Prosaic Non-Romantic Narratives about Movements

Narratives of spontaneity like Rosa Parks just being tired and the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag starting a movement are central to popular understandings of protest. While narratives of spontaneity can inspire action and aid recruitment, real-life collective action happens through more prosaic and probabilistic channels. Narratives of spontaneity tell only success stories, but in real life, most instances of collective action against oppression fail or have only limited impact. Many supporters of the Jena 6 complained that mainstream media and national Black organizations ignored the Jena 6 case, believing the case should have been treated as important sooner. But there are many cases of injustice and only a few can become major national issues. We flip the question around: why in this case was there the exceptional outcome of a huge mass mobilization and, in consequence, a media and participation cascade?

National mainstream media ignore most cases of injustice partly because there are literally too many cases of injustice to fit in the news. Before the Internet, there were physical limitations, often called “news holes,” of available column inches in newspapers or minutes in television news broadcasts. Editors chose what to put in and inevitably a lot was left out. Even with seemingly unlimited space for information on the Internet, there are still finite limits to human attention. Only a few stories can be “top stories.” This means that every potential news story competes for public attention with every other potential news story.

It is difficult to build a large movement around cases of legal injustice. The Black Lives Movement focused on police killings, but even for police killings, most cases are not protested. Protests typically occur only when the victim was doing nothing illegal or threatening and the officers engaged in gross misconduct (Burch Reference Burch2023; Lawrence Reference Lawrence2000; Lu Reference Todd2024). Even when there are local protests, most are covered in only a few local news stories. Very few cases ever become big national news stories.

The Jena 6 case involved overcharging. There was a victim: Justin Barker had been beaten. There were ambiguities about who did it, what their motivations were, what the context was, and how serious his injuries were. Advocates believed that the attempted murder charges were unreasonable and racially discriminatory. But it was never a simple case of complete innocence of everyone charged. It is difficult to build a major protest movement around such a case, regardless of where it occurs.

In fact, another case of overcharging a Black youth was in the news in 2007. In December 2006, Genarlow Wilson was sentenced to ten years in prison for being the recipient of consensual oral sex from a girl two years younger than he was. Before August 2007, the Wilson case received more coverage in both Black and mainstream news outlets than the Jena case.Footnote ⁴ Both the NAACP and Al Sharpton were advocating around the Wilson case, and ColorOfChange.org was featuring it on its website before switching to Jena in mid-July. It is even possible that the Wilson case was competing with the Jena case for attention from national media and organizations. But the Wilson case never turned into a major media cascade.

That is where the nooses came in. The Jena 6 narrative linked hanging nooses in response to a challenge to segregation to the later overcharging of Black youths in a fight, powerfully tying a history of racial violence and terror to injustice in the criminal legal system. The nooses became central to motivating the protest wave (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014).

Important as the nooses and the noose-fight narrative were, however, they did not immediately provoke large-scale collective action, nor was the narrative itself some kind of magical agent. Although the noose-fight narrative began circulating in May 2007, the energy and organization around the case began building only after Mychal Bell’s guilty verdict at the end of June and did not turn into a cascade until September. We show that, although amplification through social media mattered, the work around constructing and deploying the narrative and using it to mobilize action largely happened through prosaic channels of media coverage, existing organizations, and prior network ties. We find multiple paths of influence that reinforced each other with positive feedbacks as newer Internet-based communication operated alongside older radio communication to spread the message in a more decentralized way.

It was not enough to spread the message about injustice. Large-scale collective action also involves solving the mundane problems around transportation, agendas, coordination, and clean-up – what we might think of as “movement housework.” Physical human beings do this work in physical places. The big rally and the solidarity rallies around the country were organized on the ground by place-based groups. The existence and actions of these place-based networks and groups is an important part of the whole story that has been largely neglected in popular narratives and most academic accounts of the Jena 6 campaign, with the exceptions of Greenlea (Reference Greenlea2014) and (Flaherty Reference Flaherty2010).

National and Local Movement Organizations

The contrast between the spontaneity and cyberspace narratives and our process tracing narrative reveals important lessons to be learned from the Jena mobilization. Many criticized national-level movement organizations for being slow to pick up the Jena case. But just as with the media, it is impossible for national organizations to give the highest possible attention to every local case of injustice. Instead, national organizations such as the NAACP and ACLU have a federated structure in which local groups work on local issues. Local NAACP chapters played a crucial role in addressing local cases of injustice during the Civil Rights Era (Current Reference Current1988) and after 1965 (Minchin Reference Minchin2008). Many communities also have other local organizations that address local issues. Regional representatives of the NAACP, ACLU, and NAN were all present in Jena in the first half of 2007. The Jena 6 case got picked up by national Black organizations after Mychal Bell’s conviction at the end of June 2007 revealed that regional support was not sufficient.

Little has been written theorizing the relationships between local and national campaigns and movements, although the case study literature is full of examples. Historical accounts of the Civil Rights movement describe local activists who led local campaigns and interacted with “outside” movements and activists (e.g., Payne Reference Payne1995; Morris Reference Morris1984; Robnett Reference Robnett1997; Kelley Reference Kelley2015). Similarly, the recent Black Lives Movement built on longstanding local organizations and campaigns that were connected to each other and to national networks and organizations (Oliver Reference Oliver, Johnston and Oliver2020; Taylor Reference Taylor2016; Ransby Reference Ransby2018). The specific approach of publicizing cases of unjust prosecution to draw outside attention and to pressure local authorities was used by the Communist-led International Labor Defense of the early 1930s, most famously around the Scottsboro case (Kelley Reference Kelley2015, 78–91) which the Southern Negro Youth Congress sought to emulate in 1940 (Kelley Reference Kelley2015, 316). These campaigns simultaneously sought to redress cases of injustice and to build a movement.

Many studies recognize that the needs and agendas of local groups are often different from or in tension with the needs and agendas of national or transnational groups (e.g., Bob Reference Bob2002; Vanderkooy and Nawyn Reference Patricia and Nawyn2011; Friedman Reference Friedman2009; Ehrhardt Reference Ehrhardt2020; Oliver and Furman Reference Oliver and Furman1989; Marquez Reference Marquez2021). Local organizing for local needs is different from mobilizing for large mass protests (Voss and Williams Reference Voss and Williams2012). Local campaigns can benefit from broader visibility and resources provided by national or international organizations, while national or international organizations often choose specific local cases strategically for their value in building support for themselves (e.g., Morris Reference Morris1984; Rothman and Oliver Reference Rothman and Oliver1999; Rootes Reference Rootes2013). National-level organizations often try to build a more sustained national-level movement from the energy and attention generated by a case that has attracted attention, as happened in 2014 after the police killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson and again in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This is what we find as the Jena campaign unfolded.

Different Movement Networks

In addition to the national-local dimension, broadly allied movements differentiate horizontally in their foci and constituencies. Reuning and Banaszak (Reference Reuning and Banaszak2020) helpfully argue that protests have different kinds of goals which they typologize as directly producing change, indirectly producing change by changing narratives, and building a movement or community. Broadly, the Jena campaign involved two movement networks that emphasized different goals.

One network included Alan Bean and his Friends of Justice, the ACLU, and other activist networks centered in Louisiana and Texas. This network focused primarily on addressing the legal problems of the Jena 6. As Alan Bean said often, the goal was to pressure local authorities and persuade large law firms to provide pro bono legal counsel.Footnote ⁵ These regional legal activists were linked to broader regional networks of progressive activists and journalists who, in turn, were linked to national networks of progressive activists and journalists. These activists and journalists were primarily White but included key Black actors as well. White journalists who provided early coverage mostly communicated with these activists and focused primarily on the legal case.

The other network was primarily focused on movement building, specifically on building a Black movement that would have the collective power to address the concerns of Black people generally, including the broad problems of injustice in the criminal legal system. Campaigns about specific issues were viewed in part as means to the larger end of movement building. This included the NAACP and its regional chapters, Al Sharpton and the local chapters of his National Action Network, other civil rights groups, the Nation of Islam and its political arm the Millions More Movement, and other Black organizations. It also included Black bloggers and Black radio hosts. These groups connected with Black churches and school and community groups that provided the grassroots infrastructure for the mobilization. Greenlea’s (Reference Greenlea2014) research on the Jena 6 case emphasizes the formation of Black collective identity as central to the mobilization.

Both networks were active from the beginning. Even though they differed in emphasis, both networks combined concern about the Jena 6 themselves with movement-building goals. The two movement networks interacted and reinforced each other. The activists and journalists in the legal network got the message out and brought in mainstream media coverage and outside pressure that succeeded in drawing in pro bono legal help for the Jena 6. Black activists organized the upswelling of Black collective action around the case that drew participants to the September 20 rally.

After September 20, the work of the legal activist network was mostly done, except for continuing to monitor the legal developments until the case was resolved, while the Black movement activists sought to convert the Jena 6 momentum into a reinvigorated Black movement.

News Media and Social Media

Part of the Jena story is how the message got out. Academic researchers often focus narrowly on the New York Times and other elite national-level newspapers, and protesters at the time complained about the failure of the New York Times and other “national” newspapers to cover the Jena case. We find that the Jena 6 case was covered in other mainstream news sources. There has also been a flurry of relatively recent research on first Facebook and then Twitter, largely because the data could be easily downloaded. But other media channels matter, even though they are less easily studied, and different media channels have been important for different movements and in different eras.

Commentators at the time called out the importance of Black radio for the Jena 6 campaign and our process tracing supports radio as important in the third phase of the campaign. Radio is an under-studied communication channel, largely because there are no readily accessible data archives. The most economically viable sector of radio in the United States is talk radio (Berry and Sobieraj Reference Berry and Sobieraj2011), which engages listeners through call-ins, so that it takes on the character of a conversation or forum. Tom Joyner’s morning show and Michael Baisden’s afternoon show were four-hour blocks that interwove Black-oriented music with conversation about a wide variety of topics, including Black political issues (di Leonardo Reference di Leonardo2012). Each had about eight million listeners (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 130–141). Tyree and Williams (Reference Tyree and Williams2024) report that radio still reaches over 90% of Black people monthly and say, “At its core, Black radio remains a vital information source for the engagement of Black audiences in civic engagement, community building, economic education and empowerment, health education, political activism, and the dissemination of vital cultural knowledge” (Tyree and Williams Reference Tyree and Williams2024, 8). Although most White-centric talk radio is dominated by conservatives (Mayer Reference Mayer2004; Mort Reference Mort2012), there are progressive broadcast communication channels, especially Democracy Now and programming on National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. Our process tracing identified progressive alternative media as significant in the Jena 6 case. We expect that different specialized media will be important for different movements.

We devoted effort to a largely unsuccessful attempt to weigh the impact of bloggers in the Jena campaign. In 2007, social media was still new and there was popular and academic interest in its significance. Legacy newspapers were collapsing in the wake of lost ad revenue from the spread of Craigslist in the 2000s (Djourelova, Durante, and Martin 2025). Both journalists who still had jobs and those who had been laid off were looking for new ways to reach audiences. Bloggers and things called blogs were diverse, ranging from the websites of print and broadcast news organizations to online-only news and commentary sites to institutional and academic sites publishing long-form essays and research to individuals writing personal essays to individuals who wrote microblogs that linked to things written by others, sometimes with short comments attached. Facebook became open to anyone with an email address in September 2006 and its user base was growing rapidly in 2007. Unfortunately, the vast majority of blog and social media posts from 2007 are no longer accessible and it is impossible from this distance to provide any reliable assessment of the impact of bloggers relative to other sources of communication. Our best estimate is that blogging amplified and ran parallel to rather than leading legacy media.

Jena and Its Context

Jena is a small town (population 3,317 in 2010) that is the parish seat and largest incorporated place in rural LaSalle Parish (population 15,000) in central Louisiana. Parish officials made the infamous decisions in the Jena case. Jena High School, one of two in the parish, is governed by the LaSalle Parish school board and school superintendent. LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters was the prosecutor. LaSalle Parish is one of the wealthiest in Louisiana, partly due to oil reserves. It was 85% White and 12% Black in 2010, much Whiter than Louisiana as a whole, which was 32% Black in 2010. It had a high level of donation to Republican candidates and a reputation as a KKK area due in part to high vote totals for former KKK leader David Duke in the 1990 gubernatorial election.

The unincorporated area outside the Jena town limits is called “Ward 10” in news stories about the Jena 6. Ward 10 of LaSalle Parish overlaps substantially (but not entirely) with Midway, a Census designated unincorporated place. Figure 1 shows the boundaries of Jena and Midway and the locations of key events in the Jena 6 story. In 2010, over half (57%) of the Black residents of LaSalle Parish lived in the combined Jena-Midway area versus only 26% of the White LaSalle Parish residents. The town limits of Jena are drawn so that in 2010 it was 84% White and 11% Black. In 2010, Midway’s population of 1,297 was 42% White, 50% Black, and 7% American Indian. The Jena band of the Choctaw has offices in Trout, about four miles west of Jena on US highway 84. Of the combined population of Jena plus Midway, 93% of the American Indian people and 65% of the Black people lived in Midway versus only 16.5% of the White people. The only Black member of the LaSalle Parish school board represented Ward 10 and lived in Midway. The boys who became the Jena 6 lived in Ward 10. The two Black churches named as sites of organizing were both in the unincorporated area outside the Jena town limits, as was Good Pine Middle School, where a July 2007 forum attended by Black residents was held.

Figure 1

Map of Town of Jena and unincorporated Midway, Louisiana, showing sites of events mentioned in this Element. Map by Anya Shaw.

Figure 1 Long description

The graphs depict the following. U.S. Highway 84 enters from west north west, follows Oak Street through town, and exits to the southeast. Highway 127 enters from the north, follows First Street through town, and exits south. Highway 8 enters from west south west and ends at First Street. Highway 459 enters from the northeast and ends at Oak Street. Most of Midway is south of Oak Street and west of First Street. The courthouse is near the corner of Oak and First Streets. Jena High School is northeast of the Courthouse, and Jena Junior High is northeast of the high school. The Fair Barn is northwest of the courthouse, just inside the Jena border. The detention center is in the far northwest of Jena. The Recreational Park is in Midway, southwest of the courthouse. Antioch Baptist Church is in Midway, north of the Recreational Park and southwest of the courthouse. The Gotta Go market is west of the Antioch church at the western edge of Midway. The L & A Baptist Church and Good Pine Middle School are just west of the Midway boundary on U.S. Highway 84.

Jena High School had about 500 students and was about 10% Black. It served surrounding rural areas as well as Jena and Ward 10/Midway. High school was the first experience with integration for many White students at Jena High School. Accounts in news stories imply that Jena was like much of the United States in being legally integrated and informally segregated. The racial attitudes of individual White people varied, with overt White supremacists being part of the mix while others were more egalitarian. There were two Black teachers at Jena High and there were student and adult friendships across racial lines, even as there was a general pattern of social segregation and White political, economic, and social domination.

The Jena Juvenile Detention center was opened in 1998 and closed in 2000 after advocacy by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana about abusive treatment by corrections staff of Black and Latino youth. It reopened in 2005 to house incarcerated evacuees after hurricane Katrina, and there were reports of abusive and racist treatment of the evacuees by correctional officers. It was closed during the Jena 6 events. In October 2007, the facility reopened as the LaSalle ICE Processing Center and is in the news in 2025 as the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center where immigrants are being detained.

Jena is relatively isolated in a hilly wooded region where the primary industry is timber. As the map in Figure 2 shows, it is served only by two-lane roads. It is forty miles from Interstate 49 at Alexandria. Alexandria and its twin city Pineville combined had about 63,000 residents in 2007. The next nearest city is Monroe, 65 miles away in the opposite direction, population 50,000. Larger cities are more than a hundred miles away.

Figure 2

Map of Louisiana showing location of Jena in relation to parish outlines, highways, and larger cities. Map by Anya Shaw.

Figure 2 Long description

Parish boundaries are outlined without labels. Interstates 20, 10, and 49 are shown along with smaller highways connecting to Jena. Also shown are the Louisiana cities of Shreveport, Monroe, Alexandria, Lake Charles, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, as well as Houston, Texas and Jackson, Mississippi. In the north part of Louisiana, I-20 runs east to west through Monroe (about 1/3 of the distance from east) and Shreveport (close to the western boundary). Jackson, Mississippi, is on a line with I-20. In the southern part, I-10 runs from east to west through New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Lake Charles. Houston is west in line with I-10. I-49 runs from the northwest corner of Louisiana to the southeast through Shreveport and Alexandria, ending at I-10 at Lafayette. Alexandria is in the center of Louisiana, and Jena is to its northeast. Smaller highways connect Alexandria to Jena.

Alexandria is important in this story. The Alexandria city government officially welcomed the Jena protesters in September 2007 and Alexandria was the staging area for the Jena protest. Its newspaper, radio stations, and television station serve the Central Louisiana area and covered the nooses and the Jena 6 case. Alexandria’s population was and is over half Black. Pineville, across the river from Alexandria, is majority White but elected a Black mayor in 2000 who served for more than twenty years. Alexandria’s first Black mayor was elected in 2018. There are two colleges in the area, the Alexandria branch of Louisiana State University, and the private Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College.

The Jena 6 Narrative

The Jena 6 were Black teens charged with attempted murder after the beating of White fellow Jena High student Justin Barker on December 4, 2007: Mychal Bell (the only one who went to trial and was convicted), Robert Bailey, Jr., Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, and Jesse Beard.

The Jena 6 narrative connected a noose-hanging that occurred on September 1, 2006, with a fight that occurred three months later. Alan Bean has often recounted the story of creating the narrative and recruiting journalists to cover it (Bean Reference Bean2009, Reference Bean2010; Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 39–40). The Jena 6 story was not fiction: the events happened. But it “connected the narrative dots” (Bean Reference Bean2009) between the noose-hanging and the fight to tell a story of how “one thing led to another” (Bean Reference Bean2010). Bean’s goal was to get outside media attention for small town cases typically ignored by the national press to pressure local authorities and attract pro bono legal support from high profile firms. A press briefing with an event list was circulated by email; a copy was posted by a blogger on April 10, 2007 (McCoy Reference McCoy2007) and on Bean’s Friends of Justice website on June 12, 2007 (FOJ 06–12). We refer to this document below as Bean’s event list.

The framework for the circulating narrative was provided by three articles published in May 2007. Bean recruited two journalists whose pieces appeared on May 20, 2007, pegged to the original trial date for two of the boys: Tom Mangold’s BBC documentary and accompanying blog post, and Howard Witt’s Chicago Tribune article. Louisiana ACLU activist Tory Pegram recruited Jordan Flaherty, whose first story was posted on May 9 to multiple online progressive media outlets. Bean also recruited coverage for a segment on Paula Zahn’s CNN show that aired on the eve of Mychal Bell’s trial, a month after the other news stories broke.

The May news stories all portrayed Jena as a racist Southern town. Flaherty emphasized persistent local protests and other recent cases of racial violence in nearby towns. Witt and Mangold described Jena as a throwback to Jim Crow era segregation although they also included “both sides” interviews with White residents who described racial harmony. In a blog commenting on the Witt and Mangold stories the day after they were published, Bean said “The Jena story suggests that certain pockets of Deep South American didn’t get the civil rights memo. That is certainly the burden of the Jena stories published yesterday.” Bean continued: “Jena is being covered as a story about the persistence of the old Jim Crow, but it is much more than that. Jena is also a story about the new Jim Crow: the manipulation of the criminal justice system to deprive low status black people of basic justice” (FOJ 05–21).Footnote ⁶ The “old Jim Crow throwback” framing dominated the circulating narratives.

As the protest campaign unfolded, some writers interviewed the people involved and published divergent claims about the personal relationships and conflicts among the youths involved in the various events, the youths’ personal histories and characters, the extent of the punishment the noose-hangers, and the details of the several fights that are part of the story (e.g., Barr and Noren Reference Barr and Noren2007; Christie Reference Christie2008; Waldman Reference Waldman2008; Franklin Reference Franklin2007). We cannot adjudicate disputes about truth of these claims. Instead, we focus on the construction of the narrative. We compare the events described in contemporaneous sources – drawing primarily on accounts in the Alexandria Town Talk and Alan Bean’s narrativeFootnote ⁷ – with what was said later by media and movement actors. Except as noted, the Town Talk and Bean’s narrative agree with each other. Our discussion of the narrative as it circulated later is based primarily on sixty-nine Black newspaper articles and thirty-five mainstream newswire articles drawn from our larger research project.Footnote ⁸

Although the circulating narratives often compressed the timeline, the original time frame has two acts. Act 1 is events between August 31 and September 18 about the noose-hanging. Act 2 is events between November 30 and late December related to the fight. We have no contemporaneous records of what happened in the intervening ten weeks. The narrative task was to connect these seemingly unconnected sets of events. We first discuss the narratives constructed about of each of the two acts and then consider what was said about the connections between them.

Act 1: September 2006

The anchor events in the narrative about September were that nooses were hung on a tree at Jena High School after a Black student challenged the assumption that only Whites could sit under it and that the noose-hangers were not seriously punished. A Black student (later identified as Kenneth Purvis, a cousin of Bryant Purvis, one of the Jena 6) asked about sitting under the “white” tree at a school assembly on Thursday August 31. Two hangman’s noosesFootnote ⁹ in the school colors were hung on the tree on Friday September 1. The three perpetrators were quickly identified,Footnote ¹⁰ and the principal recommended expulsion for them on Wednesday September 6. The school board rejected expulsion and instead suspended the students on Thursday September 7. At the time, the school superintendent declined to give further details about the punishment except to say that the students were currently in an alternative school. Bean described the punishment as “a few days suspension” which was later generally rendered as “three days.” A year later, at the height of the protest, officials described more extensive punishment including three weeks of several types of suspension, a discipline court, and intervention programs (Christie Reference Christie2008), but this was not reported at the time.

It is likely that Purvis’s original question had a jocular tone and was met by laughter, and possible that the youths who hung the nooses saw it as a prank, but this does not mean the question and the nooses were innocent of racial conflict. What we know for sure is that Black adults in Jena did not view the nooses as an innocent joke. The nooses were hung on Friday before the Labor Day weekend. On Tuesday September 5, Black adults called regional news outlets, including both the Alexandria Town Talk and Alexandria television station KALB, and held a protest meeting at L&A Missionary Baptist Church. The story was circulated by the Associated Press and reprinted nationally and internationally.

The Town Talk article says that about sixteen students were present at the meeting and stood up to confirm that they had seen the nooses but did not speak. With one exception, the adults quoted in the story did not appear in later stories about the Jena 6. They include Tracy Bowens (who organized the meeting and was later quoted in Howard Witt’s May 20 story), Dan Brown (who called reporters), Renea Ogletree (who has contacted the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national action network about the incident”)Footnote ¹¹, Shirley Bowers, and lawyer Krystal Todd (identifiable in other news stories as a public defender). Associated Press articles named Tracy Bowens as having organized a community meeting and printed follow up stories about the recommended expulsion and then lesser punishment of the students. Alexandria television station KALB covered the protest about the nooses initially and in follow up stories.

News coverage of the adult protest on September 5 had consequences the next day. The Town Talk reports that there was continuing racial tension on September 6 about the nooses, including at least one fight at school and as many as five fights. Bean’s narrative says students conducted an ad hoc protest under the tree that day; the Town Talk makes no mention of a protest. Both say a school assembly was called with police present, and the district attorney spoke to the assembly. The Town Talk describes the school assembly as a response to the tensions and fights at school in the wake of the noose incident and says that district attorney Reed Walters “stressed the importance of remaining calm.” Walters later admitted under oath that he said what Alan Bean’s narrative quotes him as saying at the assembly: “I can take away your lives with a stroke of this pen.” Black students said that Walters was looking at them when he said it, while Walters claimed he was speaking to all students and addressing the fights that had occurred. In Bean’s narrative, Walters’s statement is implicitly a threatening response to the protest at school.

In the same articles that describe the ongoing conflict over the nooses and the proposed expulsion and reduced penalty to suspension only of the students who hung the nooses, the Town Talk reports that there were fights or threats at school and police patrolled the school on Thursday and Friday, September 7 and 8. The fights at school on these specific dates were not covered by the Associated Press or later articles, although many later articles vaguely referred to “ongoing fights” as if they had persisted throughout the fall.

Black adults persisted in their protests. On September 11, a group asked for but was refused the opportunity to speak to the school board and were quoted as saying they had contacted the NAACP and the FBI. The FBI did, in fact, come to town to investigate, but this was not reported at the time. On September 18, Tracy Bowens was allowed to speak for five minutes to the school board. The Town Talk coverage on September 19 says:

Black adult efforts to attract media attention and address the situation were treated as divisive. On September 13, the Jena Times published an editorial blaming the fights at school on media coverage about the nooses.Footnote ¹² The January 2007 Jena Times year in review summarizes this story:

There was intense community conflict about how to view the intentions of the noose-hangers and the seriousness of the offense. Claims that the nooses were an innocent prank without racial animus were rejected by those who argued that everyone knew or should know the meaning of nooses, especially in the context of it being a response to the previous day’s question. Ten months later in a July 26, 2007, forum at Good Pines Middle School attended by more than a hundred mostly Black people, federal officials outlined the definition of a hate crime, and an FBI agent said the noose-hanging met two of the elements of a federal hate crime (motivated by bias, interfered with a protected activity) but not the third, threat or use of force. Then the same official said that expulsion is a common remedy in response to such incidents and noted that as far as they knew, no school official or anyone in political leadership had ever denounced the noose-hanging. Other later discussions emphasize that the nooses met the definition of a hate crime in Louisiana state law and emphasize the failure of the school administration to take the incident seriously and address the concerns of Black residents.

As the Jena campaign built, the circulating narratives gave all the agency of resistance to the nooses to students, not adults. Black students stood silently on September 5 at L&A Baptist Church, while adults spoke and protested. But the circulating narratives erased the documented adult protests while adding less well-documented student protests.

School officials denied knowing about any student protest, and a representative of the FBI reported at the July forum that he could find no evidence that a protest had occurred. It is plausible that some sort of small ad hoc protest took place when Bean says it did on September 6 and that it was linked to the fights reported in the Town Talk. YouTube videos posted in the summer and fall of 2007 include Black students describing protests occurring in a variety of ways and on different occasions. Published articles have a wide variety of protest embellishments and some published variants have the students sitting in protest under the tree two or even three times, both before and after the nooses were hung.

Of the early outside reporting on the case, Flaherty mentions a school protest linked to the district attorney’s threat at the assembly and the June CNN Paula Zahn show says that students sat under the tree before the nooses, while Witt and Mangold make no mention of student protests. None of early stories nor any of the articles in our project sample mentioned any of the documented adult protests. By contrast, 56% of Black newspaper articles versus 9% of newswire articles mentioned a student protest at the tree after the nooses were hung.Footnote ¹³ Sitting under the tree in protest before the nooses were hung (often substituting for the student asking about sitting under the tree) was described in 56% of Black newspaper articles and 27% of newswire articles. In an August 1 Democracy Now interview, Jordan Flaherty describes the protest even more vividly and implausibly: “And the next day the three nooses were hung from the tree. And in a spontaneous act of daring and brave resistance, nearly every Black student in the school went and stood under the tree” (Goodman Reference Goodman2007).

Act 2: December 2006

Act 2 begins with arson. In the early hours of Thursday November 30, a fire that was obviously arson destroyed the main building of Jena High School. The event was traumatic for the community and was a major topic of multiple local news stories and a brief Associated Press story. Nobody knew who had done it. (A year later, a mixed-race group of students unrelated to the Jena 6 incident were charged with the crime.) Black and White students blamed each other. Jena High was closed Thursday and Friday. There were multiple interracial fights that weekend that did not involve the teens later singled out. Teachers asked school officials to delay reopening because of weekend fighting but school reopened Monday anyway.

Jena High School leadership was in transition. In November, the school board voted to transfer Scott Windham, the Jena High principal who had recommend expulsion for the noose-hangers, to supervising maintenance and transportation effective December 1 and to search for a replacement. A new principal was approved at a School Board meeting on December 4 “effective today.” This transition and its possible implications about ongoing adult conflicts about the noose incident or its effects on decisions about reopening school were never mentioned in any later article.

After the December 4 fight, two fights on December 1 and 2 became part of the later Jena 6 story. Because the December 1 and 2 fights were brought into the narrative only after the December 4 fight, we discuss the December 4 fight first.

Connecting the Acts and Constructing a Narrative

The power of the Jena 6 narrative was the link between the nooses and the fight. The narrative problem was to explain the connection between events in September and events in December. The authorities repeatedly asserted there was no connection. None of the Town Talk stories focusing on the arson mentioned the noose-hanging incident, nor were the nooses mentioned in the first report of the crucial December 4 fight. However, subsequent Town Talk articles about the December 4 fight that linked it to fights on December 1 and 2 always contained the official statement that the fights were not related to either the nooses or the arson, a repetition of nonrelevance that implies the possible connection was in public consciousness.

Bean’s list of events left the content and character of the connections between September and December ambiguous, saying: “Although few major disciplinary issues emerged during the fall semester at Jena High School, there is strong evidence that several black male students remained unusually agitated throughout the semester and that disciplinary referrals on these students spiked sharply.”

Those who dug into the case sometimes suggested that there were ongoing conflicts between a specific group of White boys associated with the rodeo program who included the noose-hangers and a specific group of Black boys associated with the football program who included some of the Jena 6 and that some of the conflicts were personal (including a prior conflict between Justin Barker and Mychal Bell around Barker’s girlfriend), but personalized explanations were never part of any of the circulating accounts.

One common narrative device for connecting the nooses and the fight in the news articles we examined (including in the three May breakout articles) was “persistent conflict,” implying that there had been relatively continuous or at least periodic fighting between September and December (which Alan Bean’s spring 2007 narrative explicitly denies). In some cases, the timeline was simply compressed to imply (or even say) that the noose-hanging happened shortly before the crucial fight. A few writers even included Justin Barker being arrested for bringing a gun to school on May 10, 2007, as having occurred at the time of the other fights.

In some variants of the narrative, the connection was simply that the same community was a racist place that had both tolerated noose-hanging and over-charged the youths. In this account, the nooses do not need to explain or have any direct connection to the fight; they are enough as a symbol of how racist Jena is. Greenlea’s content analysis of comments on the ColorOfChange.org petition about the Jena 6 finds that by far the most common reference was to the nooses, with 54% mentioning them (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 56). Follow-up protests by Black organizations in October and November focused on increasing the penalties for hate crimes, especially noose-hangings. The three breakout stories in May all invoked a “racist place” narrative, with Mangold and Witt emphasizing throwbacks to Jim Crow and Flaherty emphasizing present-day cases of racist violence in nearby communities. As the conflict unfolded, White Jena residents expressed resentment at being characterized as exceptionally backward and racist.

The movement problem with the “racist place” narrative is that it localizes the problem to Jena only. Both Alan Bean and Black movement leaders repeatedly sought to generalize, tying the Jena case to broader national problems of unequal treatment, treating Jena not as an unusual throwback but as symptomatic of current problems in the whole country, what Bean often called the “new Jim Crow.”

For many circulating the story, there was a narrative storytelling drive to forge a more direct connection between the nooses and the fight, making the nooses a cause of the fight and the fight an act of resistance against racial intimidation. Some said that the failure to punish the noose-hanging encouraged more racial taunting by White students against Black students. Perhaps this is what people were euphemistically referring to as “racial tensions” and what Bean is referring to in this July 10 blog post:

Bean’s statement makes the fighting sound like an apolitical defensive reaction to the hate crime. Other versions of the connection turned the fight more into an act of resistance against racism. Some accounts emphasized that Barker was friends with one of the students who had hung the nooses. Accounts stressing that Justin Barker was heard racially taunting Black students before the fight implicitly invoked the idea of “fighting words” and fighting as resistance to racism. Some accounts even claimed that the reason for the overcharging was that the Jena 6 themselves had organized a student protest about the nooses. For example, in the previously cited Democracy Now interview, Jordan Flaherty followed the description of the school protest with: “And it’s been widely said that the folks that organized that protest to sit under the tree are the so-called Jena Six, the six students that are now facing life in prison for a schoolyard fight” (Goodman Reference Goodman2007).

Adult Conflict and Collective Action

The Jena 6 narrative as it circulated typically treated these six Black students as standing alone or only with other students in resisting the racial oppression of the nooses, first in conducting a protest at an uncertain time that seemed to expand in importance with the telling and then in the fight itself, which was described as resistance to racial taunting and sometimes even as specifically about the nooses. This narrative impulse aligns with Polletta’s arguments about how openness and spontaneity can help recruit participants to action. In these narratives, the Jena 6 themselves were the only significant actors. The District Attorney’s overcharging was motivated either by static racism or as retribution for student protest about the nooses.

These variants of the Jena 6 narrative erased the adult collective action in September that included holding a protest meeting, obtaining outside media coverage, protesting at the school board, and bringing the FBI to town. They erased White adult hostility toward the outside media attention. They erased the community trauma of the school arson. They erased evidence of broader adult political pressure to bring violence under control that included the teachers’ threatened sick-in. They erased evidence of widespread community concern about racial conflict in the adult-led biracial community-wide religious racial healing events.

An alternate narrative locates the over-charging of the Jena 6 in the context of wider community racial conflict and the perception that this racial conflict had become violent. This is the emphasis in the email circulated via the Juvenile Justice Project: “The circumstances surrounding these arrests paint a disturbing picture of a community mired in racial tension…” (quoted in Flaherty Reference Flaherty2010, 340). The authorities blamed arson and racial fighting only on Black students and sought to bring the situation under control with excessive punitiveness toward the arrested Black youths.

The Jena Times had said that the noose incident was a prank that had been overblown and blamed news coverage for creating conflict. A Jena Times article dated January 10, 2007, says: “As the year 2006 ended, Jena High School and the community witness tensions resulting in a fire that destroyed the main educational building at the school and student fights on and off campus, which resulted in several arrests.” This sentence structure says that “tensions” preceded and caused both the fire and fights. In context, “tensions” seems to refer to conflicts around the noose incident.

While we cannot assess the distribution of community opinions about the Jena 6 from this distance, the community racial unity events demonstrate that many people of both races saw a community-wide problem that went beyond that one fight and called for a more bilateral need for healing and reconciliation. Even as they differed from the punitive response, these racial unity events were not necessarily addressing racial injustice. Greenlea (Reference Greenlea2014, 34) critiques the unity rallies as requiring Black people to set aside their complaints and return to the status quo and says that the families insisted instead on organizing resistance. Bean says, “the price of unity was steep–no one, black or white, was allowed to reference the plight of the Jena 6, the ‘noose incident’ or any other real-world event. As a result, the six young men accused of attempted murder were left to twist in the wind” (FOJ 08–18). Bean continues to say that only Antioch Baptist would allow meetings about the case, and that Black people supported the case privately but not publicly because “That would mean getting the white folks upset, and, Lord knows, we don’t want that.” Emerson and Smith (Reference Emerson and Smith2001) discuss the national-level attempts at racial reconciliation among Evangelicals in the 1990s, arguing that these movements ultimately failed because White Evangelicals saw this happening entirely at the level of individual personal relationships, while Black Evangelicals believed that issues of systemic racism also needed to be addressed. Jena’s interracial ministerial association fell apart as the case progressed in 2007.

Historical Context

Historians use the term “Long Civil Rights Movement” to describe the decades of organizing and protest that preceded the conventionally defined Civil Rights Era (Burke Reference Burke2020; Cha-Jua and Lang Reference Cha-Jua and Lang2007; Felber Reference Felber2020; Fujino and Harmachis Reference Fujino and Harmachis2020; Kelley Reference Kelley2010; Morris Reference Morris1984; Nichter Reference Nichter2014, Reference Nichter2021; Stillerman Reference Stillerman2020; Williams Reference Williams2015). What may be called the Long Black Movement continued from the end of the Civil Rights era into the rise of the Black Lives movement in 2014. Rollbacks of Civil Rights gains began in the 1970s (Robnett Reference Robnett, Johnston and Oliver2020) and ensuing decades saw both gains and losses. Although weakened, NAACP, SCLC, CORE, and hundreds of other national and local organizations continued to promote Black interests in a wide variety of ways with a wide range of political ideologies (Brewer Reference Brewer2003; Johnson Reference Johnson2007; Lawson Reference 71Lawson2014; Marable Reference Marable2007; Musgrove Reference Musgrove2019; Oliver Reference Oliver, Johnston and Oliver2020; Richie Reference Richie2012; Taylor Reference Taylor2015).

The 1990s saw Black disenchantment after the not guilty verdict for the police who beat Rodney King in 1992 and the Republican victories of 1994. Organizing for the 1995 Million Man March built support and raised civic and political participation across a wide range of Black demographics and political ideologies, despite controversies around Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, but there was widespread disappointment that no national-level organization emerged from it (Rahman Reference Rahman1996).

Cathy Cohen (Reference Cohen2010, 170) calls hurricane Katrina the “Rodney King moment” for young Black people in the 2000s. In late August 2005, Katrina killed 1,392 people, caused extensive damage on the gulf coast, and displaced about 600,000 households for more than a month. New Orleans flooding disproportionately affected its Black residents and over half of New Orleans’s residents were still displaced a year later. Black people identified with hurricane victims and saw racism playing a huge role in the failed disaster response (Harris-Perry Reference Harris-Perry2011, Chapter 4). Displaced activists and writers from New Orleans formed networks to address the ongoing needs and grievances of gulf coast residents (Flaherty Reference Flaherty2010)Footnote ¹⁶ and became one of the channels of organizing for the Jena 6.

The October 12, 2005, Millions More Movement rally organized by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam commemorated the 10^th anniversary of the Million Man March. It was endorsed without controversy by virtually every Black organization. Its stated intention was to build a Black agenda and a sustained movement organization. A few hundred thousand people attended. Rally speeches criticized the failed emergency response to Katrina, criticized the war in Iraq, and emphasized the broad ideological diversity of those in attendance.

The huge pro-immigrant marches in 2006 were generally supported by Black organizations, but some Black newspaper editorialists drew comparisons that decried the absence of comparable attention to Black concerns (e.g., Chicago Citizen Reference Citizen2006; Recorder 2006). Barack Obama, who later became the first Black president, was receiving substantial attention in 2007 as a Democratic candidate.

Phase One, January to May: Regional Support and Media Outreach

Although information about initial local organizing is sparse, its contours can be traced. The six boys accused of attempted murder in Jena received support from activists in the region who were notified through existing activist networks. These initial efforts at ordinary local and regional mobilizing created a local organization, attracted media attention, and produced a barely detectable rise in public attention after mid-June, but these efforts were not enough to obtain help for the Jena 6.

In January 2007, all six boys had been expelled from Jena schools. Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, and Mychal Bell were sitting in adult jail and already being punished because their families could not afford to post bail. The families of the other three boys had bailed them out and arranged for them to go elsewhere for schooling while they awaited trial. Black and White ministers sought to calm down tensions as classes resumed at Jena High School.

Regional activists were notified within days of the attempted murder charge through emails circulated through the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a group based in New Orleans that had previously organized against the juvenile prison in Jena (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 27). Writer-activist Jordan Flaherty cites the email he received in early December from Jason Williamson, an attorney with JJPL Other evidence of immediate regional awareness is a December 12 blog post titled “Open Thread: What the Heck Is Happening in Jena?” (White Reference White2006) by Lamar White, then an aide to the newly elected mayor of Alexandria:

Three comments dated December 12 to 14 offer garbled versions of the Gotta Go fight, complain that the Town Talk isn’t investigating, discuss the story about the gun, and say, “LaSalle Parish is well known as a Klan area.” The fourth and final comment dated January 24 is from Alan Bean, saying he plans to come to town soon and would like to talk to anyone who knows anything, giving his phone number. Bean left a similar undated comment on Eddie Thompson’s December 15 “awash with racism” post, mentioned above.

Phase Two, July to Early August: Nationalizing the Campaign

Pulled in through existing movement connections, national organizations began supporting the Jena 6 case in July, after Mychal Bell’s guilty verdict. Activists organized toward July 31, Bell’s scheduled sentencing date. News coverage grew, primarily in Louisiana, progressive, and Black-centric outlets including at least one mention in Tom Joyner’s BlackAmericaWeb.com (FOJ 07–02),Footnote ²³ but also on CNN, NPR, and other mainstream outlets. The New York Times was still not covering the case.

The NAACP adopted an emergency resolution about Jena at its national convention held July 7–12, 2007 (NAACP 2007; Spencer Reference Spencer2007). The resolution references the chartering of the LaSalle Parish NAACP in May and its request for “support of the NAACP in demonstrating to the local community that they are not alone in their fight for equal justice for the Jena 6,” expresses solidarity, and calls on the US Department of justice to investigate and monitor the trial and the US Department of Education to investigate allegations of discrimination in Jena High. Once it took on the issue, the NAACP also opened a web site to collect donations for the Jena 6 (which initially went to general support for the NAACP until there were complaints), issued statements of support, and circulated a petition (Kane Reference Kane2007).

ColorOfChange.org (COC) is an online organizing hub created by James Rucker, who had previously worked with MoveOn.org. Rucker was from New Orleans but living in San Francisco in 2007. COC’s first campaign about racial biases in the treatment of victims of hurricane Katrina gained little response. Rucker heard of the Jena case “from journalists and activists he had worked with on Hurricane Katrina” (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 99).Footnote ²⁴ Rucker went to Jena to investigate for himself before opening the campaign. The first COC email, sent July 17, began: “The noose-hanging incident and the DA’s visit to the school set the stage for everything that followed.” By July 31, COC had collected 45,000 signatures on a petition to the Louisiana Governor asking for relief for the Jena 6, which Rucker delivered in person as large stacks of paper at the July 31 protest in Jena. Greenlea says that Rucker helped to organize the July 31 protest.

Although Rucker had previously worked with news media, he decided to work with bloggers in publicizing this case (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 181). Comments on AfroSpear blog posts from May and June 2007 that were still extant in 2023 became more frequent in July and August, suggesting that the readership and impact of the blogs accelerated in July, possibly due to the involvement of COC.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) became one of the key pillars of organizing around the Jena case. In 2005, it had formed the Millions More Movement (MMM), which included Christian and secular groups, to advance a more collaborative political agenda. A south Texas member heard about the case from a Democracy Now broadcast and texted Jesse Muhammad (now Abdul Qiyam Muhammad) (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 125). Muhammad organized a trip to investigate and on July 22 published a cover feature about the Jena 6 for the Nation of Islam’s paper, the Final Call (Muhammad Reference Muhammad2007). The article focuses on the Jena 6 narrative and the unfairness of Bell’s trial, quoting Marcus Jones, Mycal Bell’s father. It says there will be a protest on July 31 and provides contact information for the MMM to donate funds or support the protest. Muhammad and other members of Houston’s NOI called all the organizers of student governments in historically Black colleges and raised grassroots energy (Flaherty Reference Flaherty2010). The Final Call continued to give extensive coverage of the Jena 6 as the mobilization built in August and September (D.-M. Gibson Reference Gibson2012) and the MMM got many people to Jena.

Ordinary Communication and Attention before the Cascade

There was a media cascade about Jena 6 that was mostly centered on the September 20 protest. Figures 3 and 4 summarize more detailed analyses in Appendix E. They show normalized counts of articles (top three panels) and Google searches (bottom panel) for September 1 to October 10 (Figure 3) and May 1 to September 15 (Figure 4). All counts are rescaled as proportions of the maximum within the graphed range, which is set to 100. Figure 3 shows a huge peak in Google searches and mainstream news that is narrowly centered on September 20. Black newspapers tracked by Ethnic NewsWatch had more dispersed coverage in this range.

Figure 3

Normed counts of relevant news articles from Ethnic NewsWatch, Factiva, and US NewsStream (top three panels) and of Google searches for Jena (bottom panel) between September 1 and October 10, 2007. Scaled as proportion of maximum within each series, maximum set to 100.

Figure 3 Long description

The vertical axis is labeled Normed Counts, ranging from 0 to 100 in increments of 20. The horizontal axis represents the dates. Google graph shows a steep peak on September 20 with steep rises one day before and after, much lower a few days before and after, a very gradual rise before and a decline after. The U.S. News Stream graph shows low non-zero counts before September 15, then a steep rise beginning September 17, peaking at September 21, then a steep decline, with a second lower peak on September 27 (a week later). The Factiva graph is similar to the U.S. News Stream with a bump on September 15, then a rise after September 17 to a peak on September 20 and 21, then a steep decline with another bump on September 28. The Ethnic News Watch graph shows seven-day cycles of peaks due to most sources being weekly. The highest peak is September 29, then September 20, October 4, September 13, and September 7 (in that order).

Figure 4

Normed counts of relevant news articles from Ethnic NewsWatch, Factiva, and US NewsStream (top three panels) and of Google searches for Jena (bottom panel) between May 1 and September 15, 2007. Scaled as proportion of maximum within each series, maximum set to 100.

Figure 4 Long description

The vertical axis represents Normed Counts, ranging from 0 to 100, in increments of 20. The horizontal axis represents the dates. The purpose of the display is to see correspondences between key events and bursts of news coverage or spikes in Google searches. Google graph oscillates at a low non-zero level before mid-June, then has a small, barely-detectable rise through August. May 20 shows a small spike in Factiva and U.S. News Stream, but no counts for Ethnic NewsWatch and no spike in Google. Late June shows a burst of counts in Factiva and U.S. News Stream. July 1 shows a small spike in Google. July 10 shows a small spike in Google, and there is a small burst in U.S. NewsStream after July 10. There is a small rise in all graphs after July 17. There is a burst of counts in Factiva and US News Stream around July 31 and early August, with no rise in Google. Google shows rises beginning on August 20 and again on August 28 that have no clear parallel in the other graphs. All graphs show a local peak on September 4 or 5. All four graphs show a peak on September 14 or 15 that is much larger than earlier peaks.

Earlier patterns that are too small to be detected against the September 20 peak can be seen in Figure 4. The communication and attention cascade started at the end of August. Between May 1 and August 20 there are small bursts of mainstream coverage around the May 20 articles, around Mycal Bell’s trial at the end of June, and around the protest on July 31 and Al Sharpton’s visit to Jena in early August. Prior to mid-August, most of the coverage archived in US NewsStream was from Louisiana sources. There are a few Black newspaper articles in Ethnic NewsWatch in July and then more attention in August.

Google Trends searches for “Jena” show only small and difficult to measure ripples around a generally low level with a slow rise from mid-June to mid-August. There is a one-day spike in searching for Jena on July 1, the day of the BlackAmericaWeb.com story covering Mychal Bell’s trial, a spike for searches for Jena, Jena 6, and Jena Six on July 10, the date of Democracy Now! coverage of the case that featured an interview with Jordan Flaherty and interviews with Jena residents, and possibly a rise for these terms in the two days after July 17 when Color of Change sent its first email about the case. There is a clear rise in Google Trends for searches for Jena, Jena Six, and Jena 6 that begins on August 20, although this rise is dwarfed by later increases. Two high-circulation weekly magazines published articles about the Jena case on August 20: mainstream Newsweek and Black-centric Jet. Another rise in Google trends August 28–30 does not seem linked to publicationsFootnote ²⁵ and may be tied to Black radio.

Before mid-August, the Jena case attracted less attention from mainstream and Black media than the Genarlow Wilson case. Although we could find no stories about Jena on the Internet Archive of BlackAmericaWeb.com for the saved dates of July 5, 6, 8, and 11, there are stories about Genarlow Wilson on all those dates, including a report of a protest in Atlanta involving 2000 people. Google Trends comparisons with the keyword Genarlow tell the same story as the media data. Although the search term “Genarlow” has no non-zero baseline, Google Trends reveals a few bursts of attention to Genarlow between January and mid-July that are much larger than the volume of attention given to Jena before September 1. Before late August, Genarlow Wilson was more attention-worthy than the Jena 6.

Phase Three, Late August to September: Call to Protest and the Communication and Mobilization Cascade

The Jena 6 became a huge media cascade centering on the September 20 rally. It appears that it was the call to protest and not the Jena 6 case itself that motivated protesters and drew media and public attention. Most mainstream news coverage was reactive, responding to the protest. Many Black newspapers are published weekly and the peak for Ethnic NewsWatch is September 27, a week after the rally, but Ethnic NewsWatch also shows substantial prospective coverage of the protest the week before the rally, on September 13.

After the July 31 rally, everyone involved expected the next protest date would be Mychal Bell’s rescheduled sentencing. Town Talk coverage of the July 31 protest quoted Khadijah Rashad from Lafayette’s Community Defender television saying, “When there is going to be sentencing again, we need to flood this area with as much people as we possibly can. We want the entire world to know.” Al Sharpton said in his early August visit that he would keep coming back until justice is done. An August 15 article by Jordan Flaherty says the families have called for a demonstration on September 20 (Flaherty Reference Flaherty2007b). In coverage of Sharpton and King’s visit on August 14, Deric Muhammad, a spokesman for the Houston Millions More Movement Ministry of Justice said “The next big event will be on September 20, when Bell is to be sentenced. We are expecting more people than the few hundred who showed up for the first sentencing date of July 31” and that “there is a growing student movement in support of the Jena 6 on college campuses such as LSU, Texas Southern and the University of Michigan” (Shabazz Reference Shabazz2007).

It took time for the call to protest in Jena on September 20 to circulate widely into news media. The August 20 Newsweek article says, “a host of national figures–from the Rev. Al Sharpton to the Nation of Islam to the American Civil Liberties Union–have descended on the town to inveigh against racial injustice” (Kovach and Campo-Flores Reference Kovach and Campo-Flores2007). The August 20 Jet article discusses Sharpton’s visit to Jena and gives even more attention to a Chicago radio show and rally on August 18 featuring Jesse Jackson (Waldron and Chappell Reference Waldron and Chappell2007). But neither article mentions a September 20 protest. Of the 25 articles archived in Ethnic NewsWatch with August publication dates that mention the Jena case, only one Amsterdam News article published on August 16 mentions a September 20 protest. A story in the mainstream Milwaukee Journal Sentinel dated September 2 by Black journalist Eugene Kane about the case says, “My e-mail inbox was filled up last week with pleas from activists across the nation to write about the Jena Six,” but mentions only the petition campaign and not the call to go to Jena on September 20.

However, communication and organizing were happening. The MMM had gotten people to Jena for July 31 and was organizing in more places through Black college and community groups. Other previously activated groups were also regrouping for a September protest. A blog post by Alan Bean dated August 31 says attendance at a September protest might reach 5000 (FOJ 08–31). Although few sources seem to know about a September 20 protest in August, multiple articles dated September 4 to 6 – mostly in Black newspapers but also in some mainstream outlets – discuss plans for the protest and the involvement of radio hosts.

Although we have no data on the point, most likely messaging through blogs and social media accelerated after the call to protest in mid-August. The fragmentary evidence from the blogs we located shows the greatest activity around publicizing the protest in August and September. Greenlea (Reference Greenlea2014, 72ff) discusses the content of Black blogging about the case and bloggers’ beliefs that they were unusually well poised to coordinate a movement through their decentralized communication structures. Bloggers also communicated via Facebook. Most of the blog content described in academic articles references the protest or events after the protest.

The biggest communication boost probably came via Black radio. Multiple sources say that Michael Baisden was the first radio host to pick up the Jena case and feature it on his show and that the most intense radio coverage of the case was in September. However, we have found no source that says exactly when Michael Baisden first began discussing the case or when radio hosts began publicizing a call to protest on September 20. Google Trends data shows a rise in attention to Jena for August 28 to 30 that is not associated with any published source we have located and may mark the entry of national Black radio to the campaign.

Many at the time credited Black radio hosts and especially Michael Baisden with organizing the rally (Lester and Thomas Reference Lester and Thomas2007; Robinson Reference Robinson2007). Michael Baisden said he learned about the Jena case in August about a month after the trial from multiple emails from his listeners (Fears, Thomas-Lester, and Washington Post Staff Writers Reference Fears and Thomas-Lester2007). He directly encouraged attendance at Jena and claimed credit for tens of thousands of attendees at Jena. Baisden encouraged use of the message board features of his website to create an online ride board, where users could post information about available seats on buses. Baisden collaborated with Al Sharpton, broadcast his show from Jena on September 20, and was the host and main organizer of several events in Alexandria before and after the Jena protests.

The most famous Black radio personality at the time was Tom Joyner, the founder of Reach America, the largest media company covering Black Americans, which also ran BlackAmericaWeb.com. Joyner had often previously sought to organize support for Black causes. Joyner did not directly seek to mobilize people to attend the Jena protest, but he publicized the case and also decided to broadcast from Jena on the day of the protest. Many of the commentators on Color of Change petitions listed Joyner as a Black leader and said that they heard of the case from him (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 137). Baisden, Joyner, and other Black radio hosts allied across network lines to promote the Jena 6 case, mostly in September (Morant Reference Morant2008, 116–118).

In September the call to protest was circulating through many different Black communication channels: radio, thousands of blogs, Facebook groups with thousands of members, YouTube videos, Black newspapers, and organizational networks including student groups, churches, mosques, and chapters of Black civic and civil rights organizations. These were penetrating social networks and generating feedback as people sought more information. One news article gives an example of the interconnections: “In Memphis, Lashandra Brooks was sitting in the New Direction Christian Church when one of the members stood and talked about Jena. She said there was a YouTube video, and the pastor invited her to show it. ‘It got a phenomenal response,’ Brooks said. ‘People are talking about it in barbershops and hair salons, asking, “Why didn’t I know about this earlier?”’” (Fears, Thomas-Lester, and Washington Post Staff Writers Reference Fears and Thomas-Lester2007). Another example comes from the personal account we received from sociologist Aisha Upton-Azzam, who was a student at the time. She learned about the Jena protest about three weeks in advance from her grandmother, who learned about it on Facebook and paid for Aisha’s ticket for the Jena bus from Chicago.

Getting People to Jena

Chartered buses and personal vehicles were the only ways to get to Jena. Chartering buses is a longstanding part of organizing big protests drawing out-of-towners, even those in cities served by trains and planes. Chartered buses are place-based: each makes a round trip from a physical location to the protest and back again. Someone contracts with the bus company, pays a deposit, and either subsidizes the trip or sells tickets for it. Buses were organized by on-the-ground groups or local coalitions of groups. Social media and websites including those organized by James Rucker’s ColorOfChange.org and Michael Baisden shared information about available transport organized by on-the-ground groups.

Radio host Michael Baisden claimed to be responsible for most of the crowd, while Greenlea speculates that Rucker and ColorOfChange accounted for most of the attendees. The Millions More Movement, often organizing through Black colleges and often collaborating with local churches, accounted for a large share of the buses coming to Jena. Buses associated with Michael Baisden transported people first to Alexandria and then to Jena. Many other buses bypassed the Alexandria events and traveled directly to Jena, often with passengers eating and sleeping on the buses.

Using news articles from the Town Talk and our larger project, we compiled a table of buses to Jena (see Appendix D) that, at 50 a bus, seems to account for about 220 buses or about 11,000 people from 25 cities. Adding one bus from each of another twenty-five cities in accord with MMM’s claim of having buses from fifty cities, we get a total minimum of 245 buses and 12,250 people. In its pre-event coverage, the Los Angeles Sentinel estimated that there would be a total of 500 to 1,000 buses (and 25,000 to 50,000 people). Given the incompleteness of our tally, it seems plausible that there could have been 500 buses coming to Jena.

Organizations reported to be coordinating buses included Black colleges, the Millions More Movement, the NAACP, NAN, Rainbow/PUSH, Black churches, and many ad hoc local Black coalitions that included Black newspapers, Black radio stations, Black businesses, and Black organizations. Places mentioned in news coverage as sending delegations included New Jersey, New York City, Birmingham, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, Southern California, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Prince George’s County Maryland, Washington DC, Durham, Greensboro, Chapel Hill, Columbus (Georgia), Memphis, Columbus (Ohio), Cleveland, Nashville, and the Louisiana cities of Lafayette, Monroe, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Shreveport. Black labor unions and the Harlem Revolutionary Club were mentioned as organizing in New York. Local churches in collaboration with other local Black organizations and media outlets were credited with forming the coalitions that organized protesters in Dallas and Nashville (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 115–121, 167–172) while Black newspapers and radio stations seemed to be key to the coalition of organizations and volunteers that formed in Los Angeles to fill buses for Jena and provide riders with food. As momentum built, Black people and Black organizations scrambled to get involved. Black newspapers reported the involvement of labor leaders and labor unions and militant Black nationalist or socialist groups that were not mentioned in mainstream sources.

Others came in private transportation. Black motorcycle clubs, whose members were often police or ex-military, came to Jena in groups, especially from nearby cities (Greenlea Reference Greenlea2014, 144–156). Many carpooled from around the country, and there was also high attendance via private vehicles from people in the region.

Religious networks provided housing. The Town Talk reported that Alexandria churches were hosting two to three thousand people who were coming from churches in thirty-six states. Many other people coming from outside Louisiana slept on their buses. There were also many buses and private vehicles that came into Jena from places within six hours of driving that could treat it as a day trip, including New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, and Memphis as well as the smaller cities in the region.

Solidarity Protests and Movement Building

There were solidarity protests in dozens of cities. Before September 20, at least 2,000 students rallied at Howard University on September 5, about 100 in Chicago on September 5, and an unknown number in San Diego on September 13. Sometime in early September, a group of 40 mayors meeting in Trenton issued a statement about the Jena case. On September 17, a rally of a “large number” of New York City lawmakers and organization leaders was held, and a Chicago minister called for a national day of prayer about the case.

There were gatherings in many cities as the buses left on September 18 and 19, and solidarity gatherings on September 20 for the people staying behind. Our project recorded specific mention of thirty-five events in twenty-two different cities that we estimate involved somewhere between 6500 and 36,000 peopleFootnote ²⁷ plus more vague reports that there were gatherings in many more cities. Many of these events involved Black politicians, Black labor leaders, and Black leaders of local organizations or churches. The Jena mobilization had become a bandwagon that people wanted to be on.

The evidence is that people did the work to get people to Jena and to solidarity rallies because they saw the potential for movement building. Prominent New York Black radio host Bob Law argued that local Black leaders around the country were important for mobilizing people: “You can’t say enough about the job Michael Baisden did. He heightened the awareness of Black people who don’t normally participate in these types of demonstrations … There was Kwame Kenyatta in Detroit, Chokwe Lumumba in Mississippi with the Katrina Tribunal, Zaki Baruti in St. Louis, Cynthia McKinney in Atlanta and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement through their chapters across the country … There has been a new leadership created as a result of the Jena 6 mobilization.”

Planning and Confusion

Local news reports said authorities were not sure what the protesters’ plans were and that those granted permits to protest in Jena on Thursday were: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, National Black Caucus, National Bar Association, Michael Baisden Show, Rainbow/PUSH, and the National Action Network. However, the two main groups organizing events were the Louisiana NAACP in collaboration with other groups and leaders (and including Al Sharpton) and Michael Baisden in collaboration with Al Sharpton.

Representatives of major civil rights organizations and radio host Michael Baisden cobbled together some advance planning for the rally. The established civil rights organizations attempted to coordinate efforts even though there was tension between groups operating in Jena. One faction included the regional groups that had been active since the previous spring, including Alan Bean, the ACLU, and the NAACP, who worked most closely with Caseptla Bailey and were tied to other activists with regional ties including James Rucker. The other faction was centered on Al Sharpton, who had been contacted by Mychal Bell’s family via the prior involvement of Raymond Brown from New Orleans NAN. Sharpton was tied to radio hosts Tom Joyner and Michael Baisden as well as other national-level activists with no local connections including Martin Luther King III and Jesse Jackson.

Staging for the protest was in Alexandria, 40 miles away, where the city officially welcomed the protesters. Months before, the state convention of the Louisiana NAACP had been scheduled for Alexandria; going to the protest was added to the convention agenda. Al Sharpton and others announced that they did not want to spend money in Jena and Jena merchants were fearful of the crowds and generally closed their businesses, but it is inconceivable that so many people could have been housed and fed in Jena anyway. Hotels were full throughout the region. Many protesters ate and slept in their buses. Others came in RV’s or camped out.

Michael Baisden hosted a rally in Alexandria on September 19 at the Levee Park Amphitheatre from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm and then broadcast his radio show live from an event at the Riverfront Center in the evening with $10 ticket sales going to support the Jena Six defense and Al Sharpton speaking. About 1500 people attended that event. Tickets for the bus ride to Jena were also on sale. On September 20, Baisden’s plan was that his buses would leave Alexandria at 5:30 am. In fact, they did not leave until after 7:00 am and many had not reached Jena by 9:00, when the courthouse rally started. After the Jena events, Baisden hosted another rally back in Alexandria that began at noon with hundreds attending and crowds growing during the day as people returned from Jena.

The Jena Times and the Alexandria Town Talk published multiple articles about the advance arrangements and logistics on the day of the protest. Local governments declared an emergency in hopes of obtaining state and federal funding for arrangements. Hundreds of law enforcement officers came from agencies around Louisiana to help manage the event. Local governments provided portable toilets. The Red Cross provided first aid stations, water, and snacks.

The original plan by civil rights groups including NAACP, Rainbow/PUSH, the SCLC, and NAN was to assemble in Jena beginning at 6:00 am at the Ward 10 Recreation Center about two miles south of the courthouse, a largely wooded area in the unincorporated part of town where most of the Black residents lived. (See Jena map in Figure 1.) The plan was to march to the courthouse, rally, and march back. This would feed into a planned hip-hop concert at the Recreation Center in the afternoon and evening. Concert organizer Catrina Wallace, Robert Bailey’s sister, said the concert would benefit the legal expenses of the Jena 6 and “bring together the young people of Jena and surrounding communities with local artists and performers from around the country,” and share a vision for young people, families, and communities achieving justice and equity. Alan Bean claimed that the NAACP did not publicize and tried to block the concert due to offensive language in hip hop music (FOJ 09–23).

Baisden and Sharpton pulled out of the original plan after Michael Baisen’s aide visited the site on September 17 and reported that the park was too small and isolated for the expected crowds and the planned march too long. Baisden said later that the march between the park and courthouse was canceled in a conference call that evening. The civil rights coalition wanted to continue to rally at the Recreation Center, but Baisden said later he refused to endorse that plan because the crowds would not fit there and he thought a march past Jena High was important. The main rally remained scheduled for 9:00 am at the courthouse, but other plans for assembly and marching were not coordinated. Some protesters associated with the NAACP assembled at the Recreation Center, held a rally, and marched to the courthouse from there, while the Baisden buses went directly to the courthouse.

Disorganization, Standard Templates, and Meaning

On the day of the rally, there were too many people trying to fit into in a small space. The mass media were there in force, with television crews from the major networks and reporters from a wide variety of mainstream, progressive, and Black-centric organizations. Many Black radio hosts were there. The small group of activists who had been working in Jena for months were sidelined, while the media focused on the Jena 6 families and the celebrities.

By 5:00 am the roads were already crowded and the lawn by the courthouse was already filling up. There were Muslim and Christian prayers at sunrise. Some people gathered at the Ward 10 Recreation Center according to the original plan and rallied there. The rally at the courthouse began on time at 9:00 am even though many of the buses from Alexandria had still not arrived. Traffic was backed up for miles. After the rally, a faction led by Al Sharpton and Mychal Bell’s mother Melissa Bell marched from the courthouse to the high school, then to the junior high, and then to the town park. Many protesters were met by buses at the park, while others marched back to the courthouse and met buses there. Many marched or wandered around the town in their own groups, holding smaller spontaneous rallies at various locations. Although there had been an agreement between protest organizations and the authorities that no one would go on the Jena High School grounds, there was no way to enforce this agreement and many people entered the school grounds and conducted their own rallies there. Chokwe Lumumba, one of the founders of Malcolm X Grassroots Movement who later was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, spoke at one of the impromptu rallies at the school.

Only a few thousand people could fit in the courthouse area and most people marched or milled around in other parts of Jena. There were many speakers at the 9:00 am rally but no news article mentioned more than a few. Besides Al Sharpton, Michael Baisden and Tom Joyner (who were broadcasting from the rally), those mentioned as speaking in the articles we read included Robert Muhammad (Southwest Regional Minister of the Nation of Islam), Mychal Bell’s grandmother Rosey Simmons and cousin Tiffany, rappers Mos Def and Ice Cube, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Alabama State Senator Bobby Singleton, comedians George Wilborn and Ricky Smiley, an African drummer, someone reading from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, and someone from the New Black Panther Party ending the rally with a chant: “We’re nonviolent when people are nonviolent with us, We’re not nonviolent with people that are violent with us.” What was newsworthy was that there was a protest, not what the speakers said. News articles focused on interviews with protesters and their motivations for coming and described most protesters as checking their phones, taking selfies, and talking to other protesters, not focusing on the speeches. The mood of the crowd was described as both festive and solemn.

Nearly all protesters had left Jena by noon. Only a few hundred remained in the courthouse area through the afternoon and a few hundred were gathered at the Ward 10 Recreation Center into the evening. It seems unlikely that the out-of-town protesters even knew about the planned concert at the Recreation Center.

Two things stand out. One, despite all the disorganization, the gathering in Jena was entirely peaceful. The hundreds of law enforcement officers from around the state who had been deployed to the event handled traffic and chatted amiably with protesters. Both protesters and law enforcement were following a template for a peaceful gathering. The only problems were heat-related illnesses in a few hundred marchers. Most Jena residents either left town or stayed indoors. The few who came out to interact with the protesters either agreed with them or conducted civil conversations about their disagreements. A couple of Jena residents who insulted the protesters were shushed by their neighbors.

Second, despite both the standard template and the disorganization, the event was meaningful as a protest. It demonstrated Black solidarity and support for the Jena 6 just by happening. It did not really matter what people did in Jena; the simple fact that they had gotten themselves to Jena made a statement. It was understood as a historic event by both the participants and the media. It was being there that mattered. News coverage compared it to the marches of the Civil Rights era and discussed whether this represented the revival of the Civil Rights Movement. The number of attendees was substantially smaller than the several hundred thousand who had attended the October 2005 Millions More Movement rally in Washington DC, but there was much more news coverage of the Jena rally, and it was treated in both mainstream and Black news sources as much more significant. Its power as a movement story came from its relative spontaneity compared to big rallies planned months in advance and the perception that it was a movement from below of ordinary people, not an orchestrated event from an established organization.

Narratives of Movement Building

With the advantage of hindsight, the Jena 6 protest looks like a turning point and bridge between a movement organized in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and what became the Black Lives Movement of the 2010s. It is the last big Black movement event following the solidaristic model built around the 1995 Million Man March. It was seen at the time as a potential opening to a new wave of Black activism, as welcoming a new generation into the ongoing Black movement. Both mainstream and Black news sourcesFootnote ²⁸ drew comparisons between the Jena protest and Civil Rights protests of the 1960s. Both mainstream and Black news sources quoted Al Sharpton saying that this could be the beginning of the 21^st Century civil rights movement that would challenge racial disparities in the justice system. Although both source types discussed the idea that the new movement would focus on the criminal justice system, this emphasis was more common in Black newspapers.

While no newswire articles mentioned any precedents from after 1965, a few Black newspaper articles said it was the most important Black event since the historic 1995 Million Man March. The only mention we saw of the 2005 Millions More Movement rally was one activist who was quoted as drawing a comparison between the two events, saying, “There were more young people, lots of college students and even younger. The response to the incident to me represents and signals the changing of the guard.” This theme of the awakening of a new generation was echoed in many Black newspaper articles.

The Jena rally inspired mass participation because it was seen as a historic event that would demonstrate Black solidarity and inspire a new movement generation. Both mainstream newswires and Black newspapers gave many examples of people bringing their children and grandchildren to the rally and quoted young people as wanting to be part of history: “This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation… . You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves” (New York Times) and “It was a good chance to be part of something historic since I wasn’t around for the civil rights movement. This is kind of the 21st century version of it” (Sacramento Observer). The emphasis on general awareness of discrimination, importance of collective action, concern with justice, and learning form history – not just the specific case of the Jena 6 – was also evident in the essays written by students of an HBCU as a requirement for their bus ride to Jena (C. Gibson and Williams Reference Gibson and Williams2020).

As political scientist and founder of Black Youth Project Cathy Cohen wrote in 2010: “For many in black communities, mobilization around the Jena 6 reignited the hope that black politics – as it is often imagined and conceptualized: that is, extrasystemic, collective, movement politics – is still alive among the younger generation of black Americans” (Cohen Reference Cohen2010, 151). The Jena mobilization was seen at the time as potentially opening a new wave of Black activism. Although both mainstream newswires and Black newspapers highlighted young people seeing this as the movement of their generation, Black newspapers were more likely than mainstream newswires to use the words “young,” “youth,” and “generation” and much more often emphasized the idea that the older generation wanted the younger generation to become involved. A high school senior was quoted saying: “The adult community always tells us that maybe we should as students get out there and do something positive. By this being our own initiative, we’re actually proving that we do care about our community, nation, our rights and protecting them the best way we can.” Black newspapers often quoted older adult activists stressing the importance of the younger generation waking up and getting involved. Here are several examples:

• Jeri Wright, president of the Chicago chapter of the National Action Network: “The next generation has come face-to-face with racism… Now they are part of the movement in their day and age speaking out against a grave injustice.”

• Adult supporter Tonette Moore: “We also need to get our young people involved and pass on social awareness to them.”

• Carol Hall, 63, a retired government worker: “Until now, the majority of young Black people felt they were so advanced with their i-Pods, cell phones, computers and other electronic media [they believed] that racial problems did not exist anymore. When they removed those iPod ear buds from their ears, they began to hear the cry of their ancestors, the Scottsboro Boys, the Little Rock 9 and on up to the modern day Don Imus calling their Black sisters bitches and hos.”

• Nigel Parkinson, a business man: “Black people can never get complacent and say it’s not in our neighborhood. Some young people may feel that Martin Luther King, Jr. did it all. But young people are waking up now.”

• Rev. Joseph Lowery, a cofounder of the SCLC: “… there’s a real awakening, a long prayed for awakening among our youth. No matter how much adults try to take credit for organizing and doing this, this came up out of the bosom and the belly of our youth. And I say thank God.”

• Myrlie Evers-Williams: “I have emphasized the need for communication between the two generations, that those of us who are experienced in the struggle for freedom need to reach out more than what we do to embrace the new leadership that’s coming along. We’ve got to come together to use the wisdom of the past and the enthusiasm of today to still address these ills that face our society.”

Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, Mark Potok of The Intelligence Project, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, and Willie Barrow of Rainbow/PUSH were also quoted as stressing the need for a new movement. A report on a panel discussion in Philadelphia after the rally stressed the importance of helping youth connect present events with history and understand the need to become more involved. There were also multiple reports of teachers taking their students to local solidarity rallies.

Mainstream newswires were largely done with covering the campaign within a week, except for covering the later rallies. By contrast, Black newspapers published many post-rally articles around the theme of “What do we do next?” and “Now what?” These articles either reflected on the prospects for a resurgence of the movement or provided information on what people were doing to build a new movement and inviting them to participate. For example, the Amsterdam News quoted Bob Law, activist, radio talk show host, and the New York chair of the Millions More Movement as saying that some were surprised at the expression of unity in the Jena protest, stressing the creation of new leadership from the movement, and inviting people to a meeting for organizing.

Follow-Up, Dispersal, and Reverberations

Black activists sought to keep the momentum going after the big rally. On September 25, Mychal Bell’s parents and Al Sharpton met with Congressional Black Caucus leaders asking them to hold hearings about the case. The Congressional Black Caucus urged outgoing Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco to pardon the Jena 6, but she did not. Solidarity protests for the Jena 6 continued for a few weeks after September 20. There was a call for a national student walkout on October 1 that was supported by rapper Mos Def (Cole Reference Cole2008); our data include reports of three small protests (involving dozens or hundreds of participants) in Pittsburgh, New York, and DC on October 1 and 2 and a few forums discussing the issues raised by the case.

There was an unusually high number of reports about noose hangings and other symbolic hate crimes in the fall of 2007 (Oliver et al. Reference Oliver, Lim, Matthews and Hanna2022) as well as extensive reportage about an FBI report released in the fall of 2007 about rising hate crimes in 2006. On October 16, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the Jena 6 case and related issues, with most of the discussion focusing on how the nooses should have been handled and some discussion of issues of unfair prosecution (“Jena Six Case | C-SPAN.org” 2007). For over a decade, October 22 had been a national day of Black rallies against police violence; the Jena case was folded into the rallies held in several cities on that day, including one in New York.

Al Sharpton and other Civil Rights leaders organized a protest in Washington on November 16 that linked the Jena 6 case to broader issues of criminal injustice and called for stronger penalties for hate crimes, especially noose hangings. About 50,000 people attended the rally – probably more than had gone to Jena – and thousands attended a linked free concert the next day. This rally received much less news coverage than the Jena rally. President Bush was pressured to say that he thought noose hanging should be a crime.

And then the protest episode was largely over. Despite all the grassroots energy, and the flurry of follow-up rallies around the country, the mobilization around the Jena 6 dissipated almost as quickly as it had built.

What happened next was the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama and the election of the first Black president. Although there are no studies that examine the question directly, there are scholarly speculations that the youthful energy around the Jena 6 mobilization found its next expression in the Obama campaign. In reflecting on the Jena 6 campaign and continuing the quotation from above, Cathy Cohen said that instead of a traditional protest movement, the participation of the new generation could be seen in voter engagement and other forms of action and organizing, including online organizing: “Ironically, despite data indicating that young black Americans spurred an increase in youth voting in the 2004 presidential elections and in 2008 had the highest turnout of young people among any ethnic or racial group since 1972, when talking about politics, it is the spectacle of mass mobilization that seems to hold the imagination of both young and old in black communities” (Cohen Reference Cohen2010, 151).

The path from 2008 to the explosion of BLM protests beginning in 2014 goes through the Obama campaign, Michelle Alexander’s Reference Alexander2010 book The New Jim Crow,Footnote ²⁹ disillusionment with the Obama presidency and his failure to intervene in the 2011 execution of Troy Davis (Taylor Reference Taylor2016), the Occupy movement of 2011 (Taylor Reference Taylor2016; Weddington Reference Weddington2022, Reference Weddington2024) and the publicity and protests around the Trayvon Martin killing in 2012 and the not guilty verdict of George Zimmerman in 2013, which led not only to the often-cited creation of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag (and later organization of the same name) but also the formation of another important organization, BYP100 (BYP100 2018; Simpson, Walter, and Ebert Reference Simpson, Walter and Ebert2021), at a meeting of Cohen’s Black Youth Project. Although nobody called the new wave of Black protests a “civil rights movement,” Al Sharpton did get it right in 2007 when he said that the next round of the Black movement was going to be focused on the criminal justice system. The people who were aged eighteen in 2007 were twenty-five in 2014, when the BLM protests erupted. The new generation was taking over the movement. How that happened must be the subject of a different research project, but the Jena protest marks the end of one era and the beginning of the next.

Consequences for the Jena 6

Attention to the six Jena youths themselves largely died down within a month, except for controversies about whether they had misspent the money raised on their behalf. Mychal Bell’s conviction in adult court for felonious assault had been overturned by appeals court the week before the big rally, although he was still in jail. Bell was released from jail on September 28 after a donor put up $5400 to cover the bond and was met by Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III along with media and friends and family. He was then reincarcerated for being in violation of his probation from juvenile convictions. The other five were all out on bail. The legal goal had been met: all the youths now had competent legal counsel.

Mychal Bell pled guilty to a charge of misdemeanor battery in December 2007 as a juvenile and was sentenced to eighteen months of incarceration and given credit for the year he had already spent incarcerated. Reports said that his attorneys were divided about whether Bell should plead guilty or continue to delay the case and risk a harsher sentence, and that there was a desire to get it over with and allow Bell to have a definite release date. In January of 2008, Bell was moved to a foster home for the remainder of his sentence, which was scheduled to end in July, although the Jena judge kept trying to extend his period of supervision. He was allowed to attend school and was reported to be doing well and graduated from high school but was denied permission to play football while there. In December 2008, he was arrested for shoplifting and attempted suicide after the arrest. In August 2011 he was on the Southern University (Baton Rouge) football team (Foster Reference Foster2011) and graduated from college in 2014.

The attorneys for the other five continued to delay the case with motions and won the removal of the original judge from the case in 2008. These cases were finally resolved in 2009 by plea bargains in which they pled “no contest” to misdemeanors punished by probation and restitution for Barker’s medical expenses. They also signed a statement that they had not heard Justin Barker using racial slurs before Mychal Bell hit him. Although news accounts emphasized the lack of incarceration time, it should be remembered that Theo Shaw had been held in adult jail for eight months, and Robert Bailey for five months.

Theo Shaw finished his high school course work at a school outside of Jena and was awarded a Jena High School diploma. He maintained that he was not involved in the fight and with legal help was able to get his record expunged. He graduated from the University of Louisiana Monroe in 2012, interned with the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2014, and attended law school at the University of Washington, where he gave the commencement address in 2018. He clerked for Justice Johnson of the Supreme Court of Louisiana and passed the bar in 2019. He is now a public defender in the District of Columbia.

After his release on bail, Robert Bailey moved to Georgia to live with his father and stepmother to attend high school. He was permitted to play football there and made the honor roll. His supporters emphasized the value of getting him out of the hostile environment of Jena. He graduated from Grambling State University, where he was a member of the ROTC. He joined the army in 2014. In 2017 it was reported that he had earned a masters in sports management and was working as a football coach at the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff.

Bryant Purvis was bailed out quickly and moved to Texas, where he lived with an uncle and went to school. He was arrested in Texas in 2008 for assault. He attended Grambling State University where he played basketball. In 2015 he was living in Dallas and had written a book and was speaking about his experiences; a 2017 report described a book talk at a Louisiana library and his goal of developing a business. He continued to maintain he had not been involved in the fight.

Jesse Beard was arrested again in 2007 for simple battery and assault. To give him a chance for a fresh start, with the cooperation of his mother, one of the Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers became his guardian and Beard moved to the northeast to attend boarding school. He later attended Hofstra University.

Carwin Jones had completed his high school requirements before the fight and was awarded a diploma from Jena High in 2007 and moved out of Jena. He was arrested again in 2008 for misdemeanor simple battery. He declined to speak to reporters for follow-up interviews.

Justin Barker, the victim in the fight, continued to live in Jena. In 2011, he was working on an oil rig (Foster Reference Foster2011).