My collaborators and I have just published The Jena 6: Of Nooses, Fights, Narratives, and Movement Building will soon be available online and in print from Cambridge Elements. You will be able to download it for free for thirty days when it is first published. I’ll edit this post when it is published. I have a lot of fun working on this project, which developed as a side project to our Black protest project.
NOTE: This publication will go live in January 2026. This page will be updated with links to supplemental materials including a recap of the book’s arguments and links to videos and other background materials.
Tens of thousands of mostly young Black people made their way to a remote rural town in north central Louisiana in September 2007 in support of the Jena 6. The “Jena 6 narrative” told a story of a racist small town in which first White students were not seriously punished for hanging nooses on a tree at the high school after a Black student had challenged the custom of only White students sitting under the tree and then six Black students were charged with attempted murder after a school fight in which the White victim, while injured, had been well enough to attend an event that same evening. The big Jena 6 protest was seen at the time as a renewal and invigoration of the Black movement. The nooses resonated as a powerful symbol of racial violence in the Jim Crow era. Activists and protesters linked the Jena case to the problem of over-policing and over-incarcerating Black people everywhere. With the advantage of historical hindsight, the big Jena 6 protest can be seen as a transition point or bridge between Black movement eras. I have collected links to videos, photos, and first-hand accounts of the rally and the build-up around the case that can give you a better feeling for the big rally.
Our book provides new academic research into aspects of the case that were not covered in the news accounts at the time or in the few academic works on the subject. We give more detail than other sources on the geo-political context, including original maps. We also sketch the historical context: the dislocations of hurricane Katrina, the Millions More Movement of 2005 seeking to build an ongoing Black political agenda, reactions to the big immigration rallies of 2006, and the Obama campaign that was already in the news in 2007.
In one chapter, we take a new look at the “Jena 6 narrative” and how it was shaped to link past and present and inspire a new generation of activism. We got back to the most contemporaneous sources to lay out what happened in Jena in the fall of 2006 and what the debates were. Using original data from mainstream newswires and Black newspapers, we show what was left out and what was added to the narrative as it circulated. In particular, adult collective action, media outreach, arson at the school, community conflict and community healing events got left out, while student protests about the nooses got added. We argued that the narrative was shaped to became a call to action for young Black people.
In another chapter, we trace the campaign as it grew with an emphasis on regional activists and their relations to national organizations and media outlets. We take a prosaic nonromantic approach, showing how the big rally at the end was a result of ordinary activist efforts to support the Jena 6 that escalated when initial efforts failed and eventually reached a tipping point when national activists saw an opportunity for movement-building. We trace the early involvement of regional activists in supporting the Jena 6 and their families and the media campaign that drew in outside attention and support. We show that the Jena case initially got less media and Google searching attention than another case of over-charging a Black youth (the Genarlow Wilson case). We plot news media coverage against Google trends to identify the point at which attention to the Jena case took off and became a media cascade, arguing that the take-off happened because multiple national-level organizations and activists decided it was a moment for movement-building. In this respect, the importance of the Jena 6 narrative was that it was a call to a movement, not just support for those youths.
The chapter about the rally itself highlights the place-based grassroots organizing involved in getting people to Jena and making the September rally happen. Then it highlights the themes in mainstream and Black newspaper coverage of the rally, showing how Black newspapers in particular saw the Jena campaign as activating a new and broader range of activists and how Black activists and commentators focused on the goal of using the energy of the Jena campaign to rebuild the Black movement.
Final sections sketch what happened after the campaign and attempt to draw some lessons about activism that are relevant to other cases.
A list of all my previous blog posts about the Jena case is here.
