Opinion | Bomb Threats Are Roiling Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Not that they need reminding. Across the nation, from university to university, college to college, they have spoken to the media with one voice:“You get really, really frustrated when you are trying to get an education and you’re trying to do better for this world and this country, and people are trying so hard to stop you from doing that,” Nina Giddens, a student at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, said in an interview with “PBS NewsHour.”“It makes me realize how there are still these terrorists that are trying to stop minorities from advancing or just getting a simple education from a predominantly Black institution,” Saigan Boyd, a student at Spelman College said in an interview with CNN. “I’m just tired of being terrorized like how my grandparents were.”“Their mission was to deter our mission for Black excellence and Black unity in the United States of America,” Zachary Wilson, the student government vice president at Rust College in Holly Springs, Miss., said in an interview with Mississippi Today, a nonprofit newsroom. “We are undeterred, and they failed. They simply failed.”The investigation into the bomb threats against H.B.C.U.s is being led by the F.B.I. Joint Terrorism Task Forces. “These threats are being investigated as racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism and hate crimes,” the agency said in a statement. But Lecia Brooks, the chief of staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center, used more forceful language in an online meeting of university leaders and federal education officials last week: “These are acts of terrorism.”My family moved to Birmingham, Ala., in 1968, when I was in the first grade, so I wasn’t living there during the years when Bull Connor and his ilk were blasting high-pressure fire hoses and siccing attack dogs on Black children marching for peace, or when the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, was directing investigators not to disclose to local prosecutors the evidence they had accumulated against the suspects in a Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed the four girls getting ready for Sunday service at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

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