Hopefully there are two sides to this story, Newsweek is not well known for telling an objective story....but even with their bias, its sick that this can still occur in America. Hopefully this story will start to bring some light to the darkness and start to fix what seems to be an obvious cancer. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20218937/site/newsweek/
"It began with a seemingly innocuous question. At an assembly during the first week of classes last fall at Jena High School in rural Louisiana, Kenneth Purvis, a junior, asked the vice principal if he could sit under the shady boughs of an oak tree in the campus courtyard. "You can sit anywhere you like," the vice principal replied. Soon thereafter, Purvis and several black friends ventured over to the tree to hang out with some white classmates. According to the school's unspoken racial codes, however, that area was reserved for white kids; Purvis is black. Some white students didn't look kindly on the encroachment: the next day, three nooses hung from the oak's branches." The window of opportunity for dialogue and a lesson in negotiation was missed by the principal's reply of "you can sit anywhere you like". I'm sure the principal knew the unspoken racial code, but he could have approached Purvis's question with a neutral theme to discern a motive. This should not have escalated the way it did.
Agree, it seems like it was a purposeful provocation, but never the less the follow up of everyone with authority has been somewhat less than we'd probably all like to see.