Cal State Racial Incidents Spur Task Force Creation

Two racially related incidents at Cal State Fullerton last month have prompted the university to form a task force to study interracial relations on the campus, university officials said Monday.

One of the incidents involved a black woman student who was pushed to the ground and insulted by two whites, according to T. Roger Nudd, vice president for student services. “This is an extremely unusual incident for our campus,” Nudd said. “I can’t remember anything close to this happening on our campus in the (15) years I’ve been here.”

The second incident involved the distribution on campus of a flyer, promoting an upcoming student talent show, which contained a drawing of a black-faced Al Jolson-type figure.

Nudd said the task force looking into the incidents will be composed of a mix of administrators, teachers and students. It will report its finding to Nudd, and he said he hopes to have the task force in operation by the fall semester.

The drawing and shoving-insult incidents became campus issues last week when black-student groups formed a coalition protesting the episodes. The coalition said it would try to prevent other racial insults and provocations.

Nudd said the shoving incident occurred on April 24 when a white man and white woman approached the black woman as she was walking to class near McCarthy Hall and pushed her to the ground.

“The student was walking by herself and didn’t see the couple until she was shoved to the ground,” Nudd said. “The man said something like, ‘We don’t want any niggers here,’ ” Nudd said.

Nudd added that an Asian student who apparently rebuked the white man for pushing the black student was himself insulted. “The (white) man told the Asian student, ‘We don’t want any Chinks here, either,’ ” Nudd said.

The white couple did not strike the Asian student, and they reportedly disappeared after the incidents, Nudd said. They are being sought by campus police.

The black woman student, whose identity is not being made public, was not injured in the shoving incident, Nudd said. He added that the two whites who knocked her down haven’t been identified, and it’s not known if either is a Cal State Fullerton student. “The (victim) said the man was older and might not be a student,” Nudd said.

The woman victim filed a complaint with the campus police, Nudd said, and those officers are trying to locate the white couple.

“We only have a vague description of the two suspects,” said Capt. Dan Byrnes, assistant director of public safety for the campus police. Byrnes said that if his officers can locate the pair, “we’ll arrest them for assault.’ He added that so far there have been no leads, and he said he believes that both suspects are not students.

“We’ve turned up nothing that indicates they’re students,” he said. “It may be that they just came on campus this one time and left.”

In the wake of the April 24 episode and a controversy last week over the campus drawing, Nudd said he is creating this week “a task force to improve interracial sensitivities on campus.”

The black-faced drawing was unrelated to the April 24 shoving incident. Nudd said the drawing was in poor taste but was simply done without thought. “It (the drawing) is a good example of how we hope our sensitivity task force can teach people how to be more thoughtful,” Nudd said.

“This is something that is very rare for our campus,” Nudd said of the two incidents. He noted that Cal State Fullerton students last year became outraged when they learned, through an expose in the student newspaper, that former Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger was taping racial-separation messages for cable television at campus-based studios. In the wake of numerous student protests, the cable television firm removed the Metzger filming from campus.

Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb is black, and the campus for years has had black history observances and celebrations. Black enrollment, however, is very low. Currently, there are only 570 blacks out of a total enrollment of 23,400 students. There are currently about 2,400 Latino students and about 3,000 Asian students on the campus, university officials said. Whites are the largest ethnic group of Cal State Fullerton students, currently accounting for about 16,500 of the total enrollment.