Another under (or non) reported story from the American heartland (or deep south)

Tales of injustice find audiences via Internet
Eugene Kane

Some news stories exist below the radar screen, but that doesn't necessarily make them less important.

When headlines about Michael Vick, the bathroom-trolling senator and the latest stumbles of Britney/Lindsay/Paris dominate the late-summer news cycle, some stories are inevitably squeezed out even if they deserved more ink.

Take the incredible story of the Jena Six.
My e-mail inbox was filled up last week with pleas from activists across the nation trying to get more black journalists to write about the Jena Six, a criminal case involving six young black people in Jena, La., who are charged with beating up a white student last year after a racially charged incident.

The story begins September 2006 in Jena, a central Louisiana town of about 4,000 people - 85% of them white - with an altercation over a tree on high school property under which only white students reportedly were allowed to sit. When black students at Jena High School protested by claiming the tree as their own, the next day someone put up three nooses on the tree to send an ominous message.
The white students responsible for the nooses were suspended for three days.

The racial tension at the school intensified after a brawl led a local district attorney to charge six black teenagers with attempted murder for beating up a white teenager who suffered no life-threatening injuries.
None of the six had a criminal record.

Mychal Bell was the first member of the Jena Six to face trial in July. An all-white jury convicted him on lesser charges of battery and conspiracy. He could get up to 22 years at his sentencing this month.

The rest of the Jena Six face similar fates, all because they were involved in a fistfight after a bunch of whites and blacks at the school failed to get along.
Twenty-two years in prison seems a bit excessive, given the circumstances.
Predictably, civil rights advocates and local black leaders expressed outrage over treatment of the Jena Six. The story was covered this summer by some national news magazines and CNN, but exists largely under the radar screen as an example of outrageous prosecution possibly tied to race.

That's where the Internet comes in. The e-mail campaign on behalf of the Jena Six includes a link to an NAACP petition asking the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, to intercede. The National Association of Black Journalists also issued a statement last week urging its membership to continue drawing attention to the case.

The Jena Six case is just the latest in a series of questionable prosecutions and sentencings for young African-Americans across the nation in recent months that sparked a reaction after the case became well-known. A similar e-mail campaign was launched earlier this year on behalf of Genarlow Wilson, an African-American man sentenced to 10 years in a Georgia prison for having consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.

In June, a judge agreed to release Wilson, but the state attorney general appealed the decision, which meant Wilson remains behind bars.

Also, there was the outlandish case of Shaquanda Cotton, a black girl who was sentenced to serve up to seven years in prison in Texas for shoving a white teachers aide when she was 14. Shaquanda was released from prison in March after a special judge reviewing the local criminal justice system for racial inequity agreed the sentence was excessive.

Both of those stories found similar public support after e-mail campaigns and petition drives designed to get the cases more attention succeeded. In the age of point-and-click communication, spreading news about questionable court decisions involving African-Americans is easier than it's ever been.

As for the Jena Six, word is slowly leaking out about this curious brand of justice being dispensed by some officials in Louisiana who apparently believe the law should be harsher on black kids than anybody else.

Clearly, this is a below-the-radar case that requires as many eyes watching as possible.