Protesters gather outside of the La Salle Parish courthouse in Jena, La. Thousands of chanting demonstrators filled the streets of the little Louisiana town Thursday in support of six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate.

Jena, La. ? Drawn by the disturbing symbol of three lynching nooses dangling from a tree and greeted by Confederate flags displayed along their route, tens of thousands of blacks poured into this racially tense Deep South town Thursday to stage the largest civil rights demonstration in years against what they regard as glaring racial injustices here.

Protesters from across the nation cheerfully defied obstacles placed in their way by town officials, such as a line of portable toilets put directly in front of the courthouse steps where the demonstration was held. They celebrated what Rev. Al Sharpton described as the birth of a “new civil rights movement for the 21st century,” driven by black Internet blogs, e-mail and talk radio more than any traditional civil rights leader.

Drawn from across U.S.

Many of the participants traveled 20 hours or more by bus from both coasts and even Alaska to arrive at dawn for the peaceful, six-hour rally, which featured Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King III and dozens of other black leaders and celebrities.

“The civil rights movement is finally catching up with Jena,” declared Ella Bell King, 59, a resident of Alexandria, La., who slept overnight with other family members in front of the courthouse. “Something like this should have happened here 40 years ago.”

The protesters came to decry the prosecution of the Jena 6 – six black high school students who were initially charged with attempted murder for beating a white student last December, even though the student was treated and released at a local hospital. The charges were later reduced to the lesser felony of aggravated second-degree battery.

The demonstrators came as well to criticize the decision of the local district attorney, Reed Walters, not to press similarly serious criminal charges against white youths who attacked blacks.

The ‘white tree’

And they came to defy the symbolism of Jena’s “white tree” – a shade tree at the high school, traditionally reserved for whites, where all of Jena’s troubles began.

One year ago, after a black student asked an administrator’s permission to sit under the tree – and was told he could sit wherever he liked – three white students hung nooses from the tree’s branches the following day. The local school superintendent dismissed the incident as a youthful prank and refused to expel the white students involved, outraging blacks who were offended by the potent lynching imagery. Months of racial unrest followed in the town, culminating in the December beating.

School officials cut down the infamous tree in July, hoping to eliminate it as a focus of protests. But the demonstrators were undeterred, chanting and marching 12 abreast in a mile-long procession through the streets from the courthouse to the high school courtyard, where they ringed the spot where the tree used to stand.

Louisiana state police estimated that the crowd numbered between 15,000 and 20,000 people, but organizers said they believed there were at least twice that many demonstrators filling this town of 3,000.

Even before the marchers began heading home Thursday evening, there were signs that the demonstration was having real effects.

President Bush offered his first comment about the Jena case at a press conference. “The events in Louisiana have saddened me,” the president said. “And I understand the emotions. The Justice Department and the FBI are monitoring the situation down there. And all of us in America want there to be, you know, fairness when it comes to justice.”

Meanwhile, a Louisiana state appeals court ordered that a bond hearing must be held within 72 hours for Mychal Bell, 17, the only one of the six black students to have been tried so far and the only one still in jail, unable to post a $90,000 bond.