Residents: Nooses spark school violence, divide town
JENA, Louisiana (CNN) -- Mychal Bell was like a lot of boys his age, his mother says.
The always-smiling 16-year-old often spent weekends on the couch, munching Little Debbie snack cakes, watching football and dreaming of a day he might join his heroes in the NFL.
That was before police arrested the star running back and five other teens -- dubbed the "Jena 6" -- on attempted murder and conspiracy charges after a December 4, 2006, fight at the local high school.
Bell, now 17, sits in a cell in Jena, Louisiana, waiting to learn later this month if he will spend the next two decades in prison.
"He's not the same. He's grown up a lot since he's been in there. He's not the same ol' smiling Mychal he used to be," his mother, Melissa Bell, says. "I pray that the judge will go easy on him."
Mychal Bell wasn't convicted for attempted murder. The charges were diluted to aggravated battery and conspiracy, but undiluted is the outrage over the fates of Bell and the rest of the Jena 6. Video Watch how the case has divided the town »
Many in this sleepy town of 3,000 are calling Bell's July conviction a case of Jim Crow justice.
They question why Bell's public defender never called a witness in the trial. They question the all-white jury that took three hours to convict him. They question charges they say are wildly overblown. They question why the teen was tried as an adult.
And they say the fight never would have happened if not for the nooses.
A threat or a prank?
In September 2006, as the school year kicked off, a black Jena High School student asked the vice principal if he and some friends could sit under an oak tree where the white students typically congregated.
Out in the Open
A high school fight. A black teen convicted by an all-white jury. Soaring racial tensions.
Told by the vice principal they could sit wherever they pleased, the student and his pals plopped down under the sprawling branches of a shade tree in the campus courtyard.
The next day, students arrived at school to find three nooses hanging from those branches.
"I seen them hanging. I'm thinking the KKK, you know, were hanging nooses. They want to hang somebody. Real nooses, the ones you see on TV, are the kind of nooses they were," Robert Bailey, 17, one of the Jena 6, told the syndicated radio show "Democracy Now!"
According to The Town Talk in nearby Alexandria, the school's principal recommended expulsion for those behind the nooses. Instead, the newspaper reported, a school district committee overruled the recommendation and suspended three white students for three days for hanging the nooses, a gesture written off as a "prank."
"Toilet paper, that's a prank, you know what I'm saying?" Bailey told the radio show. "Nooses hanging there -- nooses ain't no prank."
A series of scuffles ensued over the next three months as racial tension at the school became palpable.
The district attorney was summoned to address the student body. Off-campus fights were reported. Bailey said he had a beer bottle broken over his head in one incident, a shotgun pulled on him in another.
On November 30, someone torched the school's main academic building. The arson remains unsolved, but many suspect it's linked to the discord strangling Jena High.
The attack
Four days after the arson, several students jumped a white classmate, Justin Barker, knocking him unconscious before stomping and kicking him.
Parents of the Jena Six say they heard Barker was hurling racial epithets. Barker's parents say he did nothing to provoke the beating.
Barker was taken to the hospital with injuries to both eyes and ears, as well as cuts. His right eye had blood clots, said his mother, Kelli Barker. Justin Barker was treated and released that day.
Bell, Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and an unidentified juvenile -- all black teens -- were arrested and charged with attempted murder. The weapons used, according to the charges -- shoes. Their bails were set at between $70,000 and $138,000.
Only Bell remains in jail, on a $90,000 bond, and the judge has refused to lower it, citing Bell's criminal record, which includes four juvenile offenses -- two simple battery charges among them.
The Jena 6 say they are innocent. Bailey told CNN that by the time he arrived at the fight, students and coaches had broken it up.
"When a fight breaks out, all the kids just run to see a fight. That's just how it was," he said. "You really couldn't see nothing. So when I'm running to see what's going on, I got down there to the fight, it was over."
Attorneys ask judge to reconsider
Bell's new attorneys will try Tuesday to have their client's conviction thrown out or have the case remanded to juvenile court, where they say it should've been handled in the first place.
If that fails, Bell is scheduled for a September 20 sentencing hearing where he faces up to 22 years in prison. The other five await their days in court.
The case is getting international media attention -- a buzz that has drawn the NAACP and civil rights stalwarts like the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III -- but many in Jena are skeptical the boys can get a fair trial.
"Jena has been a community that has had self-imposed segregation probably since the '50s. They never got the memo," said radio host Tony Brown, who coined the name Jena 6.
Brown, who hosts a statewide radio newsmagazine from Alexandria, where he has lived since 1991, says there are still "righteous people" in Jena. However, he said, there is little commingling among black and white residents and the town often abides by "a Jim Crow mentality."
Bell's and Bailey's mothers concur, but Caseptla Bailey insists, "Jena's a good place to live. It's home. It's something that's in our hearts."
Kristi Boyett, a white resident, is not so nostalgic. She and her family are leaving Jena "because of the racist stuff that's going on here," she said.
She fears for her children's safety in the public schools, she said, and she's not surprised that racial tension in Jena has reached a breaking point.
"That's the way this town's always been. I've lived here for 16 years, and it's been segregated since we lived here," she said.
'We lost Jena'
Other longtime residents, however, paint a more harmonious portrait of Jena and blame the media for casting their town in a negative light. Mayor Murphy McMillan declined to be interviewed, saying only, "The media is making our town look bad."
Paula Brewer, who grew up in Jena, told The Town Talk in Alexandria that "everybody talks to everybody" and there are no racial boundaries in the central Louisiana hamlet.
"Where did Jena go in all this?" she asked the newspaper. "We lost Jena. We aren't what they are calling us -- racist and ignorant. Jena is a good town with good people."
Though some say race drove the decision to charge the teens with attempted murder, the victim's mother, Kelli Barker, doesn't think so. Had the attackers not been pulled off her son, she said, he could have been killed.
"I wish to goodness it wouldn't have happened," she said. "And I hate it for them parents. I mean, I can only imagine, but I also have to think about my child and my family."
Advocates for the Jena 6 aren't saying the boys should be let off if they indeed pummeled Justin Barker. Rather, they're saying the charges should match the crime -- and that the juvenile court should handle the teens' cases.
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Brown said he will use his radio show as a platform to push for justice until an appellate court throws out Bell's conviction and the remaining Jena 6 see a fair trial.
Brown said of his rationale, "My grandma used to tell me, 'You can't hang a thief for murder,' and that's what they're doing in Jena."
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