McCain Claims Obama Crowds Call Him Terrorist & Traitor

JENA 6 RALLY DRAWS THOUSANDS

*Thousands of protesters – most dressed in black – filled the streets of Jena, Louisiana as promised Thursday to support six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate.


Chants of “Free the Jena Six” erupted as Al Sharpton and syndicated radio host Michael Baisden made their way to the local courthouse with family members of the accused teens.


Sharpton said he will join Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and William Jefferson, D-La., to press the House Judiciary Committee next week to summon the district attorney to explain his actions before Congress. Also, a march in Washington is being organized for November.

"What we need is federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice," Sharpton told the Associated Press. "Our fathers in the 1960's had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing."

As coverage of the protest was carried throughout the day on CNN, MSNBC and international media outlets, President Bush said a few words about the Jena situation during a press conference yesterday at the White House.

"The events in Louisiana have saddened me," he said. "All of us in America want there to be, you know, fairness when it comes to justice."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson appeared at the rally, as did Dennis Courtland Hayes, interim president and CEO of the NAACP and Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil rights leader.

King described the scene as reminiscent of earlier civil rights struggles. He said punishment of some sort may be in order for the six defendants, but "the justice system isn't applied the same to all crimes and all people."

The six black teens were charged a few months after three white teens were accused of hanging nooses in a tree on their high school grounds. The white teens were suspended from school but weren't prosecuted. Five of the black teens were initially charged with attempted murder for the beating of a white student in ongoing racial eruptions at the school. That charge was reduced to battery for all but one, who has yet to be arraigned; the sixth was charged as a juvenile.

The beating victim, Justin Barker, was knocked unconscious, his face badly swollen and bloodied, though he was able to attend a school function later that night.

District Attorney Reed Walters stressed on Wednesday that race had nothing to do with the charges in Jena. Walters said he didn't charge the white students accused of hanging the nooses because he could find no Louisiana law under which they could be charged. In the beating case, he said, four of the defendants were of adult age under Louisiana law and the only juvenile charged as an adult, Mychal Bell, had a prior criminal record.

"It is not and never has been about race," Walters said. "It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions."

Sharpton urged demonstrators to remain peaceful, and there were no reports of violence. Most businesses in the small town closed up shop for the day, and white residents in the predominantly white town of 3,000 have largely been reluctant to comment, saying privately that the town was being unfairly portrayed.

According to the Associated Press, a group of about a dozen white residents and black demonstrators engaged in an animated but not angry exchange during the march. Whites asked blacks if they were aware of Bell's criminal record, blacks replied that Jena High School administrators mishandled the incidents.