LIVING FOR CHANGE
Beyond Jena
By Ron Scott
Michigan Citizen, dec. 9-15, 2007
When the cry “Free the Jena Six!” was swirling around the nation, followed by the intense emotional terms “Wear Black,” some thought it was the beginning of a new civil rights movement.
Thousands from across the nation converged on a small Louisiana hamlet where a noose was found hanging from a schoolyard tree following a series of conflicts between black and white youth. The usual aggregation of civil rights spokespersons and high-profile personas joined new radio talk show activists who had called for the demonstration that featured a throng of thousands.
The six African American youth who had been charged with various felonies during an altercation following the noose incident became instant political prisoners. Television, radio, newspaper and Internet outlets found this incident too titillating and too dramatic to ignore.
After all, it was the old tale, told anew: black vs. white, right vs. wrong, and civil rights vs. civil wrongs in the bastion of white supremacy and the old Confederacy.
The emergence of the radio talk show hosts, including Michael Baisden, Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey et.al., represented a new electronic era in this old drama. Unlike the ‘50s and ‘60s, new technologies could provide louder voices with wider reach to mobilize the masses. And that’s what it was: a mobilization of the masses.
This contrasts with the original Civil Rights Movement when mobilization was an outgrowth of organization.
Case in point. Long before the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott brought Rosa Parks to the fore in 1955, organizers like E.D. Nixon, who headed the local NAACP chapter, had been planning for years to assault the city’s segregation laws. The sit-down protest of Mrs. Parks helped ignite various sectors of Montgomery’s black community that had been primed to organize a long-term boycott which would be centered in the church and maintained by the people.
Had the people of Montgomery merely come out for one day and gone home, we would have nothing to write about today.
The struggle in Montgomery began on December 1, 1955 and ended more than a year later on December 21, 1956. Those 376 days included a complex transportation network that circumvented the city’s transit system and ultimately brought its economy to its knees. Organization, not mobilization, ended segregation.
I would certainly laud the efforts of those who got on the numerous buses and “went South” to challenge racism in Jena.
But at this period in history, we must look for a larger, more reconstructive context within which to build the movement. Reaction is not enough. How will racial reconciliation take place in Jena? And who is there working on a day-to-day basis to build a progressive movement among the citizens of Jena, black and white, young and old?
And what about those from around the country who participated in the support for Jena? How do we enliven these cadres of individuals to step around the corner of their own neighborhoods here in Detroit and other cities to reach the young men and women of the underclass who are caught in the cycle of economic displacement and violent interpersonal reaction? How do we drop the anvil of concern on the growing incidents of STIs (socially transmitted infection) and the alarming rate of HIV/AIDS, where 85% of the newly reported cases are among African American women?
In short, our new movement has to start on our own block, with our own families, where the shadow of a hanging noose is not as omnipresent as the shadow of disillusionment and self-destruction. Our people cry out for the building of community.
Ron Scott, veteran activist , TV producer and a founding member of the Black Panther Party in Detroit, is the main spokesman for the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality.
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