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.
The big Jena 6 protest in September 2007 was seen at the time as a renewal and invigoration of the Black movement. Tens of thousands of mostly young Black people went to a remote town in north central Louisiana to protest six Black teens with attempted murder after a school fight after a sequence of events that had begun with nooses being hung at the high school. 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. It is the last big protest that followed the script of the 1995 Million Man March, 1997 Million Woman March, and 2005 Millions More Movement rallies which had brought together Black people of diverse ideologies to express Black solidarity and identity. It reminded many of the 1960s Civil Rights era when people went South to protest segregation.
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.
