Bond blow for Jena 6 member

A Louisiana judge has denied bail for Mychal Bell, who is the first member of the Jena Six to come to trial. Bell is accused of beating a white student last year. While attorneys in the 3rd circuit court of appeals would not confirm bail was denied due to the secrecy of juvenile court proceedings, the father of one of Bell's co-defendants said the bail request was rejected. The case of the all black Jena Six has now emerged as a serious crack in the faultline of US race relations.

The small southern town was the scene of a major rally on Thursday last week led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, radio show host Michael Baisden and the families of the accused six teenagers. Thousands wearing black shirts with messages of solidarity, marched 3km from the town centre courthouse to the high school where the problems started. The school and all town businesses were closed for the day. There is ... unjustice here,” said marcher Rhonda McClain of Nashville. “There was no option but to come.”

The term Jena Six refers to a group of six black teenagers charged with the assault of a white teenager in Jena, Louisiana on 4 December 2006. Jena is a tiny sawmill town with a population of just 2,971. Although this area was once Ku Klux Klan country, locals disagree on whether the town has a history of racism.

The incident that sparked the crisis occurred at Jena High School. The school is split along racial with roughly ten percent of students black and the rest white. White students sit around a tree in the courtyard, while black students congregate near the auditorium. A few days into the first semester of 2006, a new black student asked the principal at a public assembly if he could sit under the tree. The principal said he could sit anywhere he liked.

Some of the white students did not take kindly to the question. On the following morning, they hung three nooses from the so-called “white tree”. The nooses were supposedly a code for the KKK (though some say only two nooses were hung). School administrators investigated the incident and determined it was a prank. The three boys who hung the nooses were given an in-school suspension. On the morning afterwards, the black students held a silent protest under the tree. They were confronted by white students and the school authorities called in the police. What happened next is disputed. According to black students, District Attorney Reed Walters looked at them directly and warned them he could be their friend or their worst enemy. Walters himself denies he aimed the comment only at the blacks.

While Walters diffused the immediate incident, resentment simmered behind the scenes. Sporadic racially-motivated fights broke out at the school. An uneasy truce held while the black-dominated school football team had a good season. But when the season ended, matters took a turn for the worse. On 30 November 2006, unknown parties burned down the high school. The case remains unsolved. At the time, both sides blamed each other.

That night 16 year old Robert Bailey and some black friends tried to enter a party attended mostly by whites. There he was attacked and beaten. On the following day Bailey had another fight with an unnamed white attendee of the party. During the fight, the white men pulled out a gun. Bailey wrested a gun from him and took it home. Police later charged Bailey with theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery and disturbing the peace. The white student was not charged.

A few days later a white student, Justin Barker, loudly told his friends in the school hallway that Bailey had lost a fight to a white man. Barker was later attacked by black students. Barker was knocked unconscious but recovered sufficiently to attend a party that night. Six black students were arrested and initially charged with aggravated assault. The six men were Mychal Bell, Jesse Ray Beard, Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Theo Shaw. Then DA Walters decided to increase the charges to attempted second-degree murder. Only Bell and Beard were under 17 at the time of the arrest. The four others still face adult trials where they could face long prison terms.

Walter’s move provoked a storm of black outrage and allegations of racial unfairness. Supporters launched a “Free the Jena 6” website which tracked media mentions of the case. In July 2007, the first of the six to be tried, Mychal Bell, was convicted after two hours of deliberations by an all-white jury on reduced charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it.

Despite his age, Bell was tried as an adult on the grounds that he had a prior criminal record. The judge sent the conspiracy charge to juvenile court, but he upheld the battery conviction. However, the appeal court overturned the battery conviction on 14 September, stating it also belonged in the juvenile court. Having had the conviction overturned, the judge had the discretion of granting a new bond or releasing him pending appeal. With the latest denial of bail, Bell remains the only member of the six in prison.

Malcolm Exemplar

Black America is currently re-examining the legend of one of its most complex heroes. That man is Malcolm Little aka Malcolm X. In his brief 40 years, Malcolm X had an enormous impact on race relations and in his own way was as influential as his vastly different contemporary Martin Luther King. To understand why Malcolm X is significant, it is necessary to understand his past.

His story goes back to Christmas Eve 1924, when a gang of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen complete with trademark torches surrounded a house on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska. They were at the home of outspoken African-American leader Earl Little. White racists targeted his house because of his outspoken beliefs. Luckily, he was not at home. Instead the men threatened his pregnant wife Louise, smashed some windows and moved on. Five months later Louise gave birth to her third son, Malcolm.

Earl and Louise married in 1919 in Montreal. It was Earl’s second marriage. Louise grew up on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Her father was white and Louise was often taken for a White Briton. Earl Little was from Georgia and grew up in desperate poverty. As a young man, he heard Marcus Garvey speak. Little was impressed by what he heard and joined Garvey’s movement the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

Young Malcolm grew up in Lansing, Michigan. The estate agent sold the Littles the house thinking Louise was white. When he discovered his “error”, he unearthed a document saying the house should not be sold to non-whites. They were told to move with no offer of a refund. But before they moved, the house was burned down in the night with the family just escaping the flames. Firefighters showed no interest in putting out the fire. The scarred (and scared) family moved to a new house outside Lansing.

In 1931 Earl stormed out of the house one night after an argument with his wife and failed to come home. He was later found dead crushed by a tram which cut his body in half. His insurers refused to pay out saying it was suicide but it was more likely to be murder. Malcolm was barely 7 years old. Louise struggled to raise her eight children and ended up on welfare. She eventually suffered a mental breakdown and the children were fostered out. A distressed Malcolm was expelled from school and sent to a juvenile detention home. He decided he wanted to become a lawyer but was told that was "no realistic goal for a nigger".

Aged 15, he moved to Boston to live with his half-sister Ella (one of three children from Earl’s first marriage). Here he got a job as a shoeshine boy and ended up as a drug supplier. Two years later Malcolm met a white women named Bea with whom he moved to Harlem in New York. There he got a job as a waiter. He worked as a drug dealer and lived as a criminal for the next three years ending up in a burglary gang. He was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to eight to ten years in Boston’s Charlestown prison. Malcolm believed the heaviness of the sentence was due to the fact that he was with a white woman. After two years he was transferred to Concord, MS where he first heard of a Muslim organisation called the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930 in Detroit by Wallace Fard Muhammad. It was a political religion which borrowed beliefs and practices from Islam but was specifically designed for black Americans to free themselves from white domination. Fard Muhammad mysteriously disappeared in 1934 and was replaced as leader by Elijah Muhammad. Elijah believed negros were descendents of the ‘original’ people who were advanced beings capable of communicating with another race on Mars.

Despite some of its more outlandish beliefs, Malcolm was entranced by his new religion. He got in touch with Elijah Muhammad and spent his remaining years in prison in self-education. He was released in 1952 aged 27. He went to Detroit and joined the Nation of Islam at the local temple. He finally met Elijah Muhammad at his headquarters in Chicago. Muhammad publicly praised Malcolm as a follower from prison. Shortly after, Malcolm changed his surname to X and renounced the name Little as a name a white man gave to one of his slave ancestors.

Back in Detroit, Malcolm started to find converts. He was a good and persuasive speaker. He was unafraid to express controversial opinions. “The white man was the devil” he told his crowd. He also spoke of the slave trade and white domination. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock,” he said, “Plymouth Rock landed on us!” Malcolm quickly rose through the ranks and was appointed the temple’s assistant minister in 1953. Then Elijah Muhammad sent him to Boston to recruit new members. He went on to Philadelphia and then to Harlem. This was his biggest challenge. Malcolm’s message of renunciation of alcohol, drugs, gambling and sex outside marriage was not popular. But he set up Nation of Islam businesses and gradually gained success. By 1956, he was Elijah’s unofficial deputy carrying his message across the country.

In 1956 he met and eventually married Betty Sanders. The Nation provided them a house in Queens and they soon had their first child. By now he was famous, writing a column in several newspapers and running the Nations own periodical “Muhammad Speaks”. He was invited onto TV shows where his ability to be articulate on controversial matters earned him a wide audience. In 1959, Mike Wallace produced a five-part TV series on him called “The Hate that Hate Produced”.

X’s anti-white diatribe shocked mainstream America. But the Nation of Islam expanded under his watch from 400 members in 1952 to 40,000 ten years later. The FBI started to pay attention to him after he met Fidel Castro who was in New York for a UN meeting. Meanwhile his extremism set him apart from fellow black leaders like Martin Luther King. Malcolm called King’s 1963 civil rights march the “farce on Washington”. The two men only met once (in 1964) and got on well despite their differences.

But Elijah Muhammad was jealous of the success of his protégé. He and X fought more often. Elijah asked his ministers to make no comments after the assassination of JFK but Malcolm couldn’t resist saying he thought “the chickens had come home to roost”. Finally Malcom X left the organisation in 1964 and founded a new group called Muslim Mosque Inc. He went on the Haj to Mecca and also went to Egypt.

His travels softened his opinions on race and he came back to the US no longer believing all whites were evil. In 1964 he founded the Organisation of Afro-American Unity dedicated to the interests of all blacks whether in the US or Africa. He travelled to Africa for five months on a successful tour of 11 countries. But when he returned home, he was faced with the same old bigotries.

His home was firebombed in February 1965. He and his family escaped through the windows. One week later he was scheduled to speak at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. He started his speech when he was interrupted by a scuffle in the front row. Malcolm shouted out “let’s cool it brothers”. But then three men in the front row armed with revolvers and a shotgun rose to their feet and opened fire. Malcolm died in a hail of bullets. He was 39 years old.

22,000 people attended his funeral five days later. Actor Ossie Davis delivered his eulogy: “Malcolm was our manhood” he said. “Our living black manhood!” Three members of Nation of Islam were charged with his murder. All were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. One of the accused said they were hired but refused to reveal who hired them.

Malcolm’s death unleashed a wave of racial intolerance. Militant groups like the Black Panthers filled his void for a while. Martin Luther King fell to an assassin's bullet three years later. But Malcolm X’s lasting legacy is the truth he told about US race relations. He spoke for the disenfranchised urban poor and made many white Americans aware of a past they would have preferred to ignore. Not without justification, Time magazine chose his autobiography as one of the ten most important non-fiction works of the 20th century.

Reflections on Cronulla

Earlier this week, the NSW Police taskforce set up to investigate last December’s riots in the Sydney beach suburb of Cronulla was officially wound down. The few remaining riot-related investigations will now be handed to the NSW Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad. The taskforce known as “Strike Force Enoggera” arrested 51 people in connection with the riot and another 53 were charged over their alleged involvement in the reprisal attacks that followed.

NSW Police Minister Carl Scully pointed out that the roughly equal number of arrests showed that the police force did not just concentrate on the riot itself rather than the retaliatory attacks. He also blamed a mix of "sun, alcohol and rising tension" for the riot. Scully takes a rather simplistic approach to problem. Certainly, sun and alcohol may be contributing factors but they do not explain the large-scale nature of the violence. But perhaps the answer may be in his throwaway “rising tension” rationale. Tensions did rise. And there were many eager to fan the flames of the wildfire that resulted. Racism was at its heart. September 11, the Bali bombing, the Tampa affair all added to the fuel.

Cronulla is about 26km south of Sydney on a peninsula framed by Botany Bay to the north, Bate Bay to the east, Port Hacking to the south, and Gunnamatta Bay to the west. It is on a suburban train line and is a popular tourist attraction especially for its beautiful beaches. The name Cronulla is derived from kurranulla, meaning ‘‘place of pink seashells’’ in the dialect of the original inhabitants, the Dharawal people.

The riot occurred seven months ago, Sunday December 11, 2005. On that day, a group of approximately 5,000 people gathered in the place of the pink seashells for an ad hoc protest to "reclaim the beach". The protest was organised in response to a spate of reports of assaults and intimidatory behaviour on and around the beach over a number years. Matters came to a head the previous weekend when two volunteer lifeguards were assaulted on North Cronulla Beach. Surf lifesavers said the attack was carried out by a gang of youths who regularly visited Cronulla to harass locals and beachgoers. The item led the Sydney news that night on the commercial stations seven, nine and ten.

The culprits were deemed to be of Lebanese extraction from Sydney’s western suburbs. As a result an SMS text circulated in the week leading up to the 11th calling on a vigilante action that amount to a racial war. The text message read “This Sunday every Fucking Aussie in the shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day ...Bring your mates down and let’s show them this is our beach and they’re never welcome back.” The SMS was picked up by radio, TV and newspapers and received wide coverage during the days leading up to the Sunday. The demagogue-in-chief Alan Jones stoked up the fires on Monday when he agreed with a caller to his radio show that people will “take the law into their own hands. There'll be an escalation”. On Wednesday the 7th “tensions were rising” to the point where a brawl erupted at the beach when a gang of youths clashed with a media crew. NSW Premier Morris Iemma issued a warning asking people not to take the law into their own hands. He also promised those responsible for the surf lifesavers attack would be brought to justice.

The Sunday itself started overcast but the sun soon broke through. By 10am over a thousand people had answered the SMS call and were gathering on the beach. Many of these had started already consuming alcohol. Many wore flags and displayed Australian paraphernalia. It was a big event, a show. But it also attracted extremists neo-Nazi groups such as Australia First, the Patriotic Youth League and “Blood and Honour”. Blood and Honour’s goal according to their website is to “provide White Youth with an alternative to the hip-hop culture so eagerly promoted by the Zionist media”.
Some of the demonstrators wore tee-shirts with racially-divisive slogans such as "We Grew Here, You Flew Here", "Wog Free Zone", "Aussie Pride", "Fuck Allah - Save 'Nulla", and "Ethnic Cleansing Unit". There were chants of "Lebs out", "Lebs go home" continuously shouted out by some demonstrators. Despite this, the first few hours passed without direct confrontation but the atmosphere soon turned to violence.
As the crowd moved along the beach and foreshore area, one man on the back of a Ute began to shout "No more Lebs" - a chant picked up by the group around him. Others in the crowd, carrying Australian flags and dressed in Australian shirts, yelled "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie ... Oi, Oi, Oi".

When some people of Middle Eastern appearance were spotted, the mob went rampant. One of this group was chased into a hotel bistro. Within a minute the hotel was surrounded by several thousand people screaming and chanting. About a half an hour later a fight broke out across the road and police led away a man with a shirt over his head as the crowd lobbed beer cans at him. As the day progressed anyone of "Middle Eastern appearance" was fair game and several were assaulted including a Jewish boy and a Greek girl. Police leading away the injured were then attack as was an ambulance which was treating six injured people. One ambulance officer was hit over the head with a glass bottle and another on board received lacerations.

At this point the police finally got serious and intervened in riot gear with capsicum spray. Police reinforcements arrived from Maroubra and local roads were closed to traffic. At the end of the day seven people were arrested and four charged. Broken beer bottles scattered Elouera Road, which runs along the foreshore. Dozens were treated for minor injuries. Tensions remained high throughout the evening. There were reports of vandalised cars and windows in the nearby suburbs of Maroubra and Rockdale. By 1:00 a.m., reports of violence had also spread to Brighton Le Sands, where police wearing riot gear sectioned off Bay Street in a confrontation with a crowd of people of Middle Eastern appearance.

On Monday Sydney’s Islamic community hit back. Islamic Friendship Association of Australia president Keysar Trad said the violence was "bound to happen" because of racist rhetoric on Sydney talkback radio throughout the week. "Sections of the media took this issue far too far and one can only surmise that the way this issue was dealt with on talkback radio amounts to incitement," Mr Trad said. He went on to say the media had turned a common youth issue into an issue of ethnicity. NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney, with delicious unintentional irony called the behaviour "un-Australian". Premier Mr Iemma weighed in and said lawlessness would not be tolerated and there would be no compromises in upholding the law. PM Howard also pontificated, calling the riots “sickening”. However his statement that he did not believe racism to be widespread in Australia shows that he too did not understand the extent of the problem.

That evening a new SMS flash made a group of a thousand people gather outside Sydney's Lakemba mosque. They claimed they were there to defend the Mosque against attacks from gangs, as had been threatened by the Cronulla rioters. Though they dispersed without violence, residents of Cronulla started to report that cars full of Middle Eastern men had driven into the area and were on the rampage. The local shopping centre was targeted, with several vehicles vandalised. Further carloads made their way to Maroubra for another revenge attack, organised again by SMS. They were armed with baseball bats, crowbars and bricks, and vandalised private property. Many residents took refuge in their homes, while others who tried to confront the gangs were attacked.

The premier announced on Tuesday that police will be given "lockdown" powers which would allow them to prohibit entry into specified areas. On this day the frenzy had spread nationally. Local media in Victoria and Queensland reported that SMS text messages, inciting further riots, were being sent to mobile users. NSW opposition leader Peter Debnam cynically used the riot to attempt wedge politics. He promised that if elected he would “round up the 200 Middle Eastern thugs still on the streets of Sydney” "At dawn on the 25th of March” he theatrically continued “my instruction to the police commissioner will be to take as many police as you need and charge them with anything to get them off the streets."

He was hosed down by the president of the Police Association, Bob Pritchard, who said: "politicians should not be involved in operational policing."
But the problem has not gone away. The question remains what caused the violence: Was it racism, revenge or simply alcohol-induced aggression? There has been years of brooding disagreements and hatred between the two main ethnic groups involved in these incidents: Anglo-Celtic Australians, on the one hand, and Middle Eastern Australians on the other. Tensions have simmered since 9/11 and fears of Islamic based terrorism. The Islamic community has had to deal with racism and has become defensive in return. There are no easy answers and plenty out there ready to light the match again.

One of the many SMS messages that was doing the rounds in the week following is chilling: "We'll show them! It's on again sunday... send this to everyone in your phone book... this is a straight up WAR! We must continue to come together to help the innocet an family's (sic) so every one can enjoy our beach's!" Though the rest of the season passed without incident, the worry is that the problem is just hibernating and will explode again in the coming Summer.