One of the best lessons that my son could learn that's one of the best lessons: to know what it is to be black now. You know, if this don’t teach him what it is to be black now, I don’t know what will. But he’s seventeen now. You know, he's got a lot of life left ahead of him. And the day he set foot out of jail, I'm going to tell him, I'm going to tell him again, "You know what it is to be black now. Here it is."
That's Marcus Jones, father of indy media saint Mychal Bell, speaking on September 21st's Democracy Now! and that is the nonsense that had Betty's father hitting the roof. After he was imprisoned, Marcus Jones hopes, his son had learned a lesson on race. Sorry to interrupt the canonization, but maybe a lesson should have been learned long before it?
Abbey Brown (The Shreveport Times) reported on August 25, 2007:
In addition to Mychal Bell's recent felony conviction, his criminal history was revealed Friday to contain four other violent crimes.Because of that, a LaSalle Parish judge denied a request to reduce the 17-year-old's bail in his current scrape with the law. Bell remains in jail in lieu of a $90,000 bond.
Bell was convicted in June of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit that crime for his part in a Dec. 4 incident at Jena High School that left fellow student Justin Barker unconscious.
[. . .]
Three months prior to that attack, Bell committed two violent crimes while on probation for a battery Christmas Day 2005, according to testimony. Later that same week, he led the Jena Giants to a shutout victory in a football game against the Buckeye Panthers. Bell was adjudicated -- the juvenile equivalent to a conviction -- of battery Sept. 2 and criminal damage to property Sept. 3, said Cynthia Bradford, LaSalle Parish deputy clerk.
John Barr and Nicole Noren (ESPN) reported September 21st:
While Bell is held up as a symbol for activists, what many of them either don't know, or don't choose to dwell on, is the fact he's been in trouble before.
During a previous bond hearing it was revealed Bell has a string of juvenile offenses.
Sources told ESPN that one of those cases was a battery in which Bell punched a 17-year-old girl in the face.
Where was Marcus Jones during all of this? Living in Dallas, Texas. Your son's repeatedly convicted and placed on probation and where's the father who now wants to say a lesson (about racism) may have been learned from imprisonment?
We blame all the adults, White and African-American. When three nooses were hung from a tree on school grounds, it was a community problem that should have been addressed as such. But it wasn't.
Despite the claims of some activists, every African-American student did not grasp immediately the meaning of the nooses.) Tina Jones, Bryant Purvis' mother, speaking to Amy Goodman:
Well, my son, he didn't know about it at first. And when he did go to see, the noose part of the rope had been cut off, and just the rope itself was hanging. But when I found out about it, it was at work, from some of the other parents talking about it. Bryant didn't come home and tell me. So when I got home that day, I asked Bryant about it. And Bryant told me, “Yes, ma'am.” But he didn't really understand what the noose part of it meant. So, you know, and he was like, “Well, what is that, anyway?” And, you know, we went into detail as to, you know, what it represented or whatever.
We also lay a huge portion of the blame on the media and that's independent media. That includes a White woman who elected to make jokes about a White student being assaulted by six other students, kicked and stomped long after he was unconscious as 'assault with a shoe'. We seriously doubt the same commentator would be making jokes were the student in question gay. In fact, if someone had made similar jokes about what happened to Matthew Sheppard, we think the woman would have been (rightly) offended.
Somehow independent media -- activists posing for reporters -- spent hours and hours, columns and columns, on this topic but not only left out Bell's criminal record, they also downplayed other things as well.
To be clear, we support the Jena Five: Robert Bailey, Jr., Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theo Shaw and Jesse Ray Beard. Our time is too valuable to be wasted supporting a serial offender who had his day in court many times and, in relation to the school incident, has now had his sentence set aside and will have a new day in court. We do not lump Baily, Jones, Purvis, Shaw and Beard in with him because, unlike Bell, they do not have a criminal record. Lumping the five in with a serial offender does them a huge disservice but independent media wasn't interested in that, they were interested in being 'creative.'
Jacquie Soohen (Big Noise Films) is a curious sort of 'reporter'. She declared the following in a 'report' aired on Democracy Now!:
A series of incidents followed throughout the fall. In October, a black student was beaten for entering a private all-white party.
By whom, Soohen, because press reports say it was an adult and not a student? And, according to Robert Bailey's mother, Caseptla Bailey, it wasn't an "all-White party"
That young black man was my son Robert Bailey. Him and some friends had gone to a party at the Jena Fair Barn. And to my understanding, it wasn't an all-white party there. It was a few blacks that was already there in the party, and he asked to enter the party, if would it be OK for them to come in. And he said the lady responded as, "Sure, you know, as long as there be no fighting."
So once he did enter the building, a gentleman asked him what was his name. He told him, "Robert Bailey" -- no, asked him, "Is your name Robert Bailey?" And my son said yes, and Justin Sloan hit him, as well as his sister Jessie Sloan. And from there, he was attacked by several white men in the Fair Barn. After the incident happened, his other friends came in to assist him. And once the police got there, the police told the black kids that they need to get back to their side of town. So that's where a lot of racial tension is also coming from: our town cops in Jena, Louisiana.
We'll take Bailey's word for it but here's the federal government's recounting of the party:
On Dec. 1, there was a private, invitation-only birthday party at the Fair Barn. Around 11 p.m., five black students tried to come into the party but were told by a woman that they weren't allowed inside without an invitation. The boys persisted, saying they had friends inside. A white man then jumped in front of the woman, and a fight started.
A group broke the two up, and the woman asked the white man, not a student, and the black students to leave the party. Once outside, another fight started between a group of white men, not students, and the black students. Police were called, and a white man was arrested. He pleaded guilty to simple battery.
Soohen, where do you get your facts? Soohen continues:
Later that month, a white student pulled a gun on a group of black students at a gas station, claiming self-defense. The black students wrestled the gun away and reported the incident to police. They were charged with assault and robbery of the gun.
Again, Soohen doesn't know what she's supposed to be reporting on. Again, she's created a "White student" where there was a White non-student. Caseptla Bailey explains the "gas station" exchange this way:
Well, that incident happened on Saturday, December 2nd, the following day, where Robert and two of his friends, Theo Shaw and Ryan Simmons, were going to Gotta-Go Grocery. And once they got there, they say Matt Windham, who is a man, not a student at Jena High School, and Matt Windham -- I guess they had come upon each other, because Matt Windham was involved the previous night with the white gentlemen that beat my son the previous night at the Fair Barn, where -- rather attacked my son at the Fair Barn. So once they came upon each other, I guess it was on.
You know, Matt ran to his truck, from my understanding, pulled a shotgun, a sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip, and my son wrestled with him to get the gun from him. And the other two gentlemen proceeded then to fight, and they took the gun from him and left the scene running. You know, I'm sure they were -- I know they were in fear of their lives. They were afraid that this man was going to shoot them, you know, especially in the back, running away from the scene. So they were scared. I'm sure Matt Windham was scared. You know, but he chose to run to the truck and pull the shotgun, not our children.
"A man, not a student," says Robert Bailey's mother. Again, the federal government's summary of the events:
On Dec. 2, there was an encounter at the Gotta Go convenience store that appears to have been spurred by the Friday night fight. The white man, not a student, gave one version of the story, while the three black students gave another. Walters based his charges on the statement from the witness and neither of the sides involved, and charged one of the black students with battery and theft.
Soohen has a troubled relationship with the facts when she has a narrative to sell:
No charges were ever filed against the white students in either incident.
What White students in either incident? Soohen, what White Students? 22-year-old Justin Sloan was arrested for his attack at the party and got a slap on the wrist (injustice) while the woman involved (apparently Jessie Sloan, was also a White adult, not a student) didn't even get a slap on the wrist. At the "gas station," we're again dealing with a White adult, not a student. Why does Soohen have to lie? Soohen continues her creative 'reporting:'
Then, in late November, someone tried to burn down the high school, creating even more tension. Four days later, a white student was allegedly attacked in a school fight.
"Allegedly attacked"? The student was taken to the hospital. It's a cute little narrative Soohen offers, it's just not reporting.
And it's been the biggest embarrassment for independent media.
They've near consistently revealed themselves to be unwilling to report while expecting to be seen as reporters.
We're all for supporting the Jena Five.
Bell?
Five times convicted and he's a saint?
Maybe, had independent media wanted to report instead of lie, we could know about the convictions. We could evaluate them. They've provided nothing on the five convictions. So left to take the mainstream media's word only (which happens when independent media stays silent), we're left with the belief that sports star Bell was a thug, not unlike many jocks on campuses, and got away with things he should have been thrown off the team for and moved to another school over.
Independent media embarrassed themselves by canonizing Bell. In doing so, they did a huge disservice to the other five who face being tainted by Bell's criminal past as more people learn of it. Had they done their job and covered those convictions -- or even noted them -- people would be informed; however, they didn't do that. Bell's past -- which is only Bell's as far as anyone knows -- will become better known and, when it does, some will be suspicious of the other five. That shouldn't happen but independent media has allowed it to.
The problem was the adults. The problem was always the adults. A school board overruling expulsion for the White students who hung the nooses (they were given two weeks probation), the school refusing to involve all parents immediately in what happened and to note that such actions would not be allowed or tolerated.
Another failure came when African-Americans who received jury summons elected not to show up. Hopefully those who elected not to obey the summons were not among the ones later complaining that the jury was all White.
In "Tipping the Scales of Justice in Jena," Amy Goodman opens with the following:
The tree at Jena High School has been cut down, but the furor around it has only grown.
"What did the tree do wrong?" asked Katrina Wallace, a stepsister of one of the Jena Six, when I interviewed her at the Burger Barn in Jena, La. "I planted it 14 years ago as a tree of knowledge."
How did the tree become a place for White students to sit while African-Americans were sitting on the bleachers? (We wouldn't be surprised to learn that more than just African-Americans were excluded from beneath the tree but the press wasn't interested in that.) Where were the adults?
Katrina Wallace planted the tree and you know she didn't plant it to belong to one group, let alone one group of White students. When it became that, where were the adults?
And, as Wallace asks, why was the tree cut down?
If the problem is not addressed, something else will stand in for the tree shortly.
Addressing it isn't independent media distorting the events or cutting out aspects that don't 'play' well. The five members of the Jena 6 without any record -- let alone a lengthy criminal history -- are done a huge disservice when their actions are lumped in with Bell's and independent media stays silent on Bell.
Al Sharpton does a huge disservice to issues of racism when he doesn't even know his facts. In an interview with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!), Goodman twice corrected him about the name of the District Attorney; however she failed to correct the following by Sharpton:
The fact is that if you have a prosecutor that decided that he could not prosecute the students, the white students that hung the nooses, because a hate crime, you must be an adult, according to Louisiana law, and these were juveniles, yet he felt that the black kids in the fight who were the same age, going to the same school, were adults. How do you have white kids juveniles, black kids adults, same age, same school? The fact that he did not, in any firm way, prosecute the young white student that had a shotgun on school grounds, threatening the black students, that there was a black student that was beaten at a party that he was invited to by a white female, and that person, the white student, was given a hundred-dollar ticket, tantamount to a traffic ticket.
There was no shotgun reported on school grounds. Sharpton is referring to the "gas station" incident. The White man at the party who received a slap on the wrist for his assault was not a high school student, he was a 22-year-old man. Sharpton went on to misstate the facts again:
I think that, one, no one ever said that we condone schoolyard fights, but that’s what it was. And the punishment should have been a schoolyard fight. Had these young men been dealt with in juvenile court in a regular proceeding for juveniles like any other juvenile, including the white student that pulled the gun, the shotgun at the school, and the white student that beat up, I believe it was young Mr. Bailey at the party, I don’t think there would have ever been an issue, local or national.
Repeating, no "shotgun" was brought onto the school -- that was at a "gas station" -- and the assailant in the party beating was not a high school student, he was a 22-year-old White man.
Sharpton repeatedly made similar misstatements on urban radio. Betty and Cedric would direct friends to Democracy Now!'s previous coverage of the topic but that corrective was undone when Sharpton was allowed to distort the events on Democracy Now! itself.
Racism is very much a part of the United States in 2007 and it won't go away by people denying it. It also won't be eliminated by lying. All those who offered half-reports and full out lies have allowed very real racism to be ignored in the future because the truth does come out and when Bell's criminal history is better known, it will be the excuse -- as was Tawana Brawley -- to dismiss racism. Independent media truly should be ashamed. And, Betty's father wants noted, when your child gets arrested, "You get off your butt and haul it back to where your kid is. Not five times later, the very first time."
The 'creative' reporting didn't just hurt all future causes -- because as truth gets out Bell will be used in the same manner Tawana Brawley still is today -- to dismiss very serious racial justice issues. It also hurt the other five defendents. A point Jess' parents (his mother's a public defender, his father is a prison rights activist) wanted made. Five juveniles with no record are now publicly melded with Bell. Unlike Bell, they haven't been convicted five times. Unlike Bell, they weren't on probation. Unlike Bell, they weren't turned into saints by independent media. As their cases go to court, having been yoked to Bell -- having Bell turned into the poster boy for them, juries will see them as one person. The only one who benefits from that is Bell. The others are all hurt by it because, though independent media couldn't tell you about it, Bell's convictions have been heavily reported in areas that jury pools will come from. If there was one poster boy to be made out of this, the most likely would have been the then-fourteen-year-old. He is the most naturally sympathetic because of his age. Prospective jurors, hearing about the case over the last few weeks, would have been naturally the most sympathetic to him. However, independent media wasn't interested in that. And as a result, most following the coverage can't even name him today. They can't even shape a narrative correctly.
(For those scratching their heads -- many, but not all, will be, Jesse Ray Beard was 14-years-old at the time of the school beating.)