Racism Flares on Campus

But the attacks spur a search for new understandings

The ugly message called for the elimination of "stinking black monkeys" from "a white society." It was mailed from Cleveland, signed K.K.K. and addressed to a black senior at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., part of a spate of hate mail and threatening phone calls to blacks on campus. A similar letter was sent to Williams President John Chandler.

The wave of antiblack attacks began in early November. During homecoming, two figures in white sheets planted a wooden cross on campus. Few took any notice until the pair doused the cross with gasoline, ignited it and escaped. Williams, a small liberal arts college in a rural corner of northwestern Massachusetts, is not the only school in the Northeast where racial incidents have occurred:

P: At Harvard, Lydia Jackson, president of the university's Black Students Association, found her office calendar defaced with racist slogans, including TEN DAYS TO KILL and K.K.K. UNITE. She also received several frightening phone calls, one of which threatened her with rape if she did not "stop creating trouble and making noise on campus."

P: At Cornell University in upstate New York, a gang of ten white youths jostled and harassed a young black student on Election Night. Six weeks before, someone had hurled a rock through a window of Ujamaa Hall, a residence predominantly for black students.

P: At Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., Associate Professor Jerome Long, director of the Afro-American Studies Center, got a letter addressed to all residents of Malcolm X House, a black student dormitory. "I have a dream," it read, of "wiping all g.d. niggers off the face of the earth."

There have also been incidents in the Midwest. Earlier this semester two cross burnings occurred at Purdue University in Indiana. One, made of wood, was planted on the lawn of a black fraternity house; the other, shaped of computer cards, was taped to the dormitory window of two black students and set afire. At Ohio's Kent State University, black student organization material on campus bulletin boards was defaced.

Though officials have sharply tightened security on the campuses and the FBI is investigating the incidents at Williams, Wesleyan and Harvard for possible civil rights violations, there is no evidence of who is behind the racist campaign, whether isolated individuals or concerted groups. Despite the Ku Klux Klan references and implications, there is no proof that the Klan is involved.

What particularly bothers students and school officials is that the news of each incident has seemed to spawn others. In an open letter to the college community, Wesleyan President Colin Campbell said he believed the anonymous letter delivered there was one example of "resurgent racism in society at large." Chandler concurs: "Because of the current shift in the national mood, I'm assuming that some rather ugly impulses have been liberated." Says Archie Epps III, dean of undergraduates at Harvard and a black: "In such a climate, an individual who has harbored resentment is more likely to feel free to threaten minorities because, once again, it is respectable." Among the moves that Chandler and Epps feel encourage racism are an antibusing measure in Congress and calls to repeal the Voting Rights Act.

The incidents have spurred students and faculty members to look anew at long-simmering problems between the races, both on campus and off. Acknowledges Susan Hobbs, a white Williams senior: "There has been apprehension about relations between minorities and whites." Another white Williams student wonders why "each group seems to stick together, without reaching out to each other." Says Darrell McWhorter, a black senior who is president of the Williams student council: "There is really nothing different here from the world outside. These incidents have just shown that Williams does not exist in a vacuum." Says Harvard's Jackson: "Until we sit down and talk to each other about what's really going on in this country that makes people lash out against blacks, Third World people, gay people and poor people, I think the problem will exist."

At Williams, officials held two prayer meetings and replaced half a day of classes with seminars on campus race relations. A reward of $1,000 was offered for information about the cross burners.

Cornell President Frank Rhodes conducted four meetings with administrators, faculty and staff members, and concerned students, and praised "the way they are helping me deal with [the incidents]." At Wesleyan, a rally by 600 of the university's 2,600 students heard 20 speakers, including Campbell, the mayor of Middletown, ministers and several black undergraduates. Before the Harvard-Yale football game, 250 chanting students, black and white, marched to the stadium carrying antiracist placards.

The incidents and the resulting rallies, prayers and discussions appear to have brought blacks and whites on campus closer together. Says Wesleyan Professor Long: "In the nine years that I have been here, this is the first time the university has coalesced to speak to a common concern." Concludes Campbell: "Despite the cruelty of its motivation and the pain it has caused, this latest incident may yet serve a beneficial purpose by reminding us how far we have come and how far we still have to go."

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