More than 120 Prairie View students, faculty, and staff joined thousands of people in Jena, La., Sept. 20 to protest the treatment of six African-American high school students.
Commonly known as the Jena 6, the black students were arrested in connection with a schoolyard brawl that resulted in the hospitalization of one white student.
This case has garnered national attention in the black media and historically black colleges all over the nation. The general sentiment of the supporters is that the punishment grossly exceeds the crime. The protesters from Prairie View shared those feelings.
The six black students were accused of beating a white student in December 2006, expelled from school and charged with attempted murder. This incident occurred after a black student sat under a “whites-only tree” and white students hung nooses from the tree the following day.
The protest march and rally drew a crowd that was roughly three times the population of the otherwise small town. The march was led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, radio show host Michael Baisden, and the mother of Mychal Bell, one of the accused, who was still in jail despite the fact that a Louisiana appeals court threw out his conviction for aggravated battery.
The Student Government Association sponsored the six-hour trip to Jena led by SGA President Andre Evans and Claudia Munoz. The delegation that attended got well involved in the action by chanting, brandishing picket signs, and listening attentively when a plethora of activists spoke, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
“We are not free until he [Bell] is free, so we will not stop marching until justice rolls down like waters,” Jackson declared to the crowd.
Colleges from all over the country attended. However, Prairie View stood out from the rest by the gift that the students presented to the families involved. Evans and the SGA called on senior architecture major Brandon Citizen, to design a paddle to show Prairie View’s support of the Jena 6.
When Evans presented the paddle it was greeted with thunderous applause.
One protestor commented, “Now that’s a real SGA president.”