Writer responds to fraternity members' comments

     Editor’s Note: The day before the plane crash, there was a scary on-campus racial incident that occurred after an intramural football game involving an-all white fraternity and the school's black student organization. There’s a chapter in the memoir November Ever After which provides a detailed account of this episode. There are members of Kappa Alpha who are not pleased with what was written in the book about their fraternity as it relates to the racial confrontation. In today’s blog entry, I respond to the four KA members whose comments appeared in yesterday's blog.


       Race relations on the Marshall University campus suffered a severe setback when blacks and whites got embroiled in a nasty physical altercation on a Friday the 13^th in November of 1970. During the melee, three white males were beaten to the point of having to be admitted to the hospital.

      The Friday fights erupted after a bitterly-fought intramural playoff football game involving the all-white Kappa Alpha Fraternity and Black United Students. The sparks started to fly when three KA pledges ran through a crowd of blacks while waving the Confederate flag.

      There’s an assumption that all the blacks who participated in the fight that day were members of BUS. Not true. A sizeable portion of the blacks who attended that intramural game were from the local community and were not college students.

      The KAs were known for proudly displaying the Confederate flag at public events. For most black people, the Rebel flag served as a grim reminder of the inhumanity of slavery and the vestiges of racism in the Deep South.

       Marshall’s black students made it known that they considered the “Stars & Bars” to be offensive for those reasons. Previous pleas to the MU administration to ban the presence of that flag at school-sponsored events produced no favorable results.

       When those pledges ran through the crowd waving the Rebel Flag, it was viewed by blacks as taunting. The act was also perceived as being deliberate.

       So, was the violence justified?

       No it wasn’t.

       The same can be said for taunting.

      Waving a Confederate flag in front of an angry group of blacks was ill-advised. It just goes to show how a bad decision can bring about the worst of consequences. In this case, nobody (blacks and whites) did the right thing. One wrong did not justify the other.

       As things turned out, race became a non-issue the following night when Marshall’s plane crashed, killing all of the seventy-five passengers on board. At that time, we all learned first-hand that the tragedy was not a black thing; it was not a white thing; it was a death thing, and death does not discriminate. Death is color blind.