“Civility and Civil Rights:” The Black Cultural Center, Segregated Space, and the Possibility of Interracial Dialogue.

The first Crisp column from the fall of 1992, this column denounces "punks" who are defacing the Free Expression Tunnel and is part of a longer trend towards more and more inflammatory columns.

The Loss of Civility

In the fall of 1992, racial and political tensions ran high on campus in response to a sense of impending polarization.  Part of this polarization was driven by a series of increasingly inflammatory columns written by Steven Crisp.  In his first column of the year, Crisp denounced a group of “punks” that he accused of defacing the Free Expression Tunnel with Satanic symbols.  His writing in this column verged on the hysterical as he raged against “death lovers with no future.”  It is unclear which group he is actually referring to in this column and he falls back on simplistic and mean stereotypes to denounce “punks” as a vaguely defined group of nihilists.[1]  This column, along with other hysterical columns on all issues ranging from racial conflict, to women’s rights, to abortion, caused many students to write in protest to Crisp’s column.

This column by Crisp is a response to critical letters he received denouncing his more extreme columns.  He defends his conservative point of view and calls for his supporters to write in and support him. 

In response to criticism he received in Forum Letters in the Technician, Crisp published a defensive column on September 4, 1992.  Yet instead of apologizing for some of his more inflammatory columns and ill-chosen speech, Crisp angrily charged people who disagreed with him as a small, but vocal, minority on campus.  In the column, he claims that his sole purpose is to provoke dialogue and make people think and that he writes from Biblical and conservative point of view.[1]

This earlier, 1991 column by Leslie D. West is an example of the inflammatory racial language that can be found in many columns about race.

Crisp’s angry columns in the fall of 1992 may have been especially provoking because of his use of threats, juvenile hate speech, and simplistic stereotypes, but debates about race in the columns and Forum Letters section of the Technician had long suffered from a lack of civility.  For instance, the Spring 1991 controversy over the Ebony Man beauty pageant and the newly opened African American Cultural Center on NCSU’s campus provoked heated debate when Leslie D. West’s response to Nathan Gay’s column criticizing these events included phrases like, “You must be crazy, or at least misinformed.”[1]  However, the difference between the debates of the Spring of 1991 and the debates of the Fall of 1992 lay in students’ willingness to go beyond the pages of the Technician and onto campus with their protests.