As the University of Oklahoma expelled two students Tuesday for leading a racist song that sparked outrage across the country, the fraternity involved said it would investigate incidents at other campuses as it faced questions over the chant’s use by members at other universities.
Former members of the fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, claimed on social media that the same chant was used at colleges in other states, and University of Oklahoma officials investigating the episode said they did not believe the song had originated on their campus.
Protests were held in Norman on Monday on the University of Oklahoma campus.
MSM has been buzzing since members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon were shown in two videos chanting a song whose lyrics included racial slurs boasting that there would never be an African-American member. The song also referred to lynching, with the words “You can hang ’em from a tree.” The videos were recorded on Saturday night as fraternity members and their dates rode a bus to a formal event celebrating the national organization’s Founders Day.
The fraternity — started in 1856 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., before the Civil War — celebrates its Southern heritage. Its online magazine, The Record, described an initiative “to bring Sigma Alpha Epsilon closer to its antebellum roots, closer to the original experience and goals shared by the founding fathers.”
A libertarian group, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said Tuesday that it was unconstitutional for the university to expel fraternity members for their speech, no matter how hateful.
A new video spread on social media on Tuesday showing the white woman who was the fraternity’s live-in “house mother,” Beauton Gilbow, 79, laughing as she repeatedly says a racial slur while singing along to a rap song in the background. The footage was posted in 2013 to the video sharing service Vine.
In Stillwater, the Oklahoma State University student newspaper published pictures of a Confederate flag visible in the room of a Sigma Alpha Epsilon member at the fraternity house over the weekend. The chapter’s president told the newspaper, The O’Colly, that the Confederate flag had never been a symbol of the fraternity and that he and other chapter leaders had asked the student to remove the flag.
In 1982, the University of Cincinnati suspended its Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter for two years after it held a “trash party” on the eve of the holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and passed out fliers encouraging revelers to bring canceled welfare checks and “a radio bigger than your head.”
The Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter in Norman has had black members, but very few, and none recently, according to alumni. William Blake James II wrote on his blog that when he joined in 2001, he was only the second black member, “and there still hasn’t been a third black man,” an account supported by some of his former fraternity brothers, writing on Facebook.
Source: NYT