Commentary: Please Don’t Screw Up Again, Mychal Bell – You Owe Too Many People, Yourself Included
Date: Wednesday, October 03, 2007
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com
I hope that Mychal Bell understands that just because a kindly black physician put up $45,000 for his bail doesn’t mean he’s debt-free.
He owes a lot of people. Himself included.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave with Bedouin sheepherders for the past three months, you know that Bell, 17, is one of the Jena Six. He and four other black teenagers were charged with attempted murder -- a charge that had them facing up to 20 years in prison -- for a schoolyard brawl in which they beat up a white teenager who, according to some reports, had taunted them racially.
The plight of Bell and his friends has become the flashpoint for what may evolve into a new civil rights movement; one that centers on equal justice as well as equal access. More than 20,000 protesters descended on Jena, La. last month to show their outrage over a punishment that clearly did not fit the crime -- the white teenager who was beaten up was treated and released from the hospital in time to attend a ring ceremony that night.
Ultimately, the attempted murder charges against the Jena Six were reduced to aggravated battery. Bell, who was the first of the six to be tried, saw his conviction overturned because a judge ruled that he should have been tried as a juvenile.
But initially, another judge refused to grant Bell bail because of his prior run-ins with the law. Apparently, he was on probation for a 2005 battery, and had been charged with another battery and criminal damage to property when he and his friends became involved in the brawl heard around the country; one that wound up conjuring more empathy for black teenagers who suffer from judicial double-standards than for a white kid with a big mouth and a black eye.
But now that Bell has been spared a long prison stretch, I hope he understands that he can’t get caught up in any violent behavior again. Not ever.
He owes too many people.
He owes Dr. Stephen Ayers, the Lake Charles, La. physician who was so moved by his plight that he paid his bail. He owes the thousands of people whose outrage made him the face of a movement that could force the country to begin treating black youths like him as people who deserve equal treatment, and not as predators-in-waiting.
Most of all, Bell owes it to himself not to give racists any reason to believe they were right about him.
He can’t give people like LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, who is probably praying every night that he’ll commit a drive-by or some other awful act, a reason to say, “See, I told you so.”
Now, I don’t pretend to know what Bell and his friends might have been dealing with when they got into their scrape at the school. But it seems to me that when educators treat things such as hanging of nooses -- one of many ingredients in the cauldron of racial animosity that apparently boiled there -- as a prank that means they need some educating themselves.
Nor do I expect for kids Bell’s age to always make the right decisions when it comes to controlling their tempers because they aren’t just battling immaturity. They are also battling the influences of a violent culture; a culture in which walking away from a tormenter connotes weakness, not strength.
But Bell’s ordeal should have caused any immaturities to fall away. He should realize that like the Little Rock Nine, he’s no longer a teenager but a man with a huge debt to the race. That means he cannot allow himself to be drawn into violent behavior anymore.
And after spending more than 10 months behind bars, and with the possibility of being sentenced to a juvenile detention center until age 21, Bell should know that it’s easier to avoid doing the crime rather than fight to make the time fit.
Maybe that’s where the real civil rights transformation needs to begin. Because while the Jena Six case may wind up making the justice system more just for black people, more young blacks need to realize that a greater victory lies in them understanding what real civil rights heroes like the Little Rock Nine understood; that it’s important to the race for them to avoid getting caught up in that system in the first place.
I hope that Bell gets that. I hope that he understands that he’s now obligated to a movement, and not to his urges.
And that he owes too many black people to let them down on that score.
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