Apartheid. USA 1988

March 6, 1987:

A 52-page report, based on interviews with students, the campus police, and college officials stated that the brawl on the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts following the last World Series game was ‘predictable, preventable and primarily racially motivated’. The fighting broke out when the students poured out of dormitories after the New York Mets defeated the Boston Red Sox 8 to 5 in the seventh game of the World Series. The melee left 10 people injured, including a black student who was beaten unconscious. According to the author of the report, Frederick A Hurst, a member of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the Mets were perceived as a black team and the Red Sox as a white one. The violence began with non-racial scuffles among a crowd of students, many of them drunk. ‘No one present that night can explain why or how, but the focus of the crowd perceptibly shifted toward the black students long before any black student used a weapon,’ stated the report. ‘It seemed as if the crowd was unconsciously focusing on a surrogate target against which to take revenge for the Sox loss, and that surrogate target conveniently became black students.’ The incident came in a long-standing atmosphere of racial unease and ‘ongoing, low-intensity racial affronts,’ Mr Hurst said. Members of minority groups make up only 8 percent of the 25 000 student enrollment at Amherst. Blacks make up only 3.1 percent of the minority student group. An estimated 1 200 to 3 000 students engaged in the brawl.^62.

62. The New York Times, from a report by Matthew L Wald