2008 Woodie Awards
Silent protests on campus
Students protested 'Jena 6' case on campus
Alex Tunney
Issue date: 10/31/07 Section: News
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From noon to 4 p.m. a small group of protestors sat silently on the campus quad in shifts, handed out fliers, marched around campus every hour on the hour, had a table for petitions, and a speaker to cap off the end of the protest.
The events that surround the Jena Six are a long chain of events of violent race relations starting last year involving local high school students in Jena, Louisiana. Facts of this case were handed out by protestors on the flyers, a story that involves segregation, and the hanging of nooses among other incidents, events that have lead many to act in order to fight what they perceive as injustice.
"We named it Awareness Day. We wanted to make people aware of the events that occurred [in Jena]. And so we have timelines throughout the Events and Activities Center and the flyers are something people can hold. More like a miniature version," said student Tatiana McIntosh, on the students handing out flyers.
Awareness, according to major news sources, was one of the major issues protestors discussed when not silently protesting or while handing out flyers. The beginning of the incident happened in the summer of 2006, many students did not encounter information about the story until a year later, when the trial started in June. Kim Clune, a student who reported about the event on her blog earlier in the summer, described how she learned about the story.
"I spent my summer mornings watching Democracy Now! on Free Speech TV and on July 10th, Amy Goodman reported on the Jena Six. As I watched Robert Bailey talk about his fearful reactions to the nooses hanging from his schoolyard tree, I was outraged."
Student Nyree Wright explained how she found out about the incidents.
"We learned about in a Spectrum Open Discussion. Nobody knew that it was going on. It shocked us that this was going on in 2007," Wright said. "There's a bunch of people that did not know it was going on. There's people that still don't know it's going on."
There were previous nationwide protests on September 20, 2007 the day Mychal Bell, one of the 'Jena Six,' was initially going to be sentenced. There was also a national walk out on October 1. 2007. There were attempts to have students wear green and black in a protest on campus, but numbers were small.
"We used Facebook as a stepping stool, but we only saw one or two people, so we decided to elaborate, and make it more personal, make it a Saint Rose event," McIntosh said.
"I believe there are a lot of people who are unaware of the racism that still exists in this country. There are still people who do not know about the Jena Six even though it has been going on for over a year," said organizer and student Tabitha Kumar. "The purpose of this protest is to educate the campus of the racism that still exists. I do believe there is discrimination on the campus, which is why this protest was held, and bringing awareness to the campus was the goal."
The petitions were a way of involving the campus. On a table near the protest, there were two petitions; one to free the 'Jena Six' and another where students could write stories of discrimination they either experienced or witnessed on campus.
Previous to the event Kumar explained the symbolic nature of colors worn and actions performed by protestors and supporters.
"Black will symbolize 'strength and mourning,' while green will symbolize 'growth and surpassing hate,'" Kumar said.
Kumar also discussed the symbolic nature of the silent protestors sitting under the tree, as one of the incidents at Jena involved black students sitting under what was considered the 'white tree.'
Not all the supporters were students. Some staff members came by in support of the protest such as: Assistant to the President on Diversity Shai Bulter, Assistant Vice President for the Public Relations and Marketing Lisa Haley Thomson, and Vice President for Enrollment Management Mary Grondahl, who stopped by to talk with protestors off-shift.
Many were supportive of the protest, as the protest and marches grew slowly in number as time went on or those who passed by gladly took flyers. There were some members of the campus community who did not agree with the protest and voiced their opinions in non-verbally, or in debate. However, none of these reactions were violent.
"Yes, there were some negative reactions to the protest. There were some people who refused to take the flyer of information. I responded by respecting their opinion. We were out there letting our voices be heard; I can not condemn someone else for voicing theirs," Kumar said.
Some students had views that did not fall on either extreme of the spectrum of opinions concerning this case.
"While I do understand that race is a pertinent factor in the discussion of the case, the law needs to be color-blind. And if the people of the 'Jena Six' are to be prosecuted, so should all the other parties of prior incidents that went un-admonished, no person should be singled out and punished by the law because of race," said student Sean Horan.
"I'd like to look more closely at all sides now. At this point I can't say, from my armchair headquarters, what is real and what is not. I'd suggest people keep cool heads and try to make sense of the widely varied information. As long as the rally cry remains a call for fair and equal justice under the law, that can't be a bad thing. It's the only thing I can commit to as of this moment," Clune said.
To end the protest, Tashawna Rogers, Human Resources Coordinator for The College of Saint Rose, spoke to the protestors and those passing by on the quad.
"I'm not agreeing with what they [the Jena 6] did. I'm not agreeing with the reactions to what they did. I'm here to say the punishment they are receiving is not right," said Rogers.
Rogers gave listeners more information surrounding the case. Additionally, she spoke of trend of cases where nooses were spotted in areas on Long Island, in the bag of coast guard cadet in Connecticut, on a professor's door at Columbia University, and even at Ground Zero. She continued on to talk about these events, going along with the theme of awareness, and matters of trust among members of this community.
"If it happens to us today, if it happens to a professor…will we know how to deal with it?" Rogers said.
Rogers, along with the student protestors believe they left students with knowledge that racism is not dead, and made enough people aware in order to combat ignorance of 'Jena Six' and similar cases.
"I think the protest was extremely successful. We wanted to demonstrate our feeling of the unfair treatment of the Jena Six and we did that," said president of Spectrum, Jarred Haynes. "We wanted to educate the campus about the Jena 6 and we did that. We wanted to show that actions speak louder then words and we acted."
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