A SIGN outside Jena describes it as “a nice place to call home”. But this town in Louisiana is small, poor and, for many, a new symbol of old-style American racism. On September 20th some 20,000 people rallied in the heat to protest against racial discrimination in the justice system. They came from as far afield as Chicago and New York, at least 20 hours away by bus. No one organised them; they just arrived, spurred by internet chatter and talk radio. They swamped the local population of 3,000. Dressed in black, they marched peacefully. Some exuberantly likened their protest to the civil-rights marches of the 1960s. But the campaign to free a group of black students who beat up a white classmate somehow lacks the moral clarity of the old crusades against legal segregation and whites-only elections.
Accounts differ, but the story goes something like this. At a high-school assembly on August 30th last year, a black student asked if he could sit under a shady tree on campus where the white students usually hung out. The deputy principal said of course he could sit wherever he wanted. The next day, two nooses dangled from the tree. They were quickly removed, and the principal recommended that the three white students who hung them be expelled. But the school board let them off with a suspension, arguing that the incident was just a childish prank.
Many black students and parents were appalled, and said so. Racial tension simmered. Local media began to report on it. On September 6th, two fights broke out in the school, one of which sent a white student to the emergency room for stitches. Calm followed for 12 weeks, but then, on November 30th, someone burned down part of the school. No one knows who or why.
In the next few days, several fights erupted between black and white students. On December 4th a black student named Mychal Bell jumped a white classmate from behind and knocked him out. Then he and six others kicked him as he lay on the ground. The victim, Justin Barker, was taken to hospital. He was released in time to go out that evening, but retired home early complaining of pain. Five of the attackers were charged with attempted second-degree murder. That caused an outcry, so the charges were reduced to second-degree battery, which still carries heavy penalties.
Mr Bell was tried as an adult, though he was only 16 at the time of the attack. The prosecutor says this was because he had been arrested four times before for violent offences. He was convicted by an all-white jury. (Several blacks were summoned for jury duty, but none showed up.) He was to have been sentenced on the day of the protest, and could have received as much as 15 years in prison. But a higher court threw out his conviction and ordered that he be tried as a juvenile. He remains behind bars. The others have posted bail and are free awaiting trial.
The case has attracted widespread attention. Black talk radio seethes about it. Jasiri X, a rapper, raps that “Unless you're born black you can't understand the feeling/ They beat that boy down; they never planned to kill him.” For many, Jena symbolises how the justice system treats blacks and whites unequally.
There is evidence that it does: a meta-study by the Sentencing Project, a think-tank, finds that black criminals receive somewhat harsher sentences than whites for similar offences. Sometimes this reflects intentional bias. But often it does not. Fewer blacks can afford good lawyers. Many are ensnared by race-neutral laws that passed with the enthusiastic support of black lawmakers. Possession of crack cocaine, a poor man's drug, is punished far more severely than the powder variety. Drug offences near schools earn stiffer sentences, and in the inner city you are usually close to a school.
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, two veteran civil-rights leaders, are giving their full-throated support to the “Jena Six”. (That there are seven of them was not widely known until recently, since two were charged as juveniles and one of these cases was not made public.) “Jena is not just Jena,” said Mr Jackson. “There is a Jena everywhere.” He called on President George Bush and the Justice Department to intervene.
For black America's new political star, however, the issue is more delicate. Barack Obama's support for the Jena teens is guarded. “There are a number of signs that the system is not working in this case,” he said. Mr Obama did not attend the rally on September 20th, perhaps because he was busy running for president, but perhaps also because he was loth to link arms with Mr Sharpton and Mr Jackson on this issue. To capture the White House, Mr Obama needs votes from a lot of people who think that Mr Bell sounds like a nasty piece of work.
Mr Sharpton and Mr Jackson are the men every news show calls on to speak for black America. But their credentials for doing so are increasingly disputed. As a presidential candidate in 2004, Mr Sharpton struggled to win even black Democratic primary votes. Mr Jackson was a more plausible candidate two decades ago, but both men now sound stale. Ebony magazine ran an article last year asking “Does the Rev. Jesse Jackson still matter?”
A fair answer would be: less than before. One reason is that while Mr Jackson and Mr Sharpton talk, other black leaders are acting. Charles Rangel, the head of the House Ways and Means Committee, is quietly re-writing the nation's tax code. John Conyers, the head of its Judiciary Committee, supports the Jena teens, but spends much more time bombarding the White House with subpoenas.
Another reason for the reverends' shrinking relevance is that they have nothing new to say. Both assume, with clockwork predictability, that white racism is at the root of any African-American ill. They are not always wrong. Jena clearly has a problem: the parish voted for David Duke, a former Klansman, for governor of Louisiana in 1991. But both men have got it badly wrong in the past. For example, Mr Sharpton's championing of a girl who falsely claimed to have been raped by white policemen ended with him being successfully sued for libel.
Meanwhile, many blacks think the big problem is not racist prosecutors but the tragically large number of young black men who turn to crime. Young black men are seven times more likely to be jailed than whites, but they are also seven times more likely to murder someone, and their victims are usually black. Bill Cosby, a comedian, tours the country urging black parents to “rein in their anger” against the system and bring up their children to study, work and solve disputes amicably. Of blacks behind bars, he says: “These are not ‘political' criminals. These are people selling drugs, stealing, or shooting their buddies over trivia.”
Mr Obama's attraction is that he sounds thoughtful rather than angry, and that he straddles the fence between Cosbyism and Sharptonality. He said of Jena that it was “not a matter of black and white”, but of “right and wrong”. He is always respectful of his black political elders, but gently laments “the inability of some on the left to acknowledge...the problems of absent fathers or persistent crime.”
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Race, justice and Jena"