Six young black men from a Jena, Louisiana high school can spend up to 22 years in prison for a racially motivated school fight. The story is very similar to the Jim Crow era where the police, judges and the courts where used to keep the black folks "in their place." Unfortunately it is sad to see that Jim Crow racism still exists in the 21st century.
In September 2006, a black high school student in the small Louisiana town of Jena, asked the principal for permission to sit under a "whites only" tree. The principal said he "didn't care where students sat." The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses in school colors hanging from the tree. The superintendent dismissed the nooses as a "prank," and gave the students who hung the nooses only a light punishment of three-day suspension, which resulted in more Black students to sit under the tree in protest. Then District Attorney Reed Walters came to the high school and told the students he could "take [their] lives away with a stroke of [his] pen."
Let me plug the fact that Town Hall meetings, should your representatives have them, are excellent opportunities to directly question your elected officials on votes, authored legislation, or legislation that concerns you that they voted for. Get in their face! As BOR has been documenting all week, my personal concern and sole mission for today's Town Hall was to question Representative Smith about his vote in favor of House Bill 218. Otherwise know as the Voter Suppression Act of 2007.
I asked:
"Representative Smith you voted this week in favor of House Bill 218, which passed with a 76-68 vote. The bill is inappropriately named the Voter Identification Bill; it should be entitled the Voter Suppression Bill. If it becomes law this bill will disenfranchise elder seniors, minorities, and young people from exercising their constitutional right to vote, and you supported that. Why?"
Representative Todd Smith said directly:
"I did it because I'm Republican."
With a puzzled look, my fellow Democratic constituents and I essentially dropped our jaws to the floor. And he not only said it once,twice, but three times! The final time he basically insinuated that the Republican Party endorses voter suppression by stating:
"Listen, I'm a Republican, this was a Party line vote, and I uhhhh……voted appropriately as a result."
He went on to ho-hum about the intent of the bill was to keep individuals ineligible to vote away from the polls, which, by his own admission with his bizarre quote, is nothing more then BS.
