Destruction of Pro-Black Displays

In January 1986, Dartmouth students constructed several shanties on the Green to protest Dartmouth’s economic support of the Apartheid in South Africa. At the time, roughly 30% of Dartmouth’s endowment was invested in enterprises that conducted business in South Africa. The shanties were a way of bringing attention to and expressing opposition to Dartmouth’s South Africa-linked investments and the country’s extreme racial segregation and despotic white supremacist regime. Within weeks of their construction, a group of twelve Dartmouth students with sledgehammers–the majority of whom were with the Dartmouth review–destroyed the shanties while activists slept inside.

In Fall 2016, students created a Black Lives Matter display in Collis student center, which featured shirts hung to represent the numerous Black lives lost to police brutality. This display was promptly defaced and torn down by other Dartmouth students soon after its enactment. The demolition of this exhibition spurred the larger Black Lives Matter protest on campus that followed soon after.

We chose to compare these two events because they are both violent expressions of hateful intolerance at Dartmouth. Both displays served to draw attention to larger movements and broader examples of systemic racism, and both were savagely demolished by the peers of the students who created them. It is also necessary to contrast the school’s responses to both situations. The shantytown destructors were temporarily suspended, but President McLaughlin also ordered the complete removal of the shantytown from The Green in February of 1986. On the other hand, there was no judicial prosecution of the perpetrators regarding the #BlackLivesMatter display. Even with 29 years of separation, Dartmouth students who attempt to shed light on broader examples of systemic racism must suffer violent backlash from their counterparts, while the institution fails to support their initiatives.

For further reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/12/us/dartmouth-suspends-12-for-attack-on-shanties.html