As we pause too briefly this week to properly remember one of the greatest leaders in American history, our leaders declare the nation’s triumph over racism.
They point out that Secretary of State Colin Powell rose to prominence in this new nation of “equal opportunity,” even while our deicision to fund public schools through property taxes denies the underprivledged a chance to get ahead. We wonder what happened to Gary Condit and Chandra Levy, even as we ignore the story of Diamond and Tionda Bradley, two black girls from the South Side of Chicago who have been missing since July 6. We wonder if we have already achieved the colorblind society that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. only dreamed of, even while a recent incident at Auburn University underscores the continued presence of racism in our society.
Like many Greek organizations, the Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi fraternity houses at Auburn hosted costume parties for Halloween last year. Some partygoers dressed as clowns and firefighters. Others dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan. Some even donned blackface to ridicule Omega Psi Phi, a black fraternity at Auburn.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has published photographs from the party to document the abhorrent, hateful nature of the costumes. In the most disturbing image, a young man, wearing a white gown and hood, stands before a Confederate flag. In his left hand, he holds a rifle. In his right, he holds a noose around the neck of a young white man in blackface.
The visual impact of this mock lynching is potent. Because state and local governments endorsed this violence in the late 19th century, obtaining accurate statistics about the prevalence of lynching is difficult. But historians estimate that the numbers were in the thousands. Lynching still symbolizes enforced oppression. These Auburn students did not stumble upon racial insensitivity. They embraced racism in its cruelest form.
University administrators and the fraternities’ national offices responded strongly – and justly so. The University withdrew its recognition of the fraternities and indefinitely suspended 15 of the students involved. The national organizations for Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi disbanded their Auburn chapters. In a press release, Interim President William F. Walker called the students’ presence “an immediate threat to the well-being of the university.”
The most forgiving assessment is that these young men demonstrated a remarkable lack of judgment and nauseatingly poor taste. But they certainly do not deserve such a generous review. Proximity and lineage tie them closely to Alabama’s legacy of white supremacy and oppression. Lynchings still took place frequently in the South in the decades prior to World War II, when their grandparents were entering adulthood.
Montgomery, Ala., is about an hour away from Auburn University. There, in 1956, King established himself at a leader of the civil rights movement, by joining the bus boycott in progress at the time. The day before his assassination in 1968, King said: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.” Should we ever forget the lasting relevance of King’s message, we will not get there.
