The Magazine


The case of the amazing disappearing hate crime.

Jan 21, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 18 • By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
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Jena, Louisiana




The August incident was the first of a wave of highly publicized noose-sightings on campuses and business premises across the country. But the three Jena High perpetrators said they had no idea that nooses hanging from tree limbs could be interpreted as symbols of white-vigilantism and the lynching of black men in the post-Reconstruction South (in Louisiana alone there were more than 200 lynchings) or as a warning to blacks to know their place. Given the current state of historical illiteracy among young people, such ignorance certainly is conceivable. The three students maintained that the nooses were a school spirit-prompted prank directed at a rival school's Western-themed football team (the youths said they were inspired by a hanging in the 1980s television miniseries Lonesome Dove).

This explanation, although belittled by Jena Six supporters, does not seem entirely implausible. The nooses were in Jena High's school colors--one black, one gold-- high-school football is a major fall event in the rural South; and inter-school pranks, such as draping rival campuses with toilet paper, are frequent. Still, the tree in question was one under which members of Jena High's overwhelmingly white student population customarily sat (some called it the "white tree," although blacks sat under the tree, too), and the day before the noose incident, a black student had jokingly asked at a school assembly whether blacks were allowed to sit under the tree (the answer from a school administrator was that blacks could sit anywhere they liked). It is thus possible that the nooses were intended as a joke (although certainly in appalling taste) aimed at the previous day's joking comment. The high school's principal recommended expulsion for the three students involved (their names have never been made public), but the school board for LaSalle Parish settled on the lesser punishment on grounds that the three youths had no prior disciplinary records and seemed genuinely remorseful.