Civil rights' online movement

JENA, La. — There is no single leader. There is no agreed schedule. Organizers aren't even certain where everyone is supposed to gather, let alone use the restroom. The only thing that is known for sure is that thousands of protesters are boarding buses at churches, colleges and community centers across the country this week, headed for this tiny dot on the map of central Louisiana.

What could turn out to be one of the largest civil-rights demonstrations in years is set to take place here Thursday, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, popular black radio talk-show hosts and other celebrities converge on Jena to protest what they regard as unequal treatment of African-Americans in this racially fractured Deep South town.

Yet this will be a civil-rights protest literally conjured out of the Internet, of a type that has never happened before in America — a collective national mass action grown from a grass-roots word-of-mouth movement spread via Internet blogs, e-mails, message boards and talk radio.

Jackson, Sharpton and other big-name civil rights figures, far from leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up. So, too, has the national media, which has only recently noticed a story that has been agitating many black Americans for months.

As formidable as it is amorphous, this new African-American blogosphere, which scarcely even existed a year ago, now comprises hundreds of interlinked blogs and tens of thousands of followers who within a matter of a few weeks collected 220,000 petition signatures — and more than $130,000 in donations for legal fees — in support of six black Jena teenagers who are being prosecuted on felony battery charges for beating a white student.

"Ten years ago this couldn't have happened," said Sharpton, who said he first heard about the Jena case on the Internet. "You didn't have the Internet and you didn't have black blogs and you didn't have national radio shows. Now we can talk to all of black America every day. We've been able to form our own underground railroad of information, and when everybody else looks up, it's already done."

Gearing up

Hotels are booked up for miles around Jena.

Police said they were gearing up for the rally that they estimated could bring up to 50,000 people to this town, about 140 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.

Col. Stanley Griffin, chief of the Louisiana State Police, insisted the protest "will be secure and it will be uneventful," regardless of the number of people who show up.

Residents of this mostly white town aren't so sure.

Gary Moser, 70, the owner of a two-story brick building that houses two boutiques, plans to board up his property, fearing the protest could spin out of control.

"We're only 2,300 people and there are supposed to be 10 times that many [protesters] here," he said. "We've never had to deal with anything as momentous as that."

"You get so many people here on both sides and something's bound to happen."

The momentum for the protest did not slow even when the original reason for the event — the scheduled sentencing of Mychal Bell, 17, the first of the "Jena 6" defendants to be tried and convicted of aggravated second-degree battery — evaporated.

Last week, a state appellate court abruptly vacated Bell's June 28 conviction, ruling that he had been improperly tried as an adult rather than a juvenile. The local district attorney, Reed Walters, has vowed to challenge that decision, and Bell remains jailed in lieu of $90,000 bond.

The start of trouble

The trouble in Jena started a year ago with a resonant symbol from the Jim Crow past: After black students asked administrators at the local high school for permission to sit beneath a shade tree traditionally used only by whites, white students hung three nooses from the tree. The incident outraged black students and their parents, but was dismissed by the school superintendent as a youthful prank; he punished the white students with three-day suspensions.

A series of fights between whites and blacks ensued, both on and off the campus. Whites implicated in the fights were charged with misdemeanors or not at all, while the blacks were charged with felonies.

In November, someone burned down the central wing of the high school — an arson for which no one has been arrested.

And then in early December, Bell and five other black students at the high school were charged after a white student was jumped and beaten while he lay unconscious.

Although the white student was treated and released at a hospital, Walters initially charged the six black youths with attempted murder — charges that he later reduced to aggravated second-degree battery after black bloggers and civil-rights leaders from across the country raised complaints that the charges were excessive.

Besides Sharpton, King and Jackson, the NAACP and the ACLU will have contingents here Thursday, as will the Millions More Movement led by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

New "viral" movement

Many black bloggers say the Jena demonstration is really more about a new generation of civil-rights activists who learned about the Jena case from hip-hop music blogs that featured the story or popular black entertainers such as Mos Deaf who have turned it into a crusade.

"In traditional civil-rights groups, there's a pattern — you call a meeting, you see when everybody can get together, you have to decide where to meet," said Shawn Williams, 33, a pharmaceutical salesman and former college NAACP leader who runs the popular Dallas South Blog.

"All that takes time," Williams added. "When you look at how this civil-rights movement is working, once something gets out there, the action is immediate — here's what we're going to write about, here's the petition, here's the protest. It takes place within minutes, hours and days, not weeks or months."

This new, "viral" civil-rights movement now taking shape still benefits from the participation of well-known leaders like Jackson or Sharpton — it just doesn't depend on them, bloggers say.

"When Reverend Jackson or Reverend Sharpton or other recognized leaders get involved, that's helpful, and it helps them — they can see where momentum is building around an issue," said James Rucker, the 38-year-old founder of Color of Change, an Internet-based civil rights group that has more than 280,000 subscribers. "You can argue they came late to Jena, but they are here now, which is good."

The blogs also serve as watchdogs over more traditional civil-rights groups. When the NAACP first began featuring the Jena case on its Web site and claimed to be soliciting contributions for the teens' legal defense, it was a black blogger who quickly pointed out that the donation link directed visitors to the generic NAACP fundraising page, with no way for donors to direct their funds to the Jena defendants.

Within days, the link was redirected to a bona fide Jena 6 fundraising site.

Information from the New York Daily News is included in this report.