Seeking Justice in Jena

Thank you and you're welcome, SthPacific.

Thank you, Angryindian.

Thank you for the flag and your input, Komjobe. 

Well put.

The history of the lynching of persons of African descent, during and after slavery, is the history of the United States.
Three nooses hung from a tree in Jena, Louisiana, after an incident involving Black students sitting under the 'white tree', has been identified by many in the town as a causative factor in the racially tense atmosphere it has created after the incident. When viewed by many of African descent, nooses in a tree would represent lynching.
In recent times, in 1981, Michael Donald, a 19 year old Black man, was randomly kidnapped, beaten, cut, strangled and hung from a tree in Mobile, Alabama.

For anyone unaware, many Black people would view a noose as a warning or threat of violence.
Many of my generation are only the first or second generation born outside of the South 'up North', as they say, with the South being the primary location where lynching occurred. Many of my generation, as do I, have stories of family killed or forced to flee because of violence or the threat of violence.
Everyone immediately without equivocation understands the death, horror and pain associated with the swastika. For many Americans of African descent, a noose evokes the same emotions.

Please explore the links included in the article.
 

The "victim" in question whom you believe was nearly beated to death attended a function that very same evening.  In fact, many reported that he even danced that night.  Hardly sounds like someone brought to the edge of death.  He was released from the hospital in less than two hours following the incident. 

Whether the commentator lives or knows anyone personally in Jena, LA is irrelevant.  How many Iraq invasion and occupation advocates sitting on tall, white horses in the U.S. who routinely dismiss Iraq and American deaths for U.S. oil firms as an acceptable price to pay for Iraqi democracy know anyone personally who was killed or tortured under Hussein?  Several polls show that more than 68% of U.S. residents even know how to find Iraq on a global map.

As for this belief that it was in fact an African student who hung up all three nooses in the school's official colours, it has alreadly been discussed and dismissed on local Louisiana radio as a vicious rumour that began primarily to blur and dismiss the charges that Jena and its school system continues a legacy of anti-African racism.  The image above is appropiate.  You want the United States to simply forget 400-plus years of African genocide, the victims of this history demand and expect justice for those in the modern day.  And the U.S. can never claim a moral high-ground for defending the existence of the Ku Klux Klan and other White power terror organisations including the group behind the Oklahoma Federal Bldg bombing. 

I can say this with certainty because Homeland Security officially removed White supremacist groups from their terror watchlists even after Oklahoma, the FBI sting that netted three operations by White Power advocates attempting to assist Al Queda attack the U.S.,  American terrorist Eric Rudolf bombing abortion clinics and the Olympics on American soil and inclusive of the Anthrax attacks that were performed by a known White supremacist terrorist with international far-right connections that also extend into radical Islamic terror groups, pacifist organisations and individuals such as Peace Fresno and the abolitionist Quakers were defined by AG Alberto Gonzales as "credible threats to national security."

On a personal note, which I make every effort unlike many other NP contributors not to do, I actually lost family to the South Carolina band of the KKK.  Their crime?  They tried to vote.  My father's family was forced to move at the behest of a loaded gun to the face several times because my Methodist minister grandfather told his congregation that all people are equal under God and that Black people had as much right to vote and sit or go anywhere they pleased as any White man.  Eventually he was forced to leave the South for good just to stay alive.  But what really made up his mind was the loss of my grandmother in the early 1960's who died needlessly from Diabetic shock because the segregated hospital that was in my family's area refused to admit her even though they knew she was borderline terminal.  The ambulance staff, both White men, argued and fought for her life to no avail.  She was DOA halfway on route to the "Black" hospital in the next county. 

This is just one personal story amongst the many thousands of African Diasporic narratives that America would rather prefer go unacknowledged.  And after all of the sacrifices made by Africans for this country from a runaway Black Indian slave Cripus Attucks, the first man to die for American independence to the Black men and women fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan today and can still be racially profiled and marginalised under federal law, (See: The New Crime Bill passed by Bill Clinton which authorizes random racially-biased profiling) this history cannot be divorced from the present.  The German population of modern Europe has accepted its past including its centuries long history of Judeophobia which eventually led to that continents genocidal urges in Armenia and most of the subcontenent.  If they can be this mature and progressive about one of the worst and shortest episodes of human immorality to his fellow man, what is stopping the U.S. from acting accordingly like a real nation that embraces social and political justice.  The example Jena, LA is displaying is a paradox many outside of the U.S. find disturbing.  As I do this thread.