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By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY
On the campus of the University of Maryland, where a third of the students are minorities, a noose is found hanging from a tree in front of a building that houses black organizations.
At the Model Secondary School for the Deaf on the campus of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., seven students, six white and one black, assault a black student and scrawl KKK and swastikas all over him.
The incidents are among at least a dozen racial incidents across the country found in news reports since the case of the "Jena Six." The six black teens were charged with beating a white student after a series of racial incidents that included white students hanging nooses from a schoolyard tree.
Most of the dozen occurrences in the past two months involved a noose left anonymously at a school or workplace, including nooses found in a Long Island, N.Y., police locker room, at a Pittsburgh bus maintenance garage and at several high schools.
"For a dozen incidents to come to the public's attention is a lot," says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. "I don't generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year."
Several of the recent events are being investigated by police as hate crimes — crimes motivated by prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity.
Criminologists and civil rights advocates say there is usually a spike in hate crimes after events such as the Jena case, although recent data are unavailable. The most recent statistics are for 2005.
"Any time you have a case that receives national notoriety, you see an uptick in copycat offenses," says Brian Levin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
After 9/11, FBI reports showed the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes shot up from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001.
Copycat offenses are most often committed by men under 22 who are bored or drunk and looking for attention, Levin says. They generally are not members of hate groups, he says, but they harbor racial animosity or feel threatened by racial groups they think have unfair advantages, such as affirmative action.
"Those prejudices are already there for the most part, and what the Jena incident did was give them a green light on repeating this novelty," Levin says. "It's a way of reasserting their importance."
Scholars and civil rights advocates say the rash of episodes reflects the country's continued tensions over race.
"It's something in our culture that never goes away even though all this progress has been made," says Philip Dray, a New York writer on black history who authored At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. "Below the surface remains a hostility and distrust that can be easily awakened. … You can have a situation where people go along for years, and then an incident triggers it and you have this kind of eruption."
He says nooses are an unmistakable act of hostility toward blacks, given the country's history of 4,000 lynchings of black men in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Model Secondary School, where half of the 175 students are minorities, hired a consultant after the Sept. 29 attack to train the faculty and staff to deal with racism, says Dean Kathy Jankowski.
She says the school already sponsored diversity assemblies and cultural festivals and assigns students to sit at different tables during lunch so they can learn about other groups.
That's why the attack was so surprising, she says.
"It's very disappointing," Jankowski says. "We've have done so much to promote diversity, and it still happens. … It tells me we need to do more."
On Sept. 20, the day more than 20,000 people from across the country rallied in Jena, La., to support the Jena Six, Rosalyn Carpenter of Nashville couldn't believe it when she saw a red pickup drive by with a noose hanging from the back.
She and other demonstrators were in Alexandria, near Jena, waiting for their tour bus home.
"It was so bizarre," says Carpenter, president and CEO of the Urban League of Middle Tennessee. "To me it spoke to where we were, in the Deep South, and what is acceptable and what is allowed. … We need to get it together when it comes to issues of race."
Two males, 18 and 16, were arrested. The older teen was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, driving while intoxicated and inciting to riot.
In Winchester, Ky., four teens were charged in August with terroristic threats for taunting a black classmate with drawings of a noose, a Confederate flag and someone being whipped and lynched. The mother of one says her 17-year-old son wasn't doing it because of Jena.
"I know he meant nothing by it," says Lois Cotton. "I know he's not racist. He said he was just joking around. They were passing time in class."
She says her son didn't understand the impact of the drawings and has apologized. "I think he understands how serious this thing is," Cotton says.
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