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Every now and then I look out from the pulpit at Middle Church and am so overwhelmed with the amazing beauty of who we are and what God is doing in and through us, that I weep. September 16 was such a day. Our congregation has moved from being a sea of beautiful black and white faces to a really gorgeous multiracial/multicultural melting pot. It looks and feels to me always like God is helping us to rehearse the Reign of God here at Middle and to take it with us into the world as a vision for what life can be. We take it with us to work, to our homes, to our relationships. We take with us what it means to learn to live with difference, to celebrate from someone else’s perspective what their culture is.
And we may, some of us, think we do not need to be talking about race anymore. We have been to the mountaintop, we think. We have marched, we have moved, we have grown and changed our world. But not nearly enough, it seems.
Here is a story, so familiar, so frightening. This is the way the NAACP is reporting it:
In a small highly segregated rural Louisiana town of Jena in September 2006, a black student asked permission from school administrators to sit under the shade of a tree commonly reserved for the enjoyment of white students. School officials advised the black students to sit wherever they wanted and they did. The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, were hanging from the same tree. The Jena high school principal found that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion. The white superintendent of schools over-ruled the principal and gave the students a three day suspension, saying that the nooses were "a youthful stunt." Black students decided to resist and organized a sit-in under the tree to protest the lenient treatment given to the noose-hanging white students.
Racial tensions remained elevated throughout the fall. On Monday, December 4, 2006, a white student who allegedly had been racially taunting black students in support of the students who hung the nooses got into a fight with black students. Allegedly, the white student was taken to the hospital, treated, released, and reportedly attended a social function later that evening.
As a result of this incident, six black Jena students were arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder. All six were expelled from school. The six charged were: 17-year-old Robert Bailey Junior whose bail was set at $138,000; 17-year-old Theo Shaw, bail $130,000; 18-year-old Carwin Jones—bail $100,000; 17-year-old Bryant Purvis—bail $70,000; 16 year old Mychal Bell, a sophomore in high school who was charged as an adult and for whom bail was set at $90,000; and a still unidentified minor.
On the morning of the trial, the District Attorney reduced the charges from attempted second degree murder to second degree aggravated battery and conspiracy. Aggravated battery in Louisiana law demands the attack be with a dangerous weapon. The prosecutor was allowed to argue to the jury that the tennis shoes worn by Bell could be considered a dangerous weapon.
When the pool of potential jurors was summoned, 50 people appeared, all white. The jury deliberated for less than three hours and found Mychal Bell guilty on the maximum possible charges of aggravated second degree battery and conspiracy. He originally faced a maximum of 22 years in prison.
On September 4, 2007, the District Court granted Bell’s Motion in Arrest of Judgment as to the Conspiracy charge. On September 14, 2007, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana vacated Mychal Bell’s conviction for aggravated battery. Mychal Bell may be tried in Juvenile Court. The rest of the Jena 6 await similar trials. Theodore Shaw and Carwin Jones are scheduled for trial on January 28, 2008.
What do we do about these kinds of events? And on an even smaller scale, what do we do, think and feel when our friends, families, partners and co-workers still make disparaging remarks about people just because of the color of their skin and their ethnic origin?
I think we can take the experience of Middle Church into our lives, and into the world. I think we can hold each other in our hearts in such a way that we are always standing with and for the other. I think we can carry the love at Middle, love which casts out fear, into the community and into the culture. I think that Middle is the color of love.
