Another stain for the U of Alabama

Every day when I walk to class at the University of Alabama, I am reminded of a great stain on the university’s history. The infamous front steps of Foster Auditorium, where Governor George Wallace stood next to tens of white students to block the first black students from enrolling in the university, are a constant caution to how recently a public demonstration of vicious racial hatred found a home on our campus. 

But George Wallace didn’t win. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, commanded the white students to move or be moved, and achieved the enrollment of the black students Vivian Malone and James Hood. When I began college, I saw the steps of Foster Auditorium as a historical relic, not thinking that anything as vile and racially motivated could ever again take place in American colleges. I was wrong. Just like the crowd of racist students once tried to bar black students from University of Alabama’s campus, now antisemitic pro-Palestine protesters are harassing and threatening the safety of Jewish students at colleges across the nation. Our nation’s leaders should deal with them the same way. 

The war between Israel and Palestine is a contentious and complex topic, but the issue itself is not the crux of the problem in America. Here, in the absence of actual war, pro-Palestine protesters encourage violence against Israelis and American Jews with chants like “Globalize the Intifada,” “Death to America,” a rallying cry most famously heard in the halls of the Iranian parliament, and even “from the river to the sea,” an antisemitic chant calling for the complete removal of Jewish people from Israeli territory. These protestors are agitators, blindly defending a land completely overtaken by terrorists. When George Wallace and his students shouted “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” in protest against integrating black students on my campus, the federal government stepped in to restore order and the rule of law. These disruptive, antisemitic protests should not be treated any differently.

Free speech is one of the most important founding principles of America, but the Constitution does not protect advocacy for racially motivated terrorism. It does not protect fighting words. It protects the right to peacefully protest in an approved public area, not to commit an illegal, hostile takeover of private university property. 

In a Tiktok video posted Monday, Professor Shai Davidai demonstrated how Columbia University locked him out of his own workplace, deactivating his key-card in a supposed “counter-protest” measure solely because of his Jewish heritage. This is ludicrous. What if, instead of removing George Wallace from the doorway, the University of Alabama banned the black students from campus “for their safety”? The protestors shouting, “Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too,” do not deserve either deference or coddling. The ones who tell Jewish students, “Go back to Europe,” are not superior to the racists who told black Alabama students to return to Africa. These “protests” are, simply put, dangerous embarrassments proliferating on American soil.

In the same way that the Alabama protest was “peaceful,” so are the pro-Palestinian protests “peaceful.” If this rhetoric calling for violence against Jews remained the same, and the only cosmetic addition to the situation was white hoods, no one would bat an eye at the protests being shut down. Unfortunately, there’s a taboo in our culture that perpetuates the lie that these protestors cannot mean harm, that they cannot espouse hate, because they do not fit the bill of “white supremacists.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. These protests that prevent professors and students from coming on campus for fear of their own lives, that disrupt the administration of education to administer a misguided mob justice, need to be condemned. President Biden has the power to federalize the National Guard and end this unlawful intimidation just as his predecessor, JFK, did 61 years ago. America condemned the racist protests against desegregation. It’s time to condemn these antisemitic demonstrations too.  

Sam Underhill is the Executive Director of the ActivateGenZ Project, a Young Voices contributor, and a student at the University of Alabama.

Image: Library of Congress