Dear Mayor Murphy McMillin,

I hear that you're angry.

Me too.

But it appears our outrage is directed at decidedly different targets.

I, for one, am angry at the three young white men in your town who, last year, hung nooses from a tree after a black student dared sit under it, thereby touching off several months of racial tension. And I'm mad at their parents for whatever it is they taught their kids - or failed to teach them - that would allow their children to believe such a thing appropriate.

But it is not these persons who have elicited your anger.

I'm mad at the school superintendent, who declared the noose hanging an "innocent prank," and refused to as much as criticize those responsible, let alone truly punish them.

But it is not the superintendent with whom you are upset.

I'm angry at the District Attorney, who threatened black students in Jena that he could make their lives disappear with a stroke of his pen, if they didn't stop all the complaining about the noose incident. And I'm even more enraged by his decision to charge six young black men with attempted murder for beating up a white student (one who had been taunting them prior to the attack and whose family recently had a leader in the white supremacist movement as a guest in their home), while only charging a white man with misdemeanor battery for beating up a black kid a few days earlier.

But the D.A. is not the target of your ire. Indeed, I'm told that you two are friends.

"Neither the jury, nor the incompetent public defender seems to concern you."

I'm angry about the conviction (since overturned) of one of the young black men, Mychal Bell, by an all-white jury, and by the utter incompetence with which his court-appointed attorney defended him--calling no witnesses to impeach the testimony of those called by the prosecution, even though there were several who had made clear they were available.

But neither the jury, nor the incompetent public defender seems to concern you, at least not enough to have inspired you to write or speak as much as one solitary sentence to that effect.

Yet, today you broke your silence and showed us all your anger, an anger that is aimed not inwardly at those in your town who openly express racism or at those who sit by silently and do nothing in the face of it, but rather, outwardly, at singer-songwriter John Mellencamp for daring to release a song about it.

You might have been a Mellencamp fan in the past. Lots of folks in small towns are, seeing as how he has long sung the virtues of such places. So long as he wrote about little pink houses, he'd have been alright by you. But with his latest release, in which he implores your town to "put away your nooses," Mellencamp has, apparently, gone too far.

I guess you feel it isn't fair, all this negative publicity. You (and most whites in Jena) think your town is getting a bad rap. The actions of a few, you insist, shouldn't be allowed to paint an entire community with the broad brush of bigotry.

That's understandable, I suppose.

Of course, I do find it interesting that neither you nor any white elected official in Jena have seen fit to label the noose-hanging a racist act and its perpetrators racists. It's as if you can't come to say the words, no matter how obviously they fit. Oh sure, you said the act was "hurtful," but nothing more. And you wonder, dear sir, why 20,000 people descended on your town to let you know what they think of you?

"Neither you nor any white elected official in Jena have seen fit to label the noose-hanging a racist act and its perpetrators racists."

Does it not give you pause that two-thirds of Jena's white folks voted for neo-Nazi, David Duke in 1990 and 1991, when he ran for U.S. Senate and Governor?

Or perhaps you were among those two-thirds? After all, you did recently tell white supremacist leader Richard Barrett that you were grateful for the counterdemonstrations he's been seeking to foment in Jena, in answer to the mostly black protests of last month.

Maybe you too supported Duke: a man who not only led the nation's largest Ku Klux Klan group in the 1970s, but who, as head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People (with which he remained affiliated until the early 90s), called for dividing the U.S. into racial sub-nations and breeding a master race of high-IQ whites. From the back of Duke's newsletter, he even sold books praising Nazi Germany and denying the Holocaust, but perhaps that wasn't a big concern of yours.