The rally protested a federal judge's decision to uphold the city school board in its expulsion of the students, and to honor the contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This past September, the board expelled six students from school for two years after a fist fight broke out during a high school football game. Another dropped out before being disciplined. All seven students are Black.

Six of the students filed suit against the school board for violating their right to due process during the expulsion hearing. Later, in a summation at the trial, the students' lawyers added that the school board used racial discrimination in imposing the harsh penalty.

The students' lawyers plan to appeal the judge's ruling.

The rallies and marches, which began in October, have pushed the school board back. Instead of the original two years, the expulsions have been shortened to one year. Two of the students will be able to graduate on time with their class this year, and all of the students are now attending alternative schools, which was not an option originally.

The students, along with their working mothers, occupied the front row of the church at Saturday's rally. Democratic Party politician Jesse Jackson was the keynote speaker. In his hour-long speech, Jackson talked about King, the students' case, the disproportionate number of Blacks being expelled from schools, and high rates of incarceration of African-Americans.

During the three-day federal trial in December, testimony revealed that 47 of 57 students expelled from Decatur high schools in the last four years are African-American. Jackson said in his speech that Blacks make up 12 percent of the population of the United States and 55 percent of the prison population. Jackson promised to continue the fight, calling the school board's actions "excessive, arbitrary, racial, and unfair."

A lively audience, mostly Black, responded many times by jumping to their feet with extended applause in support of the students. The audience also responded when Jackson pointed to the disparity in the number of Blacks in city and public school district jobs. He called for the jobs to be distributed more fairly.

John Slaughter, a retired electrician wearing his IBEW Local 148 union jacket, said he attended the rally because Jackson "marched with us and lots of other working people here" around the Staley fight. In the early 1990s locked-out paper workers at A.E. Staley, United Auto Workers union members on strike against Caterpillar, and other working people linked up in support of each others struggles. Several large labor rallies and marches were held in Decatur at the time. A report to a local southern Illinois NAACP chapter on the rally yielded some discussion.

Mona Crim commented, "You can see what their priorities are--putting all this money into prisons and not into schools. It's just another way to enslave a group of people."

Rainbow/PUSH has called for a rally for January 24 in the state capital, Springfield, followed the next day by a national conference on the "crisis of expelling and jailing our youth away."  
 
 
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