There were barely enough chairs — or steaming plates of cornbread and chicken — for the group of almost 50 students gathered at last night’s Jena Six dinner and discussion in El Centro Chicano.

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Gus Jewell

History Prof. Clayborne Carson (left), English Prof. Michele Elam (center) and Political Science Prof. Lucius Barker (right) spoke last night at an NAACP-sponsored discussion on the Jena Six.

“Modern-Day Lynching: A Look into the Horror,” the first NAACP event of the year, featured a panel including English Prof. Michele Elam, the new director of African and African American Studies, History Prof. Clayborne Carson and Political Science Prof. Emeritus Lucius Barker, who fielded questions from eager undergraduates about the incident.

The term “Jena Six” refers to the six black teenagers who were charged with attempted murder for beating a white classmate in Jena, La. in Dec. 2006. A series of racially-charged incidents preceded the beating, including the hanging of nooses from a tree by white students who refused to let a black student sit under the tree, which they said was for whites only.

One of the arrested students, Mychal Bell, 17, was tried and convicted as an adult in June 2007 on charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy. Though appeals courts have overturned the ruling, he is still in jail. Demonstrators are continuing to march in the town of Jena, which is 85 percent white.

Last night’s discussion used the events as a springboard to talk about the larger issue of institutional racism in America.

“This incident indicates the danger of not having a shared cultural vocabulary,” Carson said.

While authorities in Jena maintained that the nooses that provoked the incident were not illegal, “the white kids knew exactly the potency of the noose as a symbol of power and threat of killing that white men used against blacks in recent history,” Carson said.

Elam agreed that, “the image gets recycled.”

After focusing on the significance of the noose in the South, the conversation moved to the media’s role in sensational cases such as Jena Six.

“Racism is a systemic problem in our society, but in newspapers, it’s a who-did-what-to-whom-when story,” Barker said. “Six months from now there will be another Jena Six, because if it bleeds it leads, but to study Jena is to study a microcosm of a bigger problem.”

Carson agreed with his colleague.

“To focus on whether one kid in Louisiana will go to prison as opposed to the large number of black men that are sentenced to life in prison at age 18 or 19, that’s the real issue,” he said. “But probably none of you have read an article about that issue.

“We should use this as a moment to address the larger issue,” he added.

Several students expressed frustration, saying that they did not know how to personally make a difference when incidents like the Jena Six surfaced. They did recognize, however, that there is still a need to combat institutional racism.

“There are a lot of ways to mobilize,” Elam urged. “Work for social change wherever you are, whether that is in the arts or in schools like Stanford.”