The Towerlight, April 13, 1989

tl19890413-000 "Vol. 82 No. 21 ""Required Reading"" April 13, 1989 The ""Tower Published weekly by the students of Towson State University The Ugly Issue . by Michael Raymond Editor-in-Chief Racist papers pepper campus A lone wolf calls out eerily in the still night. Another answers from the distance and you're chilled. But you are not in the wild. You have not wandered into Alaskan tundra. You are on the telephone, listening to a recording on the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) hotline. Following the wolves is a man with a message�actually a variety of messages�available to Towson State University students since the hotline number was distributed anonymously on campus in mid-March. The recording sounds something like this: ""The James Brown gang will meet at (time and place deleted). Special operations make sure your infiltrators get in early. Local agents wait for instructions."" And on the movie Dead Bang, ""Little wimp Donnie Johnson and his negro friends save Coca-Cola land from white racists."" There are also remarks on the ""Zionist Occupation Govern-ment,"" white supremacist political campaigns, and provincial racist publications such as The Hammer in Hawaii. The WAR hotline number proliferated at Towson State Mon-day, March 13, when an unidentified white male passed through at least one academic building (Linthicum Hall), distributing WAR literature to students. Larry Hirsch, a student who received one of the papers, did not describe the distributor in ""skinhead"" terms. ""He had long blond hair and, I think, a brown leather jacket. He just looked like the average person from class,"" Hirsch said. Until this week, the Linthicum incident seemed isolated. But Friday, April 7 brought more racist literature to campus. This time a poster distributed by the Chi-cago Area Skinheads claiming ""THIS LAND IS OURS"" offered a P.O. Box ad-dress for B.A.S.H., (presumably Baltimore Area Skin Heads). In light of the surrounding circumstances�the recent race relations debate in The Towerlight, anti-apartheid week, today's racism forum in the University Union, and the administration's statement of intolerance toward racial attitudes�Uni-versity officials and student leaders are taking this activity very seriously. ""I really don't know what ought to be done,"" says Marion Hoffman, dean of stu-dent development. ""I'm torn between not wanting to give them more publicity and not wanting to ignore them and pretend it didn't happen."" ""It's frightening because of what people know about this group already. The very fact that they would put up the sign is suggestive of violence,"" says Hoffman. MD 21204 � THIS fil LAND / is OURS See WAR page 3 "