Students Show Support for Jena Six
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| Joining thousands around the nation, Gettysburg College students
demonstrated on campus Thursday, Sept. 20, in support of the "Jena 6,"
a group of African-American high school students initially charged with
attempted murder in a Louisiana case that has roused civil-rights
concerns. "It's sad that in the 21st century we're still seeing racial incidents like this," said Dominique Volney, the student who took the lead in organizing the event. "You have to do something about it, and we did today." Approximately 80 students, chanting "no justice, no peace," marched across the crowded noontime campus. They handed out flyers about the case as well as pre-addressed postcards that could be mailed to the Jena 6 Defense Committee in Jena, La. Volney said she first learned of the case during training as a staff member of the College's Center for Public Service (CPS). This past Sunday she heard of plans for nationwide demonstrations and began spreading the word to social justice-oriented student groups on campus. The groups' response delighted Volney, a junior health-sciences major from Millstone Township, N.J. "When I saw people coming in packs, not just one or two, I was ecstatic," she said. "I started jumping up and down." She told the marchers "we are part of history today." Groups represented among the black-clad marchers included the Black Student Union, the campus chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Amnesty International, the Spanish and Latino Student Association, the Peace Club, eRace, the International Club, Delta Gamma and CPS. The demonstration showed the campus social-justice groups what they can achieve by working together and set the stage for closer collaboration in the future, Volney said. "This was definitely a catalyst," she said. The demonstrators distributed flyers from colorofchange.org, a national online advocacy organization that coordinated a National Day of Action and summarized the widely reported case in a news release: "Last fall, two Black high school students sat under the ‘white' tree on their campus. The next day, white students hung three nooses from that same tree. When Black students protested the light punishment (a 3-day suspension) for the noose-hangers, Jena District Attorney Reed Walters came to the school and threatened the students, telling them he could ‘take [their] lives away with a stroke of [his] pen.' |
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| "Tensions mounted in the small town. Several cases of off-campus violence against black students were barely punished. When a white student was beaten up after taunting a black victim of the violence, the District Attorney charged six young black men with attempted murder. In June, the first young man to be tried, Mychal Bell, 17, was convicted in adult court by an all-white jury of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy (which carries a maximum sentence of 22 years). |  |
On September 14th, an appeals court judge reversed the conviction on the grounds that Mychal shouldn't have been tried as an adult. However, the DA says he'll appeal the decision, and he still plans to try the other five young men." Walters has told the media that the charges have nothing to do with race. Posted 9/20/07 By Jim Hale |
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300 North Washington Street · Gettysburg, PA 17325