Intolerance on Campus
Chills Blacks at Tech

Kimberly Vaughan and her boyfriend, Pete Pollock, walk to Virgnia Tech class; social pressures that motivate her are considered by others to make for relentless stress. ALAN KIM/staff

BLACKSBURG - It came after they watched a videotape of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, a question from a white professor pressing the only black student in the room for some special insight. The question made Kimberly Vaughan angry that day in her public speaking class at Virginia Tech. She had only made a few observations about King's style. But the teacher wanted more. "Just because I'm black am I supposed to know the speech by heart?" she said, recalling her first thought that day. "Just because I was black [the professor assumed] I could identify with it."

Not necessarily, especially for a 20-year-old from Leesburg who has a white boyfriend and says she would feel comfortable at Tech "if I was the only black on campus. I feel comfortable here because this is just like where I was brought up."

Other black students feel less welcome. They cite an administration whose actions do not keep pace with its progressive rhetoric; a town Police Department apparently perplexed by and fearful of a growing black student population; and many white students indifferent to racial and cultural sensitivities.

"The first days you'll go to class and you'll say, 'Hmm, I'm the only black student in here,'" Vaughan said, admitting it can feel a bit daunting. Yet, what she finds a motivator, others, such as Randy Lucas, consider a relentless pressure.

"I think I'm [more] aware of what I say. I feel like I always have to be right," Lucas, as senior from Richmond, said. "I can't say anything off the wall in class. I feel it's never an acceptance. I have to prove; I have to prove; I have to prove."

Whatever the perspective, and they are as diverse among black students as anywhere, a nagging reality remains: Tech's black students are virtually swallowed in a sea of white classmates, despite impressive gains in black enrollment in the past few years.

Increasing the black student and faculty population here takes time. While recruitment programs begin to bear fruit - witness the 64.6 percent increase in black applications this year over last - officials here find themselves preoccupied with "campus climate," the latest buzzwords in higher education.

Charles Pinder, one of 21 black professors among a faculty of nearly 2,000, said, "There's a perception by some students that we don't have problems and by others that we have mammoth problems." Some black students and officials worry that a string of incidents involving black students and - at various times - town police officers, white students and blacks and whites from off campus, may chill a cultural climate that some say is warming within the classrooms and student body. "Pockets of tolerance kind of balance it for us a bit, but as a campus community we have a long way to go," said one senior administrator, who is black. He called the climate 'around the tolerable level."

Kimberly Vaughan is the only black in her public speaking class. She resents being singled out during a discussion of a speech by Martin Luther King.

Tom Goodale, Tech's student affairs vice president, says his "most pressing issue" is the growing intolerance of incoming students. "You talk to these kids about Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy - any of the great civil rights leaders - and even the black students don't know about them."

Administrators who have worked with college students for decades, such as Goodale and Cornel Morton, special assistant to President James McComas, insist the racial tolerance of students has declined in recent years.

Searching for some explanation, they point to waning national leadership for civil rights during the Reagan-Bush years and suggest that many white students come from comparatively isolated communities that have not prepared them for living with - and accepting - people different from themselves.

Further, Morton thinks students who come form homes where parents take scant interest in civil rights and racial issues may often grow indifferent to minority concerns and hostile to affirmative action and other minority counseling programs.

"Whites and blacks who are concerned about race equity and racial justice very often see these issues in very different ways from different perspectives," he said. "Being white means not having to think about it."

Efforts to bolster minority representation within the student body and faculty may actually increase the tensions in and around Tech, as more minorities permeate the campus community and confront longheld biases.

While Tech's black leaders agree that the campus is no hotbed of racial strife, the school has had its share of racial controversies - many within the past year.

Several of the most recent incidents involved black students and Blacksburg police, others involved black students and townspeople, authorities said. Few of the reported encounters have pitted white students against their black classmates, a hopeful sign for students and officials attuned to campus climate.

Still consider:

Two black students got into a fight at a dance sponsored by a black sorority earlier this month, drawing at least a dozen Blacksburg police cars, witnesses said. One witness called the response a "stupid overreaction."

"They didn't respect us at all," said Lucas, president of the Black Organizations Council. "They were abrupt. They weren't telling people to go back inside. They were yelling at people."

Blacksburg Police Chief Donald Carey defended the police response, especially after what happened the previous weekend during homecoming. That Saturday, a black man from Salem was arrested after allegedly firing two shots into a wall during a predominantly black dance. No one was hurt by the bullets, but several were hospitalized after a fight broke out. Members of a predominantly white fraternity, Phi Kappa Sigma, who were seeking to rent a local restaurant for an upcoming party, were asked by the owner if blacks would be attending" 'because black students drive away my business,'" a senior university official familiar with the case quoted the owner as saying. This past summer, a student government senator working in a local cleaning establishment reported that her employer had asked her to help find additional help for the store, "as long as they weren't black," according to an internal university memo. In August, police said a young black man was beaten with a stick after he questioned a white man who had made an obscene gesture on Main Street. Apparently the black man, stuck in traffic behind the car driven by the white man, honked his horn and motioned for the car ahead to move on.

Police said someone in the white man's car made an obscene gesture, then the driver turned into a nearby vacant lot. Instead of driving on, the black man pulled in behind the other car, got out and confronted the other driver.

Douglas Phillips, 22, of Radford was arrested for hitting the black man and charged with malicious wounding. A court date is set for Dec. 12. Last July, a black female graduate student was hit by a large dead frog thrown from a passing truck and the passengers shouted racial slurs as they drove by. Last April, town police, many in plain clothes, turned out in force for a Friday night speech at Burruss Hall by an aide to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Two plain clothes officers also were dispatched by Chief Carey to meet Khallid Abdul Muhammad's plane at the Roanoke Regional Airport and take pictures of him and his entourage.

The presence of police at the speech, during which Muhammad recounted the photo session in the air terminal, irritated many black students who attended.

Carey defended the action, saying it was justified by other occasions where Muhammad's speeches incited crowds who found his rhetoric anti-semitic and anti-white. Last November, Delta Kappa Epsilon, a predominantly white fraternity, was banished form campus for five years for instructing its pledges to have their pictures taken kissing black women.

SOURCE: Virgnia Tech Office of Admissions. Staff

The incident at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, mobilized Tech's black student community, whose leaders demanded that officials bolster black studies and multi-cultural offerings at the university, among other things. Officials hope to hire a black studies coordinator before the end of the year. Black students and some university officials, most of whom are aware of the recent incidents, worry that efforts to make the campus community more sensitive to minority concerns are hampered by what some perceive to be heavy-handed police behavior and pockets of racism in the community. "Incident after incident is going to lead to further polarization of racial relations hare. It only takes one use of excessive force to trigger an ugly confrontation," said Oscar Williams, a local NAACP official and associate director of Tech's Center for Volunteer Development. Williams, a frequent sounding board for black student leaders, said the students feel "there are officers out there just looking for an incident. It's typical Southern police thinking. You'd think you were in Alabama or Mississippi in the olden days." University officials recently met with Carey to discuss concerns that relations between his officers - four of 48 sworn officers are black - and black students are deteriorating. "We're trying to address these tensions before these tensions rise to something uncontrollable," Carey said. "We're not here to harass students, to pick on people. The college is the lifeblood of this community. I'm not stupid. I think this whole thing developed from a sense of mistrust and suspicion that was ill-placed." Blacksburg police officers receive interracial and sensitivity instruction during their training, Carey said. Black students who sense tensions with the local police invariably mention Greekfest '89, the gathering of predominantly black college students in Virginia Beach that deteriorated into widespread property damage and charges of racism and police brutality. "I think a lot of people were bothered by the Virginia Beach thing and I think it's clouded a lot of people's judgment about the whole thing," said Tinishia Montague, a senior from Baltimore. "It's an attitude now." Six years in Tech's rural, predominantly white environment has radicalized Montague. Time spent around other black students from urban areas transformed the 23-year-old management science major form a high school student who thought little about race into a self-described "militant." "I have that learned kind of radical behavior, pseudo-radical," she said. Ideas of Farrakhan and Malcolm X meld in Montague's mind with the songs of Public Enemy, a rap group whose lyrics carry explicit social and political messages. Broadly speaking, students say, "mainstreamers" and "radicals" comprise Tech's black student community. Mainstreamers such as Dwayne Mondrey, a junior from Amelia, come form rural areas and the Northern Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington, where minority black populations are swallowed by the white majority. Radicals are more likely to hail from inner-city Richmond, Norfolk, Baltimore or Washington, strongholds of black culture where predominantly black high schools are more common.

"There are a lot of black people here who are black in color only. They don't hang around with black people' they don't know any black people." Montague said, expressing her difficulty with interracial relationships - especially black men and white women.

Perhaps like Mondrey's 1.5 year relationship with Karen Hinson, a junior from Newport News who is white.

"Interracial couples never really bothered me," Montague said, "until I got more radical. It's called 'sellin'out to the white man,' which means, basically, turning away from your culture and taking in the culture of the white race."

Mondrey sees it differently. "I was always taught not to look at color, and if I like a person to like them. I know some black women who hate [interracial dating], who think the black man is hurting the race."

"Basically, within the university, I'd say [our relationship] is more frowned upon by blacks than whites," Hinson said. But overt racism came from some white men in a truck passing them one Sunday evening.

"'Hey bitch, why don't you find yourself a ...white boy,'" she said one of them screamed. "We've had stares and stuff, but that's the only thing that's been outright."

Mondrey says Tech's racial atmosphere "is what you make it." He and others such as Vaughan, the junior from Leesburg, find themselves too preoccupied with their studies to fret about Tech's racial climate.

"Tech is a difficult institution," said Montague, agreeing on one thing with her mainstream counterparts. "There's so much here. If you try to get a quality education you're going to be missing something. Tech is really designed for failure. It's not designed for success."

An institutional culture that many students describe as "sink or swim" makes it difficult for some - black or white - to succeed if they arrive poorly prepared. Administrators know it, too, and say changes are coming.

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URL: http://spec.lib.vt.edu/archives/blackhistory/timeline/racism.htm

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