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An effigy of Barack Obama was found hanged from a tree on the campus of the University of Kentucky today. The effigy was discovered and reported by a faculty member early this morning, and an investigation by campus and local police is underway.
In a statement, UK president Lee Todd called the act “despicable.”
This is the second such incident to occur on a college campus this year. In late September, an effigy of Obama was hanged on the campus of George Fox University, a small Christian college in Oregon.
At the 1967 Congress of the US National Student Association (NSA), the delegates present passed a resolution endorsing the Black Power movement, which they defined as a struggle for the unification and liberation of black people in America “by any means necessary.”
These last four words got a lot of attention.
One of the most prominent attacks on the resolution came from the New York Times, In an editorial entitled “Appeasing Negro Extremists.” The resolution, the Times declared, was “morally … inexcusable” because it was “insincere.” Surely the members of NSA did not, it continued, “believe that American Negroes have the right to seek something called ‘liberation’ by murder, arson and other terror tactics,” as “the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ clearly implies.”
A few days later Ed Schwartz, NSA’s newly elected president, replied in a letter to the editor.
The Black Power resolution had, Schwartz noted, made no reference to “murder, arson, and other terror tactics.” Its authors had deliberately left the phrase vague, leaving it “to the reader of the resolution to determine what means will be necessary to achieve social progress in this country.”
“If the Times believes,” he continued, “that ‘murder, arson and other terror tactics’ have become ‘necessary means’ to social progress, then it should examine why such tactics … have become ‘necessary.’ … Those who predict violence are,” he said, “admitting that we will remain incapable of solving problems of our own creation. The National Student Association is unwilling to make such an admission.”
Morehouse College in Atlanta is the only all-male historically black college in the United States. This spring, for the first time in its 141-year history, its valedictorian is a white man.
MSNBC has the story, and the blog Stereohyped has some thoughts. (Both links via Racialicious.)
Richard Peltz, a professor at the University of Arkansas Bowen School of Law, has filed a lawsuit against two students who called him a racist.
The lawsuit names Valerie Nation and Chrishuana Clark, both third-year law students who have been involved with the school’s Black Law Students Association, along with Eric Spencer Buchanan, president of the W. Harold Flowers Law Society. The organizations are also named in the suit.
In the fall of 2005, Peltz gave a lecture in his constitutional law class that March 2007 letter circulated by the Black Law Students Association later described as a “hateful and inciting speech … used to attack and demean the black students in his class.” In light of this and other incidents, the BLSA asked that Peltz be reprimanded by the law school, barred from teaching required courses “where Black students would be required to have him as a professor,” and made to attend diversity training.
In his lawsuit, Peltz contends that these and other “false accusations of racism damaged plaintiff’s reputation, character and integrity in the Arkansas legal community.”
Last Thursday an attorney for Clark filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that “an accusation by a plaintiff that a defendant has called him a racist, in the context of public discourse at a law school,” will not “support a claim for defamation.” The motion contends that Peltz “has embarked on a personal vendetta against two black law students and two predominantly black organizations based on what he perceives as their opposition to him or to his political views and legal theories.”
There’s talk at the University of South Florida about merging or downgrading the school’s Women’s Studies Department, Africana Studies Department, and the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean. This blog is trying to stop it.
According to the blog, the USF Women’s Studies Department has been around for 35 years, and is “the only free-standing department of Women’s Studies in the State of Florida.”
The Columbia University takeover of 1968 began forty years ago this week. The anniversary has been commemorated in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as on Democracy Now.
Racialicious offers a roundup of recent racist op-eds in campus newspapers, to which Feministe responds with a discussion of satire, hate speech, and the obligations of campus editors. Many more important links in both of those pieces.
Update: The comments at Feministe include a link to a 2007 Campus Progress report on the lack of racial diversity among student newspaper staffs, as well as comments from a student editor and a writer of satire pieces for a campus paper. Worth a look.
A bill passed by a committee of the Arizona state legislature would prohibit groups “based in whole or in part on race-based criteria” from operating at the the state’s public colleges and universities. The bill would also ban courses and “school sponsored activities” that, taken “as a whole,” serve to “denigrate, disparage, or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and western civilization,” and would be binding on high schools as well as colleges.
“This bill basically says, ‘You’re here. Adopt American values,’” one state legislator told a reporter. “If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture.”
The text of the bill is online here.
