HOW THE JENA PROTEST HAPPENED

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EUGENE ROBINSON, WASH POST - [The] events happened in 2006. For months,
they utterly failed to penetrate the national consciousness. We still
might not know about what was happening in Jena if the case hadn't been
noticed by bloggers, who sounded the alarm. And I'm quite sure there
would have been no busloads of protesters descending on Jena if the
cause hadn't been taken up by a radio personality best known for R-rated
banter about sex and relationships.

Michael Baisden, whose afternoon drive-time show "Love, Lust & Lies" is
heard in urban markets across the country, launched a crusade on behalf
of the "Jena 6" -- a group of black students, ages 15 to 17 when they
allegedly beat up a white schoolmate and who still face adult charges of
aggravated battery that could send them to prison for up to 20 years.
The hours that Baisden normally would have spent in risque repartee with
"grown and sexy" callers about romance or infidelity were devoted
instead to the Jena case.

The obvious issue was one of equal justice: Either treat the whole
series of incidents as a mere disciplinary problem for the high school
to handle, or treat it as a criminal matter. Just don't have one
standard of justice for whites and another, much harsher standard for
blacks.

The cause was then taken up by other black radio hosts -- Tom Joyner,
whose morning drive-time show has enormous reach; Steve Harvey, the
comedian whose morning show usually covers the same "Does he really love
me?" territory as does Baisden's; the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose show, as
you might expect, was already heavy on politics and activism.

Yesterday morning, as the throng descended on Jena, both the Joyner and
Harvey shows featured live updates from the scene. Baisden and Sharpton
were in Jena, helping lead the demonstrations. It's fair to say that
without black radio, the case of the Jena 6 probably never would have
become a significant national story -- and certainly never would have
sparked one of the biggest civil rights protests in decades.

Why is this interesting? Because black America is increasingly
complicated and diverse, riven by fault lines that didn't exist back
when the great civil rights heroes were marching in Selma. We're not
forced by law to live in the same neighborhoods or to go to the same
schools anymore. A generation has reached adulthood without ever
experiencing the in-your-face racism of the Jim Crow era. There are
black families that have had multigenerational middle-class success, and
black families trapped in multigenerational poverty and dysfunction.

Black radio is one of the places where all the varied segments of black
America still come together. It's a true community medium, even if what
we still call "the black community" is, for most purposes, best thought
of as plural.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/20/
AR2007092001956.html

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