Racial Tension Erupts in Melee at UCLA

Voting booths were upended, ballot boxes grabbed and blows exchanged at UCLA Thursday as more than 200 students disrupted an undergraduate presidential election in a protest that campus leaders said was the outgrowth of months of racial tension.

The demonstrators, angry that their candidate, a Latino, was disqualified from the race for not having enough college credits or sufficient grades, stormed into voting locations on campus, overwhelming a handful of campus police and attacking voters and student poll-watchers, according to witnesses.

There were no immediate arrests, and none of the injured required hospitalization.

The melee followed a heated rally on the campus at Meyerhoff Park, at which the disqualified candidate, Lloyd Monserratt, and other minority student leaders accused the campus administration and student leaders of racism for disqualifying Monserratt as a candidate.

“They knocked over all the ballot booths, the whole place was completely trashed and it was just unbelievable,” said Bruce Cowan, the Interfraternity Council second vice president, who threw himself over a ballot box near Bruin Plaza to stop the crowd from taking it away. “It was just a mob, and they were all going for the ballots.”

Cowan, one of several students who was attacked, said he was “in a chokehold from somebody behind me that I couldn’t see.”

“Then the guy holding me got punched in the face, and I turned around and somebody punched me in the face. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

Jason Weiss, a junior who went to Cowan’s aid, said he was hit “by a blow so hard I was thrown about 5 feet,” and a friend near him was caught in a chokehold by a student who refused to let go until other minority students persuaded him to stop.

“(My friend) was pretty shocked and pretty fazed, but he went on to class after about 20 minutes of just resting. This was all almost unreal,” Weiss said.

Monserratt said Thursday that he did not condone the violence and said he left before it erupted. He said he would have been unable to stop the violence because “I’m a leader . . . not a dictator.”

“This event was being used as an outlet for (student) frustrations,” over racial problems, Monserratt said.

“We have not seen a real commitment (from the administration) to diversify our faculty, our programs, our administration,” he said.

Nkuli Mustafa, outgoing chairwoman of the Black Student Alliance that represents 1,500 black students on campus, said she had urged people at the rally to sign their ballots and then rip them up as a protest. She said the violence began when rally-goers approached the Westwood Plaza ballot box area and student election officials started swinging their elbows to protect the ballot box.

“Their elbows hit some people, and from that point on, all I saw was people going to blows,” Mustafa said. “At that point I backed off and pulled my people back.”

Minority, gay and other student groups have voiced anger for several days over the disqualification of Monserratt, who won the primary election for president three weeks ago but was deemed ineligible by the Undergraduate Student Assn. Council because it was found he did not have enough college credits nor a sufficient grade-point average. The council said it based its decision on the administration’s refusal to grant retroactive credits to Monserratt.

Monserratt has hotly disputed those findings, saying the college lost paper work that proves he took an independent study class for which he received an A-grade that would have given him sufficient college credits and the 2.0 grade-point average required under campus rules.

Bob Alvarez, a senior who joined Thursday’s demonstration, said that the administration should have expected trouble.

“We played by the rules and because of a technicality, we were disenfranchised,” Alvarez said. “Now we’re not going to play by the rules anymore.”

Mike Meehan, a major vote-getter in the student body presidential primary election who was considered a possible front-runner in Thursday’s election, said he watched as the rally of students grew more and more boisterous, finally streaming toward a nearby polling booth at Ackerman Union, the student union building.

“They have been directing a lot of violent talk toward me in recent days, and I felt I would be in danger when I saw how hot things were getting,” Meehan said. “Usually in campus elections there is a minority ticket and a non-minority ticket, but it’s never come to this point before.”

A reporter covering the rally for the Daily Bruin newspaper said that just before the melee broke out, one speaker told the crowd, “I don’t know about you, but where I come from, when you get mad at someone, you hit them.”

The Daily Bruin reporter, Eugene Ahn, said about 40 people from the rally headed for Ackerman Union, but the crowd grew to more than 200 as groups began attacking various polling areas and fighting with other students.

At one point, students occupied Murphy Hall where the chancellor’s office is located, kicking a hole in the wall before marching to Campbell Hall, said Darlene Skeels, a UCLA spokeswoman.

Skeels said that because voting was interrupted during the fracas, Thursday’s election will be nullified.

Several students said the Monserratt issue was just one of many that have angered minority and leftist groups on the campus recently, including the failure of the college administration to grant tenure to an Asian assistant professor who is popular with students.

A march was held on the campus by several student groups Wednesday to protest racism at UCLA, and the Asian professor issue was cited as an example, students said.

Moreover, campus administrators in October reprimanded a Latino student group because some of its leaders had allegedly roughed up student Armando E. Azarloza, a member of the Undergraduate Students Assn. leadership who was accused by activists of siding with white student leaders over campus issues.