Stephenville is about 60 miles northeast of Brownwood
MLK Party Causes Uproar on Texas Campus
Jan 25, 5:47 AM (ET)
By JEFF CARLTON
DALLAS (AP) - Authorities at Tarleton State University said they plan to investigate a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party that mocked black stereotypes by featuring fried chicken, malt liquor and faux gang apparel.
"I feel like there is no excuse for this type of ignorance," said Donald Ray Elder, president of the Stephenville school's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Photographs posted on social networking Web site Facebook.com showed partygoers wearing Afro wigs and fake gold and silver teeth. One photo showed students "mocking how African-Americans do step shows," Elder said. In another picture, a student is dressed as Aunt Jemima and carries a gun.
"That upsets me," Elder said. "That's someone who knows nothing about Dr. King, because Dr. King was totally about nonviolence."
Wanda Mercer, the school's vice president of student life, said an investigation was planned into the Jan. 15 party.
More than 400 students attended a university-sponsored forum Wednesday night that Elder described as "a shaky baby step" in bridging a divide between black and white students on the campus, which had about 400 black students out of 7,800 overall last semester.
Elder said he sensed a racial divide at the forum, with black students sitting on one side of the room and whites on the other.
"It was civil, but it also escalated into a shouting match," he said in a telephone interview afterward.
Some of the students shown in the photos apologized, Elder said.
University President Dennis P. McCabe said the photographs were reprehensible.
"I am personally insulted by these photographs and am disappointed that Tarleton students have demonstrated such insensitivity," he said.
Stephenville is about 60 miles southwest of Fort Worth.
source: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070125/D8MS8LP00.html
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Picture stirred up tearful debate
January 28, 2007
Sometime in early May, we expect to welcome Ella Alvarez to our family and our world. I've never been a grandmother before, so you can imagine how much I'm thinking about this new role, and what it means and how I'm supposed to fill it.
I have several close and dear friends who have been doing this for a while who are willing to mentor me, to provide me examples to follow. Thank you, Susan, Judy, Ruth Ann, Linda. And, of course, my own mother.
Thursday, I was handed another, not so exciting, very different opportunity to think about being a grandmother. It was a day and a night when we had a philosophical struggle here at the newspaper, the kinds of discussions and debates that make newspapering such a special calling.
Students at Tarleton State University chose to remember Dr. Martin Luther King with a most obscene, heinous sort of event - the only thing missing was black face. We chose to publish a story about it on Friday, complete with a photograph of one of the students portraying Aunt Jemina.
The newsroom debate: Should we publish the photograph?
Some of us argued that we had an obligation to run the photo. More than 40 years ago, as a junior high student, I decided I wanted to be a journalist so that I could change the world. I could show the world the facts that would change the way we think. If I accomplished nothing else, maybe, through our reporting and story-telling, I could change the way we think about one another.
The hate-filled event that happened in Fairway Oaks on Jan. 15 - when some ignoramus carved the ''N'' word in the ice in an African American family's front yard - and the behavior of the Tarleton State students confirm that we haven't come as far as most of us wish we had come in the way we think about one another. It confirmed that all these years of idealistic journalism haven't changed the world.
I wanted to publish the photo. I thought it would shine a light: our company's motto, after all, is ''Give light, and the people will find their own way.'' That's what that photo could do, I thought.
And then I talked to Kathleen Whitmire, one of our most senior staff members. Our only African American staff member. Kathleen told me how offensive that photo was to her, how offensive it would be to some of our readers. Readers who look like her.
As we talked, I realized just how much that photo would affect Kathleen. At one juncture in our talk, Kathleen said she realized that I couldn't understand why that photo would upset her. And, of course, she was right. I couldn't.
I talked to Kathleen about Ella. I told her how important it is to me that Ella, unlike her mother, grows up in a world that knows no color boundaries. And, I believe, people like Kathleen and me, who have the heady opportunity - nay, responsibility - to provide a window on the world, should seize that opportunity to enlighten. We, I said, have a chance to show Abilene and the surrounding area that even folks who call themselves a ''Christian, loving, welcoming community,'' open their arms, really, only to a limited few.
Our managing editor, Barton Cromeens, heard the arguments but felt strongly the photo should run, if for no other reason but to expose the ignorance among us.
Kathleen Whitmire's objections weighed heavily on me. After all, many a night, after Barton and I go home, people like Kathleen are ultimately in the hot seat, making at the last minute the sort of ''life and death'' decisions that affect what our readers see the next morning.
Kathleen was clear about the story: she wouldn't have kept it out of the newspaper. She just preferred the strategy of not giving ignorant people too much of a platform. Perhaps it would have been OK, she said, at the bottom of the front page, sans photo, or on the Big Country/Texas page. To her, it was no shock that people could behave so ignorantly. That's an everyday occurrence ... like people who pull their handbags closer to them in grocery stores or assume all black people like rap music. But to give such ignorance a forum without any rebuttal seemed abhorrent to her.
Finally, I called one of the two or three people I call ''pastor.'' Dr. Kelvin Kelly, founder of the FACES Ministry and a former pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church who is African American, looked at the photograph on the Web and said, ''Do it.'' And after he showed it to his wife, he called me back to tell me Kimberly said, ''Go for it.''
After that, Kathleen and I agreed to publish the photo. Frankly, our conversation included some tears - tears of Kathleen's pain, tears of a grandmother-to-be who wishes, deeply, that Ella Alvarez will only know of these debates through her history studies.
source: http://www.reporter-news.com/abil/op_columns/article/0,1874,ABIL_7981_5310903,00.html
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