[NYTr] White supremacist backlash builds over Jena case

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Chicago Tribune - Sep 24, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-jena25_websep25,0,4477421.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout


White supremacist backlash builds over Jena case

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent

HOUSTON - No sooner did tens of thousands of African-American
demonstrators depart the racially tense town of Jena, La., last week
after protesting perceived injustices than white supremacists flooded
in behind them.

First a neo-Nazi Web site posted the names, addresses and phone numbers
of some of the six black teenagers and their families at the center of
the Jena 6 case and urged followers to find them and "drag them out of
the house," prompting an investigation by the FBI.

Then the leader of a white supremacist group in Mississippi published
interviews that he conducted with the mayor of Jena and the white
teenager who was attacked and beaten, allegedly by the six black
youths. In those interviews, the mayor, Murphy McMillin, praised
efforts by pro-white groups to organize counterdemonstrations; the
teenager, Justin Barker, urged white readers to "realize what is going
on, speak up and speak their mind."

Over the weekend, white extremist Web sites and blogs across the
Internet filled with invective about the Jena 6 case, which has drawn
scrutiny from civil rights leaders, three leading Democratic
presidential candidates and hundreds of African-American Internet
bloggers. They are concerned about allegations that blacks have been
treated more harshly than whites in the criminal justice system of the
town of 3,000, which is 85 percent white.

David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, last week announced his
support for Jena's white residents, who voted overwhelmingly for him
when he ran unsuccessfully for Louisiana governor in 1991.

"There is a major white supremacist backlash building," said Mark
Potok, a hate-group expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil
rights group in Montgomery, Ala. "I also think it's more widespread
than may be obvious to most people. It's not only neo-nazis and
Klansmen—you expect this kind of reaction from them."

Controversy over the Jena 6 case has been percolating for months but it
exploded into national view last Thursday when a crowd of at least
20,000 peaceful demonstrators from around the country marched through
the central Louisiana town.

They came to support the six black high school students who were
initially charged by the local prosecutor with attempted murder for
attacking Barker, a white classmate who was beaten and knocked briefly
unconscious last December. The charges were later reduced to aggravated
second-degree battery.

The incident capped months of racial unrest after three white students
hung nooses from a shade tree at the high school after black students
asked permission to sit under it. School officials dismissed the noose
incident as a prank, angering black students and their parents and
triggering a series of fights between whites and blacks. The whites
involved were charged with misdemeanors or not at all while the blacks
drew various felony charges.

McMillin has insisted that his town is being unfairly portrayed as
racist—an assertion the mayor repeated in an interview with Richard
Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist
group based in Learned, Miss., who asked McMillin to "set aside some
place for those opposing the colored folks."

"I am not endorsing any demonstrations, but I do appreciate what you
are trying to do," Barrett quoted McMillin as saying. "Your moral
support means a lot."

McMillin declined to return calls seeking comment Monday.

Barker's father, David, said his family did not know the nature of
Barrett's group when they agreed to be interviewed, adding, "I am not a
white supremacist, and neither is my son."

But Barrett said he explained his group and its beliefs to the Barker
family, who then invited him to stay overnight at their home on the eve
of last week's protest march.

Rev. Jesse Jackson told the Tribune that he had grown so concerned
about white extremists' threats against the Jena 6 families and
perceived injustices in the town that he called the White House over
the weekend to ask for immediate federal intervention. Jackson said the
acting head of the U.S. Justice Department's civil right division
phoned him Monday to say that the agency had begun investigating the
Jena situation.

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