EAST LANSING, Mich. - The campus of Michigan State University has been rocked by recent acts of racial intimidation directed toward black students. The student body at the state's largest university made their voices very loudly heard on Tuesday night that these acts will not be tolerated.

"The incident that really jump-started this movement was an incident at Akers Hall where someone wrote 'No Ni**ers, please' on a door of a young lady's room," said Mario Lemons, the president of the MSU Black Student Alliance (BSA). "The residence life staff told us not to talk about. Of course, someone took a picture of it and sent it to one of us."


The picture set off a firestorm on campus and online, even starting the hashtag #MSUBlackUnity on Twitter. An estimated crowd of 1,000 MSU students of all races filed into Conrad Hall for a town hall meeting on the issue of racial intimidation on Tuesday night.

"We put it on Facebook and Twitter and started a dialog about it," said Lemons. "From that came more stories of other people going through things on campus."

These incidents included other racist messages being scrawled on doors; outright physical acts of racial intimidation; and the initial incident of a black doll being hung from a beaded noose in a chemistry lab shortly after the school year began in early September.

"There are people overtly saying the n-word," said Lemons, a senior from Detroit, majoring in education. "People telling other students that they don't belong here, saying that they only got here because of Affirmative Action. Very unwelcoming things done to black people on campus."

The Akers Hall incident was directed toward Tinisha Sharp. Sharp was leaving her dorm room to go to chemistry class last week when she saw the slur written on the dry-erase board. Since she was the only black student living in the room with three other students, it was very clear the message was directed at her.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," said Sharp, a sophomore from Detroit. "It was very surprising to see a message like that. I really thought this type of discrimination had been ceased by this time. But I guess not."

Sharp moved that same day from Akers Hall to another dorm across campus. According to the MSU registrar, of the over 47,000 students that were enrolled at MSU in 2010, 3,175 -- or 6.7 percent -- were black.

MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon issued a statement, via e-mail, to the MSU students and faculty on Tuesday afternoon. It said that the university was investigating the matters and that she is concerned by these actions.

"The University supports free speech including the use of words that are offensive to most in our community," Simon said. "However, given the nature of these incidents, the MSU police were immediately contacted and the matter has been turned over to them to investigate, not only as a form of vandalism, but also as potential ethnic intimidation. I am personally awaiting the outcome of the police investigation."

"In my many years at MSU, this rash of incidents at various parts of the campus in such a short timeframe is unmatched, is extraordinarily troubling and creates a legitimate concern that all of us must address."

BSA feels that the University administration stood idly by and let these incidents happen. MSU has no explicit policy on racial intimidation, and generally handles any incidents internally.

http://www.thegrio.com/education-1/m...timidation.php