Black students say Iowa State does a good job of enticing them to come to school here as a matter of diversity. There is a lot of wining and dining, and prospective students are flooded with mail.

The university even offers certain scholarships exclusive to minority students, including the prestigious George Washington Carver Scholarship. And many students, upon visiting the campus, love the look of it.

Kyle Pierce, a senior in chemical engineering, said when he was still attending Joliet Central High School in Joliet, Ill., the university kept his mailbox overflowing with recruitment letters.

“Iowa State inundated me with stuff everyday,” Pierce said. “After a while it was a letter everyday saying how good it [would be] to have me.”

He, his parents and a friend visited the campus in early spring of his senior year, and while on a tour of the grounds, he asked the tour guide where all the black people were. The guide told him that most of the black students were ‘out of town for a conference,'” Pierce said.

“Back at home, it was pretty diverse,” he said. “We didn’t really have any racial problems. So I was kind of naive about a lot of things when I got to Iowa State. It didn’t dawn on me that [whites] were 98 percent of the whole [population of] people.”

Once Pierce got to Ames he said the beauty of campus soon wore off, and underneath, all he saw was ugliness — in the form of racism and intolerance.

“Reality set in,” he said. “I shouldn’t’ve come.”

Pierce’s feelings, along with those of other African-American students, have been sharpened by recent events on the Iowa State campus, including last Friday’s beating of a black security guard by a group of white men and a dispute over funding from the Government of the Student Body for the Big Eight Conference on Black Student Government put on by the Black Student Alliance.

But, Meron Wondwosen, president of BSA, pointed out at a recent news conference, these latest incidents are just “part of a series of problems” that demonstrate ISU’s “atmosphere of intolerance, hate and anti-diversity.”

Wondwosen cited GSB funding for BSA’s Mr. and Mrs. Black ISU Pageant and the naming of Carrie Chapman Catt Hall as two glaring examples of intolerance.

She called the campus environment “uncomfortable and hostile” for blacks here. Many black students are saying President Martin Jischke and other administrators have done little to reach out to them.

“We are tired of [Jischke’s] lip service, and we demand some results,” Wondwosen said. “We have always known the severity and intensity of the hatred toward non-majority groups on campus.”

For Gabriel Clausen, an ISU alumnus and director of security for the September 29th Movement, the situation couldn’t be much worse. He declared “a state of emergency” and urged all blacks to “watch each other’s backs and to never walk alone.”

Such measures may seem a tad extreme to many Iowa Staters, especially in the twilight of the 20th Century. But black students say that despite so-called progress, Iowa State has a long way to go with race relations.

“We’ve had to work very hard to work within a system that we know is broken,” said Veronique Cantrell-Avoles, a GSB senator and member of the Black Caucus. “We have tried, through our bills, through our debates, and mainly through our interactions with other students, to show that racism, in all its forms, that stereotypes, in all their forms, are around. Unfortunately, we have not yet changed the system, and I do say, ‘yet,’ for we continue to work on that.”

But change can be daunting. Many African-American students say that no matter how they go about dealing with disagreement with administrators, they always hit a brick wall.

“We’re incensed, we’re tired, and we’re tired of being tired,” said Milton McGriff, a spokesperson for the September 29th Movement.

“We have been civil, respectful and academic in our approach, yet we have been met with hostility,” Clausen added.

“That hostility has convinced us that our struggle is correct, and that the pressure will be stepped up even more intensely.”

Still, the prospect of changing the mindset of Iowans on their own turf is discouraging. Cantrell-Avoles went so far as to say that the recent violence didn’t shock her. What did raise her eyebrows was Jischke’s response to the beating of Deantrious Mitchell, calling on black faculty and staff members asking them to try to “calm down” students.

“I don’t know about a lot of other people up here, but I’m not exactly surprised that a racially motivated crime happened in Iowa,” she said. “I don’t think many are. What I am surprised at is that the blame could somehow be reflected back at the very people who are victimized by it.”

Part of the problem, Wondwosen said, is that ignorance breeds ignorance. If people are unaware that certain actions and behaviors are racist, they can’t take steps to alter that conduct.

“This university and some members of this community have no understanding of covert and institutional racism,” she said.

“Hatred, bias and racism have many different forms and shapes. The attack on Deantrious Mitchell was just one of these forms. The naming of Carrie Chapman Catt Hall was another.”

Pierce, for one, has gotten involved and fought for causes that he believes in. He said that as a former BSA president, for example, “I have been really aware and subjected to a lot of stuff and seen a lot of stuff. So as a result, what’s happening here is that being here in Iowa makes me distrustful of white people. It’s actually making me start to not like white people.

“So my whole outlook on racial issues just totally changed because I would rather assume that [whites] are bad instead of assuming that they are good. I hate that that’s the way [ISU] has changed me.”

While he thinks that the university does “a fine job of getting people here, of offering them money or whatever the case may be, I just think that after they get here, they don’t take care of the students,” Pierce said.

It’s culminated, for Pierce, in regret.

“I think I could’ve went somewhere else and still been prepared to deal with society and white people without being subjected to the type of stuff I’ve been subjected to. … It sure isn’t fun to learn when it hurts this much, you know?”