The Jena 6 protests, which were some of the largest protests around civil rights in years, were organized by ColorOfChange.org. Because of its success, the group has been attacked by DJ Michael Baisden, who accused the group of taking money meant for the Jena 6. Baisden has been forced to apologize, as Howard Witt reported.
Only one national civil rights group, Color of Change, has fully disclosed how the $212,000 it collected for the Jena 6 via a massive Internet campaign has been distributed. The grassroots group, which has nearly 400,000 members, has posted images of cancelled checks and other signed documents on its website showing that all but $1,230 was paid out in October in roughly equal amounts to attorneys for the Jena youths.
You can see all this information here. What I find fascinating is how the group outdid the NAACP. Here's Jill Tubman:
NAACP: 500,000 members, almost $20,000 raised for Jena 6, 0% of funds disbursed to families and lawyers to date
Color of Change: 400,000 members, over $200,000 raised for Jena 6, 100% of funds disbursed to date
Color of Change raised about $10k of the money that went to Donna Edwards last week, and began working on the CBC with the fight against the Fox News/CBC Institute debate. This is a very important group, because it is serving as a bridge for African-American activists who have not had a way to involve themselves in the political process. It serves as a Moveon-style organization, working among black radio, black blogs, and political elites.
ColorofChange and its dynamic director James Rucker has arrived as a serious force in progressive politics.
Although I've been extremely negligent in my Jena blogging, I assume most of our readers are acquainted with the basic outlines of the situation. If not, Color of Change is a great place to start. I was moderately hopeful that some good would eventually come out of this - but so far it seems to have kicked off a series of copycat noose incidents. The Southern Poverty Law Center is reporting organized online efforts by white supremacist groups to encourage followers to hang nooses in their communities, among other things.
First, there was an incident in Alexandria, LA (about 40 miles from Jena) where an unnamed 16 year old and 18 year old Jeremy Munsen were arrested with two nooses hanging from the back of Munsen's pickup truck. The 16 year old told police his family was in the KKK, and that brass knuckles and unloaded rifle found in the car belonged to him. Then, 4 nooses were found at a high school in High Point, North Carolina. The nooses were found hung from the main flagpole, in a parking lot, and (two) hung in a tree at the front of the school. Also, there were the two nooses at the Coast Guard Academy. One was left in the bag of a black cadet in July, the other in the office of an officer who conducted a race relations training.
Up here in the North, it's a similar story. Outside of Chicago, an unidentified student drove to Warren Township High School with a noose hanging from his rearview mirror. Worse yet, people are trying to excuse it, using a variation on the same ludicrous excuses we're hearing from those down South.
"A child who lives in Chicago may not understand the real implications of what they're carrying around, like a [Confederate] flag or a noose," said Peggy Riehl, an early childhood development expert with the Chicago Metro Association for the Education of Young Children. "They may not have the real experience that children in other communities that may have seen what that means."
I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that. The Confederate flag, maybe. Maybe they saw it in on the Dukes of Hazzard or something, but a noose? It might be marginally more believable than kids in Louisiana or North Carolina claiming that, but either way, we're deep into the realm of ridiculous excuses here.
This morning brings the unwelcome news that my current home state of New York is continuing the trend. A noose was found hanging in a Long Island police station.
"It's astonishing to hear something like this is happening in Nassau County in 2007, especially in Hempstead Village," said John Nedd, president of the Nassau County Guardian Association, a black police officers' group.
Corey Pegues, a New York City police captain and the president of the Long Island chapter of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, said members believed the noose may have been directed at a high-ranking Hempstead police official who is black.
I wouldn't go as far as astonishing, but it is absolutely disgusting. I don't have much to say about all this, beyond noting the obvious - racism is real, it's lurking just under the surface in my community and yours, hanging nooses is an implicit threat and everyone knows it, and the hardcore racists out there will think racism is acceptable unless we say otherwise, loudly. You can add your voice by signing the Color of Change petition, or donating to the Jena 6 defense fund.
Color of Change has been all over the case of the Jena Six for months, as has Jack and Jill politics, which today pointed out that the Judiciary Committee is going to hold hearings on the matter. Eugene Robinson discusses the way the story moved, which makes sense.
Yesterday morning, as the throng descended on Jena, both the Joyner and Harvey shows featured live updates from the scene. Baisden and Sharpton were in Jena, helping lead the demonstrations. It's fair to say that without black radio, the case of the Jena 6 probably never would have become a significant national story -- and certainly never would have sparked one of the biggest civil rights protests in decades.
Why is this interesting? Because black America is increasingly complicated and diverse, riven by fault lines that didn't exist back when the great civil rights heroes were marching in Selma. We're not forced by law to live in the same neighborhoods or to go to the same schools anymore. A generation has reached adulthood without ever experiencing the in-your-face racism of the Jim Crow era. There are black families that have had multigenerational middle-class success, and black families trapped in multigenerational poverty and dysfunction.
Black radio is one of the places where all the varied segments of black America still come together. It's a true community medium, even if what we still call "the black community" is, for most purposes, best thought of as plural.
But yesterday's protest needed more than the right medium, it needed the right message. When a local prosecutor in a small Southern town is confronted with a racial clash and he gives the whites a slap on the wrist while trying his best to send the blacks to prison, there aren't many black Americans who feel they can enjoy the luxury of indifference.
One point that's been left out is that the black bloggers and Color of Change organization first cooperated in stopping the Fox News-CBC debate months ago. Indeed, the media itself, as with Fox News, is part of the story of the Jena 6. Compare these two reports, one from Brian Williams and the other by an independent producer called Collateral News in Philadelphia that has been seen by over a million people on Youtube.
This is continuing to be a problem. Chris Matthews on Hardball spent 14 minutes on the OJ Simpson case, and mentioned the Jena 6 only in the context of the "Rev. Jesse Jackson's reported comment that Sen. Barack Obama was "acting like he's white"."
Black politics and activists is changing radically and in fascinating and unpredictable ways. It was black bloggers, independent media, hip hop, black radio, and Color of Change that led on the Jena 6, with the NAACP and the rest of the black elite pulled in tow.
It'll be interesting to see how this leadership moves to create change through the policy process, and somehow, I think the CBC is going to see more accountability sent their way.
The Jena 6 case, in which six black students in Louisiana were put up on basically fraudulent charges of attempted murder, has come up on the blogs from time to time as a good example of the flourishing racism still happening openly in America. The story, pushed early by black bloggers and Color of Change, and then by civil rights leaders and the NAACP, is now being covered by the traditional corporate media. How it's being covered is instructive.
Watch both of these reports, one from Brian Williams and one from an independent outfit, and note the difference in narration and the use of facts. It's really, well, stunning.
This is amazing to watch. As good as some journalists are in the corporate media system, obfuscatory reports like this from wingnuts (yes, Williams is well-known to be a dittohead) are counterproductive and dishonest. There is just no value in American corporate journalism as a system anymore.
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