Summary: Joint Statement on Bomb Threats against HBCUs: A History of Domestic Terrorism
March 2022
The MLA Executive Council signed on to an American Historical Association statement historicizing and condemning the numerous bomb threats received by at least seventeen Historically Black Colleges and Universities in early 2022.
The statement says, in part:
- These crimes are part of a long history of attacks on institutions that serve the Black community as well as on the individual men, women, and children associated with these institutions. Violent intimidation directed toward Black Americans has a long and bloody history, and recent events suggest that these acts have spawned not only a hateful legacy but also a current, ongoing threat to the physical safety and emotional well-being of all Black Americans.
- The institution of chattel bondage had as its foundation physical violence or the threat of it against enslaved women, men, and children. After the Civil War, whites sought to replace the legal system of slavery with a form of social and legal control that relied on terrorism directed toward Black voters, school children and teachers, political activists, and anyone whose success or even mere demeanor appeared to threaten the imperatives of white supremacy.
- Whites committed horrific acts of violence intended to serve as a warning to all those who aspired to an education or sought to exercise their newly won rights as American citizens according to the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
- Today, the domestic terrorists issuing bomb threats against HBCUs hide behind the cloak of anonymity to instill fear in everyone connected with these institutions. The threats disrupt classes, upend the rhythm of the semester, and wreak havoc on the routines of everyday college life.
- Directed at pillars of Black higher education, the threats strike not only at the heart of the aspirations of Black students and the work of Black faculty and staff members but also at the ideal of higher education itself.
- The AHA condemns this latest in a centuries-old series of assaults on Black Americans and on the educational institutions that are integral to a diverse, free, informed, and open society.