A Perfect Storm: The Jena Six from a Sociohistorical Perspective

by Juan Battle and Michael Bennett

On September 20, 2007, upwards of 15,000 people, of all races (though primarily African American), of multiple generations, and from all over the United States converged on Jena, LA. Among the protesters were Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, and several self-described White supremacists. On that same day, similar rallies were held in other parts of the country. What happened in Jena that managed to move so many in the United States to respond so passionately?

In August 2006, during a back-toschool assembly at Jena High School, a Black student asked permission to sit under a tree in the school’s courtyard. The tree was referred to as the White Tree—a gathering spot for White youths in this town that is 85% White.

The next morning, according to several accounts, nooses were hanging from the tree. Most students did not see the nooses before they were cut down by school officials, yet word of the matter got around and school officials eventually suspended three White students who were involved. As the New York Times reported, many local Blacks saw the incident as “an unambiguous gesture of racial intimidation.” Fights erupted in the town over the next few weeks. In November 2006, a fire broke out at the high school. The high school was closed for several days, and, when classes resumed in December, another fight broke out during the lunch hour. Six youths, according to law enforcement officials, ganged up on a White student, who was taken to the hospital. He was treated and released; later that evening, he attended a school event.

Six Black youths were arrested for participating in the beating, and five were originally charged as adults with attempted second-degree murder, although those charges were later reduced. One of the six was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery, but the conviction was thrown out in September 2007 by a Louisiana appeals court, which ruled that he mistakenly had been tried as an adult.

Modern Look at Racism

The protests organized during that same month arose out of a conviction that the Jena Six represent the latest incarnation of a separate and unequal social, educational, legal, and judicial system that has characterized the United States from its inception. Viewing these events through a sociohistorical lens, one can see the simultaneous occurrence of early modern, late modern, and postmodern forms of racism. Jena is the eye of a perfect storm that brings together these various historical forms of racism and the institutions through which they are manifested.

The image of the noose conjures the legacy of racial violence stretching back to the origins of the slave trade. It symbolizes the history of state-sponsored racial terrorism that was, in theory, superseded in the late modern period by the era of integration. However, the older generation of protestors at Jena lived through a time when the noose was not merely a “symbolic” lynching.

The mid-twentieth century was supposed to see the end of separate but equal as the law of the land. Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965) all symbolized the intention of equality between Blacks and Whites. However, as we move from the prescription of late modern intentionality to the description of the postmodern materialization of race relations, a very different experience comes into view.

De Jure to De Facto

Jena reminds us that social and spatial segregation persists despite surface changes in education, the judicial system, and other social institutions. Though no longer legal, segregation is very much alive and supported throughout various social structures in the United States. A tree bearing strange and forbidden fruit is a central symbol for both Black and White religious observances, but the most segregated hour in America is still 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, as Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently expounded. Contemporary forms of racism may not be de jure, but they are de facto.

One postmodern manifestation of racism is spatial discrimination; it’s understood that, even in the absence of legal prohibitions, this space is for White people and that space is for Black people. When such boundaries are violated, the old symbols and structures of racism may be summoned as reminders of the rules concerning power, places, and peoples. The Black students of Jena are given the message that though they might go to that school, it is not their school. On a larger scale, the striking dissimilarity between the malign neglect of Black residents of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the proactive intervention for White residents displaced by Southern California’s wildfires demonstrates the separate and unequal socioeconomic privileges and public policy perks experienced by different races and the spaces they inhabit.

The inequality of our social institutions— the criminal justice system, the education system, voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida, lack of equal access to healthcare—teaches us that to be Black in the United States is to be consistently reminded that though you call this country home, you do not own anything in the house. You are not to be an actor; you are to be acted upon.

The Jena Six story became a perfect storm, a lightening rod for protest, because it embodied the message that, though the legal structures that enforce racism are gone, the social structures that perpetuate it are not. Public schools are more segregated in 2007 than they were in 1954. Though Jim Crow is dead, James Crow, Esq., is alive and well. As a result, every generation of Black Americans will have experienced at least one type of segregation—whether legal, socioeconomic, or spatial—and some form of racism, from the most obvious to the most subtle. These various embodiments of U.S. racial history simultaneously occurred in that one story, in that one small town, with those six boys, in Jena, LA.