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High school girls in an auto repair class in Central High School, Washington DC, 1927.
The Negro History Club of Albany State College in Georgia, 1940.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
Sidwell Friends is a quaker school, founded in 1883. For more than seventy years Sidwell was whites-only, but in 1956 the school’s trustees announced that they would allow African Americans to enter the following year. The class of 1957 was thus the last to experience Sidwell as an all white school.
William Zantzinger was among the graduates that year.
Zantzinger was the son of a prominent Maryland tobacco farming family. In the years after he graduated from Sidwell, he married and took over the operation of the family plantation. On the evening of February 8, 1963, Zantzinger and his wife went out to dinner and a society ball.
Zantzinger drank quite a bit at dinner, and quite a bit more at the ball. Over the course of the evening, he verbally and physically harassed several black serving staff. At about one-thirty in the morning, annoyed that she hadn’t returned quickly enough with a bourbon he’d ordered, Zantzinger struck African-American barmaid Hattie Carroll in the head with a cane.
Hattie Carroll was fifty-one years old, and the mother of eleven children. She collapsed not long after Zantzinger struck her, and was taken to the hospital, where she died of a brain hemorrhage the following morning.
Zantzinger was indicted for murder. He said he was so drunk at the time of the assault that he didn’t know what he was doing. His lawyers said it was stress, not physical injury, that caused Hattie Carroll’s death.
After a three-day trial, Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter. He was fined $500, and sentenced to six months in jail, with the sentence to begin after the tobacco harvest. (While he was still in jail, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded a song about his crime.)
On January 3 of this year, William Zantzinger died.
On January 5, Malia and Sasha Obama enrolled at Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC.
Back in the spring, Arkansas law professor Richard Peltz brought a defamation lawsuit against two law students who had circulated a letter accusing him of racism in the classroom. At the time, the students’ lawyer argued that a charge of racist behavior, “in the context of public discourse at a law school,” was not grounds for legal action.
Peltz requested and received an investigation of his actions by administrators, and in October the school’s interim dean gave Peltz a letter stating that his investigation had revealed “no evidence that you are or have been a racist … during your employment at the law school.”
Saying that he brought the lawsuit to force the university to take a stand on his behavior, Peltz then dropped the suit and circulated a nine-page memo responding to the charges that had been made against him.
Black on Campus has a pair of new posts up on the issue of alcohol consumption on campus, and they’re both well worth reading.
First, there’s a quick overview of the situation, and an endorsement of lowering the drinking age back to 18. Dr. Mance argues that “the current prohibition policy for drinkers under the age of 21 encourages an illicit alcohol culture, and one that is characterized by the same excesses and extremes (and denial) that accompany any illicit activity.” (Mance also links to Choose Responsibility, a drinking-age reform group that arose out of college administrators’ frustration with the status quo.)
The second post explores the fact that drinking rates are lower among black college students than among white students, and lower still among students at historically black colleges and universities. The post concludes with a provocative quote from a black student leader on the relationship between binge drinking and bias crime.
A new addition to the blogroll: Black On Campus.
It’s a great blog, with all sorts of material on black students, black faculty, and other issues relating to African-American higher education past and present. Just a really rich resource. I’ve already spent a chunk of the morning over there, and it’s going to be a regular read for me from now on.
studentactivism.net 
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