WASHINGTON (AFP) — Thousands of black Americans marched in Washington Friday, demanding the federal government act against racial hate crimes and give fair treatment to black offenders.
"The US government must intervene and protect its citizens," said the march's organizer Al Sharpton, a reverend and leading civil rights activist, addressing the rally.
"When you hang up a noose, that's no joke to us," he said, referring to a spate of recent cases in which nooses have been hung in symbolic reference to the lynching of blacks in the segregated southern United States last century.
Protesters also complained of cases where young blacks have been killed or roughly treated by police, while those who threatened blacks by hanging nooses have not been punished.
Demonstrators marched through the streets of the capital's administrative center and towards the Department of Justice, shouting "No justice, no peace," and "What do we want? Justice!"
"I challenge them (the Justice Department) to wake up," said another activist, Martin Luther King III, a son of the 1960s civil rights icon Martin Luther King. "We might have to come back again and again and again."
The Justice Department issued a statement assuring that it "shares with those who demonstrate today their objective of bringing to justice those who commit criminal acts of hate."
Attorney General Michael Mukasey said in the statement that the justice department along with state and local law enforcement were investigating "aggressively dozens of noose-hangings and other recent racially and religiously motivated threats around the country.
"In order to be most effective, these investigations do not occur in the public eye," he added.
The most widely reported noose-hanging incident happened at a school in Jena, a town in the southern state of Louisiana, where tensions between groups of white and black youths have erupted into violence in the past year.
Six young blacks there were initially charged with attempted murder for beating up a white youth at the school. Whites in other cases of racial violence in the town have not been charged.
A demonstration in September brought 20,000 people onto the streets of Jena.
Nearly 4,700 racist crimes were recorded in the United States in 2005, 68 percent of them against blacks, according to the latest figures from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The figures for 2006 were due out on Monday.
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