For those of you who don't know about the Jena Six, please read this article. I don't normally write about important shit but this just makes me so mad I could cry.
So six students have been charged with attempted murder for beating up a white student. Keep in mind the victim did suffer a concussion and multiple bruises, but was well enough to attend a school function on the day of the beating. Parents of the students charged with attempted murder say the town is determined to "keep institutionalized slavery alive and well." Most white residents however, see no connection between the nooses hanging from the tree in the school's quad (an act that was dismissed as nothing more than "a prank" by school officials) and the fight that broke out months later. In the words of the town's librarian, it "just didn't seem to be racist."
Meanwhile 2 of the students whose parents were unable to make bail (set between $70,000 and $120,000) have spent the past 7 months in jail awaiting trial. Keep in mind, these kids are between the ages of 15 and 17 and they're facing 20 years to life in prison. One student has already been convicted of aggravated battery by an all-white jury and faces 22 years.
Seriously though, this shit is ridiculous. It just really goes to show how far we haven't come. The district attorney was out to get these kids from the beginning. He told the local paper that when the students were convicted, he would seek the maximum penalty allowed, and threatened in a school assembly that he could "end their lives with the stroke of a pen."
According to one of the boys' fathers, for better or for worse, now his son "knows what it is to be black."
1 comment:
I am completely enraged by this. We should get all these people together and throw them off a cliff. Bigots.
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