S.C. School Drops Interracial Dating Ban

Bob Jones University dropped its ban on interracial dating Friday, a month after Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush’s visit to the school drew widespread criticism.

“As of today, we’ve dropped the rule,” Bob Jones III said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Friday night.

During Bush’s appearance at the fundamentalist Christian school last month, the Texas governor told his audience that he shared their conservative views. Bush later apologized for failing to criticize the school’s anti-Catholic views and racial policies during his visit to the Greenville campus.

“I’m pleased that they’ve changed the policy,” Bush said Friday while campaigning in New York. “Right after my speech, I spoke out against the policy. The university has made the right decision.”

The school banned interracial dating, although it started admitting black students after losing its tax exempt status in 1983 following a 13-year battle with the Internal Revenue Service that cited the school’s discrimination.

The school had defended the policy based on a biblical interpretation that God created people differently for a reason. The policy arose in the 1950s when an Asian family threatened to sue after their son, a student, almost married a white girl, a school spokesman has said.

“We don’t have to have that rule,” Jones said. “This thing is of such insignificance to us. It’s so significant to the world at large, the media in particular, why should we have this thing here as an obstacle?”

Jones said the school had a greater concern for its graduates than for keeping the rule. While extolling the virtues of the school’s graduates, he said, “But now we’re being defined as a racist school. That’s all the media talk about.”

Earlier Friday, the university used full-page advertisements in USA Today and South Carolina’s largest newspapers to answer some of the criticism directed at it.

Bush appeared at Bob Jones University shortly after he lost to Sen. John McCain in the New Hampshire primary. The South Carolina primary was looming at the time, and he went on to win in the conservative state.

After losing South Carolina, McCain’s campaign made “Catholic Voter Alert” calls in the next states, Michigan and Washington, to tell them of Bush’s visit to Bob Jones.

GOP candidate Alan Keyes, who recently spoke at Bob Jones University, said Friday night he thought lifting the ban was “a good step forward.”

“As you know, I’m married to an Indian American, so our marriage would have violated their own guidelines,” he said in a telephone interview. “I think this will help, so that the world will understand the real heart of Bob Jones University and the people I met there and the people I know there. I think that’s the shining truth that will come through.”

Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley said through a spokesman: “It’s about time.”

The university, in the Appalachian foothill city of Greenville, has 3,500 students. It has long established itself as a bastion of fundamentalism.

Jones III, president since 1971, and his father, Bob Jones Jr., who died in 1997, have been sharp-tongued about those they believe have abandoned the strict teachings of the Bible, including Billy Graham and the pope. Graham should not have reached out across denominations for his crusades, Jones III says. And rather than meet Pope John Paul II when he visited Columbia in 1987, Bob Jones Jr. said he would “speak to the devil himself.”

His grandfather, an evangelist and son of an Alabama sharecropper, was a product of the Bible-thumping, Jim Crow-era South. Bob Jones founded the school in 1927 in College Point, Fla. He later moved it to Cleveland, Tenn., then brought it to Greenville when the Chamber of Commerce offered to buy 170 acres of land for the school.

Today, Bob Jones University offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and 55 graduate degrees, most of those religious or musically oriented.