under serious construction

The racial demons of the Old South have resurfaced in a rural Louisiana town where black students who tried to sit on the white side of the school yard were met by three hangmen's nooses dangling from a tree.The students and their parents were outraged by the stark reminder of the mob lynchings which had terrorized Southern US blacks until just a few decades ago.Months of inter-racial violence followed the decision by a white school superintendent to over-rule the principal's recommendation to expel three white students found to have hung the nooses.The community became even more divided after a white prosecutor imposed significantly harsher charges on the black youths caught up in the violence. "Race is just below the surface in almost every aspect of southern life," Potok told AFP.Jena's troubles started in September when a few black students tried to challenge the accepted state of things by crossing an invisible color line in the school yard.They arrived the next morning to see three nooses hanging from the tree they sat under. And the students who hung them were suspended for just three days."Adolescents play pranks," said superintendent Roy Breithaupt. "I don't think it was a threat against anybody."Inter-racial fights broke out at the school and then spilled out into the small lumber and oil town of 3,000, which is 85 percent white and 12 percent black.Someone set fire to the central wing of the high school in November. Then a black student was beaten for showing up at an all-white party. And a white youth pulled a shotgun on three black teens at a convenience store.Finally, on December 4, a group of black students jumped a white student as he was coming out of the school gym.Even though the teen wasn't seriously hurt, six black students were expelled and were charged with attempted second-degree murder and other offenses for which they face up to 100 years in jail.The white teen who beat a black party crasher was charged with simple battery. The white youth who pulled a shotgun was not charged at all.In the convenience store incident, the three black teens were arrested and accused of aggravated battery and theft after grabbing the shotgun -- in what they call self-defense."There's no doubt about it -- whites and blacks are treated differently here," said Melvin Worthington, the lone black member of the school board."The white kids should have gotten more punishment for hanging those nooses. If they had, all the stuff that followed could have been avoided."Black men are three times more likely than white men to face jail once they have been arrested: 24.4 percent of blacks arrested in the United States in 2005 ended up in jail compared with 8.3 percent of white men.They also receive jail sentences that are on average 15 percent longer than whites convicted of the same crime.The biggest disparity is among men convicted of aggravated assault: black men were sentenced to an average of 48 months in jail, which is 33 percent longer than the average sentence of 36 months received by white men, according to the Urban League's annual State of Black America report.