November 18, 2007

Nooses At CSUF: Civil Rights Leaders Want Federal Investigation

KNBC-TV

LOS ANGELES - Civil rights leaders demanded a federal investigation Friday into a display of nooses found in the Cal State Fullerton quad area prior to a campus rally against hate. Nooses Appear On CSUF Campus "We were certainly appreciative of Cal State Fullerton. The president there immediately said we're going to do everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen again in Fullerton. But that's not enough," said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable.

"It's not one campus," Hutchinson said. "It's not one place, It's not one time. It's 18 to 19 states at last count. It's in a number of cities. It's in a number of workplaces and campuses, so it demands national action." Five nooses spray-painted orange were found Nov. 7 hanging on a clothesline alongside T-shirts displaying anti-hate messages. The display appeared just prior to a "Rally Against Hate" demonstration sponsored by the university's Association for Intercultural Awareness. "It was a smack in the face that something like this could happen in central Orange County," association chairwoman Sumanah Mithani told the Los Angeles Times. "Incidents like this are not going to be tolerated anymore, and we're going to speak out. This was an attack not just on African Americans, but all ethnic groups on our campus." A week after the incident, an estimated crowd of 150 gathered during a second rally held on Wednesday afternoon where students were free to speak.

During Wednesday's protest, students of different racial backgrounds, including some from Cal Poly Pomona, UC Irvine and UCLA, showed up in orange shirts expressing their opposition to the orange nooses. Campus police were also in attendance to ensure a peaceful protest. "It's an incident, it's not a crime. We do document incidents that happen on campus. Actively, we have nothing to go on, no lead, nobody to talk to," campus police Lt. Fred Molina told CSUF's Daily Titan newspaper. Molina told the newspaper that he hoped Wednesday's rally would motivate people who may have witnessed the incident share what information they know. "What we're asking is for the community to call us, give us some leads so we can find which way to go with this. Students are bound by certain rules of conduct on this campus, so if we get lucky and find out who did this, they will be dealt with in that form."