The Black Awareness Council Rally and Incendiary Racial Speech

The original article that ran in the Technician on September 12, 1992 about the UNC Black Awareness Council Rally.

Simmering racial tensions on State’s campus exploded in late September of 1992 when a rally at the Dean Smith Center at UNC-Chapel Hill calling for a free-standing Black Cultural Center resulted in a series of divisive student protests and debate on NC State’s campus.  The Black Awareness Council at UNC Chapel Hill, which organized the rally, took an overtly black power stand and used black power symbols like the Black Panther and Malcolm X to rally African American students to their cause.  In addition, the rally hosted speakers like Spike Lee and Nation of Islam minister, Rev. Tehaldi Abdul Muhammed, who used the theme of “revolution” to engage the crowd.[1]

This column by Steven Crisp published on September 23, 1992 was the immediate cause of the Brickyard burning of the Technician.

Jeffrey Rom's column ran right below Crisp's incendiary column about the BAC and contributed to the reasons African American students had for burning the Technician.

The rally caused knee-jerk backlash for conservative columnists and students at NC State because it challenged the very assumption that racism no longer existed in any substantive way on campus or in society at large.  For columnists like Steven Crisp and Jeffrey Rom, the angry protesters who yelled black power were wholly beyond comprehension and were a breed of radical terrorists who wanted nothing more than “black superiority.”  These columnists could not understand why the African American protesters of the Black Awareness Council would use the language of black power.  Crisp and Rom felt personally attacked by the Black Awareness Council’s allegations of racism, and that personally sense of attack contributed to their anger at the rally.   They could only compare the Black Awareness Council and the protesters at UNC Chapel Hill to white hate groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood.[1]  Their dire warnings of race war and use of hate group comparisons enraged African American students at NC State University at a moment when racial consciousness because of the large UNC Chapel Hill rally, ran high.