LEXINGTON Ky.
A Southern university is trying to defend its image after the student newspaper published a cartoon of a black man being sold at auction and a racist death threat was scribbled on the door of a black student leader's dorm room.
Earlier this month, the cartoon in the University of Kentucky's newspaper, the Kernel, sparked peaceful protests around campus. It showed a black student, bare-chested and chained, being auctioned off among three fictional fraternities: Aryan Omega, Kappa Kappa Kappa and Alpha Caucasian.
Just when the furor was starting to die down, a junior recently elected as "Mr. Black University of Kentucky" returned to his residence hall to find his door vandalized with the message: "Die," followed by a racial slur.
University officials condemned the cartoon and the threat, and President Lee Todd spoke Thursday to the state's Commission on Human Rights, which held a special meeting on campus to address the incidents.
"They were ugly and should not have happened," Todd said.
Todd insists the school had started to make significant progress in race relations. Black enrollment on the campus broke a record this year, and the school retained black students at a higher rate than their white classmates.
Yet Josh Watkins, the student whose door was vandalized, and black leaders contend the university might not have advanced quite as far as enrollment suggests.
"It's a history of segregation," Watkins said. "In the day and age we live in, you would think people would try to improve that image. It's almost like you can bait someone to get here and then leave them out to pasture to fend for themselves."
Kentucky, a border state during the Civil War, wasn't as slow to desegregate as some universities in the Deep South, although it took a lawsuit for the first graduate student to be admitted in 1949. Black undergraduates arrived five years later.
However, the school's claim to national fame a basketball program that leads the country in all-time wins didn't sign its first black player until 1969, 20 years after the first black graduate student enrolled.
