Stirring Up ‘Uncivil Wars' On College Campuses
David Horowitz reparations ad campaign proves explosive

Several months have passed since the last campus protests erupted over a David Horowitz advertisement in college newspapers stating that reparations for American slavery is "a Bad Idea — and Racist Too."
But Horowitz, an author, activist and perhaps the nation's most visible and ardent critic of the reparations movement, is preparing to reenter the spotlight when his new anti-reparations book is released this month.
Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations and The American Idea, chronicles the origin of the volatile ad and the fierce "attacks" on his character that Horowitz claims he experienced while visiting campuses nationwide (see Black Issues, April 12 and May 24). Also it criticizes campus administrators and faculty for caving in to political pressures that Horowitz claims led them to speak out against the advertisement.
According to book excerpts the California-based Horowitz sent to Black Issues, the author says he became intensely interested in the reparations debate after he learned about a vote in Chicago in 2000. The city council there had passed a resolution favoring reparations for slavery by a margin of 46 to 1.
"Until then," Horowitz writes, "I had always regarded the reparations movement as an obscure fringe cause. The lopsided vote was a sign to me that something was changing."
Nine months before submitting the ad to college papers, Horowitz wrote about the reparations issue in a column for Salon, an online magazine. It was during Black History Month 2001 that the first ad appeared in the student paper of the University of Chicago. The ad titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea — and Racist Too" would be sent to 70 other college papers nationwide. Forty-three papers refused to run it, and editors on some campuses that ran the ad, including those at Berkeley, later apologized to readers. On some campuses, students protested by removing thousands of papers from racks and discarding them. Students said their goal was to prevent readers from seeing the ad, which claimed: