Reply #7: 2 links here- mostly about the actual incident, and

[Bluerthanblue]

not the pending sentence (Sept) for the one teen found guilty so far.

The first has a video-
http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2007/07/02/photo-story-by-michael-david-murphy/
The second link is a very thorough account of the incident-

..........SIMMERING TENSIONS
Local activists say that the wave of problems started last September when Black high school students asked for permission to sit under a tree at an area of the high school that had, traditionally, been used only by white students. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree.

The following week, Black students staged a protest under the tree. At a school assembly soon after, La Salle Paris District Attorney (DA) Reed Walters, appearing with local police officers, warned Black students against further unrest. “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen,” he threatened.

According to many in Jena, tensions simmered in the town throughout the fall, occasionally exploding into fights and other incidents. No white students were charged or punished, including the students found to have been responsible for hanging the nooses. Bryant Purvis, one of the Black students now facing charges, stated that after the incident, “There were a lot of people aggravated about it, a lot of fights at the school after that, a lot of arguments, and a lot of people getting treated differently.”

In the first weekend of December a Black student was assaulted by a group of white students, and a white graduate of Jena High School threatened several Black students with a shotgun. The following Monday, white students taunted the student who was assaulted over the weekend, and one of the white students was beaten up.

Within hours, six Black students were arrested. “I think the DA is pinning it on us to make an example of us,” said Purvis. “In Jena, people get accused of things they didn’t do a lot.”

Soon after, their parents discovered that these students were facing attempted murder charges. “The courtroom, the whole back side, was filled with police officers,” Tina Jones, Bryant’s mother, recalls. “I guess they thought maybe when they announced what the charges were, we were gonna go berserk or something.”..............





http://www.indypendent.org/?p=1095