Black Students Versus Campus Newspapers   

When a black student group at Evanston, Illinois' Northwestern University brought rap singer Sister Souljah to campus to speak about black empowerment last October, the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, was ready for a big story. Souljah had spoken at Northwestern three years earlier and her speech was peppered with anti-Semitic statements, which, to the delight of the Daily, provided weeks of fodder for the editorial page.

The Daily's coverage of the incident did not delight the campus' black students, however, and upon Souljah's return to the campus, the black student group sponsoring the event, For Members Only Black Student Alliance (FMO), did its best to create a news blackout by refusing to allow Daily reporters into the lecture hall.

When a Daily reporter sneaked around the FMO "security" check-in, his notebook was spotted and a police officer escorted him out. The reporter argued he had a right to be there since his student-activities fee had helped pay for the speaker. FMO officers countered that the Daily was irresponsible in its coverage of black students and had lost the privilege of covering the event.

The police officer eventually allowed the reporter to cover the event, but not before FMO coordinator Jimmie Sanders pronounced the incident "another example of white supremacism" to a booming ovation from the mostly black audience.

The Northwestern incident is just one in a chilling trend of strained relations between college newspapers and black student groups across the country. At the University of California-Berkeley last fall, 23,000 copies of the Daily Californian were confiscated by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary. At the University of Kentucky in Lexington last April, students lifted 11,000 copies of the Kentucky Kernel because of racial concerns. At Salem State College in Massa-chusetts, black students took 1,500 papers in February 1995 after the paper ran a story about black students arrested at a campus dance. At the University of Maryland in College Park in November 1993, 10,000 copies of the campus daily were stolen and replaced with fliers saying, "Due to its racist nature, the Diamondback will not be available today — read a book." And at Chicago's DePaul University two years ago, students staged a sit-in at the DePaulia, the campus' weekly paper, after editors refused to apologize for identifying two students arrested at a party as black men. Presses were stopped for two weeks as a result.

For campus newspapers, such incidents are black and white: Newspapers cannot be stolen and the press cannot be stopped or banned. But to the black student groups, the issue is black versus white: The mostly white campus media are hiding behind the First Amendment to avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes and misperceptions.

More than 20 race-
related newspaper confiscations have occurred on college campuses in the past five years, according to the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), an Arlington,
Virginia-based legal information clearinghouse for student journalists.

Taking newspapers hostage is intended as a statement to the campus media that coverage needs to reach beyond white perspectives. It's also meant to raise awareness of legitimate complaints by black student groups about biased coverage and careless mistakes.

According to FMO's Sanders, tensions often arise from small errors. The University of Maryland's papers, for example, were stolen after an article referred to Frederick Douglass as "Franklin Douglass" and called W.E.B. Du Bois' book, "The Souls of Black Folk," "The Sales of Black Folk." Northwestern's Daily ran a story last April about guest lecturer Leonard Jeffries that incorrectly identified him as a leader of the Nation of Islam.

"That's when it goes beyond a mistake," Sanders says. A goof-up for the newspaper is a racist assertion for others, he says.

Black students at the University of Pennsylvania got so fed-up with the Daily Pennsylvanian's coverage that they started their own publication, the Vision, to address black issues in a more "nonconfrontational" manner.

"The editors at the mainstream campus paper don't see that they're doing anything wrong," says Rasool Berry, a Penn sophomore and president of the Black Student League.

Since 14,000 copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian were taken in April of 1993, the paper has made special recruiting efforts to attract minority writers. But only a few minority students have joined the staff.

"We keep running into the same walls," says Mike Madden, managing editor at the Daily Pennsylvanian. "There is constant, low-level hostility."

If newspapers are serious about alleviating racial tension, they need to make a serious effort to diversify their staff and conduct sensitivity training, says Karen Hawkins, an editor of the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In an effort to bridge the racial gap, Hawkins edits a special multicultural section created four years ago called "Crossroads." But "Crossroads" hasn't turned out to be the quick-fix it was intended to be for the "notoriously bad reputation" the Illini has with black students, says Hawkins.

"On so many campuses, student newspapers have continued to be almost entirely Caucasian in their staff makeup," says Mark Goodman, director of the SPLC. "That alone perpetuates the impression that sometimes they don't understand the perspective of minority students."