Bowie donates $10,000 to defense fund for
6 black teens accused of beating white classmate

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

NEW ORLEANS — David Bowie has donated $10,000 to a legal defense fund for six black teens charged in an alleged attack on a white classmate in the tiny central Louisiana town of Jena.

The British rocker's donation to the Jena Six Legal Defense Fund was announced by the NAACP as thousands of protesters were expected to march through Jena on Thursday in defense of Mychal Bell and five other teens. The group has become known as the Jena Six.

"There is clearly a separate and unequal judicial process going on in the town of Jena," Bowie said Tuesday in an e-mail statement. "A donation to the Jena Six Legal Defense Fund is my small gesture indicating my belief that a wrongful charge and sentence should be prevented."

Bell was found guilty on second-degree battery charges June 28 by a six-member, all-white jury. Before the case was overturned by the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal, his sentencing had been set for Thursday.

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This thing has really gotten out of hand since I first noticed it back in June. At that point, the story was simply about the nooses put up by white kids to intimidate black kids. The school where this all took place called it "a prank" and essentially slapped the white students on the wrist--of course, such an act can hardly be called a prank; non-racist whites and African Americans alike would see it for what it was, a death threat. And that's how the school's black population saw it. Inevitably, some fighting broke out, and one of the white kids got a concussion. Suddenly, the black kids are being charged with attempted murder.

Fortunately, the most egregious charges were eventually dropped, or dismissed on appeal, but the Jena Six are still in some deep legal trouble which is why Bowie's dropping 10k for their defense, and this big march is headed there Thursday.

Obviously, the white power establishment in Jena is deeply racist, and in deep denial about it. If any charges should have ever been filed, they should have been for the death threats that started it all. What really pisses me off is that the school could have stopped this whole thing in its tracks by treating the noose incident with the seriousness it deserved. The racial tension that led to the fighting was an easily predictable consequence, but the whiteys in charge were too fucking stupid and racist to get it.

Really, from the point of view of the Jena Six, the fighting was self-defense.

Democracy Now was all over this Wednesday morning, and the one thing that struck me is how white people there don't seem to understand what's going on. "We're not racist here," they were all saying, "This isn't about racism." They're just as clueless as people in Vidor.

As I've said, I often fear that the single lasting legacy of the Civil Rights Era is that white racists don't think they're racist.

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