Reverend Al Sharpton (2nd-L), president

Reverend Al Sharpton (2nd-L), president of the National Action Network, Charles Ogletree (2nd-R), director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School and Rev. Brian Moran (R), pastor of the Jena Antioch Baptist Church and president of the NAACP Jena Chapter listen to testimony from Richard Cohen (L), president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the "Jena Six" 16 October, 2007 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The hearing focused on the "Jena Six," six black high school students in Jena, Louisiana, who were charged with attempted murder after they beat up a white student at school following months of racial tension. The tension was sparked when a black student tried to cross the schoolyard's invisible color line and sit under a "white tree;" students arrived at school the next day to see three nooses hung from the tree, a stark symbol of the lynching which once terrorized southern blacks. A US judge ordered the release 27 September, 2007 of one of the six black teenagers whose arrest in Louisiana sparked a protest by some 20,000 people over perceived racial discrimination in the US judicial system. Sharpton had hailed the demonstration, which recalled civil rights protests of the 1960s, as the beginning of a movement to protest racial inequalities in the US criminal justice system. AFP PHOTO/ TIM SLOAN (Photo credit should read TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images)