Eric Hirsch

all your local network TV affiliate and ask them why this isn’t news, but the Duke lacrosse case was worth covering for an entire year.”

These are words of advice offered at the end of a YouTube video created in support of an online petition in support of the struggle of black students in Jena, Louisiana. This video was created sometime this past August.

Is it not odd that most Americans have only heard about the Jena issue now, more than a year since the initial racist event occurred? Or that we, on this campus, which is considered one of the most intellectual and liberal student bodies in the world, only recently began vocalizing outrage at this event? Or that many readersof this article still might not even know what happened a year ago in Jena, Louisiana?

The moment I heard that “segregation-era oppression” was happening—yes, a moment way too late—I went to the New York Times website to learn the specifics. I typed several different sets of key words into the search box: “Jena Six,” “Jena, Louisiana,” “Louisiana racism,” and others I thought related fittingly to the racial crisis in Louisiana. Nothing was to be found. That search happened this past summer, not long before the first anniversary of the inciting event in Jena. At the end of September I searched again, to find that the first article on the subject was published September 24, 2007, over a year after nooses were placed on the “white tree” at Jena High School.

This absurd time lag is a serious problem; but let’s start from the basics. Here is a comprehensive overview of the events:

On September 25, 2006 a black student asked the principal of Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, if he could sit under a tree known at the school as the “white tree,” due to the precedent of only white students sitting under it. That student was told that he could sit anywhere he wanted. A day after sitting under the tree, three nooses in school colors were found hanging from it. While the (white) students responsible were originally expelled by the principle, town authorities referred to the action as a “prank” and reduced their punishment to a brief suspension from school. Outraged, the school’s black students sat as a silent collective body underneath the tree several days later in the protest. Allegedly, the white District Attorney came to the high school later that day, threatening the black students by telling them he could destroy their “lives with a stroke of my pen.”

At a party on the night of December 1st attended by predominately white students, several white students assaulted a black student. The following day, the attacked student and friends encountered one of the assaulters; in the confrontation that ensued, the white student pulled out his shotgun. The black students took the gun from him, and were subsequently arrested for stealing the gun, while the white student was not charged with any crime. Two days later, after a white student repeatedly ridiculed the black protestors with racial insults and touted his support for the nooses and the white bullies, the black students beat him and injured him. He was released from the hospital later that day. Six of these black students, who would come to be known as the Jena Six, were subsequently charged with second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. After satting an astonishingly high bail, all six have now been released from prison.

While in America silence has prevailed, foreign medias have been covering the Jena Six for months. In an article detailing the story of the “white tree” and the Jena Six, BBC News reports that “Billy Doughty, the local barber, has never cut a black man’s hair. But he does not think there is a racism problem in Jena,” and speaks of “fears of a new kind of ‘stealth’ racism spreading through America’s deep south.” French newspaper Le Monde reported in July of this year, still two months before the New York Times said anything, “C’est une histoire du vieux Sud. Une histoire tragique, hantée par des démons surgés d’un autre temps. Une histoire en noir et blanc” (It is a story of the Old South. A tragic story, haunted by demons arising from another era. A story in black and white). In the process of recounting the story to French readers, the report notes that local papers have ignored any mention of racism.

A recent article was written for New America Media by black academic Anthony Asadullah Samad titled “O.J. Coverage Overshadows Jena Six.” Samad writes, speaking of “the national media,” “Given a choice to lift up black America, or make us look crazy—you know which one they’re going to choose. And they chose it.Never mind the Jena Six was the most news worthy event happening last week. For every one media hit the Jena Six event got, the O.J. Simpson ‘perp’ walk got ten.”

A recent CNN article, but still one of its first acknowledgements of the Jena Six case, is written with obvious slant: “Nooses hung briefly from a big oak tree outside Jena High School a year ago, after a black freshman asked whether black students could sit under it. A white student was beaten unconscious three months later, in December.” While the the facts in this statement may not be completely false (although, in my opinion a symbolic noose hung even for a second is not “hung briefly”), CNN does not include the condemnations for protest, or the black students also beaten up, or why the white student was “beaten unconscious.”

The blog Too Sense, in a post on August 1, posits that readers of the most popular news publications have probably “never heard of the Jena six,” while the chronic omission of “vital details” from a few scant stories on NBC lead to the construction of “an inadequate narrative.”

The blog Afrobella says on September 21, “Finally! The Jena 6 gets the kind of front page coverage it deserves.”

Only now are most of America’s mainstream media outlets caving in to social pressure. But they were a year too late. Consequently, most of the public were also a year too late. A majority of Columbia students I have spoken with over the past few months were either unaware of the Jena Six episodes or had only become aware as the summer came to an end. Media organizations—not just those considering themselves independent or explicitly leftist or progressive—should have covered the Jena Six like they covered the incidents at Duke University. They should have been there first. Their responsibility is to make American citizens aware of the most important things that happen and that directly concern us all.

The yearlong silence has been unacceptable. Now, we can only hope that more eyes have been opened to the very real and dangerous racism that is still out there, and unfortunately, still within Columbia’s own gates.