HANOVER, N.H. -- Dartmouth College students swinging sledgehammers smashed an anti-apartheid shantytown Tuesday in a campus cleanup drive branded as racist by students opposed to the college's South African investments.
Twelve Dartmouth students, also brandishing a crowbar, opened their attack on the scrap-wood shanties shortly before 3 a.m., police Capt. William Moore said.
Two women students inside one of the shanties were threatened verbally but not injured, Moore said. The 12 raiders were taken to campus police headquarters but no charges were filed, he said.
Moore said action against the students would be left to Dartmouth officials. College spokeman Rick Adams said the college was investigating the incident but no charges were contemplated.
More than 200 students opposed to Dartmouth's $63 million worth of investments in companies doing business with South Africa rallied on the Ivy League college's green at noon to protest the attack on the shanties.
'It came on the day after Martin Luther King's birthday,' said sophomore Kim Porteus, one of two students sleeping in the shanty. 'It's not only an attack on the shantytown but blatant racism.'
A spokeswoman for the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival claimed responsibility for the attack, and dismissed the racist accusations as 'absolutely unfounded and ridiculous.'
'The members of this committee are not trying to stifle debate on campus,' said spokeswoman Debbie Stone, managing editor of the Dartmouth Review, an independent conservative weekly newspaper.
'We are merely picking trash up off the green and restoring pride and sparkle to the college we love so much,' she said. 'It (the group) does not believe that the structures on the green constitute an allowable protest.'
The four shanties were moved in early January to the back of the campus green to make room for a large ice sculpture for the 76th winter carnival, which begins Feb. 6.
Stone said the group wanted to donate the scrap wood to charities in the Upper Connecticut River Valley area for fuel for heating stoves.
A spokesman for the Dartmouth Committee for Divestment, which built the shanties last fall to protest the college's investments in firms linked to South Africa, said three of the four shanties were badly damaged.
Stone denied that a member of the committee threatened the two anti-apartheid protesters sleeping in one of the shanties. 'One member peeked in and sort of said 'hi,'' she said.
