JENA — What started out as a bad joke reportedly meant to intimidate has escalated until it has garnered national attention, and Thursday people from the Miss-Lou will join others in a small LaSalle Parish town to rally for a group of boys known as “the Jena Six.”

Almost 40 busloads of people from around the country are expected to meet in Alexandria early Thursday morning and caravan to Jena, where rallies at the LaSalle Parish Courthouse and Jena High School are set to take place.

Local activist Ser Sesh Ab-Heter C. M. Boxley said he is going to the rallies with a group from the Miss-Lou area.

“I’m really just a foot soldier for justice,” he said.

The Miss-Lou delegation will meet at 6:30 a.m. at the Natchez Reception Center’s southwest parking lot, and everyone who wants to attend the rally needs to be at the LaSalle courthouse by 8:30 a.m., Boxley said.

“This thing in Jena is blatant white supremacy in using the law to dominate and oppress,” Boxley said. “That says to the world, ‘In Jena, white rules.’”

Natchez resident Andrew Robinson Jr. said he also plans to attend the rallies.

“We can no longer let people who are under the law continue to ruin the children’s lives,” he said.

Boxley said he has met people from as far away as Jacksonville, Fla., and Memphis, Tenn., who plan to attend the rally.

Racial tensions have been mounting in the Jena community since September 2006, when three nooses — two black and one gold, the Jena High School colors — were found hanging from a tree in the school’s campus square.

Many believe the nooses were meant to intimidate black students at the school.

The three white students allegedly responsible for the noose incident were reportedly given several days of in-school suspension.

During the semester that followed, tensions reportedly remained high, and a fire that destroyed much of the school on Nov. 30 of that year is suspected to be arson.

In December, the situation exploded when after a heated verbal exchange a black student and a white student came to blows.

When the white student fell to the ground, several black students allegedly attacked him.

Six black students were eventually arrested for the fight, and one of the students, Mychal Bell was convicted on charges of second-degree battery.

Supporters for the Jena Six say the punishment has not fit the crime, which they say was little more than a high school fight, and Bell remains incarcerated on a $90,000 bond.

Bell’s sentencing was set for Thursday, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the conviction because the court believed Bell should not have been tried as an adult because he was 16 at the time of the incident.