Drop the Charges and Stop the Harassment Against the Hampton
University Students Against the Bush Regime!
Students who act to Drive Out the Bush Regime, especially when
they remain firm in the face of police and administrative threats,
are heroic. They must be defended. Their example must be
followed.
Students at Hampton University participated in nation-wide
outpourings in over 70 places and 200 schools on November 2nd to
launch of a movement to drive out the Bush regime. In the course
of organizing, they were followed by campus police, targeted by
video surveillance, and forced to turn over their ID’s for the
simple act of distributing literature. That these students were
targeted for the content of their activities is demonstrated by the
fact that other students routinely post unauthorized flyers (often
with scantily clad women advertising parties) without harassment.
On Friday, November 18th, 3 student organizers were issued
summons
for a hearing on over possible expulsion the following Monday
morning, giving them no time during the working week to contact
lawyers, parents, or campus administrators. After hundreds of
phone-calls from around the country to the Dean’s Office, their
hearing was postponed. Days later, 4 more students were issued
summons and campus police shut down an interview being filmed by
the local media, attempting to prevent their story from getting
out.
The attacks on the student organizers at Hampton University, a
historically black college with a mostly Republican administration,
is an ugly harbinger of the “dissent-free” future the Bush regime
is trying to lock into place. These attacks are part of a pattern
of repression against high school and college students nation-wide
on November 2nd that disproportionately targeted black, Latino and
other oppressed students.
A standard cannot be set where the President of the United
States
can stay on vacation as a major city’s poor and black people are
left for five days without food or water, where influential friends
of this President are allowed to float out genocidal notions of
aborting all black babies to bring crime rates down, and where the
President’s policies of “abstinence-only” in the face of an
international AIDS pandemic threaten millions of lives, but where
students who dare to act to end this are silenced and expelled from
school.
As it says in the Call for The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the
Bush Regime, “This will not be easy. If we speak the truth, they
will try to silence us. If we act, they will to try to stop us. But
we speak for the majority, here and around the world, and as we get
this going we are going to reach out to the people who have been so
badly fooled by Bush and we are NOT going to stop.”
We, the undersigned, demand that the Hampton University
administration to drop all charges against, cease their political
harassment of, and to apologize to these students. These students
must not be expelled! We also call on students at campuses
nation-wide to send statements of support, and to join, strengthen
and support the movement to Drive Out the Bush Regime because the
World Can’t Wait!
Eleanor J. Bader, adjunct Kingsborough Community College & Pratt
Institute, Brooklyn, NY*
Jennifer Baumgardner, author, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism,
and the Future
Rosalyn Baxandall, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY Old
Westbury*
Edget Betru, Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative - Center for
Constitutional Rights*
Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara*
Carl Dix, National Spokesperson, Revolutionary Communist Party
Michael Eric Dyson, author, Is Bill Cosby Right?
Beva Eastman, Associate Professor, William Paterson University
and
New Jersey City University*
Judith Ezekiel, Universite de Toulouse le Mirail*
Bea Kreloff, director, Art Workshop International*
Allen Lang, National Student Organizer, The World Can’t Wait –
Drive Out the Bush Regime!
Efia Nwangaza, Executive Director, African American Institute
for
Policy Studies & Planning
Katha Pollitt, writer The Nation*
Sonia Jaffe Robins, freelance writer and editor
Alix Kates Shulman, writer
Sunsara Taylor, writer for Revolution, Co-Initiator of The
World
Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime!
Lise Vogel, Professor Emerita, Rider University*
Barbara Winslow, Brooklyn College*
Laura X, Women’s History Library*
Howard Zinn, Historian and Author
*affiliations for identification purposes only
Demand that the 7 students facing expulsion be cleared of any
disciplinary measures and that the intimidation and punishment for
student protest stop!
Call the Dean of Men (Woodson Hopewell Jr.) at 757-727-5303, the
Dean of Women at 757-727-5486.
To add your name, email:
youth_students@worldcantwait.org and
specify how you would like to be identified.