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.