Hate in Houston

Throughout the South, the quiet campuses of Negro colleges are smoldering with the unrest and resentments of an unquiet generation. One night last week, Houston's Texas Southern University, which is 95% Negro, erupted into a campus-style Watts. By morning, 488 students were arrested, one student and two policemen were wounded and a rookie cop was dead.

About 50 students were gathered in front of the student union when a rumor went through the crowd that a policeman had shot a six-year-old Negro child that day. Someone heaved a watermelon at a police cruiser, and the crowd dispersed to shout the shooting rumor through the campus. It was too late to tell them that the six-year-old was actually a white child wounded by a white boy who was target-shooting.

Students poured out of their dormitories. More police arrived. Rocks and bottles flew. Then shots flashed from Lanier Hall, a men's dormitory, wounding Officer R. D. Blaylock in the thigh.

Soon it was full combat between police and snipers in the hall. Some 500 police stormed the dormitory, pouring more than 3,000 rounds of shotgun and carbine fire into the building. Officer Dale Dugger, 32, took a bullet wound in the cheek. Patrolman Louis Kuba, 25, was hit in the forehead and died six hours later. "It looked like the Alamo," said one policeman. Somehow, only one student was wounded. After the cops had raged through the dormitory, virtually all of its 144 rooms were wrecked--TV sets kicked in, clothes destroyed and even the housemother's sewing machine smashed.

In the morning all but four of the 488 arrested students were released, but the mood at T.S.U. remained venomous. What caused the riot? "Hate," was the explanation of S.N.C.C. leader F. D. Kirkpatrick. Hatred of the school administration, police, Whitey, and every other target of a student's ire on the eve of final exams, which were held on schedule.

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