Don't mess with Texas ...

[Flashermac]

MLK Party Causes Uproar on Texas Campus

25 Jan 2007

 

 

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.

 

[elef]

MLK was a big butterfly.

[Flashermac]

Shhhhh!!! You get in trouble for saying that. (One of MLK's aides said he told him he had to have a woman every day.)

 

 

[Dali]

I can imagine what the student offenders are like. Good ole boys who've led a sheltered life and have never really known anyone outside their own race, religion and culture. They're just upset because rednecks don't have their own national holiday.

[chuckwoww]

They're just upset because rednecks don't have their own national holiday.

 

Don't they celebrate Abe Lincoln Day?

 

[Flashermac]

Abe Lincoln WAS a redneck!

 

p.s. He also told an African American group during the Civil War that "your people and mine can never live together" and advised them to move to Liberia or Haiti. Lincoln's good friend Ward Lamon, a Virginia born banjo picker, wrote after Lincoln's death that the man they were portraying bore only a slight resemblance to the friend he had loved.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Hill_Lamon

 

[chuckwoww]

Complex man obviously. Economics? Slavery? States rights? I still don't know what the Civil War was really about.

[Flashermac]

A couple of professors, Grady McWhiney and another whose name I can't think of, did several studies: "Attack and Die" and "Cracker Culture". They pointed out how the south was settled largely from Celtic or Celtic influenced areas of Britain, and the north by Anglo-Saxons. Their argument was that the Civil War was more or less a continuation of the Celt vs Saxon struggle from the old country. Remember that 4 slave states did not secede and that even U. S. Grant had once been a slaveowner.