Hundreds of students at Baylor University are upset after police were called on a group of black students who were studying and socializing in Moody Memorial Library last week.
Students say, on the night of Jan. 27, a security guard who responded to a noise complaint from an unknown source told the black students ‘it wasn’t a basketball arena, it was a study area.’
Cell phone footage of the incident shows students attempting to explain the “inappropriate analogy” to the security guard.
“Having the security guard ignore me, and then having the cop come and say we are ‘juvenile’ for something that meant something to us–it’s just the invalidation of everything that happened (that bothers me),” Sam Onilenla, a junior at Baylor.
The incident spawned a protest outside the library a week later.
”This is a fight,” said sophomore Victoria Bingaman who helped organize the protest. “There are 16,787 that are on this campus: every single one of us got the same acceptance letter, yet we don’t get the same level of acceptance once we get here, and that’s not okay.”
At least 200 students wore black in solidarity, supporting the students who say earned and paid for the right to be at the library that night, at Baylor needs to be better.
“We are people of color at this university, and you can’t keep giving us the stares and the glares, and you can’t call the cops when you feel uncomfortable because obviously we feel uncomfortable every single day,” said Onilenla. “So I want people to know we are building a community here, we’re trying to foster a community here, we’re going to make strides to make you feel comfortable, make you feel wanted.
While the event was originally supposed to be a ‘sit-in’, student activities objected due to COVID-19 and the event was moved outside with most of the crowd standing and wearing face masks.
“We understand changes need to be made in how we treat and respect others within the Baylor Family, and we must further the important conversations related to race and cultural understanding on our campus,” University officials said in a statement. “In this instance, there was a cultural disconnect, and we simply missed the mark.”
Bingaman says the incident was “just the tip of the iceberg really” for this community.
“The fact that they called the police for a noise complaint shows that there’s more than a clear disconnect,” said Bingaman. “It shows that they allow racism on their campus, and we want them to eradicate that.”
Bingaman says they’re not asking for the security guard to be fired, but they’re calling for the university to practice what it preaches by putting more policies in place and executing the the diversity training it said staff would go through, because many have not.
“We strive to be a welcoming community on our campus as part of our Christian mission, and over the past year, we have made a strong commitment to doing better and being better,” University officials said in a statement.
—KWTX