Is hanging a noose a hate crime or a prank?

During its Saturday programming, (9/22/07), CNN asked if hanging a noose is a hate crime or a prank? The question itself is insulting. There is no basis for there to be a question. Of course hanging a noose is a hate crime. As one person reportedly responded to CNN by email, "there is only one use for that noose and we know what it is."
Another person responding to the question cut to the point: "people are promoting terrorism" by displaying the noose.
One responder said displaying nooses was "crass" but not a crime. Another said the act was a "hate prank." These comments reflect a sympathetic attitude with the teens (and others) who are testing the line of social tranquility. In effect they are saying that these acts are inside jokes and humor in the white community, reflecting a prevailing undercover attitude that is crass but tolerated and harmless.
Young people growing up in the tolerant hostility are now acting out--just letting off a little steam. They don't mean nothin' by it.That is not good enough, however. Displaying a noose is not letting off steam--it is a threat meant to cower black people into submission and passivity. That is the history of the noose, a history some who are still living participated in, and apparently their youth have taken up as a cultural legacy.
Title edited 9/22/07 2:06pm

Jena Six: “Shot heard ‘round the world”

Watching the Jena rally broadcast on television and described on the radio raised much to compare and contrast with social action protests of the past. The coverage seemed a strange hybrid of a party atmosphere—celebrating the presence of R&B groups--and the more sobering and focused purpose of social protest against institutional injustice in the American legal system. What also caught my attention was that repeatedly commentators remarked how the great outpouring of support for the so-called "Jena Six"—at least 50,000 people attended the rally—all began last fall at the beginning of the 2006 school year around a question about who could sit under a shade tree.

Many persons interviewed on radio and television said that this outpouring of support from across America—from whites and blacks--was not just a one day event. It marked the beginning of a movement, something of a revolution. If this is true then the Black student who asked the Jena high school principal if there was any reason that he could not sit under a shade tree "reserved" for white students essentially issued the equivalent of the "shot heard 'round the world" in this 21st century. The "shot heard 'round the world" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”) refers to the initial shot fired in the battle that ignited the American Revolution. The premise of the student’s question shook the core of Black America. The fact that our children are still denied such basic human rights, that they are still instructed in a system of social inferiority, rightly exploded complacency and ignited a call to action in many Black Americans. Nearly one year later, the world saw Americans of all backgrounds rise up to reject this despicable social residual of this nation’s segregated past.

After hearing from the principal that he could sit anywhere on school grounds, Kenneth Purvis and his friends stood under the shade tree. White students responded by hanging three nooses from the tree. Kenneth Purvis said in an interview that after seeing the nooses, he and others went back to stand under the tree again.

These students acted in the spirit of resistance which is Black America's legacy and responsibility, from early enslavement through the Sixties and beyond. Resistance is a core value of Black American culture. "Resist, resist, resist," sang veteran social revolutionist poet Sonia Sanchez to an audience in New Haven just a few months ago.

Entrenched segregation in Jena shocked Black America but did not faze white Jena residents. The white adults of Jena who say that their town is not racist should be alarmed however that their children are. (How far does the "white" shade tree grow from its root?) At least three white Jena youth not only harbor racist attitudes, but situated themselves in the appalling historical context of American racial bigotry by hanging three nooses, thus invoking the heinous reign of terror whites levied against black men. (See 100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginsburg)

The white students’ actions represent an attempt to threaten and intimidate based on racial supremacy, essentially an imbalance in power.

Taking a stand by sitting under the tree was the bravest and most affirming action those young people could take. They acted in the affirming tradition of forbearers such as Dred Scott, Rosa Parks and many others whose resistance contributed to dismantling legalized segregation and discrimination in America.

They challenged institutional racist attitudes, previously sanctioned by the school administration and exercised by their peers. Resistance was an imperative not only for their present school days but also for their future. What would be their prospects to obtain social equality in Jena five or ten years after high school, when a white Jena graduate would then be a supervisor in a position to hire them? The roles of segregation, submission and inferiority established in high school will carry over implicitly, if not explicitly, into work situations and all aspects of social order.

To allow this Jim Crow situation to dominate the small patch of ground in front of the high school is to sanction Jim Crow across the land. As Dr. King said again and again, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

There is much more to examine and build upon based on the sincere response of more than 50,000 black Americans, and Americans of all races, who came to Jena to protest injustice, to support the cause. There is much to be proud of in the youth who led the way.

Support the Jena 6!

Is the Black community in a battle to save the souls of our young people?

"Our children are our greatest asset." "They are our future." We hear some variation of those comments often in our community. What is the evidence of their value to us?

I believe, I know, many of us are in pain over the headlines, news reports, unreported violence and abusive environment that some of our children experience each day. I am in pain over it.

Three of our best and brightest young people--college students--were shot and killed execution style in New Jersey a few weeks ago. Another of the group survived her wounds and helped police to identify the assailants. These hopeful young people had survived growing up in the Newark streets and were in the process of gaining access to education and opportunity until the moment they were attacked. The gunmen included teenagers, younger than the victims, and an alleged adult illegal immigrant and convicted criminal.

The stories of teenage murders in particular seem unending and unreal.


I do not relate to the extreme conditions I hear that our children grow up in today. I did experience a breakdown in the primary family, my parents separated for a time when I was a child, but the extended family (living with my grandparents) was a shelter and hedge against the encroachment of poverty and any challenge to moral values and a standard of behavior that my parents had instilled in me. This added protection from the extended family was firmly in place for a lot of my friends and our generation that grew up in the social revolution of the Sixties.

But it is clearly dismantled or at least severly weakened in present day families and communities. As a result, children are catching (or dodging in desparation) the full frontal impact of the the family breakdown--absent or unenforced standards of moral behavior, drug abuse, sexual abuse, poverty. The fruits of evil prevail in the absence of family social values, economic support and community intervention.

In addition to the family and extended family, the public schools were a strong enforcer of moral values that I learned at home. I despair the erosion of the high standards that teachers held themselves and my friends and I to beginning in my elementary school education.

Even though stories proliferate about the social malaise that has infected many poor Black communities, I have not had such a clear and powerful window to the entrenchment of this perverse social order until I read Cindy Brown Austin's novel, By the Rivers of Babylon (2007).

My reading is light in the urban fiction trend, and even less have I encountered the Christian thriller, which Rivers might be viewed as. But what Austin showed me more than any other text I've read is how our young Black boys are systematically reared into the criminal culture on a wide scale, and how a poor community (trapped in an expansive project complex) is occupied by a dominant drug culture as overtly as the U.S. military invades foreign territories, or the way I recall the National Guard occupied my neighborhood in Baltimore in the wake of riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By the Rivers of Babylon showed me that there is a force of evil that has set up a recruitment of our greatest assets, our future, our children. Through the interaction with Gabriella Sinclaire, a talented Christian journalist/love interest, Austin takes the reader along the narrative to peer into the mind and heart (such as it is) of the main character, Lincoln Duvall, one of the most notorious drug lords of a poor community, based loosely on the one Austin hails from in her native Hartford, Connecticut.

Lincoln Duvall is a menace, a terror. However, he also has a background that show him victimized by his parents volatile relationship and weakened moral foundation that left him exposed to the lure of acceptance, power and money in criminal life.

But what I caught sight of, hovering in the background of the outrageous criminal exploits of Lincoln Duvall and his flank of teen rogues, was the tedium of life that everday people were living, trapped as they were in a housing complex where the police were in partnership with the criminals, if only by complicity through their absence.

What I caught sight of was the despairing result when community breaks down, when the stronger more stable segments of the community are cut off, or cut themselves off, from the segments that are vulnerable to poverty, poor education, lack of exposure to opportunity and the access to society's rewards. What I saw was my own complicity defined by my lack of interaction with our young people.

Although the conditions have existed for more than a few generations, the novel is an eye-opener for me, another call to action that I am increasingly answering.
In the inagural issue of Devotion Journal we asked, "How are we telling our children who God is?" I believe that we must answer this question--how and even if we are telling our children who God is--as a means to reinstate a moral center for the family and the greater community.

Dialogues, community organization, increased mentoring, youth activites, public school revitalization, promoting marriage and extended family, and moral values--all of these responses are being discussed and planned by concerned community partners who have been affected by Austin's book, and most importantly, who have been answering the call to rescue our young people. There is more to come.

Knowing who God is is irretrievable from knowing our history as Black Americans. Our forbearers told us of the link between our history in America and our Christian heritage when they sang "I look back and wonder how I got ovah."

By the Rivers of Babylon poses its story as an underlying battle of good against evil, and that is accurate. In reaity, we are in a battle of good against evil, a battle to save the souls of our young people from the fruits of evil. By entering the battle we will be saving our own souls as well.