Bowie makes donation to race trial defence fund
David Bowie has donated $10,000 to a legal defence fund for six black teenagers charged in an alleged attack on a white classmate in the tiny central Louisiana town of Jena.
The rocker’s donation to the Jena Six Legal Defence Fund was announced by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People as thousands of protesters were expected to march through Jena tomorrow in defence of Mychal Bell and five other teenagers.
The group has become known as the Jena Six.
“There is clearly a separate and unequal judicial process going on in the town of Jena,” Bowie said yesterday in an e-mail statement.
“A donation to the Jena Six Legal Defence Fund is my small gesture indicating my belief that a wrongful charge and sentence should be prevented.”
Bell was found guilty on second-degree battery charges June 28 by a six-member, all-white jury. Before the case was overturned by the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal, his sentencing had been set for tomorrow.
The court said Bell, who was 16 at the time of the alleged December 2006 beating, should not have been tried as an adult.
Civil rights leader, the Rev Al Sharpton, who helped organise the march, planned to do his syndicated radio show from Alexandria today, then travel about 35 miles to Jena in an attempt to visit Bell, who remains in jail because he is unable to post a $90,000 bond.
Sharpton says he expects more than 10,000 marchers.
“We are gratified that rock star David Bowie was moved to donate to the NAACP’s Jena campaign,” national board of directors chairman Julian Bond of the NAACP, said in a statement. “We hope others will join him.”
The marchers will pass by the stump of a tree that has become the focal point of the current racial tensions.
The tree on the campus of Jena High School had been a gathering spot for white students.
After a black student asked school officials if blacks could sit there too, three nooses were found hanging from the tree. Amid the racial turmoil that followed, the tree was cut down.
Three white students were suspended for hanging the nooses.
Interracial fights reportedly followed, leading to the December school yard attack on white student Justin Barker and attempted murder charges against five black students who were charged as adults. A sixth student is charged as a juvenile, so charges are secret.
The attempted murder charges, widely criticised as overly harsh, have been reduced as the students were arraigned.
Tomorrow’s march had originally been scheduled around Bell’s sentencing.
After the appeals court ruling wiping out Bell’s conviction, organisers decided to go ahead with the rally anyway to show support for Bell and his co-defendants.
Schools in Jena will close tomorrow and many businesses in the town of 2,900 also say they will shut down, concerned about whether the march will remain peaceful.
