Newspaper Ad Challenging Reparations for Slavery Ignites a Debate About Free Speech at Brown U. By ANDREW BROWNSTEIN
Providence
An advertisement attacking the idea that black Americans should be paid reparations for slavery led student activists at Brown University on Friday to trash roughly the entire press run of the campus newspaper in which the ad appeared.
The action capped tense days of protests, meetings, and demands that are likely to continue as students examine the issues of free speech and race behind it.
In a quick, well-organized action, representatives of 15 ethnic and political student organizations removed nearly 4,000 copies of The Brown Daily Herald on Friday morning from various delivery points on the campus. One student left the Herald's offices with the remaining batch of Friday's issue but was chased down by two office managers, according to Brooks King, the paper's editor-in-chief.
The editors took to the campus Saturday, hand-distributing a reprint of the Friday issue. They are also taking unprecedented security measures. They plan to guard delivery sites and carry disposable cameras to catch possible thieves. The outer door to the newspaper's offices has been locked; unknown visitors must provide identification.
The controversy results from the latest provocation by David Horowitz, a 60's radical-turned-conservative who delights in tweaking the liberal orthodoxies he once espoused.
Mr. Horowitz, author of The Death of the Civil Rights Movement, and head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, in Los Angeles, took an issue with little popular support -- reparations for slavery -- and turned it into a personal crusade for free speech on college campuses.
The ad, titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too," suggests that despite the horrors of slavery, black Americans are better off economically today that black Africans. It calls reparations "one more attempt to turn African-Americans into victims" and explains the "debt blacks owe to America" for helping end the slave trade.
Most campus newspapers -- including The Harvard Crimson -- have refused to publish the ad. Another, The Daily Californian, at the University of California at Berkeley, ran a front-page apology after facing a series of vociferous protests.
It was the student newspaper at Brown, known for its liberal student body, that became the first Ivy League university to publish it -- last Tuesday.
"There was never a vigorous debate about whether we should run the ad," said Mr. King. "We have never refused to run an ad based on political content."
He went so far as to say that the decision would have been the same even if the ad had declared that the Holocaust never existed. Groups that dispute that the Holocaust took place have taken out ads in some college newspapers in the past.
"Horowitz's ad is so ridiculous, really," Mr. King said. "It's hard to take seriously his implication that blacks should be thankful to whites for enslaving them."
The Herald gave a full page this week to opinion pieces from the ad's critics.
But that wasn't enough for many student activists. They demanded that The Herald pay $725 -- the equivalent of the price of a full-page ad -- and give them a full-page in the paper to rebut Mr. Horowitz's arguments.
Some coalition members said the ad fit a pattern of poor coverage of minority students by The Herald. A sore point is that no black or Latino students serve on the paper's board or work on its staff.
In a statement released on Saturday, they took aim at the newspaper's independence from Brown, which it won after fights with the administration during the Vietnam War. "We find this newspaper masquerading as a university paper, is in fact simply a private corporation," the statement said. "The crux of our actions is to create awareness about our lack of a Brown community paper." The paper's defenders say that its budgetary independence from the university allows it to print controversial articles without fear of cuts.
Members of the opposition coalition were generally refusing to be quoted by name, as their leaders spent the weekend debating their legal and public-relations strategies.
"We're under a press gag order," said one student, who referred a reporter to a coalition leader.
Outside Brown's Third World Center, where much of the planning for the protests occurred, another student said: "We're afraid of repercussions. I'm a senior. I don't want to be ostracized."
Leaders of the coalition told The Chronicle that they preferred to remain anonymous to show that they "speak with one voice," or to be referred to simply as "persons of color."
"This paper does not allow us to have a voice," said one student. The student denied that the removal of the papers was theft or an issue of free speech. "The paper is free," the student said. "Students could read it on the Web."
Sheila E. Blumstein, interim president, condemned the removal of the newspaper this weekend, saying that "such behavior is unacceptable within the Brown community."
The Herald's editors plan to continue printing and delivering their publication under guard. Mr. King said they planned to seek a restraining order against four students who were photographed taking papers on Friday.
Meanwhile, the editors recently received words of encouragement from the one person who arguably has profited the most from the debacle -- David Horowitz.
"You and your editors are to be commended for your courage," Mr. Horowitz wrote in an e-mail note. "This battle against campus fascism -- because that's what it is -- is as crucial as any I can think of."