Indianapolis Recorder - April 25, 1987
1 2019-03-12T23:56:23+00:00 Stanford University Press af84c3e11fe030c51c61bbd190fa82a3a1a12824 1 1 Indianapolis Recorder - April 25, 1987 plain published 2019-03-12T23:56:23+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
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April - Archived Posts
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Click on date to view post:April 1, 1950: Political April Fools’ Day wishes in Pittsburgh Courier.April 2, 1966: Pittsburgh Courier sports editor Bill Nunn Jr. on Texas Western championship basketball team.April 3, 1954: Cleveland Call and Post reports on death of nightclub owner and numbers racket king Bennie Mason.April 4, 1968: The front pages of black newspapers after assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.April 5, 1933: Hamilton Lodge Ball and drag performances in New York Amsterdam News.April 6, 1972: North Carolina Mutual insurance advertisement in Los Angeles Sentinel.April 7, 1959: Ads for Lydia Pinkham’s tablets and topics to relieve menstrual and menopausal pain in the Philadelphia Tribune.April 8, 1939: Norfolk Journal and Guide on controversy over Louis Armstrong’s swing version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”April 9, 197: Hank Aaron’s record breaking 715th home run covered in the Atlanta Daily World.April 10, 1909: New York Women’s Business Club featured in Baltimore Afro-American.April 11, 1936: Chicago Defender on a Howard University student bet gone wrong.April 12, 1947: Jackie Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut covered in the black press.April 13, 1948: Philadelphia Tribune reports on killing of World War II veteran George Serrell, who refused to sit in a Jim Crow train car.April 14, 1979: Disco advertisements in the Cleveland Call and Post.April 15, 1939: Account from a fugitive from a North Carolina prison in the Baltimore Afro-American. Guest post by Daniel Arico, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 15, 1939: Marian Anderson’s landmark performance at Lincoln Memorial reported in Chicago Defender.April 16, 1904: Anti-profanity campaign reported in The Appeal. Guest post by Caroline Arkesteyn, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 16, 1959: Francois Andre’s male fashion show at Hollywood’s Moulin Rouge in the Los Angeles Sentinel.April 17, 1915: Ohio Governor Frank Willis blocks exhibition of racist photoplay, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Alex Bishop, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 17, 1943: African-American women protest racial discrimination at Bechtel-McCone-Parsons airplane modification plant in Birmingham, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Lillian G. Page, MA student in history at the University of Memphis.April 18, 1942: Eleanor Roosevelt calls for equality in speech at the Hampton Institute, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Connor Callahan, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 19, 1958: New York Amsterdam News on dangerous apartment conditions. Guest post by Mark Speltz.April 19, 1960: Chicago Defender on racial discrimination and student organizing at Indiana University. Guest post by Samuel Carter, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 20, 1929: Chicago Defender on teen runner killed after winning race. Guest post by Trent Cork, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 21, 1953: Washington Afro-American on discrimination in the U.S. Army. Guest post by Katelyn Culver, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 22, 1950: Housing discrimination in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Austin Demers, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 23, 1960: White woman in Alabama beaten for dating black men, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Thomas Esposito, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 24, 1954: Chicago Defender on discrimination in Baltimore hotels. Guest post by Mark Fowler, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 25, 1987: Indianapolis Recorder on black student demands at Purdue University. Guest post by Derek Gilman, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 26, 1930: Indianapolis Recorder on movie theater discrimination. Guest post by Ethan Hill, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 27, 1974: Chicago Defender salutes Duke Ellington on his birthday. Guest post by Luke Johnson, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 28, 1962: Police brutality reported in Indianapolis Recorder. Guest post by Samanvay Kasarala, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 28, 1988: Cleveland Call and Post endorses Jesse Jackson for President.April 29, 1904: Iowa State Bystander reports on practical joke gone wrong. Guest post by Robert Kinser, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 30, 1960: Student protests in Greensboro, North Carolina reported in the Chicago Defender. Guest post by Samuel Kramer, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.
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April 25, 1987
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Guest post by Derek Gilman, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.
On April 25, 1987, the Indianapolis Recorder ran a story about black Indiana lawmakers responding to an issue of racial harassment at Purdue University, “Black Lawmakers Seek Solution to Racial Uneasiness at Purdue.” After the university’s president released an “unacceptable statement” following a cross-burning in front of the black cultural center, members of a black fraternity presented the administration with a ten-point plan to “combat racism at Purdue.” These points included: having the president of the university take a more proactive stance on racism; adopting “official procedures for addressing complaints of racial harassment”; ensuring full legal action would be taken against people caught committing an act of racial harassment; the formation of a task group to study racism at Purdue; a more active police force with respect to investigating acts of racial harassment; a larger recruitment of minority students, faculty, and staff; programs to retain minority students, faculty, and staff; more funding for minority programs; mandatory diversity courses in the curriculum; and the administration’s sponsorship of a “forum on the divestment of university funds from South Africa.”
Parts of this article stand out as having a more comfortable place in a bygone era, with the issue sparked by a burning cross. It is shocking enough that more than once when reading through the article one might forget that they’re reading an article from just under thirty years ago! The article speaks to the same style of racism in the North that Martin Luther King Jr. found so difficult to fight in Chicago twenty years prior, with a similar sense that, while it may not be doing anything that is overtly racist and illegal, Purdue’s administration still fostered behavior that set people back based on their ethnicity with implications of the administration allowing for less punishment than normal for racial harassment and a police force that spent less time than warranted on cases involving racial harassment.
Interestingly, while a few of the points raised in the article are well defined and obviously useful, with the clear demand that racial harassment be met with the full force of the law or the clear request for a larger recruitment of minority students, staff, and faculty (something that would definitely create a more diverse university and would likely help make the university a more inclusive place), others are either vague (like the request for official procedures to address complaints), feel useless (the request of a token “proactive stance”), or confusing to an uninformed reader who didn’t know that Purdue was in some way investing in South Africa during apartheid.
The most interesting thing about these demands is not that a few elements in their plan contain vague rhetoric that is hard to determine success from, but that it is very similar in style to other lists given by modern protestors of similar issues. When compared to the list of demands posted last year on www.thedemands.org by Purdue students protesting racism at their university, you see extremely similar demands calling for: more diversity in students and faculty, a call for a diversity-based curriculums, more effective policing, and (of course) a proactive stance from the president. To me this is the part that is actually interesting, if not shocking: despite thirty years, black students at Purdue (and at universities around the nation) are still fighting for many of the same things. This creates a fantastic image of what life was like in twentieth-century minority communities by showing that it was unsettlingly similar to twenty-first century life. Sure it is less obvious (there were not any cross-burnings on campuses last year), but the same problems exist, for better or (much more likely) for worse.