MBU News

Civil Rights Today

October 4, 2007

By Kasey Bartley

At 11:55 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 20, the Café began to swarm with students leaving chapel as usual. That day, however, they were greeted with hundreds of white fluttering papers scattered on the tables. In stark black on the sheets were handwritten phrases such as “Wear Black!” and “Stop racism!” In the middle in large bold Arial print read, “Jena 6.”

The Jena Six are a group of young African American students arrested in Jena, La. after a school yard fight between them and one Caucasian male. The Caucasian student was taken to the hospital and released two hours later in time to attend a school function that evening. The six African American students were taken to jail immediately and later charged with attempted second degree murder. When the conviction of Michael Bell, a fifteen-year-old charged as an adult, was overturned, a new court date was set and the case began to gain notoriety as a civil rights issue.

The Jena High School Handbook recommends expulsion for “threatening a student and/or faculty or staff with a weapon (real or imagined)” while mandating a three-day automatic suspension for fighting. Thousands of people flocked to Jena last week to support Bell, saying that the town’s blatant disregard for the school’s own rules was racially motivated.

That’s where the flyers came in to play. Derrick Glasby, a student here at MBU, rallied friends to create and distribute the flyers. “America has gotten so comfortable that they don’t think that racism is still alive and well,” said Glasby.

Many of the students filing into the café on Sept. 20 had never heard of the Jena Six until reading the flyers. Associate professor of education Pam Stanfield sat with students in the café that day. She was pleased with the attention to current events and remembers thinking, “MBU knows what’s going on in the world!”

Brenda Bradford, business department division chair, first heard of the Jena Six through emails and the news. “It was like a fall-back to the 60s,” Bradford said.

The Jena dispute did not begin with the schoolyard fight. It started when a group of African Americans sat under the “white tree,” a shade tree that had only been used by Caucasian students. The next day, three nooses hung from the tree.

The fight for equal rights is not nearly over. The Jena Six situation has forced people to take a long look in the mirror and evaluate their feelings towards those of another race. The day of Michael Bell’s trial, 40,000 people of different races and even other nationalities, marched into Jena, reminiscent of the marches of the Civil Rights Movement.

“Hopefully, this will wake America up,” said Glasby.

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