Once again, we have breaking news that an HBCU campus received a bomb threat. This morning (2.25.2022) students, faculty, and staff at Elizabeth City State University were evacuated from the campus after receiving the bomb threat. This is not okay. We are angry.
These threats are not jokes nor harmless pranks, but real possibilities based on the historic and ever-present violence perpetrated against Black people. Though I focus on Black people here, threats and acts of violence have been and are still being perpetrated against people in a host of other communities including people indigenous to this land, various peoples of Asian descent and heritage, disabled people, diverse faith communities, our many Latinx groups, and LGBTQ people.
Pick any place and any time since the first colonizers entered this territory we call the United States, and where there have been people or communities identified as Black, there have been acts of violence. Defacing of visual art expressions as we recently witnessed outside the gates of Shaw University; attempts to ban texts written by Black authors; sundown towns; the massacres of Black people that occurred in places like Wilmington, NC (1898), Tulsa, OK (1921) and Rosewood, FL (1923); police-initiated killings of Black youth and adults; lynching’s; and the assassinations of Black parishioners, notably in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite these acts of terrorism, Black people continue to surmount the violence and live in the most productive ways possible. And this includes the challenge of economic violence against our institutions.
As a recent Forbes article stated, “A 2018 paper by four business school business professors found that on a typical $30 million bond, a Black university would have to pay underwriters $35,000 more than a white university. The paper found another striking fact: ‘The effect is three times larger in the Deep South, where racial animus remains most severe.’”
Although the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia dominates media reports (and this is indeed an important story), we still must shine light on the cowardly acts of white supremacists and their supporters as they attempt to break our spirit.
We won’t be banned – our HBCUs will remain in existence, and we will continue the sacred promise entrusted to those of us who are educators and administrators at these institutions to fulfill the charge found in Shaw’s mission statement: “To advance knowledge, facilitate student learning and achievement, to enhance the spiritual and ethical values of its students, and to transform a diverse community of learners into future global leaders.” We will take our righteous anger and do as Audre Lorde directed in her essay, “Uses of Anger” to express and translate this anger into “action in the service of our vision and our future…[as] a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.”
Submitted by Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson – Dean of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities at Shaw University
