Black students call out racism at A&M
Concerns, experiences of intolerance resurface at College Station campus
Joseph Collins was headed to his summer job on Texas A&M’s main campus in early June, taking the walk he does every day, when a car slowed beside him.
A white man, who appeared to be around Collins’ age, stuck his head out of the car window and yelled an expletive and the N-word. Collins, an African American man and a second-generation Aggie, was taken aback.
“I haven’t had any bad experiences (at Texas A&M) until that incident,” said
Collins, who reported the incident to university police.
The flagship at College Station, a rural setting about 90 miles north of downtown Houston, has long struggled with a reputation of not always being a welcoming place for African American students. The campus, nicknamed “Aggieland,” is predominantly white, with Black students making up only 3 percent of the student body and on the decline. Surveys have ranked its student body as among the most conservative in the country.
Four years after students and alumni took to social media to publicize racist comments, such concerns are coming to the surface again. They were sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an African American man who died in the custo
dy of Minneapolis police, and nationwide protests about police violence toward Black people.
Hundreds of A&M students and generations of alumni have shared their experiences on social media using hashtags such as #RacismAtTAMUFeelsLike and #hateisthehiddencorevalue.
Last month, Infinite Tucker, a student and hurdler at Texas A&M, posted a video in which he said he was peacefully protesting the presence on campus of a statue of Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross, a Confederate general who went on to serve two terms as Texas governor before becoming president of what would become Texas A&M.
An older white man whom Tucker was debating asked the Black athlete whether he was an “Aggie or a Blackie,” he recalled.
“If you find me a Black person that has never experienced this, I can 100 percent guarantee that they’re lying,” said Gerald Daigle, a 2016 A&M graduate who is also African American.
The university’s chancellor, John Sharp, said in a statement to the Houston Chronicle that the experiences shared on the hashtags were “heartbreaking” and “unacceptable.”
“Racist behavior should never be tolerated. The law may not allow us to expel students who use ‘free speech’ as an excuse to spew hatred and racism, but we do not have to let racist conduct and actions go unchallenged,” Sharp said. “Racists are not welcome at Texas A&M.”
Sharp pledged his support for two initiatives: a race relations task force and a commission to consider the future of statues, monuments and buildings. Sharp also announced last month that the system had launched a $100 million scholarship fund to make its 11 institutions more diverse and “look like Texas.”
Few would argue that the main campus of A&M, founded six years after the end of the Civil War as the state’s first public institution of higher learning, looks like Texas yet.
According to Census Bureau estimates for last year, Texas was 41 percent white, 40 percent Latino, 13 percent Black, 5 percent Asian and 1 percent American Indian or Alaskan Native.
For the fall 2019 semester, A&M’s main campus was 55 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Asian, 3 percent Black, 2 percent multiracial and less than 1 percent American Indian or unknown. Roughly 8.5 percent were international students.
A&M also has campuses in Galveston, McAllen and the nation of Qatar. And the A&M system as a whole is far more diverse, with Black students, for example, at 11 percent.
The university previously acknowledged that A&M needs to narrow disparities between races and ethnicities in retention and graduation rates, and stated in a diversity report several years ago that students had reported harassment and subtle insults.
‘Triggering memories’
Daigle, who studied industrial engineering on three academic scholarships, vividly remembers trying to adjust to a campus culture in which he was often the only Black person in class and mistaken for an athlete.
One day, in passing, he overheard someone say, “I can’t believe they actually let (n-----s) here.”
Daigle said many of his memories of A&M are positive, but he said racism is part of the campus experience for many students of color, particularly Black students.
“It’s still a very good ol’ boytype school,” Daigle said. “It’s one of those things where you can always feel it.”
Raisha Smith, a 2013 graduate who is also African American, said recent events and the hashtag movement brought back her own painful memories of feeling marginalized on A&M’s campus.
“We bury the racism once we graduate and try to forget it and mask it with the traditions and our love of the university,” Smith said. “But now that we’re in this moment … it brings (it) back, triggering memories.”
University President Michael Young last month announced several steps aimed at improving diversity on campus, including tripling the physical space of its Department of Multicultural Services, recruiting more Black students and those from underrepresented communities, and launching the race relations task force. As part of a “Stop Hate” campaign, Young has encouraged the campus community to report troubling or hateful acts through a university website.
“It is time for a unified approach on how we address the representation of people who contributed to Texas A&M throughout our history and how we want to shape the expectations and behavior of our community to stand firmly against racism,” Young wrote in a letter.
But some aren’t convinced these moves will lead to changes in the racial climate.
“We’ve been an institution that has been perceived as conservative and not diverse for over 100 years,” Smith said. “When you look at the diversity numbers, has the needle even moved?”
In fact, Black enrollment since 2016 has dropped from 2,261 to 2,042 — roughly a 10 percent decrease.
Smith recalled being excluded from campus study groups, as well as conservative students throwing eggs at a large poster of candidate Barack Obama in 2008. As president, Obama visited the campus the following year for a forum on public service with former President George H.W. Bush; several hundred people turned out to protest Obama’s policies.
As one of the few Black student leaders, Smith said she witnessed how her group events and dates were disregarded by other organizations — and how many students of color took refuge in the Department of Multicultural Services, one of the few places they felt they could go and truly be themselves.
Off campus in College Station, a city that is only 8 percent Black, Smith recalled being stopped several times by police, having her car searched without cause and being harassed by strangers while walking down the street. On Thursday, the Texas A&M System announced efforts to analyze racial profiling data from police stops statewide.
To Black historian and educator Maco L. Faniel, a 2002 graduate who has worked to diversify the campus, A&M’s recent initiatives feel very “wash, rinse and repeat” and don’t get at the heart of institutional racism there. Despite the university’s efforts, hashtags venting frustrations about racism on campus crop up year after year, and interest in white supremacist ideologies exists.
Alt-right activist Richard Spencer spoke on campus in 2016; he was invited again in 2017, but the event was canceled after a white supremacist rally he helped organize in Charlottesville, Va., led to violent clashes that left dozens injured and one dead.
“Black students and other students of color will tell you this is a great institution, but built into this system and institution is a history of racism that the institution refuses to reckon with,” said Faniel, 39.
Faniel has urged the university to come to terms with its racist history and better honor the contributions of Matthew Gaines, a former slave who helped to found A&M as a Black state senator during Reconstruction. His online petition has 463 signatures.
Beyond statues
Young announced in June that his office and Sharp, the chancellor, had together donated $225,000 toward creating a statue to honor Gaines. Student organizers reached their $350,000 fundraising goal last month, according to the Bryan-College Station Eagle.
Faniel also supports removing the Sul Ross statue — a monument that has recently been the subject of protests by many students, including Aggies quarterback Kellen Mond. A change.org petition calling for the removal drew more than 25,000 signatures last month.
“White Aggies don’t want that to be removed. The removal of that statue threatens their identity as a white person and a white Aggie,” Faniel said.
In a strongly worded June letter to the Battalion, A&M’s student newspaper, Sharp wrote that Ross “had NO ties to white supremacy” and said that neither the flagship nor Prairie View A&M University, the state’s first public historically black college, would exist without Ross. (Prairie View A&M was founded in 1876 as as separate institution for black students).
“Lawrence Sullivan Ross will have his statue at Texas A&M forever, not because of obstinance, but because he deserves the honor with a lifetime of service to ALL TEXANS and ALL AGGIES,” Sharp wrote.
In a Facebook Live conversation last month, Sharp said the conversation on campus should be about more than statues.
“We ought to be looking at why people of color feel uncomfortable on campus,” Sharp said. “We ought to be looking at what our faculty and staff look like.”
He continued, “Our goal is to create a comprehensive look, put all the dirty laundry out there. … Let people see it, and prevent it from happening again and certainly lessening it.”
Erica Davis Rouse, a 1995 alumna and vice president of the university’s Black Former Student Association, said she was encouraged by the actions of A&M leaders.
“There just needs to be further conversation, and I’m so grateful for (Young) taking the bullets,” Rouse said. “Even though some of us feel like it’s a good start, there’s already people who think he’s gone way too far.”
Rouse said she experienced uncomfortable moments on A&M’s campus, but her experiences growing up in cities such as Galena Park and Pasadena — where she said bias and microaggressions were “par for the course” — prepared her. She said it was concerning that she was the first Black person some A&M students had ever met, but it also made her feel that she should stay.
“It was important for my presence to be on campus and for certain conversations that come up, for them to have a potentially different voice,” she said.
As a young Black woman, Rouse created spaces and took part in activities that felt safe. After being the only Black person on Texas A&M’s dance team, she founded “Fade to Black,” an African American dance company on campus. More recently, after seeing a decline in Black student enrollment and the lack of African American alumni returning to campus, she founded the Aggie Impact Gala, a scholarship initiative that raises money for Black students.
Last year, the inaugural event raised more than $100,000, mostly in small donations, for Black students of any socioeconomic background and drew African American alumni who had not “stepped foot on Texas A&M in decades,” Rouse said.
Smith, the 2013 graduate and former student leader at A&M, tried to connect Black students and alumni through Aggie Big Kick It, a homecominglike weekend for alumni, current and prospective students, and a program that invited prospective minority students for a weekend on campus, led by college students of color. The program was eventually dissolved, Smith said.
While Rouse is hopeful about changes at A&M, Smith — now a graduate student at Rice University — is less optimistic.
“We love our university,” Smith said, but “our university should be pouring into us as much as we are pouring into it.”