This September 20^th, thousands of Americans drove to Jena, Louisiana to protest the unjust prosecution of six black youth. The protest was so large—drawing somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people—that the multitude couldn’t even fit within the city limits of Jena. Are we seeing the birth of a 21^st century civil rights movement?

It all started last September, when white students at Jena High School hung three nooses in a tree in the school courtyard, to warn black students not to sit there. The school authorities dismissed this hate crime as a harmless prank. When black students staged an impromptu protest, the school called an emergency assembly to deal with the underlying causes of this unrest: troublemaking black youth. Flanked by police officers, Jena’s District Attorney looked directly at the high school’s black students and told them, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.” Yes, that’s right. In the minds of Jena’s authorities, the nooses weren’t the problem—black students protesting nooses were the problem.

At the end of November, the central academic wing of Jena High School was destroyed by a fire. Over the weekend, white students provoked a series of fights with black students. In one altercation, a white graduate of the high school threatened three black students with a shotgun. The black youth wrestled the gun out of his hands, but incredibly were charged with theft of the weapon, ignoring the fact that they were defending themselves! Next, a group of white youth attacked a single black youth at a party—and the police took no serious action.

Finally, a white youth, Justin Barker, was struck after he taunted a fellow student with racial slurs, knocked unconsciousness, and was kicked while on the ground. Barker went to the hospital, but was released that day and went to a party that night. The six black students were charged with attempted murder. After a national outcry, the charges were reduced to conspiracy and battery. This month, a Louisiana court of appeals vacated the charges against Bell, ruling that the prosecutor was wrong to charge him as an adult instead of a juvenile--but he is still sitting in jail instead of moving forward with his education. Five more of Jena’s black teenagers are also rotting in jail instead of finishing school.

But the historic protests on September 20th created hope—tens of thousands of Americans left Jena energized to transform our nation’s broken criminal justice system and stop the mass incarceration of black teenagers.

So what can we learn from the Jena story? America is ready for a new civil rights movement. The real question is, are progressive activists ready to lead it? There are two challenges we must overcome.

First, Jena shows that while our nation’s race problem has mutated, our intervention strategies have not. I know the inner workings of the Jena story because I work with the faith-based civil rights organization, Friends of Justice, which broke the story for the first time. Without our early intervention, Jena (like the notorious Tulia drug sting) would be yet another missed opportunity for our nation’s civil rights advocates. Last December, Friends of Justice got a call from the parents of those six young men in Jena. They were desperate, because none of the established progressive organizations could do anything for them. Once we investigated and broke the story to the media, progressive organizations and leaders were lining up to get involved in Jena. My point is not to be self-congratulatory, but to explain how the "Jena 6" could have easily ended up as faceless statistics rotting in prison, instead of the focus of national protests. For so many young Americans in their position, there is no way to bridge that gap between mundane, street-level injustice and the world of progressive advocacy and media coverage. Scandals like Jena aren’t born, they’re made.

The problem is that right now, most civil rights and criminal justice reform organizations are focused on policy advocacy and civil litigation of the Brown v. Board of Education variety. These top-down tactics were designed for the de jure caste discrimination of the Old Jim Crow; they are powerless against the de facto realities of the New Jim Crow. In the New Jim Crow, black people with money and status can escape the old regime of caste discrimination to pursue the American Dream. But black people who lack money and status live in constant fear of police harassment, abusive prosecution, and family members lost to prison—they are effectively relegated to second-class citizenship.

The New Jim Crow calls for new strategy. We need civil rights organizations to do grassroots organizing around strategic cases like Jena, but instead, they typically ignore these “local” events while they wait around for another “big case” that can produce a dramatic DNA exoneration, a celebrated civil rights lawsuit or a precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling. But DNA evidence is relevant to a tiny minority of cases and the current composition of the Supreme Court has transformed the old Brown vs. Board strategy into an anachronism. Friends of Justice has discovered that we can create the next “big case” by intervening strategically in the small cases like Jena, and turning them into media spectacles big enough to impact the national zeitgeist.

It’s time to move past the top-down models of policy advocacy and public interest law that dominate the progressive movement, and build new links between national advocacy and grassroots organizing. It’s my hope that organizations like Friends of Justice can facilitate this shift towards integrated, strategic collaborations. The Louisiana ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center blazed a trail this year when they started organizing locally with Friends of Justice to bring national attention to Jena, and their hard work will likely bear fruit in major civil rights litigation. This kind of innovative collaboration between grassroots organizing, law, and advocacy must become the norm, not the exception.

Second, progressives need to develop a new narrative and empower new leadership to fight the New Jim Crow. On September 20^th, the civil rights leaders of tomorrow weren’t on stage—they were watching from the crowd. You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, but those thousands of people weren’t there to watch Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton chant the same tired slogans—they were there to start a real movement.

Alan Bean of Friends of Justice reported that last week’s protests had the electricity of the March on Washington—he kept expecting the scene to flash into black and white. (Read his full report here or watch an evocative Youtube video here.) The New York Times captures this new spirit of hope and purpose among the protest’s young participants:

Two students from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette said they felt it was their turn to march for civil rights.

“This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,'’ said Eric Depradine, 24, who is a senior. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is the chance to experience it for ourselves."

Meanwhile, white progressives largely sat this one out—it seems that we still see criminal justice reform as a peripheral issue. It was telling that my white activist friends were caught off-guard by the Jena protests, even though the “Jena 6” became a household name for black Americans a month ago. Since white, middle-class activists are less likely to have a brother, sister, or cousin who has been needlessly incarcerated, we are slower to catch on to the magnitude of our nation’s prison problem. All that has to change if we want to build a new civil rights movement and finish what our grandparents started.

So, the protests in Jena leave us at a turning point. We could help birth a 21^st century civil rights movement. Or we could keep doing the same old thing and wait for historical events like Jena to be handed to us on a silver platter. Progressives need to reinvent grassroots organizing and integrate it with our established methods of top-down advocacy and public interest law. We need to move beyond identity politics and develop a new narrative about our nation’s mutating disease of racialized inequality. We need to build bridges with a broad constituency of people of color, especially the young generation that was galvanized by the Jena story. If we overcome these challenges, we can transform our nation’s criminal justice system and end the New Jim Crow.