Nation: Racism Flares on Campus

But the attacks spur a search for new understandings

The ugly message called for the elimination of "stinking black monkeys" from "a white society." It was mailed from Cleveland, signed K.K.K. and addressed to a black senior at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., part of a spate of hate mail and threatening phone calls to blacks on campus. A similar letter was sent to Williams President John Chandler.

The wave of antiblack attacks began in early November. During homecoming, two figures in white sheets planted a wooden cross on campus. Few took any notice until the pair doused the cross with gasoline, ignited it and escaped. Williams, a small liberal arts college in a rural corner of northwestern Massachusetts, is not the only school in the Northeast where racial incidents have occurred:

¶ At Harvard, Lydia Jackson, president of the university's Black Students Association, found her office calendar defaced with racist slogans, including TEN DAYS TO KILL and K.K.K. UNITE. She also received several frightening phone calls, one of which threatened her with rape if she did not "stop creating trouble and making noise on campus."

¶ At Cornell University in upstate New York, a gang of ten white youths jostled and harassed a young black student on Election Night. Six weeks before, someone had hurled a rock through a window of Ujamaa Hall, a residence predominantly for black students.

¶ At Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., Associate Professor Jerome Long, director of the Afro-American Studies Center, got a letter addressed to all residents of Malcolm X House, a black student dormitory. "I have a dream," it read, of "wiping all g.d. niggers off the face of the earth."

There have also been incidents in the Midwest. Earlier this semester two cross burnings occurred at Purdue University in Indiana. One, made of wood, was planted on the lawn of a black fraternity house; the other, shaped of computer cards, was taped to the dormitory window of two black students and set afire. At Ohio's Kent State University, black student organization material on campus bulletin boards was defaced.

Though officials have sharply tightened security on the campuses and the FBI is investigating the incidents at Williams, Wesleyan and Harvard for possible civil rights violations, there is no evidence of who is behind the racist campaign, whether isolated individuals or concerted groups. Despite the Ku Klux Klan references and implications, there is no proof that the Klan is involved.