Blood and Ivy - A Story of Race, Politics and Violence on a College Campus (Hardcover)

In the summer of 1990, police found a young man named Nicholas Haddad dying of gunshot wounds in a Hartford city park. He had been a promising student at Wesleyan University, an elite liberal arts college in nearby Middletown, Connecticut, and a charismatic, mysterious and somewhat menacing figure on campus. An American citizen of Lebanese descent who grew up in Beirut, he claimed variously to be an African prince, a Sudanese rebel and an African American. The man who killed him, the son of a South Indian professor of music, had been one of his followers in radical politics at Wesleyan. It was the dawning of the Age of Diversity, and Wesleyan was a battleground for the conflicting ideologies and commitments that would erupt into the larger culture wars of the 1990s. Campus activists confronted the administration with uncompromising fury over issues such as more minority teachers and students and a multicultural curriculum. Fireboms exploded in the president's office and at the crew team's boathouse. Militants fired an AK-47 at an administration building. Malcolm X House, the all-black dorm, was vandalized with racist graffiti. The rhythms of academic life were punctuated by wild rumors, hunger strikes, intense standoffs and death threats. This was Andrew Hazlett's introduction to college life. A student when Haddad was murdered, he has spent a decade investigating the case and its bitter aftermath. Blood and Ivy examines the personalities and ideas that collided so destructively in Middletown that tumultuous year. Based on personal recollections, archival research and interviews, this suspenseful book relates the strange events, lingering mysteries and broader lessons of a darktime--foreshadowing the political conflicts, just as intense if less bloody, that soon erupted on campuses nationwide.