Coast Guard commandant speaks about noose incidents

John Christoffersen

NEW LONDON, Conn. — The head of the U.S. Coast Guard made it clear before a packed audience of cadets, faculty and staff at the Coast Guard Academy last Thursday that racial harassment will not be tolerated in the service.

Commandant Admiral Thad W. Allen was on the New London campus to address a series of racial incidents this summer in which nooses were left for a black Coast Guard Academy cadet and an officer conducting race relations training.

“By my mere presence, you know this is important,” Allen told the crowd. “When you enter the Coast Guard you are held to a higher standard. Anybody that is involved in putting symbols of racism in anybody’s workplace or personal equipment, in my view, that is conduct unbecoming an officer.”

Allen vowed to find those responsible. The Coast Guard has more than a dozen criminal investigators working on the case.

Allen was joined by U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, who has called for a thorough investigation. He decried the incidents as “an act of terrorism.”

“Any attack upon any link in this chain of our nation’s defenders weakens and endangers us all,” Cummings said. “It is a heinous act calculated to make it far more difficult for you as a service to achieve the strength of unity that your essential mission for the people of our country requires.”

Cummings urged the cadets to cooperate with the investigation.

“I would bet more than one person knows what has happened here and I’m convinced we will find out who did this,” Cummings said.

Cummings noted that the Coast Guard rescued thousands of hurricane victims in 2005.

“Those men and women of the Coast Guard who rescued more than 33,600 individuals from the rising flood waters of the Gulf Coast did not ask whether the person to be saved was black or white, Asian or Hispanic,” Cummings said.

The first noose was left in the bag of a black cadet in mid-July on board the Coast Guard cutter Eagle, officials said. The cadet pulled out the noose at a crew meeting the next morning and told everyone that he was offended.

The second noose was found in early August on the floor of the office of a white female officer who had been conducting race relations training in response to the first incident.

After the incident on the Eagle, the ship’s commanding officer met with the crew and outlined conduct standards and his expectations, Coast Guard officials said. The commander conducted a full investigation, and all crew members received race relations training, officials said.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said racial incidents like those at the Coast Guard are becoming all too frequent across the country and urged more federal enforcement of hate crimes.

“Hanging nooses or hanging people or swastikas — these are provocative hate crimes,” Jackson told The Associated Press. “Unless justice is a deterrent, this hatred will spread.”

Jackson pointed to incidents in Jena, La. where six black students were arrested for an alleged attack on a white classmate, after three white teens were accused of hanging nooses in a tree on campus.

He said the University of Louisiana at Monroe is investigating two of its students after a video surfaced depicting several white youths pretending to re-enact a racial beating. And in Hempstead, N.Y., federal and state prosecutors are investigating a noose found in the locker room of the local police department, where minority officers make up about half of the force.

“Given the number of these incidents, the president and the attorney general nominee (Michael Mukasey) should be very concerned,” Jackson said.

The Coast Guard Academy has pledged to hold additional racial sensitivity training, seminars and discussions in the coming months.

The academy created a task force last year to examine the culture after the first student court-martial in the academy’s 130-year history. Cadet Webster Smith, accused of sexual assault in a case involving four female cadets, was convicted of extortion, sodomy and other charges.

Smith filed a discrimination complaint alleging he was treated differently because he was black. A federal view determined there was no racial bias.

The academy has about 950 students, including 14.5 percent who are ethnic minorities, Cummings said.

Jonathan Scott, a black cadet from Mississippi, was among the hundreds attending Allen’s speech last Thursday. He said the nooses highlighted some issues that the Coast Guard was not aware of and that some cadets thought the perpetrator may have intended them as a joke.

“They don’t understand the impact it has on everyone,” Scott said.

(Associated Press)