Thousands protest in support of the Jena 6

'Thousands protest racial injustice in US South' Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of a small Louisiana town Thursday protesting the racial injustice of stiff criminal charges lodged against a group of black students who beat up a white student in a school fight. The fight followed months of racial tensions after a black student tried to cross the schoolyard's invisible color line and sit under the "white tree" and was met the next morning by nooses hanging from the tree. Several fights broke out among students and a fire was set in the school after the superindentant refused to expel the three white students who hung the nooses, long a symbol of anti-black violence in the south. In most of the cases, the white students escaped criminal charges, but six black students, who became known as the Jena Six, were charged with attempted murder after fight. While those charges were eventually reduced, the students still face stiff penalties. Protestors accused the local district attorney of racism for failing to meet out equal punishment to the white students who started fights with their black peers. "It's not equal," said Tina Jones, the mother of one of the "Jena Six." "The black people get the harsher extent of the law whereas white people get a slap on the wrist," she told CNN. "I hope the DA (district attorney) will wake up and realize that he's doing the wrong thing and to release these kids and let them go." LaSalle Parish district attorney Reed Walters insisted that the case "is not and never has been about race." With the white victim of the school beating, Justin Barker, standing silently behind him, Walters held a news conference on the eve of the protest and insisted that his only motivation was "finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions."