Guard, Police Impose Calm in Resort City in Wake of Riot by Vacationing Students

Heavily armed National Guardsmen and policemen enforced a strained Labor Day calm Monday in Virginia Beach as loud and joking black university students strolled and drove down Atlantic Avenue in an almost defiant show of exuberance.

Although the mood had changed greatly from that of the previous two nights, police still had some clashes with students Monday night. After a false fire alarm was set off at one hotel, police, leading dogs on leashes, came to clear students from the sidewalk in front of the hotel. In the confrontation, which lasted less than a half-hour, three students were arrested and one person was reportedly injured.

But by midnight, most students had already checked out of their hotels and driven out of the city, vowing to return next year whether the people of Virginia Beach liked it or not. Many obviously would not. As the lines of cars moved slowly out of the city, Tim Mudge, a Virginia Beach resident, told a television reporter: “I think it’s a shame what they did to our town.”

A festering controversy remained over whether the roots of the rioting and bloodshed lay in the lawlessness of some students or in the excessive zeal of the police.

Jack W. Gravely, president of the Virginia chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, condemned the looting of stores by students on Saturday night but was even more vehement in his denunciation of the police for clearing students from several blocks of Atlantic Avenue on Sunday night.

“At the time the police moved in,” Gravely said, “the students were not looting, breaking or milling in the street.”

He said the police reaction would have been different if the students had been white.

“Their response was to confront the students from a position of power,” Gravely said. “The Virginia NAACP strongly condemns the overzealous, overpowering and overreactive actions of the Virginia Beach police.”

But, Gravely, added: “That is not to say that they did not have a right to protect property and persons.”

NAACP officers and students have said that they felt unwelcome in the city and had been harassed by police officers. Gravely said that the trouble broke out because students “felt squeezed” by police and “felt a need to show discontent.”

But Virginia City Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf said the police had moved on the students only to stop “lawless behavior in the streets.”

She called it “a controlled response.” All of those arrested had been released by early Monday morning, she said.

At a news conference Monday afternoon, city officials played police videotapes of the looting. But the tapes did not show police officers clearing students from the streets with riot batons Sunday morning and Sunday evening.

Eyewitnesses said that the violence began after thousands of students, dancing and mingling, clogged Atlantic Avenue early Sunday morning and blocked an ambulance that was trying to assist a 20-year-old man who had been injured in a fall from the fourth floor of the Kona Kai Hotel.

Police officers tried to clear a path, triggering pent-up anger, several students said, at the city’s lukewarm welcome for the black fraternities and alleged petty harassment by police.

There were scuffles, then someone broke a window. “As it got nastier, people started getting into it, they started breaking windows,” said Richard Ancrum, 14, of New York City.

The weekend toll was two dozen injured, at least 260 arrests, 400 police citations and scores of shops looted and damaged. It was by far the worst trouble experienced by the beach resort as a result of the gathering of young black university students here during the last few years. The students, mostly members of black fraternities in Eastern universities, call their annual weekend Greekfest.

The scene on Monday afternoon was an odd one. National Guardsmen in riot gear still stood in the street. Riot policemen walked from corner to corner along Atlantic Avenue, the main street of shops and resort hotels. A helicopter whirred overhead. The windows of many restaurants and souvenir shops were boarded up, as if they had been shattered by a hurricane.

Yet the streets were crammed with celebrating young people, coolly trying to prove that nothing could sully their Greekfest. They looked, in fact, like any other cluster of loud college students at a frolic in America, showing off and kidding one another and shouting professions of love and propositions at the most comely among them.

Many of the college students wore T-shirts that proclaimed both defiance and pride in Greekfest. “We are back” and “Black by popular demand” said two popular Greekfest shirts. Several shirts featured likenesses of Malcolm X, and one showed Malcolm X with a rifle and a quote from him: “By any means necessary.”

The crowds on Monday were far smaller than the mass of 100,000 students that the police had tried to clear on Saturday night.

Two men, ages 25 and 28, suffered gunshot wounds, and a third man was injured in a fall from a hotel balcony. The circumstances of the shootings are still unclear.

No weapons were fired by policemen or members of the National Guard, Oberndorf said.

The troubles raised many questions, because Virginia Beach, a city of 250,000 people, perhaps 90% white, does not usually have such large numbers of blacks at any one time.

And black students were insisting that police officers had harassed them long before the trouble erupted late Saturday night.

There had been some tension at last year’s Greekfest, and there were reports that merchants had asked the city for more police protection this year. The numbers of students also swelled this year when compared with those who came to Greekfest last year.

The rioting occurred in a year in which many educators have reported a growing tension between the races on university campuses, with an alarming increase in the number of instances of overt racial discrimination.

In a similar gathering of black university students at Jones Beach in New York in July, violence also occurred, ending with three people injured by gunfire.