It came to my attention that the members of the Ku Klux Klan are planning to march on Jena on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday this comming week. I am so disgusted with this and I'm not sure how much play this story is getting so I'll bring it to you all....in case you didn't know.
As reported on Revcon.us
A white supremacist group recently announced plans to march and rally in Jena, Louisiana on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 21, 2008. These white racists, who call themselves the “Nationalist Movement,” are billing the event as “Jena Justice Day—No to Jena 6, No to King.” They were quoted encouraging people to bring homemade signs calling for jailing the Jena 6, opposing the Martin Luther King holiday, and “down with communism.” They suggested that people come in U.S. military or Confederate Civil War uniforms, and they even encouraged people to DISPLAY NOOSES!!
As for these racists and their march, we have one thing to say: THE DAY IS LONG SINCE PAST WHEN VIGILANTE RACISTS RUNNING AMOK AND TERRORIZING BLACK PEOPLE IS TOLERABLE. Go crawl back under your miserable rocks, and get out of the way.
But for those who argue that the Jena 6 case is about six Black youth who need to be punished for beating up a white student...and NOT about nooses being hung on a “whites-only” tree...this alone should make it very clear that this case is truly all about the fact that the nooses hung at Jena High School stood for a whole history and present-day reality of racism, oppression and discrimination…AND the fact that Black students resisted this.
The system came down HARD on six Black youth to make the point—that they will not allow defiant rebellion against the status quo of racist unequal justice, segregation and KKK terror. From the very beginning, high school administrators, city officials, the DA and judges AND officials from the U.S. Justice Department worked together to push forward the outrageous prosecution of the Jena 6. But as word spread throughout the country a real grassroots movement grew. On September 20, tens of thousands of Black people from all over the country demonstrated in Jena, and many more protested in other cities and towns.
But KKK-types then jumped out in a reactionary counter-attack. Families of the Jena 6 got death threats and a white supremacist website encouraged vigilante action against them by posting their names and addresses. As a result of the struggle of the people, the courts were forced to release one of the Jena 6, Mychal Bell, who had been unjustly imprisoned for 10 months. But no sooner was he out than they threw him right back in, supposedly for probation violation from “previous offenses.” Then the DA, the Jena Times newspaper, and the mayor went on a mission in the media to strike back, saying the real “victim” in all this is the white student, Justin Barker, who the Jena 6 are accused of beating up. And the media has also been a launching pad for vilifying the Jena 6 as gangsters and thugs. But support for the Jena 6 has continued to grow, especially among students, and in November thousands of people marched in DC against racist hate crimes, demanding that the Jena 6 be free.
There is a real battle, a profound political struggle, going on that must take off to higher levels, with two sides fighting over a question that, right now, concentrates the oppression of Black people: WHAT WILL BE THE OUTCOME OF THE JENA 6 CASE?
Talk to other Black people who live in Jena. They’ll tell you about how a Black man was stomped to death by a gang of white guys because he bumped into a white woman. You’ll hear other accounts of Black people being attacked, beaten up, killed. Maybe it was a Black man who dated a white woman. Maybe it was a Black youth with an attitude a white cop didn’t like. Or maybe it was someone attacked just for being Black.
It’s not that surprising there was a “whites-only” tree at Jena High School.
On the road leading right out of Jena, you pass a big mansion on a hill, standing all by itself. There’s a big iron fence around it, with a huge gate blocking the driveway. The whole thing is adorned with American AND Confederate flags. Stop at a gas station on the way to Jena and go into the gift shop and see trinkets for sale—ceramic figures of degrading caricatures of Black people. You see t-shirts for sale with Confederate flags and slogans openly promoting white supremacy.
In a place like Jena, you feel the echoes of slavery. You can’t help but be reminded that on this very ground, in these very places, kidnapped Africans were bought and sold, shackled and worked to death. Children ripped from their parents’ hands at the auction block. Plantations where Black people created tremendous wealth for their owners. And white slave-catchers hunted down runaway slaves. THIS economic system of slavery is at the very foundation of the whole way the capitalist system developed and grew in this country.
It took nothing less than the Civil War to end slavery in this country. But even this did not end the systemic oppression and super-exploitation of Black people. Instead, capitalism “re-integrated” millions of Black people in the South into new forms of oppression. Now they were to be exploited as sharecroppers, sometimes working on the same plantation land they, or their parents and grandparents, had worked on as slaves. And coming out of this and in turn propping up all this was the persistent “Southern culture” of KKK cross burnings, lynchings, and Jim Crow laws that required “white only” and “Black only” public schools, drinking fountains, trains, buses and all kinds of other public places.
And this continues right down to today. White racists—admitted and otherwise—will argue that they are just upholding “proud traditions,” “Southern culture,” and “the way of life our parents and grandparents have all enjoyed.” And down in Jena some who loudly say that they are not racist will, in the same conversation, tell you that Black people are dangerous, lazy, criminals with a lower innate intelligence than white people. This is the kind of culture and thinking that in turn bolsters and justifies all the ways that capitalism profits off of the exploitation and oppression of the masses of Black people—subjecting them to the lowest-paid jobs, the worst working conditions, the worst neighborhoods with little or no social services, and the highest unemployment rates.
These unequal and oppressive relations have been and continue to be brutally enforced. And while Black people no longer mainly face widespread lynching and cross-burnings—though the KKK would like to bring them back and there was a cross-burning just recently “up south” in Peekskill, New York—they do face the widespread terror of police brutality and murder.
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