Students at Oberlin College in Ohio are
on edge following a recent spate of hate-filled incidents.
The school canceled classes on Monday
after a student reported seeing a person wearing a Ku Klux Klan-type
hood and robe on campus early Monday morning. The sighting took
place near the African Heritage House.
Sunceray Tavler, the student who
reported the sighting, told Cleveland's Fox 8: “As I was in the
car, I saw someone in what seemed to be KKK paraphernalia walking on
a pathway that's like a pathway that leads to south campus. And just
like seeing that and having it sink in, like this is something that's
real, that actually happens.”
Classes resumed on Tuesday. But more
than a dozen messages of hate have been found on campus over the past
month. Some were anti-gay, others read, “Whites only.”
“Oberlin has such a reputation for
being a very open and accepting place, where people of any walk of
life can come and live,” Joshua Blue, a freshman, told CNN. “I
mean, that someone was threatening that way of life was kind of
scary.”
Oberlin was a center for abolitionists
and a stop on the underground railroad, the network of safe houses
used by 19th-century black slaves escaping to freedom in
the North and Canada.