By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2     

This Monday, on university campuses across the US, African-American students walked out of classes and demonstrated in support of 6 black high school students from the small town of Jena in central Louisiana. The now famous "Jena 6" had been charged with attempted murder in the second degree after a fight last December where the black students had beaten up a white student. The incident began when black high students wanted to sit under a shade tree informally claimed as a reserved space by white students. The next morning the tree has been festooned with a hangman's nooses. The black on white retaliation that followed was a result of this provocation.

Last week in Jena as many as 20,000 demonstrators overwhelmed the less than 3000 local residents in a protest march led by many veterans of the 1960s civil rights struggles. These thousands, protesting what they saw as unequal justice, had been mobilized in a very modern way into a grass roots movement. Over 400,000 people had signed petitions over the Internet demanding a review of the case. David Bowie had contributed $10,000 to the legal defense of the Jena 6. The case had exploded on blogs, You Tube and on black talk radio stations.

In Gilberto Freyres evocative posthumously published "diario de adolecencia" there is a powerful and shocking description of a "viagem macabra" he made between Dallas and Waco in 1919 when he was student at Baylor University in Texas. "O que me arrepiou foi, na volta, ao passar por um cidade ou vila chamado Waxahaxie (...) sentir um cheiro intenso de carne queimada e ser informado com relativa simplicidade: "e um negro que os boys acabam de queimar!" Nao sei - mas isso sim me arrepiou, e muito. Nunca pensei que tal horror fosse possivel nos Estados Unidos de agora. Mas e. Aqui ainda se lincha, se mata, se queima negro. Nao e facto isolado. Acontece varias vezes."

Race relations in the US have changed for the better. It is important to recognize the fact. The US spends 60 billion dollars a year on prisons and incarcerates over two 2 million of its citizens. Of these half are Black Americans. It is against this background that the toxic memory of the past lived again last week in Jena, La.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.