Obama Hopes Could Rest on Jena Case

Senator Obama's presidential ambitions may rest on how he responds to the trials in Jena, La., of six schoolboys accused of attempted murder in a case that has become a test of whether racialism still stalks the Southern states.

As the sole black candidate in the presidential race, the Illinois Democrat is under mounting pressure from black political leaders to side more strenuously with the accused and object more clearly to the actions of the LaSalle Parish district attorney.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama was taunted by a veteran civil rights advocate, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who made disparaging remarks about the senator for his failure to take the lead on the issue and said he was "acting like he's white," according to a report in a newspaper in Columbia, S.C., the State.

Rev. Jackson's remarks, which he later said he could not remember uttering, have rekindled a controversy from early in Mr. Obama's campaign over similar comments from black leaders who said he "wasn't black enough." Mr. Obama is the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya.

"If I were a candidate, I'd be all over Jena. Jena is a defining moment, just like Selma was a defining moment," Rev. Jackson said.

Rev. Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, sprang to national fame as a supporter of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. during protest marches against racial bigotry in Selma, Ala., in the 1960s. Rev. Jackson endorsed Mr. Obama's candidacy in March.

The case of what has become known as the "Jena Six" stems from an incident at a high school on August 31, 2006, when black students sat under a tree in an area informally reserved for white students. The following day the tree was adorned with three nooses, the traditional Ku Klux Klan death threat to blacks.

In the months of interracial fighting at the school that followed, a white student, Justin Barker, was assaulted and lost consciousness. The local district attorney, Reed Walters, arrested six black boys and charged five of them as adults with attempted murder. The charges against the sixth, who is being tried as a juvenile, have not been made public.

One of the young men, Mychal Bell, was tried on June 28 by a six-member all-white jury and convicted of aggravated second-degree battery. He faced a sentence of 15 years in prison until last Friday, when a state appeals court vacated his conviction, saying he should not have been tried as an adult, a move that Mr. Obama said he welcomed.

The boy, who remains in jail, received a yesterday by a New York civil rights advocate, the Reverend Al Sharpton. "It breaks our hearts to see him in handcuffs and leg shackles, but his spirit is high," Rev. Sharpton said.

Mr. Obama has not been silent on the Jena episode, which has become a national cause célèbre. "When nooses are being hung in high schools in the 21st century, it's a tragedy. It shows that we still have a lot of work to do as a nation to heal our racial tensions," the senator said in a statement on Sunday.

Senator Clinton, Mr. Obama's main rival for the Democratic nomination, appears to have outdone Mr. Obama by not only condemning the prosecution but also demanding that the Justice Department investigate.

"This case reminds us that the scales of justice are seriously out of balance when it comes to charging, sentencing, and punishing African-Americans," Mrs. Clinton told attendees at an NAACP dinner in South Carolina on Saturday.

Speaking yesterday on Rev. Sharpton's radio show, broadcast from Jena, Mrs. Clinton went further: "People need to understand that we cannot let this kind of inequality and injustice happen anywhere in America."

Another Democratic candidate, John Edwards, has also expressed outrage. "As someone who grew up in the segregated South, I feel a special responsibility to speak out on racial intolerance. … When a ‘white tree' stands outside a public school, marking a place where white students sit but black students are not welcome, there is something so wrong that the right words are hard to find," the former North Carolina senator said in a statement yesterday morning.

Some African-Americans have come to Mr. Obama's defense. "To ask a man that has worked tirelessly in the inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago helping to rebuild communities, a man that has stood side by side with black religious leaders to solve problems in the worst neighborhoods in the city, if he's ‘black enough' is nothing short of ridiculous," the founder of Black Women for Obama, Patricia Wilson-Smith, said in an essay in August.

Jena "should not become an opportunity to denounce any of the presidential candidates," a black Democratic strategist, Donna Brazile, said, according to MSNBC.

Today Jena, a small town of 3,500 inhabitants, will become the focus of a day of protests, with thousands arriving from out of state to take part. Rev. Sharpton has appealed for the demonstrations to remain peaceful. Mr. Bell "doesn't want anything done that would disparage his name: no violence, not even a negative word," he said.