*On this date in 2008, About 50 white separatists protested the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in JENA, La.
Police separated participants in the "pro-majority" rally organized by the Learned, Miss. based Nationalist Movement from a racially mixed group of about 100 counter-demonstrators outside the LaSalle Parish Courthouse. There was no violence and one arrest, a counter-demonstrator. Chants of "No KKK" from the mostly college-age counter-demonstrators were met with a chant from the separatists with a racial nickname.
At one point, dozens of state police forced back about ten people, dressed in New Black Panther uniforms, who had gathered around a podium where the separatist group's leader Richard Barrett was to speak. Race relations in Jena (population about 2,800) have been in the news ever since six black teenagers were arrested in the beating of a white classmate at Jena High School in December 2006.
