ST. CLOUD, Minn.
Bisharo Iman hoped college in St. Cloud would be different than attending high school. There would be no more taunts of “Go back to your country” aimed at her Somali dress, no more being slammed into lockers.
“I did get away from it for a while,” says Iman, a junior business major at St. Cloud State University.
That was before a frightening six-week stretch in November and December when vandals carved or scrawled more than a dozen swastikas and other racist images on campus walls, elevators and bathroom stalls.
The spate came as a setback to this central Minnesota university, which has spent more than $1 million, thousands of hours and untold energy in recent years trying to undo its reputation as hostile toward racial and ethnic minorities, an image so entrenched that some refer to the surrounding town as “White Cloud.”
“Do I groan and say, ‘Goodness, not again?’ Of course I do,” says Dr. Earl Potter, president of the school situated in a quiet, overwhelmingly White city of about 60,000 on the Mississippi River that has seen an influx of Somali immigrants. “But you have to look at our country, and how we still struggle with some of our more unfortunate legacies. These are complicated issues for everyone.”
As a new term starts, St. Cloud State has responded with a series of new initiatives, including an all-day unity rally, aimed at reassuring minority students that they are safe and easing the concerns of faculty, donors and potential students.
The first two swastikas appeared in mid-November, carved into the wall of a computer lab in the Student Cultural Center, a popular gathering place for minorities among the 17,000 students at the university, the state’s second-largest.
“The fact they did it here, you feel more targeted,” Iman says, reclining on a couch with friends in the bustling center.
About a dozen reports followed, including several more drawings of swastikas, a Ku Klux Klan hood and a burning cross. Some of the more disturbing allegations came from a minority student who says a group of young White men spit at her and another gave her a Nazi salute.
