JENA CASE FAR FROM OVER...

(USA TODAY)
By Abbey Brown, The (Alexandria, La.) Town Talk
JENA, La. — Thousands made the journey to Jena on Thursday to show their support for the "Jena Six." While the day may have remained peaceful during the rallies, the days since have been anything but.
First, it was the two teens who were arrested Thursday night after driving a pickup through downtown Alexandria, where ralliers had gathered, with nooses hanging off the back. Both allegedly had been drinking, and a gun and brass knuckles were found in their truck.

The next day, the FBI announced it was keeping tabs on a neo-Nazi activist in Roanoke, Va., who had posted the names and addresses of the Jena Six on his website proclaiming "Lynch the Jena 6," the Roanoke Times reported. William A. White also listed the phone numbers of the six, urging his readers to "Get in touch, and let them know justice is coming."


INVESTIGATION: FBI looking into website with possible Jena 6 information
White — the leader of a Roanoke-based white-supremacist group — has a penchant for inserting inflammatory rhetoric into racially charged incidents that attract national attention, such as the "Jena Six" case, according to the Times.

The "Jena Six" are the six black teens originally charged with attempted murder in connection with the Dec. 4 beating of white Jena High School student Justin Barker.

Barker was knocked unconscious and then kicked by the defendants, according to court documents. He was treated for three hours in a local emergency room, released and that night attended a class ring ceremony with his family.

Tens of thousands of people from across the nation descended Thursday on Jena to rally around the cause of the group, with specific emphasis on Mychal Bell, the only one of the six to have been tried and remain in jail.

Bell was convicted in June of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit the same — the same charges most of the others now face.

Both of his adult convictions have been vacated, one already being tried in the juvenile court system and the other in limbo until LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters decides whether to appeal.

Bell's attorneys on Friday were hopeful he would be granted bond, but it was denied.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, described White's actions to the Times as "appalling, but it's not surprising."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco issued a statement Saturday condemning White's website, which she deemed as a threat.

"Harassing families involved in the legal issues in Jena can not and will not be tolerated," she said in the statement. "Public attacks on private citizens done out of ignorance and hatred is appalling, and anyone who stoops to such unspeakable persecution will be investigated and subject to the full penalty of law. I have asked law enforcement agencies to investigate this matter, and as governor I will do everything in my power to put a stop to these cowardly threats to Louisiana citizens."

The Rev. Al Sharpton also issued a statement about the posting of contact information for the Jena Six family members.

"Some of the families have received almost around-the-clock calls of threats and harassment since this website appeared, and to think that some person could actually harm or even continue to harass these families with no effort by law enforcement, will further exacerbate the tensions around this case immeasurably," he said. "Since our massive rally, there have been hangmen nooses found in several cities. The escalation has been met with a stubborn silence by officials in Jena, and we feel the governor must send in state law enforcement to investigate these threats and protect the public."

The actions of the teens in Alexandria, White and the hundreds of others who have been harassing the families are disgusting, the Rev. B.L. Moran said. He said Tina Jones, the mother of defendant Bryant Purvis, has been especially rattled by one threatening caller.

"There have been statements made on these websites saying if (Bell) was released that they'd kill everyone that has anything to do with the Jena Six," he said. "It certainly bothers them. It bothers them enough to get in touch with authorities."

The rallies were held to bring peace and unity, not violence or hatred, he said.

"What they stand for is nooses and murder," Moran said of those threatening the families. "All of this is causing not just Jena and the parish trouble, but trouble all over America. Now when you turn on the TV, you see nooses hanging everywhere. And it all started in Jena."

Alan Bean, director of Friends of Justice, said the actions of the teens in the truck and those making threats represent people trying to provoke fear or anger.

"They are sick individuals trying to get attention for themselves and piggyback on such a peaceful, beautiful event," he said. "They wanted to blemish something that was so completely without incident."

The situation in Jena, Bean said, won't be helped by hurling insults back and forth or, even worse, violence.

"Jena has seen enough violence already," he said.

Sharpton said he and Bell's parents, Marcus Jones and Melissa Bell, will meet Tuesday with U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to seek federal hearings and intervention.

"At the same time, Mychal's attorneys will pursue state remedies for his immediate release," Sharpton said in his statement. "For a judge to refuse to release him after his conviction was overturned is to hold the system of law in contempt and to further display the raw bias that inspired our involvement and participation in this movement around the 'Jena Six' since early this summer."

Sharpton said he and other civil rights leaders and activists will continue their plans for the next "major effort to protest this continued injustice." Those plans, he said, will be announced after Tuesday's meeting.

Jena 6 Rally in DC!

 
 
 
 

JENA 6 RALLY IN DC!

 
 
 
 


Hundreds of concerned people of all races came out yesterday for the JENA 6 Rally on Capitol Hill.
The speakers were inspirational and captivating. The rally in Jena went well also from what I hear, and now we must continue our fight to include the injustices happening all over America, in addition to the Jena young men. Black Youth Vote is committed to seeking social justice for all, and want YOU to get more involved with this movement!!
To get involved, and run a voter empowerment and voter registration campaign in your community, please call the National Coalition office at: (202) 659-4929, or email jmthierry@gmail.com

Peace, Justice, and Equality!

Florida Voter Reg Law CHALLENGED...

Fla. Voter Registration Law Challenged
By DAVID ROYSE

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A voter registration law wrongly barred thousands of Florida residents from taking part in the 2006 election and should be thrown out, the NAACP and others said in a federal lawsuit filed Monday.

The law prevents voters from registering if their driver's license or Social Security information doesn't match what is on the registration form.

Opponents of the law say it, and similar requirements in a number of states, have caused myriad problems. Legitimate voters have been thwarted for having a maiden name on a driver's license instead of a married name, or because of database input errors that make one digit wrong in a birth date, opponents said.

The lawsuit claims more than 20,000 people had their voter registration slowed down or denied in 2006 because of difficulties in confirming registration data.

The process is also too subject to user error, the lawsuit said. For example, a registration application would be thrown out if a potential voter accidentally reverses a couple of digits in their 13-digit driver's license number, the suit said.

"With the elections approaching, we should be doing everything we can to ensure that eligible citizens can register to vote and have it count, but Florida's draconian registration law won't give many citizens that chance," said Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning, named as the defendant and who oversees Florida compliance with election laws, said officials work to resolve discrepancies, but noted that the matching program is a requirement of the federal government.

"I will reiterate that it is the intention of the Department of State to make sure that every eligible voter in the state of Florida has the means and the opportunity to register to vote and to cast a ballot," he said in a statement.

He concluded, "I have every confidence that Florida is complying with all state and federal laws."

Gov. Charlie Crist said that he wasn't familiar with the lawsuit and couldn't comment.

Plaintiffs in the suit filed in U.S. District Court include the Florida State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition.

The lawsuit asks a judge to prevent the law from being enforced by the end of the year. Dec. 31 is the registration deadline for the 2008 presidential primary.

In 2006, a federal judge barred the state of Washington from enforcing a similar law. That state subsequently agreed to let people whose names do not perfectly match information in other government databases to register — but election officials now flag their names and require additional information before their ballots are counted.

stay focused on the Jena 6! (Chicago Tribune)

In Chicago, civic leaders vow to stay focused on 'Jena 6'
By Antonio Olivo | Tribune staff reporter
September 16, 2007

Black community leaders in Chicago on Saturday sought to keep the spotlight on the racially charged "Jena 6" case in Louisiana a day after a state appeals court there threw out a felony conviction against one of the teen defendants.

Both Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton pledged to continue plans for a demonstration in Jena, La., on Thursday, arguing the overturned battery conviction against Mychal Bell, 17, did not diminish the racial injustice of a case that drew national attention when Bell and five other black teenagers were charged with attempted murder for beating a white teen and leaving him unconscious.

The white student was treated at a local hospital for cuts and bruises, and later released.


Bell remains in jail, and the district attorney overseeing the case pledged to appeal the overturned conviction or bring new juvenile charges against him. The five other defendants are free on bail and await trial, said George Tucker, one of the defense attorneys in the case. Tucker and Bell's parents visited Chicago on Saturday to attract more people to the planned rally.

"It's taken a big toll on us from Day One," said Bell's father, Martus Jones, after a rally Saturday at Whitney High School that drew several hundred people.

The December beating came after several white-on-black attacks in Jena in which white assailants escaped serious charges. Racial tensions had been simmering in town after a black freshman at Jena High School asked a vice principal for permission to sit under a tree on campus claimed by white students as a favorite patch of shade.

The vice principal told the student to sit wherever he wanted. But three white students later hung nooses from the tree, perceived as a threat to blacks in the mostly white town of about 3,000 residents. Those students were suspended for three days.

On Saturday, during a morning sermon inside his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition headquarters on Chicago's South Side, Jackson called the Jena case emblematic of continuing systemic mistreatment of African Americans, who make up the majority of prison populations around the country and suffer from poor health care and underfunded public schools.

"Jena is just a DNA sample of what's happening around the country," Jackson said, arguing that the use of nooses in the rural South should have been treated by local authorities as a hate crime.

"Don't just put your eye on the Jena jail system," Jackson said. "If you can't make it to Jena, go to 26th and California," he said, referring to the site of the Cook County Jail.

Sharpton sought to use the case to spur more action against police abuse in the city's black neighborhoods. He announced plans for a march in the city in the fall.

"There hasn't been a mass march in this city for years," he said. "It's time we bring these issues to City Hall."

----------

aolivo@tribune.com

Court Tosses 'Jena 6' Conviction!

(AP) JENA, La. A state appeals court on Friday threw out the only remaining conviction against one of the black teenagers accused in the beating of a white schoolmate in the racially tense north Louisiana town of Jena.

Mychal Bell, 17, should not have been tried as an adult, the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal said in tossing his conviction on aggravated battery, for which he was to have been sentenced Thursday. His conspiracy conviction in the December beating of student Justin Barker was already thrown out by another court.

Bell, who was 16 at the time of the beating, and four others were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder. Those charges brought widespread criticism that blacks were being treated more harshly than whites following racial altercations involving Jena High.

Civil rights leaders, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, had been planning a rally in support of the teens for the day Bell was to have been sentenced.

Teenagers can be tried as adults in Louisiana for some violent crimes, including attempted murder, but aggravated battery is not one of those crimes, the court said.

Defense lawyers had argued that the aggravated battery case should not have been tried in adult court once the attempted murder charge was reduced.

The case "remains exclusively in juvenile court," the Third Circuit ruled

Soldiers who signed anti-war op-ed piece die in Iraq

(CNN) -- Two U.S. soldiers whose signatures appeared on an op-ed piece in The New York Times critical of the war in Iraq were among seven Americans killed in a truck accident outside of Baghdad, family members said Wednesday.


Iraqi National Security Adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie said Wednesday he will support 2008 decrease in U.S. troops.

Staff Sgt. Yance Gray and Sgt. Omar Mora were members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Gray, Mora and five other soldiers died Monday when their truck overturned near the Iraqi capital, U.S. officials said.

Gray and Mora were among seven soldiers, mostly sergeants, who wrote the op-ed piece that appeared in the Times on August 19. It called the prospects of U.S. success "far-fetched" and said the progress being reported was being "offset by failures elsewhere."

"Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence," they wrote. "When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages."

Gray, 26, joined the Army out of high school in Ismay, Montana, in 2000, said his father, Richard Gray. Yance Gray is survived by a wife and daughter.

A relative at Mora's family home in Texas City, Texas, confirmed his death but had no other comment.

In their article, Mora, Gray and their comrades wrote that American troops in Iraq are operating "in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear."

However, they concluded, "As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through."

Another of the signers of the Times article, Staff Sgt. Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head a week before the article appeared but survived.

Meanwhile, a top Iraqi official said he foresees a decrease in foreign troop levels to less than 90,000 by the end of 2009 as Iraq bolsters and readies its security forces to take over responsibilities now being shouldered by the U.S.-led coalition forces.

The U.S. troop increase this year, dubbed "the surge" by the Bush administration, added nearly 30,000 troops to Iraq. The number of U.S. troops at present is more than 160,000 and the number of other coalition forces is more than 11,000.

National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, speaking at a Wednesday press conference, told reporters that by next year the number of foreign troops might drop to about 130,000, the pre-surge level, or to 100,000 troops.

"When we reach 2009, we could talk about numbers that are less than 90,000" among the Multi-National Force, said al-Rubaie, who emphasized that such withdrawals would depend on the security environment and troop readiness.

Al-Rubaie made the remarks a day after senior U.S. administration officials said that President Bush is prepared to embrace the recommendation of his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and withdraw as many as 30,000 U.S. troops by next summer.

Woman Tortured in West Virginia: Hate Crime?

Details Emerge in W.Va. Torture Case
By JOHN RABY and TOM BREEN
The Associated Press
Tuesday, September 11, 2007; 11:15 PM


BIG CREEK, W.Va. -- For at least a week, authorities say, a young black woman was held captive in a mobile home, forced to eat animal waste, stabbed, choked and repeatedly sexually abused _ all while being peppered with a racial slur.

It wasn't until deputies acting on an anonymous tip drove to a ramshackle trailer deep in West Virginia's rural hills that she was found. Limping toward the door with her arms outstretched, she uttered, "Help me," the Logan County sheriff's office said.



In this photo released by the West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority Frankie Brewster is shown on Sept. 9, 2007, in Logan, W.Va., after she and five others were arrested for holding a Charleston woman captive in a Big Creek home for at least a week. The FBI is investigating whether the beating and sexual assault of this woman was a hate crime. (AP photo/West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority) (AP)


Six people, all white, including a mother and son and a mother and daughter, have been arrested and could face federal hate crime charges in the suspected attack on 20-year-old Megan Williams, who remained hospitalized Tuesday with injuries that included four stab wounds in the leg, and black and blue eyes. Her right arm was in a cast.

"I'm better," Williams told The Associated Press in a voice barely above a whisper.

"I don't understand a human being doing another human being the way they did my daughter," Carmen Williams said Tuesday from the Charleston Area Medical Center. "I didn't know there were people like that out here."

The AP generally does not identify suspected victims of sexual assault, but Williams and her mother agreed to release her name.

A prosecutor said police are investigating the possibility that the victim was lured to the house and attacked by a man she had met online, but Carmen Williams insisted that wasn't the case. "This wasn't from the Internet," she said.

Authorities were still looking for two people they believe drove the woman to the house where she was abused, said Logan County Chief Deputy V.K. Dingess. Deputies also interviewed Williams on Tuesday morning. An FBI spokesman in Pittsburgh, Bill Crowley, confirmed that the agency is looking into possible civil rights violations.

The case is "something that would have come out of a horror movie," Logan County Sheriff W.E. Hunter said.

The home is in a forlorn part of Logan County about 50 miles southwest of Charleston, where the scattered homes are marked by "No Trespassing" signs. An old shed linked to a mobile home by an extension cord is what authorities say became a hellish prison for Williams.

Deputies found her when they drove to the home on Saturday after receiving an anonymous tip from someone who witnessed the abuse, officials said.

The woman was forced to eat rat and dog feces and drink from a toilet, according to the criminal complaint filed in magistrate court based on what the suspects told deputies. She also had been choked with a cord, it alleges. Deputies say the woman was also doused with hot water while being sexually assaulted.

One of those arrested, Karen Burton, is accused of cutting the woman's ankle with a knife. She used the N-word in telling the woman she was victimized because she is black, according to the criminal complaint.

Carmen Williams said doctors told her daughter she may be well enough to leave the hospital within a few days, although a nurse said the young woman's condition was listed as "under evaluation."

"I just want my daughter to be well and recover," Carmen Williams said. "I know the Lord can do anything."

The six suspects were arrested Saturday and Sunday. Frankie Brewster, the 49-year-old woman who owns the home where the suspected attacks occurred, is charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, malicious wounding and giving false information during a felony investigation.

Her son, Bobby R. Brewster, 24, also of Big Creek, is charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, malicious wounding and assault during the commission of a felony.

Frankie Brewster was released from prison in September 2000 after serving five years for voluntary manslaughter and wanton endangerment in the death of an 84-year-old woman, according to court records.

Burton, 46, of Chapmanville, is charged with malicious wounding, battery and assault during the commission of a felony.

Her daughter Alisha Burton, 23, of Chapmanville, and George A. Messer, 27, of Chapmanville, are charged with assault during the commission of a felony and battery.

Danny J. Combs, 20, of Harts, is charged with sexual assault and malicious wounding.

All six remained in custody Tuesday in lieu of $100,000 bail each, and all have asked for court-appointed attorneys.

___

Tom Breen reported from Charleston, W.Va.

Reverend Yearwood Gets Attacked on Capitol Hill?

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., is a minister, community activist, and one of the most influential people in Hip Hop political life. A powerful and fiery orator, Rev. Yearwood works diligently and tirelessly to encourage the Hip Hop generation to utilize its political and social voice. He currently serves as President of the Hip Hop Caucus in Washington, D.C. The Hip Hop Caucus is a national, nonprofit, nonpartisan, organization that inspires and motivates those born after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Rev. Yearwood is known for his activist work as the National Director of the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign in which he organized a coalition of national organizations and grassroots organizations to advocate for the rights of Hurricane Katrina survivors. More recently, Rev. Yearwood has become an important figure in the peace movement as an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration. He was an Officer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and recently led a "Make Hip Hop Not War" national tour to engage more young people in the movement for peace.
(taken from Hip Hop Caucus Website)

Kalamazoo Needs Moore!

Visit www.KalamazooNeedsMOORE.com, and help Black Youth Vote's most dedicated leader become elected to her City Commission!

Kalamazoo, Michigan needs Stephanie Moore because she brings a voice of social justice, racial and gender equality, and community upliftment to all of her projects.

Stephanie has worked with Black Youth Vote! and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation for years now, and consistently performs beyond expectations, registering thousands of voters throughout the years.
For more info check out her website, and...
Please contribute to her campaign anyway you can!