hearing voices-
A letter, May 8, Kent State
To the editor:
In order to prevent distortion of the facts pertaining to recent events at KU, to spread the views of KU students to all Americans and to expose responsible citizens to the facts so that they may write their Congressmen, the Congressional Action Committee requests that all KU students address a letter to their home town newspaper informing them of the recent activities at KU and the motives behind those activities.
The Congressional Action Committee believes that most KU students are opposed to Nixon's installation of soldiers in Cambodia. If you share this belief write your hometown newspaper telling them why you want peace and why you have supported this strike for peace. This is one way every student can do something constructive with the remainder of the semester.
We strongly urge that each student write a personal letter to his respective hometown newspaper; however if that is not possible there is a form letter below.
Committee for Congressional Action Lawrence Velvel, professor of law and chairman
To the editor:
As a student of the University of Kansas and a resident of the community I feel that it is necessary to explain the activities at the University during the past week. We as students of the University of Kansas, feeling it imperative that the students of this university be given the opportunity to express their opposition to the war in Indo-China, have decided to allow students to discontinue classes, if they so desire, or to engage in activities designed to secure an end to the war and to protest the senseless death of four students at Kent State University.
Contrary to news reports, students are remaining on campus not only for classes, but to work toward an end of the war. Please support the McGovern and Cooper-Church Bills.
Sincerely,
To the editor:
KU students, faculty, and administrators may be proud of the events of Friday, May 8 in all respects except one. Instead of creating a real University community, a community held together by bonds of mutual respect, concern, and affection, the 12,000 or so students gathered in Memorial Stadium coldly, clearly, and apparently with finality severed relations with an important and vital part of their black student membership. That such a move was taken in ignorance and haste, as the result of a hidden, perhaps invisible racism makes the move doubly tragic.
Racism as an issue on this campus, like racism anywhere, has never been a popular subject with most whites. At Thursday's ad hoc meeting in Hoch Auditorium, Greg Thomas' attempt to raise the issue in connection with the present situation here and elsewhere met with no response. The events Friday, confusing though they were, help to explain why. The scenario is relatively simple:
a) Campus black activists, already alienated by a continually decreasing interest in black problems generally and the questions surrounding the role of black students particularly on the part of the nation and its small number of activist students, appear at a University Convocation advertised as a significant event in a "Day of Alternatives." The blacks have an alternative to suggest.
b) The Chancellor of the University, in a delicate tactical position with a proposal that must be approved if the University is to be able to function at all, refuses the blacks permission to present their alternative until after the vote on alternative modes of action is taken. The Chancellor's apparent reasoning being that any discussion, of other plans, however little likelihood there might be of their adoption, would (or could) detract from the support his program would receive, and his plan, to carry weight with Topeka as well as with the University at large, must have substantial support.
c) After the vote is taken, the blacks are offered the microphone following a small struggle for the P.A. system just prior to the vote. The blacks refuse the offer since the vote on alternatives has already taken place. They begin to leave the field.
d) Some students begin the cry "Let them speak," but of course it is too late. Ignorant of this fact, the mass of students become angry and abusive, shouting taunts and epithets at the blacks as they leave the field.
e) A white takes the microphone and attempts to apologize to the blacks for the obvious (to him) absurdity of the situation but he is booed down by his fellow students and physically attacked by one of them.
f) A well-known law professor then takes the microphone and praises the Chancellor for his physical courage and praises this country for its tradition of free speech. He is cheered.
g) The blacks gather at the southeast corner of the stadium and say to themselves over and over; "I don't understand; how can he say that?"
Call it "lack of communication" if you care to. Call it a misunderstanding. Call the basic situation "unfortunate" all you want. But don't call those cries of "Nigger," "You'd use that stick if you wasn't chicken," "Get your black ass off our field," anything but what they are—racial hatred. The look of intense, utter hatred on the face of the young man who attacked me was real, and it was frightening. And it is not isolated on this campus or in this country.
The war in Indochina will end some day and we will be left with our neglected problems. We will have to find the answers to embarrassing questions. We live in a society where our chief executive requests "Welfare Cadillac" be played for him on a State occasion, where the Chancellor of this university finds it amusing that a group of sophomoric Silent Majority types decides to ridicule the plans and aspirations of a majority group that has experienced 300 years of physical, mental, and emotional slavery, where a Supreme Court nominee has for his credentials a white supremacy speech and the letters of incorporation for a segregated country club, where white professors on this campus pay lip service to the ideals their disciplines promote and join private swim clubs with explicit segregation/exclusion clauses, where a black can get five years for stealing a loaf of bread, but a realtor gets a $500 fine for refusing to sell a home to another human being because his skin is the wrong color.
My time is too short to mention the other inequities with which we should be familiar: the problem of the over-recruited under-educated black athlete, the crime of North Lawrence, and so on. I suppose I really want to remind my fellow whites at this university to go easy on the celebration over their new-found "community," because it isn't one yet. It will not exist until black students are recognized to be exactly what they are: our Brothers and Sisters in the fullest and most non-rhetorical sense. The University Community which has been so highly touted on this campus will not be a reality until we are all aware of our responsibility to the common good, partners in a common brotherhood, and participants in a common search for truth and justice.
Jon C. Suggs Lawrence graduate student
Griff & the Unicorn
$ \textcircled{c} $ David Sokoloff 1570
Now is the time to question our "great" American heritage. Ours was not a noble revolution—its most salient feature is that it was an insurrection instigated by regicides and "hippies"; people who felt that their current system was wrong—this same situation exists today in America.
It is today that we have to question the great American "whitewash" everything which has been told and taught to us from the time we were infants. Think about General George Washington, the Father of Our Country, who was in more than one way our father. Think about the economic advantages of the War of 1812. Think about the racism of the Civil War. Think about the Spanish-American war in which we bombed our own ship, the Maine, in order that we could gain territorial and economic priorities in Cuba and the Philippines.
To the editor:
On March 5,1770,a group of colonists threw snowballs at a delegation of British troops guarding a Customs House. The troops panicked and fired upon the "insurrectionists"-eleven Bostonians were killed or maimed.
Think about Kent State. Now, think about the principles on which this country was founded. Think about the events which precipitated the American Revolution. Think about the Boston Massacre.
Think about World War I in which the great militaristic America paid her "debt" to her European forefathers. Think about a group of politicians who defeated Wilson's League of Nations and allowed World War II to occur. Think about the genocide of World War II. Think about Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia Southeast Asia—the World. We can no longer be the world's policemen. We can no longer lay down human lives for further
economic and political exploitation.
We are not right. We have to question those "self-evident truths." We have to question a nation's leaders who, when our Bill of Rights was first proposed, defeated a provision which would have allowed exemption from the military service to all those "religiously scrupulous of bearing arms." The real solution to the problem of conscientious objection to war is the elimination of the war itself.
Are we going to follow passively while the blind lead the blind? Now is the time for action, militant non-violence. It is the time to change that American heritage of white-wash, racism, religious prejudice, poverty, militarism, economic exploitation, and biases of all sorts. Now is the time for our own edification, a knowledge which really counts, a process by which we can try to make things right, or die trying.
We have to question today's legislators who are playing politics with our future—leading us ever closer to World War III and total nuclear extinction for the entire human race. We have to question our Senator Shultzes, Governor Dockings, and President Nixons.
The time is NOW! In a short letter such as this, I cannot list but a few of our problems. You must think: we are at the nadir of our existence. Think about Kent State, Vietnam, Cambodia, the judicial excellence exhibited in the Chicago Seven Trial... think about the FIRST American Revolution. Today is indeed a day of alternatives.
As the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat said:
The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair. To turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.
Kelly Pendergrass Kansas City junior