Does Jena Rally Show Rebirth of Rights Era?

Summary

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The "Jena 6" protest was really the first such event of the Internet era, propelled as it was by Black bloggers around the country who took the case and pushed it into mainstream consciousness. The protest was probably the largest rally of African Americans since the "Million Man March" in 1995 (though dwarfed by the proimmigration rallies in cities such as Los Angeles last year), and was attended largely by young people. The rally was also accompanied by sympathy protests in a number of cities around the country, including Baltimore, Washington, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York.

"I want to be a little cautious about that," [Ron Walters] said. "The seeds are beginning to germinate because the protest at Jena was interesting. It attracted a lot of people, a lot of them young people who had never participated in protests before."

"The goal here is a more difficult goal than we had in the civil rights era," Walters said. "We were able to get the country on our side because of the patent injustice that people felt of Blacks being excluded from the mainstream of American society." "Colored" water fountains exist only in museums today. No one is forced to ride in the back of the bus. And folks who were once killed for voting are now being courted for their votes.

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Does Jena Rally Show Rebirth of Rights Era?

Ron Walters, now in his 60s, remembers what it was like to be a young Black man in the eye of a hurricane called the civil rights movement.

The man who is now a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, and one of the nation's most-quoted scholars when...

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