NEW YORK -- Black students at Columbia University threatened Monday to sue the school for 'fostering a climate of racism' on campus that culminated over the weekend in an attack by about 20 white students on a small group of blacks.
The blacks described the confrontation early Sunday morning as a 'race riot' that followed weeks of verbal harassment at the Morningside heights campus in upper Manhattan.
Several students filed a complaint with the 26th police precinct late Sunday charging aggravated harassment in the case. The police department said it was investigating the incident in which a black student said he was knocked to the ground and stomped on by several members of the Columbia football team.
'The conflict at the heart of this is racism' on campus, said Cheryl Derricotte, a senior at Barnard College, in a news conference held at Columbia. 'It seems like it's open season on black people,' she said.
Derricotte and about a dozen other black students who said they were assaulted Sunday or witnessed the attack described an uneasy college life in which blacks are frequent targets of racial slurs by white students and are made to feel unwanted by the administration.
'It took an act of violence to call attention to the issue,' said Michael Jones, the black student who was the first assaulted Sunday.
University President Michael Sovern issued a statement saying that 'no incident of racism will be tolerated.' He said the school's deans 'have begun a full investigation' and were asking all witnesses to come forward.
Black students will not walk alone on campus anymore because 'we don't know where these attacks are going to come from,' Derricotte said, adding that arm bands will be passed out to students to show support for the victims.
The black students have retained civl rights lawyer C. Vernon Mason to represent them in a case that Derricotte said 'could culminate in a civil rights case against the university for fostering a climate of racism.'
They showed several copies of campaign fliers for the student council that contained racial slurs, as well as an issue of a campus humor magazine they said stereotyped blacks.
The students also said Columbia has failed to increase the number of black students and faculty members and has not established a black studies department, issues first raised by black activists at the university in the 1960s. Less than 3 percent of the total student population is black, they said.
But school spokeswoman Judith Leynse said blacks account for about 11 percent of the student population at Columbia College and about 6 percent at Columbia University. She said Columbia makes a special effort to attract and keep black students and that a record number have applied for admission for the 1987-88 academic year.
Leynse said 4.2 percent of the faculty at the University is black, which she maintained was well above the national average.
Sunday's incident began, Jones said, when he was confronted a white football player outside Ferris Booth Hall at 2 a.m. and asked him why he had been 'riding' him since the beginning of the month.
The football player, Matt Stodl, had called him and his friends 'chicken wings' and earlier that night grabbed Jones and rubbed his head, he said.
When he demanded that Stodl stop harassing him, some of the football player's friends struck Jones in the head from behind and knocked him to the ground, Jones said. Other white students coming out of the building soon joined in. Jones said he was 'stomped on' and beaten.
Blacks who came to his aid also were attacked, and one was chased off campus onto Broadway at 116th Street.
Stodl could not be reached for comment Monday.
Several students compared the incident to the racial attack in the Howard Beach section of Queens in December. The Howard Beach case, in which a black man fleeing a gang of whites was killed by a passing car, has fueled racial tensions in the city.
