Apartheid. USA 1988

December 14, 1986:

Educators and civil rights leaders are becoming increasingly worried over what they fear is a proliferation of racial incidents on college campuses around the country. Officials at colleges and experts in race relations say that these incidents seem to be part of a growing pattern of bigotry and animosity toward minority students at predominantly white schools. The episodes include fights between black and white students. At the University of Texas a group was formed calling themselves the ‘Aryan Collegiates’. Their aim is to rid the campus of ‘outspoken minorities’. In Tuscaloosa, white students of the University of Alabama burned a cross in front of a new black sorority house. At The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, the FBI investigated a case in which five white students wearing sheets and carrying a burning paper cross taunted a black cadet in his dormitory bed.

The Times report further mentioned various factors, line

[p. 2]

perceived differences in the standards applied by college admissions officers to minority students, cutbacks in Federal student aid, and political divisions over anti-apartheid protests. Although some college administrators maintain that incidents of racial violence and harassment are rare and are sometimes blown out of proportion by the press, officials at many institutions acknowledge that confrontations appear to be racially motivated. Racial disharmony will also lead to a further drop in black student enrollment. In 1972 black students constituted 3 percent in four-year institutions. This figure rose in 1976 to 10.3 percent, but dropped in 1982, the latest year for which figures were available, to 9.6 percent.^4.

4. Lena Williams from Washington DC.