Taters make Washington Post - The Sit-Ins have begun

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CLEMSON, S.C. — In four years at Clemson University, the rotting bananas hanging from an African-American history banner on campus weren’t the most racially offensive thing biology major Brendan Standifer has seen. They were just the latest.

Standifer said a quiet racial schism runs through the campus.

“The only time you see true unity is on game day,”

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Five students were cited for trespassing two days later when they refused to exit Sikes Hall. They moved the sit-in outdoors, camping in tents. Several football players came by the protest over the weekend to support the #SikesSitIn.

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Standifer, who is black, joined a few dozen other students Monday on the steps of Sikes Hall, Clemson’s administrative building, for the sixth day of a protest demanding more diversity at South Carolina’s second largest university. The protest was still underway Wednesday.

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Just 6 percent of Clemson students are black in a state where nearly a third of the people are African-American. None of South Carolina’s 13 public four-year colleges and universities has a smaller percentage of black students, and Clemson’s African-American enrollment is behind most major Southern universities. The University of Mississippi is 13 percent black.

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Towering over it all — both literally and figuratively — is Tillman Hall and its clock and bell tower. One of the campus’ first buildings after Clemson’s 1883 founding, it’s named for former South Carolina Gov. “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman.

He helped establish Clemson, but he also whipped up a white mob that killed black Republicans in 1876 as part of voter intimidation for an election that ended Reconstruction. Tillman, who went on to serve in the U.S. Senate, bragged about it for the rest of his career.

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“Clemson University tries to hide things and pretend like they never, ever happened or don’t exist. So instead of saying it was bananas on an African-American flag, they say a banner was defaced on campus. You are denying the fact it was racist at all,” said Rae-Nessha White, a junior political science major from Charleston who was arrested during the protest.

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