'Beggars' can't be choosers

...As long as students can use them as enclaves, to ward off the challenge of change-to retain the solipsistic world view of the adolescent-they thwart the purpose of the university...

...and, unlike the University of Wisconsin, Madison, none of our fraternities has held a "slave auction" at a pledge party...

...than by her own brush with death...

...Bands of unruly black youths roamed the downtown area, and in fights among themselves one was stabbed to death and another was shot...

...Unlike the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, we have had no riots...

...Maybe then people would realize there really is a problem...

...We had been reading James Baldwin and Alice Walker with the hope-my hope-that, in response to these writers, my students, all of whom were white, would come away with at least a vicarious notion of what and how black people had suffered...

...In response to these events, I scheduled one of our regular late-night dorm discussions to deal with the topic of racism on campus...

...That's the very opposite of education...

...That's our tradition...

...Trenton Catholic football game and seeing a black boy on the ground and a white boy kicking him...

...The Beggars' charter has not been renewed, and the sixty-eight-year-old fraternity is considered legally dead...

...One excellent black student applied last year to all three frats...

...and in 1968, in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination, when I stood on the balcony of our Georgetown dorm and watched Washington burn...

...with people beating on each other, fists flying, blood coming from noses and lips...

...A girl in a predominantly black grammar school is sure she is not picked for the basketball team because she is white...

...But, it seems to me, there will be little personal, intellectual, or moral growth as long as blacks and whites on campuses are allowed to go on making their judgments purely in terms of their immediate personal experiences...

...Army, single-handedly integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962...

...And those who wish them well but lament the history that seems to hold them captive have wondered whether there was some way to break through...

...A young white woman robbed at knifepoint by a black man was more upset by her landlady's racist talk-"If some nigger ever puts foot in our driveway, I'll blow his goddamn ass off...

...But, if those persons exist and if they speak up at meetings, there is little evidence that they are being heard...

...As individuals, they often contradict the negative image of the group...

...but I asked about and discovered that I was the only one on campus not to know the Beggars' reputation: famed partly for their abusive hazing practices (some of which may have been exaggerated by legend), regarded as brawlers-either in rough and tumble intramural games or in a Saturday night barroom fracas-suckled by a local alumnus, they see themselves as an "Old New Orleans" frat, founded with a Jesuit mentor in 1921 and tied to Southern traditions...

...They will be together...

...Loyola students woke up to see a group of tables moved by some of their fellow students to form a swastika in their quad...

...At a tiny rally that night, they (including two who had been beaten by blacks) signed up to oppose Duke, and some traveled to the state capital in Baton Rouge to protest his installation...

...Last year the Greek-life committee of fraternities and sororities finally sponsored a campus-racism public forum...

...I woke up to find a scrawled sign stuck to my door: "Why Don't We All Get Together For Another Hapless [Did he mean hopeless?] Racial Talk...

...At first glance, set in the national context, Loyola has no racial "crisis...

...some faculty who would grant that racial segregation was wrong in principle could not muster much indignation if a bunch of otherwise nice-enough white boys wanted to keep their private club to themselves...

...At the racism open forum, a Beggar complained that he had visited a Black Student Union meeting and been made to feel out of place...

...black students in my residence hall were delighted to see their own feelings confirmed in the articles...

...He knew the policy wasn't right, he said, but: "We never had a black member and we never will...

...I recalled the post-game riot in Trenton during the 1967 Detroit riots when, as a young priest, I witnessed policemen roar into an intersection, leap out of their cars and pound a black man to the ground for the crime of standing on a street corner in his own neighborhood...

...Alumni started knocking at the university president's door...

...At this stage of my education, perhaps I should not have been shocked to find a seg-regated fraternity in the South-even in 1986...

...Meanwhile whites are quick to point to the Black Student Union and local black frats and sororities as proof that the blacks themselves are responsible for de facto segregation...

...Boy, the Last One Sure Solved a Whole Hell of a Lot Father Ray...

...Suddenly, in the last weeks of May 1989, events took a dramatic turn: the vice-president for student affairs suspended the whole Beggars fraternity for six months for hazing violations...

...Blacks against whites...

...But our parents-my father an editorial writer for the Trenton Times and my mother a teacher-had taught my brother and me that the word "nigger" was a despicable term and raised us to abhor prejudice and segregation in any form...

...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., author of Books for Believers (Paulist Press), is a professor of communications at Loyola University of New Orleans...

...Perhaps, too, within the same context, , each frat brother experiences his isolated "brotherhood" as an occasion for personal growth...

...The tragedy, he added, is that there have always been Jesuit mentors who bought into the system...

...Because social clubs, with their intense bonding and overwhelming peer pressure, can be even more decisive in the student's moral formation-for good or ill-than the classroom or the chapel...

...Meanwhile, the affirmative action process moved slowly...

...The Beggars donned their blue blazers and put in an appearance at the Black Student Union cocktail party, and the committee issued an affirmative action plan, which says the Greek system is open to everyone, rejects any quotas, and grants themselves five more years to show the results of their integration efforts...

...My first reaction was to question the student's story...

...Unlike our next-door neighbor, Tulane, our frats have not had two cross burnings this academic year...

...In the fall of 1988, a Maroon editor wrote a satirical column attacking racism using the mimicked voice of a Southern bigot...

...Why persist with the conviction that exclusively all-white or all-black institutions, whether by law or "tradition," have no place on a university campus...

...Meanwhile, mirroring a larger American society in which the whole concept of broad racial integration has become a lost ideal, the campuses have witnessed a resurgence of racial incidents-many in the context of fraternity rites and pranks...

...They still have the house their patron provided...

...Blacks who will tell me that the Beggars are historically racist show little interest in getting them integrated...

...In our little world, the Beggars-now underground-are recruiting a new pledge class...

...So why not forget it, leave the fraternities and sororities alone, blacks and whites, to go their separate ways...

...Indeed, their constitution, as late as 1981, limited their membership to white, Christian males...

...There is no 1990 equivalent of James Meredith, who, with the help of the U.S...

...Eleven percent of the students and about 4 percent of the faculty are black...

...In a sense, each of these incidents is valid within the context of that person's experience...

...Indeed, today few young blacks even recognize his name-unless they read the news stories about his going to work for Jesse Helms...

...At the same time, some papers show considerable sensitivity and a desire for better racial relations...

...Meanwhile, other evidence of trouble was piling up...

...Like most white liberals, over the past forty years I have gone through a series of both intellectual and emotional states on the issue of race...

...One Beggar alumnus from over forty years ago explained that the whole glue of the group has always been the illusory, unexamined conviction that they were an "elite," a superior breed of New Orleanian-even though the only evidence of their "superiority" seemed to be their fervid devotion to themselves...

...Because the purpose of a university is to break down stereotypes, to change one's perception of reality...

...A black girl liked the Beggars enough to want to be a "little sister" (a widespread system which attaches groups of college women to fraternities, a system which feminists consider sexist and which national fraternity reformers oppose), but she was frozen out, she thought, by the white "little sisters...

...In a series of articles and columns which later won an Associated College Press Leadership Award from the Los Angeles Times, the paper documented, through interviews with unnamed ex-Beggars pledges who feared reprisals and with blacks who had suffered their abuse, the frat's pattern of racism...

...But an observant visitor would perceive, in effect, an informally segregated campus--whites, Hispanics, and blacks separated by color, language, and culture, gravitating into increasingly isolated groups...

...Someone's uncle is not promoted to fire chief because an allegedly less qualified black gets the post through affirmative action...

...One young white man invited to a Mardi Gras ball escorted a young black woman-and was promptly thrown out...

...One of the things that has struck me most in the papers my students have written on racism is how often white students-rather than extrapolate from James Baldwin's and Alice Walker's sufferings to sympathize with other blacks-see themselves as victims of racial prejudice...

...And they can stay the same...

...Then one replied that he belonged to a fraternity called the Beggars...

...And they can stay the same.e together...

...Unlike "Old Miss," our frats did not dump two white students, bound and naked, with KKK and racial slurs painted on their chests, on a small black campus in Mississippi...

...individual Beggars who did not consider themselves racists and who were making an inside effort to get black members, even adjusting the rules to make it easier for them, felt unfairly tarred by the journalists' brush-indeed, themselves victims of "discrimination...

...Some of the traditionally white sororities have attracted a few black members...

...I have received a "Dear Louisianian" letter from David Duke, who is running for the United States Senate, attacking "special privileges for minorities" and promising to fight for me...

...A high school girl with a black girl friend loses that friend because of peer pressure from other blacks...

...But this was at a Catholic and Jesuit institution, and Jesuit schools, especially this one, had, over the last decade, drawn up goal statements committing themselves to social and racial justice...

...Affluent Metairie, New Orleans's white-flight suburb, in spite of opposition from religious leaders, including a letter from Loyola's president to alumni living in Metairie, elected David Duke, the smooth-talking, ex-Nazi Ku Klux Klan Republican, to the Louisiana legislature...

...One said, "Expecting me to join them is like asking me to join the Klan...

...A group of boys walking home are hassled by black boys...

...A few nights later, a black student who had been beaten bloody by whites downtown returned to the dorm in the early morning and attacked the first white boy he saw...

...But black students misread the column and complained to the local NBC black anchorman, who promptly ran an evening news lead story chiding the white student journalist...

...In the twenty years since then, again like most white liberals, my feelings on race have become more complex-moving back and forth on the continuum between a romantic conviction that blacks are somehow superior persons because of what they have suffered, to, at the other extreme, the frustration I have felt as an academic dean and professor at several colleges with what seems the paranoia, self-pity, and self-destructive tendencies of black students who fail to study hard enough to whip the odds stacked against them-who are, in effect, as irresponsible and shiftless as whites...

...When the same student received the year-end award for promoting racial understanding, another black student wrote in the Maroon that he had "assimilated...

...and blacks have been student government presidents...

...By then, of course, the authors of the plan will have graduated...

...A year passed and the program was barely perceptible...

...In a letter, they called on their alumni to cut off donations to the university and their president declared that, "the Beggars will continue to exist longer than Loyola...

...In spring 1987, the campus newspaper, the Maroon, launched an investigation into the activities of the fraternity...

...But when a banned alumnus showed up at a frat Halloween party, the deal was off...

...The campus reaction was neither surprise nor outrage: some assailed the messenger, the Maroon, for bringing the bad news...

...For a while this fall, the administration, citing respect for the Beggars' long history, began to negotiate their return...

...When I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1930s and 1940s-where Baldwin, in Notes of a Native Son, threw a pitcher of water at a waitress who refused to serve him-blacks were cordoned off in Lincoln High School and relegated to the balcony of the Lincoln Theater, and I remember a race riot breaking out after the Trenton High vs...

...Indeed, last year the goal of integrating student social life was made more complex, in my judgment, by the establishment on campus of a new black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha-part of a multiplying group of black fraternities who, rather than establish new directions, mimic the most destructive aspects of their white counterparts, reinforcing their identity with elaborate military rituals, hazing, and, for some young men, branding their biceps and chests...

...Last spring a couple of black males reportedly showed up at a Beggars rush party, but, for whatever reason, they never joined...

...I believe that within the frats and sororities there are those who sense that something might be wrong, who may perceive that when they withdraw into their white-like-us world they are somehow diminished as well as made to feel secure...

...You're an Omega for life," one brandee told the New York Times (October 2, 1989...

...Told they could return only if they affiliated with a national organization, got a new moderator, and disassociated themselves from a prominent Beggars alumnus deemed a negative influence, the Beggars yelled defiance...

...REV...

...On Martin Luther King's birthday last year and in the following week, roving bands of black teenagers attacked and beat up whites on the edge of the French Quarter, including three students from the residence hall where I am a resident counselor...

...A riot where they might have to call the police to break it up, people might have to be hospitalized, and TV cameras might be pushed into people's faces...

...Nevertheless, the trustees were willing to grant that there might be a problem, and the fraternities and sororities, as a group, were asked to set up an affirmative action program...

...I have also been struck by the essays of the black professor Shelby Steele, in Harper's (February 1989) and the American Scholar (Autumn 1989), who regrets the black students' unconscious need to exaggerate campus racism and withdraw into a black "theme house" or black student union rather than compete academically and struggle for a truly integrated societv...

...On November 29, 1988, a white female wrote in her diary, later published in the 1989 yearbook: "Sometimes, I really wish there would be a race riot on this campus...

...This semester, once again Martin Luther King Day got nasty in New Orleans...

...Then last spring, the racial turmoil that had bubbled beneath New Orleans's surface became evident to the nation...

...they are endearing, amiable, sincere...

...Both the Beggars and one other fraternity (which has one black member) turned him down and he took the rejection without protest...

...WAKE UP...

...Another year passed...

...a black woman replied that she's glad he experienced that because that's how blacks feel every day...

...Although the Beggars and the three "white" sororities at Loyola have traditionally not had black members, the other two fraternities have had a total of four...