Everything changed after this post.  Everything changed after the Day of Blogging for Justice.  It's hard to believe, but when we blogged about the Jena Six at the end of August 2007, the national media still had not picked up on the story.   On September 4th I wrote: One of the main goals of the Day of Blogging for Justice creators was increased media coverage regarding the Jena 6.  Today I saw a piece on Headline News where they spoke to parents on both sides of the issue.  There is no doubt the Day of Blogging for justice made a tangible difference.  Just two weeks later I appeared in a Howard Witt Chicago Tribune piece and that was most of the nation's first exposure to Dallas South.  I then appeared on NBC Nightly News and Dallas South instantly went from a local Dallas issue blog to a site that people from around the country were interested in. How I blog has remains the same, but what I blog about has been different. Consequently the Jena story is not over.  The motion to remove J.P. Muffray from the bench has been tabled.  Hopefully someone less biased can take over the case and ...

Today a visiting judge was supposed to decide whether or not Jena 6 Judge J.P. Mauffray had been biased in his treatment of the fiver remaining defendants.  That judge has postponed the hearing until at least July. Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune reports:  Attorneys for the five remaining defendants facing trial in the racially divisive Jena 6 incident in Louisiana presented evidence Friday of what they said was bias on the part of the judge presiding over the cases and sought his removal. After more than four hours of testimony, a visiting judge appointed by the state Supreme Court to hear the recusal motion against LaSalle Parish District Judge J.P. Mauffray asked for more evidence and postponed a ruling until at least July. Defense attorneys have long asserted that the white-dominated justice system in the small central Louisiana town was biased against their African-American clients: six high school students who were initially charged with attempted murder in the December 2006 beating of a white classmate. According to those present during Friday's hearing, defense attorneys testified that Mauffray had made prejudicial comments to them about their clients on multiple occasions. David Utter, an attorney for defendant Jesse Ray Beard, said Mauffray had labeled the Jena ...

From Color of Change.org - I will be updating you on the developments this Friday. Jena 6 Judge Put on Trial Lawyers Cite Clear Pattern of Bias, Demand Removal of Judge Mauffray Jena, LA--Citing powerful evidence of Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr.'s bias against them, five of the African-American youth known as the Jena 6 are back in court next week seeking to remove Mauffray from their cases. Legal documents filed in the proceedings reveal Judge Mauffray's personal vendetta against the Jena 6. Among other incidents, Mauffray characterized the young men as violent trouble-makers and confessed his intent to incarcerate one of the youth—regardless of the strength of the evidence. Given Mauffray's documented inability to preside over a fair trial for these youth, their legal teams have requested that a new judge be appointed to handle all Jena 6 related proceedings. "Judge Mauffray is the man at the center of Jena's broken justice system and now he is forced to justify his bias in a court of law with the entire nation watching," said James Rucker, Executive Director of ColorOfChange.org, the 400,000 member group that has advocated on behalf ...

Color of Change Press Release  Lawyers File Motion to Recuse Judge and DA—Putting State on Trial—Claiming Clear Pattern of Race Bias  JENA, LA— Lawyers for the youngest of the Jena 6, Jesse Ray Beard, filed a motion today to remove Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. and District Attorney Reed Walters from any future involvement in juvenile court matters involving Beard. Mauffray and Walters served as the trial judge and prosecutor, respectively, in the Jena 6 cases and Beard's attorneys argue that their prejudice during and after the proceedings has betrayed an unfair bias against Beard. Millions of Americans remember District Attorney Reed Walters as the man who refused to prosecute white students who hung nooses at Jena High School and then threatened black students at a school assembly saying that he "could end their lives with a stroke of his pen." Walters charged Jesse Ray Beard, and five other African-American students with attempted second-degree murder for allegedly beating Justin Barker, a white student, in a schoolyard fight following the incident. Attorneys for Beard argue that this and other facts paint a clear picture of the District Attorney's bias. "Millions ...

Dallas South and others are featured in an extensive article in the Philadelphia Tribune Magazine titled Blogger Nation. It is the cover story of their April edition. Click the link to see the Philly Tribune article BLOGGER NATION. The article that is put together by Heather Faison doesn't break any new ground for visitors to this site, as many of you were part of the history that was made. However folks who aren't into the whole "internet thing" may find it interesting just how much internet activism is credited with some of last years efforts. What About Our Daughters, Jack and Jill Politics, as well as Electronic Village and his Black Blog Rankings are Afrospear blogs mentioned in the article. Heather does a great job recapping some of the milestones achieved in the internet movement last year. My quotes all seem to be critical of the NAACP, but what I said is what I said. Also, the Afrospear was created before the Shaquanda Cotton case, but many of us who are now member were not aware of it until after. That case IS what brought us all together, there's no questions. Click on the link above, it's a really ...

It is my pleasure to congratulate Howard Witt for being a finalist for a 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism.  Howard, Southwest Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, was a finalist in the category of National Reporting for his examination of racial issues in America.  I count Mr. Witt as a friend of Dallas South.  Howard ran a quote from me in a September issues of the Chicago Tribune, and I gained a whole new audience as a result. I've made sure to keep up with what he's been up to since he has been way ahead of the curve as it relates to covering race in America.  I'm going to repost an interview I conducted with Howard back in October for those of you who may not have been part of the Dallas South family back then.  Congrats again to Howard and many happy returns. Last March, Howard Witt wrote an article in the Chicago Tribune about the sentencing of a 14 year-old girl in my hometown of Paris, Texas.  In the 6-plus months that have followed, the landscape of the internet, the civil rights movement, and the media has greatly changed. Some, including yours truly, attribute the outcry in the ShaQuanda Cotton and Jena 6 cases ...

Howard Witt, forever on the case, let's us know that one of the Jena 6 defendants has found himself in hot water after an incident at a Dallas area high school. Bryant Purvis, now 19, was arrested Wednesday in Carrollton and charged with misdemeanor assault. These are young men and they need guidance. Drive-by activism just won't do. I don't have to go into who, what, and why of the Jena 6 on this site, but needless to say this is an unfortunate chapter in the saga. There have been a number of of unfortunate incidents regarding this story since September. Here are some of the highlights from Mr. Witt's story. Purvis' attorney, Darrell Hickman, characterized the assault as a "minor shoving incident" and said it involved a student whom Purvis believed had vandalized his car a few days before. A police affidavit accompanying an arrest warrant alleged that Purvis choked the student and pushed his head into a bench, injuring the victim's eye. The Texas arrest "doesn't help his case in Jena, that's obvious," Hickman said. "From what [Purvis] told me, I can understand him losing his temper. We all lose our temper every now and then. But we're in ...

The America Jouralism Review recently published an article by Raquel Christie that takes an extensive look at how the mainstream media covered the Jena 6 story.  Raquel spent a lot of time pulling this story together and examines it from a number of different angles. There are a few AfroSpear blogs, including Dallas South, that were featured in this report.  Click here to see AJR's entire story titled Double Whammy.  All this awful bait, but the national media didn't bite. The story, instead, was the property of black bloggers and radio hosts, two local papers and activists. Only after they had interpreted it, only after they had dissected it, only after they had decided the right and the wrong of it – and dedicated a movement, the Afrospear, to it – only after big names like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson stepped into the fray last summer did the news media give it to us. Soon, the blogs were afire with cries for justice in Jena – and for media respect. "I make a final plea to the American media," wrote black blogger Shawn Williams on the day of Blogging for Justice, ...

  Chicago Tribune senior correspondent Howard Witt has returned to Linden and Paris, Texas, as well as Jena, Louisiana to discover whether the fundamental racial dynamics of the towns were alterned in any meaningful way after the TV cameras departed and the headlines faded away. Click here for Witt's extensive story.  Some highlights from Witt's Chicago Tribune article: Plotted on a map, the towns of Paris, Linden and Jena line up neatly along a 300-mile diagonal that falls across the Texas-Louisiana border.  But to many African-Americans, that line looks more like a gash across the beneficent face that the New South tries to present to the rest of the nation.  In many ways, Linden no longer resembles the starkly divided town where many white residents once closed ranks around the four white youths who in 2003 assaulted a mentally retarded black man and dropped him beside a garbage dump, unconscious and bleeding in his brain. Instead, many here say that over the last year a new spirit of interracial cooperation has infused the town of nearly 2,300 people, 78 percent of whom are white and 20 percent black. Little has changed in Paris in the nine ...

There's more news out of Jena, Louisiana as a white separatist group has sued the city over a rally they plan to stage next month. According to the Associated Press, The Nationalist Movement which is planning a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Jena, is suing the town claiming officials are violating the Constitution by asking participants not to bring firearms, changing the parade route by one block and requiring the posting of a bond. The Associated Press also reports that the group filed the federal lawsuit Dec. 14 and is seeking a temporary restraining order to keep the town from interfering with the Learned, Miss.-based group's "Jena Justice Day" rally. Group officials claim the town's rules violate their 14th Amendment rights to due process. "When a group of, say, minorities or homosexuals want to have a parade, they aren't usually required to put up a bond or pay for police or pay for cleanup," said Barry Hackney, a spokesman for the organization. Click here to read the entire AP story.  The Associated Press goes on to say that this is not the first time The Nationalist Movement has filed suit over a rally.  They successfully sued York, ...