Duke Professors and the 610 Protests

Video from WRAL TV - The potbangers protest

Note! Italicized paragraphs were taken from Ekstrand Lawsuit & The Duke Lacrosse Team Lawsuit. The photos and videos are all available freely on the Internet.

With Durham PD Cpl Addison's inflammatory & false remarks on WRAL March 24 2006, the Duke community composed of professors, employees, Trinity Park residents, and local activists joined together to start a series of daily protests which propelled the dubious story into a national event by skillfully using organizing techniques. Voices of calm who called for restraint until the charges could be examined were thrown by the wayside. The Duke PD knew the charges came from a mentally troubled woman and had expressed their opinion it would go away.

However people were at work creating a metanarrative that fit the mantra of race, class, and gender which had become the centerpiece of these professor's academic agendas. It was promoted as the perfect storm composed of town and gown issues with the allegations buoyed by the false reports of injuries coming from Duke University Medical Center. Duke professors who should have followed the code of conduct in their faculty handbook threw it aside and began an vitroilic attack on the entire Lacrosse Team. It was a great opportunity! Brodhead and his Administration who were assured the charges were most likely false by their own PD failed to stop the Duke professors and their employees.

"But once you tell one lie, you've got to tell another and another and another. You're caught up in a web of lies."

Durham attorney Butch Williams
Herald-Sun, The (Durham, NC) March 31, 2006

Duke Faculty Encourage Campus Protests Against Lacrosse Players

250. As the Duke administration was thus rebuffing the parents' requests for support for their sons, a large number of Duke faculty members, other Duke employees, and students immediately rushed to condemn the lacrosse team. Over the weekend of March 25-26, they began a prolonged public campaign of harassment and organized protests falsely condemning the lacrosse players both for committing a heinous crime and for attempting to cover it up. They also called upon the Duke administration immediately to condemn the lacrosse team, to cancel the lacrosse season, and to impose disciplinary sanctions on the team, its coach, and its members.

251. On the evening of March 24, Duke English professor Faulkner Fox sent an email to numerous persons associated with Duke, calling for a protest at the lacrosse game. Other Duke professors attended the protest as well. Fox later told the media: "The students need to realize they live in a community, and people are going to talk back if they do something, or potentially do something, that is disrespectful to women." Protesters holding "DON'T BE A FAN OF RAPISTS" signs arrived at the lacrosse field prior to the scheduled Georgetown game. The game, as noted above, was canceled by Brodhead shortly before it was scheduled to begin.


252. Professor Fox, in addition to calling for the "DON'T BE A FAN OF RAPISTS" protest at the Georgetown game, also helped organize a "candlelight vigil" at 610 North Buchanan on the night of March 25. On the night of Saturday, March 25, over 250 people—including Duke faculty members, staff, and students—gathered outside the house at 610 North Buchanan.


253. Gathered in front of the house, the crowd chanted "shame," and "you can't run, you can't hide," and other hostile slogans. Members of the crowd told local media that every attendee of the March 13 party should be expelled from the university.

254. The same night, the protesters moved from 610 North Buchanan to a nearby duplex located at 1105 and 1103 Urban Avenue. This house, owned by Duke University, was occupied by lacrosse team members William Wolcott, K.J. Sauer, and Erik Henkelman. The protestors surrounded the front of the house and banged on the windows, screaming "Shame!" Wolcott called Larry Moneta, Duke's Vice President for Student Affairs, and asked for help. Moneta said there was nothing he could do.


255. At approximately 6:10 a.m. the next morning, Sunday, March 26, Duke personnel and students, gathered outside the lacrosse team's residences and engaged in a so-called "pot-banging" protest. They banged on pots and pans, trash bins, water jugs, and empty beer cans. The crowd wielded signs reading "CASTRATE!!", "You can't rape and run," and "It's Sunday morning, time to confess." Other signs stated: "Real men don't protect rapists," "Don't rape and run," "Give Them Equal Measure" and "Get a Conscience, Not a Lawyer." Sam Hummel, Duke University's Environmental Sustainability Coordinator, shouted into a megaphone: "The community consequences for this action, I guarantee, will range far beyond the legal consequences you will face." The crowd chanted: "Who's protecting rapists? They're protecting rapists! So who are the rapists? They must be the rapists!" The protest lasted at least two and a half hours.

Sam Hummel, Duke's Sustainability Director, chanting

475. The menacing slogans were compounded by “speakers” who addressed the crowd and the home of three of the lacrosse team captains through a bull horn. The Potbanger- Speakers variously asserted that a rape occurred and demanded a confession. The statements of Potbanger-Speakers, many of whom were University Professors, Administrators, and students, included, for example:

(1) “We are making this kind of noise because we are standing in solidarity with the women who have gone through this horrible atrocity.”

(2) “Wake up! Wake up! The Sun is up! It’s Sunday morning! Time to confess!”

(3) “We want the members of the Duke Lacrosse team to come clean.”

(4) “They haven’t been convicted, but 30-something kids are remaining silent.”

476. Several Durham Police and Duke Police Officers were standing a short distance away, watching the mob in front of 610 N. Buchanan, and did nothing to intervene. One officer appeared to be taking pictures.

256. Upon information and belief, Hummel played an instrumental role in the protests, helping to organize them by, among other things: sending one or more emails calling for a protest, creating and distributing a slanted and harassing "fact sheet," attending the protest and directing multiple signs (including "Get a Conscience, Not a Lawyer") at the lacrosse house and at television cameras, shouting into a megaphone during the protest, and setting up a speaker system for the protest. Hummel also posted harassing and inflammatory messages on the "Durham Responds" Yahoo Group. In one message, Hummel implored readers to attend an event "geared toward educating the larger Duke community about the sexual assault that occurred two weeks ago in a house just off East Campus that is rented by Duke students." In another message, Hummel referenced a protest in which he had recently participated, and then discussed "planning an on-going response to the March 13th sexual assault that addresses root cause issues such as racism, sexism, misogyny, alcohol culture, paternalism, economic exploitation, athlete impunity, and Duke's (lack of) accountability to the community." On information and belief, Hummel was also involved in creating and/or distributing the WANTED posters, described below.

Pictures of the Lacrosse Team were posted on campus.
Sam Hummel in backround

257. In addition to Hummel, the participation of Duke faculty members in both organizing and attending the protests was extensive. As noted above, on information and belief, professor Faulkner Fox was one of the organizers of the "DON'T BE A FAN OF RAPISTS" and "CASTRATE! !" protests. Likewise, Duke professor Tim Tyson publicly admitted in a National Public Radio interview to participating in the protests, as well as the "candlelight vigil." Duke professor Kim Curtis also participated in protests targeting the lacrosse players.

Duke professor Tim Tyson

Professor Tyson, a board member of the Insitute of Southern Studies, is a Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture, Duke Divinity School and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies. On April 2 2006 he wrote this column for the News-Observer.

..White college students a few generations back would sometimes hire a black man to let them tie his hands behind his back, and then the black man would try to fish coins and bills out of a barrel of flour. More recently, white fraternities would don blackface and hold "slave auctions" at parties. Such minstrel humor was very popular but racially degrading, damaging the community and the people involved.

This is also the case with rich white boys hiring black "exotic dancers."

The spirit of the lynch mob lived in that house on Buchanan Boulevard, regardless of the truth of the most serious charges. The ghastly spectacle takes its place in a history where African- American men were burned at the stake for "reckless eyeballing" -- that is, looking at a white woman -- and white men kept black concubines and mistresses and raped black women at will.

It matters, of course, what happened. But the dynamics of race, power and violence that have marred our history remain with us. When the men of one group have most of the power and privilege and see themselves as above the law, that will always be a recipe for abusive relationships with women from other groups, sometimes physically violent, more often spiritually violent... NewsObserver

258. On March 26, Brodhead had a telephone conversation with Durham Mayor Bill Bell. The next day, Bell complained publicly about the team's silence and urged Duke to cancel the whole season to "send a strong message to the community."

Duke Professor Houston Baker appeared to take the lead as the chief spokesman of the campus professors and those at John Hope Franklin Center, who would eventually create the "We're Listening " ad. He would appear in numerous radio, TV, and newspapers condemning the Lacrosse Team and the culture of racism.

In an report from the WRAL web site Professor Baker appears to be the first who starts the call demanding the disbanding of the Lacrosse Team.

...The English professor wrote an open letter criticizing the slow response of the administration. claiming that they have known for months and even years about the lacrosse team's bad reputation.

"It seems to me to wait until the 28th to have a major press conference by leaders of this university is appalling," said Dr. Houston Baker. "The slowness of response and the feeling among a lot of faculty that the men's lacrosse team has long been a unit of bad actors and it's been known by university leaders and still it's escalated into a national crisis and local disaster is frustrating."

Baker would like to see the current men's lacrosse team disbanded and the university put a blue ribbon committee in place to mandate how to handle these types of situations. Baker also wants a new lacrosse team formed -- one with certain standards and expectations set out by the university. In his letter, Baker referred to the lacrosse team as privileged white male athletes...WRAL TV

This drumbeat would continue for weeks and it certainly appears Duke President Brodhead succumbed to mob rule by cancelling the Lacrosse season and "threw" the players under the bus. The myth of the culture of white privilege had been created by just a few professors who used their graduate studies and professional activists to incite the community and the nation. It certainly wasn't about the truth.

“The arrogance and bravado that they were above the law or they could think this woman is below the respect of the human community really outrages a lot of people.” Duke Professor Faulkner Fox

259. In the face of these menacing protests, the players reasonably feared for their physical safety. Players Evans, Zash, Flannery, Wolcott, Sauer, and Henkelman were driven from their homes. On or around March 28, Player Bo Carrington was accosted and surrounded on campus by a jostling crowd of students who shouted "Tell the police what you know! Why are you protecting these rapists?" On Sunday, March 26, when pressed by defense counsel to provide more security or at least excused absences from class for the players, Moneta refused, stating "well, frankly, I don't believe them."

Epilogue

Two years have passed since this modern day witch hunt began. Duke University has never criticized the actions of its Faculty and employees despite knowing the 2006 Lacrosse Team was falsely accused. One wonders why Duke persists in denying the truth that on those horrible days in March 2006 their Faculty and employees engage in a hateful & racist attack on the Lacrosse Team?