Dillard students react to David Duke on HBCU campus

7th November 2016   ·   0 Comments

By Kaelin Maloid
Contributing Writer

On the left side of the Public Science Building at Dillard University there are a set of doors. They are glass doors, typical for a university. What was not typical, though, was what happened on either side of those doors on Nov. 2, at a historically Black university.

On one side, inside the safety and protection of the building, U.S. Senate candidates answered questions to a mostly-empty auditorium for the debate. At the last minute, broadcaster RayCom Media, who owns WVUE Fox 8, the hosts of the debate, decided to close the event to the public. The main reason: David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, was one of the candidates at that debate. He had polled 5.1 percent to qualify for the debate. And while he made for an uncomfortable fixture during the debate, outside the auditorium, he was equally not welcomed.

“This is 2016! Wake up, our children should not have to go through this,” one protester shouted, his fist raised.

What started as peaceful, but boisterous protests by students and their allies two hours before the debate started, turned just as the debate kicked off taping at 7 p.m. By 6:57 p.m. the protesters pushed themselves to the doors, where four Dillard University police officers were guarding the entrance. They demanded to be let in. They demanded to “let Black intelligence in.” There is a brief struggle with police officers and protesters. A minute later, the protesters are being pushed. They push back. There is a scream — a woman — and someone swears. Next, there is chaos.

Everyone gasps as pepper spray consumes the air.

“Your tuition just went to protect David Duke and arrest a student,” one Dillard student shouted as the students came to terms with being pepper sprayed on their own campus.

When it was announced Duke would be speaking in the U.S. senate race debate being held at this historically Black university, students immediately protested his presence. They said they emailed their university president, Walter Kimbrough. No response. And then they sent him a physical letter. Still no response. So they even tweeted him. Kimbrough, a well-known Twitter user, still didn’t respond. Kimbrough had said in an earlier interview that the university had already contractually agreed to the event, and at the time, did not know Duke would be included. However, the explanation didn’t satisfy students and raised more frustrations than answers.

“DU will be in compliance with our demands,” said Brielle Kennedy, a senior at Dillard.

Kennedy was later detained by Dillard’s police department after trying to force her way into the building. The New Orleans Police Department put out a statement after the event saying it tried to assist the campus police with crowd control, that its officers did not use pepper spray and that any arrests — of which there were reportedly six — did not result in charges.

But for students, it was a second violation of the day’s events, with Duke’s presence being the first.

The closed door or the stares of police officers didn’t stop them. They even asked to raffle off tickets for seats into the auditorium, and still, no access was granted to a building many of them enter each day for classes.

“We want to make our voices heard,” said Faith Flugence, a junior at Dillard.

Kimbrough, who never showed his face during the protest, took the time to respond to a few tweets. He put a disclaimer that he did not call New Orleans Police Department on students. He made sure to clarify that he didn’t say Dillard students were the problem. When asked to clarify why Duke was on campus, Kimbrough tweeted, “you have my number.”

“When you speak and your president doesn’t listen, that’s called a dictatorship,” said local activist Pat Bryant. “You have to agitate the president, get up in his face.”

Bryant continued that when he was a student, this would have never happened. In the sixties, when he was in school, he and his peers would not have let something so offensive happen.

“You can’t let anybody deter you from having a voice on this campus,” Bryant told the students. “Time after time, your administration will leave you out. And that’s when you have to fight to get back in.”

Despite the chants of his students, Kimbrough never did show his face; however, his wife, attorney Adria Nobles Kimbrough made a brief appearance behind the closed doors, her back turned to the protesters.

His non-presence students called a lack of leadership. Some protesters even called their university president a “sell-out.”

“He sold our birthright for a check,” said Malcolm Suber of Take ‘Em Down Nola, a group that lobbies and protests for the removal of Confederate monuments across the city of New Orleans and who stood side by side with the students that day. “Our president is a sell-out.”

Some spoke of what the university symbolized for their parents and grandparents at a time of racial inequality in the state and across the country. Local artist, Michael Quess Moore of the poetry group Slam New Orleans, said Kimbrough did not deserve his respect. Moore said his mother graduated from Dillard, and that it “burned him to his heart” and “made him sick” to have Duke on the campus.

But in the midst of the chaos and slight students felt, not everyone was angry at Kimbrough.

Student Government Association president, Tevon Blair, worked to remind his peers not to target their protest at the university’s president, but instead at the individual, Duke, who had violated the very nature of their campus by stepping foot onto it.

“This is not the David Duke show,” Blair said. “This [debate] is to let us know who else is running.”

Despite his attempts to calm his student body, they were still angry. They chanted for the university president, not the SGA president.

While the debate was supposed to educate the public about the issues at stake in this election and to the candidates’ platforms, it was overshadowed by what happened outside those closed doors.

Students were not alone in being excluded from the debate. U.S. Senate candidate Derrick Edwards, the only minority quadriplegic in the race, released a statement the following day expressing his dismay at being barred from entering the debate. “Every candidate should have the opportunity to have their platforms heard,” Edwards said.

Edwards said that RayCom discriminated against him and as a result, he’s pulling his advertising. Edwards is also encouraging other companies to rally behind him by pulling their advertising as well. “It’s horrible that I’m not given the opportunity to let voters hear from me.”

When Kimbrough finally spoke, when it was all over, about the national media circus the university found itself in, he returned to his usual platform, Twitter. He tweeted “#myDU pretty clear polling rigged as Trump would say for ratings. Any protests become part of reality show masquerading as news. #WakeUp.”

But his students were “#Woke” in a way their president didn’t intend. They had seen both exclusion and racist bigotry arrive at the very campus they consider a safe space for Black student education. And they were determined they would not be silenced by Duke, or Fox 8, or their president, or pepper spray, or the NOPD, and certainly not a closed glass door keeping them out from letting their voices be heard.

This article originally published in the November 7, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.