University officials denounce racial actions on election day.
October 5, 2008
WACO — Baylor University officials said they are investigating an apparent noose hanging from a tree the day Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president.
Campus authorities also responded to a barbecue pit fire where several Obama campaign signs were believed to have been burned, interim president David E. Garland said.
“These events are deeply disturbing to us and are antithetical to the mission of Baylor University,” Garland said in a statement Wednesday. “We categorically denounce and will not tolerate racist acts of any kind on our campus.”
On Tuesday afternoon at the world’s largest Baptist university, some students notified officials that a rope resembling a noose was in a campus tree, Garland said. Campus police took the rope and are investigating.
“We believe that the incidents on our campus yesterday were irresponsible acts committed by a few individuals,” Garland said.
No students had been taken into custody as of Wednesday afternoon, Baylor spokeswoman Lori Fogleman said.
Source / AP / Google News
I am embarassed by the ingorance, but not surprised. Thank you for helping me understand where I live.
I am a freshman at Baylor, and as the article says, it was only a few individuals, and by no means is the opinion of the student body in its entirety, by no means.
I have a good friend who has lived in Waco for several years, and I’m not at all surprised by these events. Baylor has some deeply racist and violent elements. Members of the baseball team are, I’m told, pretty regularly involved in brutal cat-killings. Waco was the site of one of the last legal lynchings in Texas, memorialized for many years in a gruesome mural in the basement of the county courthouse. The whole town somehow has always seemed to be stuck in a 1950s timewarp! Waco is also the epicenter from which Texas’ remaining “dry counties” are ruled.
and also want to add, it’s WONDERFUL to see some RagBlog readers in Waco, and to hear that the election day crimes displeased many students!!
even Waco CAN CHANGE!!!
I’m a junior journalism major at Baylor, and therefore have been very involved with this story. That said, I completely agree that this is not at all representative of the school. I also believe that hearsay is not always the most accurate of information. Stories tend to be embellished with every retelling (someone recently called in with concerns because they had heard that students were burning crosses which is not at all true). In other words, don’t report something if it can’t be validated–that includes speculation and generalizations. While it’s incredibly important for Baylor to address this incident, it is also important to note that it was isolated. It’s also ignorant and offensive to define a university by the actions of only a handful of the 14 thousand+ students.
I’m also a previous student of Baylor, and this does not at all represent it’s students or standards as an institution. You could find a few ignorant, obnoxious kids like this at any school- and it would not be fair to judge the university or the rest of its students based on those few.
Agree entirely. But it’s also important to report these actions in order to shine a spotlight on the perpetrators and hopefully to isolate them.
If it doesn’t get reported it can become, like, business as usual.
Thorne
Greetings from Mexico City!
My husband Howard (Baylor ’64) read all the Baylor stories in the Waco Trib and the Lariat (student paper) and has sent a ltr to the editor to the Lariat. I’m going to guess that there was a lot of stuff like that going on around the country. What with the proliferation of maniacal hate crazy groups and the encouragement of same by the McCain campaign, there’s a little nasty worry about the possibility of a racist nutcase with lots of guns and assassination on his mind.
I flew in here Nov. 5 and the radio and print news were full of Obama. People here are pretty excited and hopeful, and were all quite friendly and wanting to talk when I learned how to say “yesterday I voted for Obama in Austin, Texas” in Spanish.
Solidarity,
Leslie Cunningham
“Las luchas obreras/No tienen fronteras.”
@ kd, well said.
Also mind you the “signs that were burned” weren’t actually Obama|Biden signs according to the police report, they were pieces of computer boxes.
It turns out the whole thing was a misunderstanding.
Here’s the results of the investigation and a letter that was mailed to all baylor students, faculty and parents.
http://www.baylor.edu/lariat/news.php?action=story&story=54583
Did you even bother to follow up on this story? The police determined it wasn’t a noose. Good Job not being bias! Democrats are so awesome and perfect in every way!