigation and during the trial, there was no such linkage ever suggested. This compact story line has only been suggested after the fact.” The linkage between the noose display and the ambush attack on Justin Barker was created in order to dignify the Jena Six hate squad – to re-invent them as defenders of Black Dignity. In truth, they were just five young jerks who were inspired to commit a hate crime by an out-of-control repeat violent offender.

Thomas Clough
Copyright 2008
January 2nd, 2008