p> In 1992 alone, 31 persons were killed in hate crimes (Davis 387). Blacks were the primary target of hate crimes, then Jews, other ethnic groups, and gays and lesbians (Davis 387). According to Matsuda et al. (1), a 1990 report by the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence found that 65 percent to 70 percent of minority students reported that they had been the targets of some sort of ethnoviolent harassment, a group of victims estimated to be 800,000 to 1 million per annum. Such incidents occurred in public schools and at institutions of higher learning.
One response of government was the enactment by Congress of the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990, under which the attorney general was directed to collect statistics on hate crimes. Various states and localities have enacted laws and ordinances aimed at curbing hate crimes. A number of leading universities, in California (U Cal and Stanford), Connecticut, Georgia (Emory), Massachusetts (Tufts), Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin adopted speech and conduct codes which were designed to prohibit and/or to impose sanctions against expressions of hate conduct or speech on campus (Walker 127; Cochran et al. 398).
Not only students were subjected to such codes. At Harvard in 1988, Professor Stephen Thernstrom was reprimanded by the university for quoting southern plantation owners on the subject of black character during a lecture. A professor at the University of Maryland was required to apologize to his class for quoting the views of Spanish conquistadors on the character of Indians (Cochran et al 397).
Hate crimes and hate speech have been recurrent themes in American history dating all the way back to colonial times. Various explanations were offered for its recent resurgence:
(1) The increasing multi-cultural character of American society. Cochran et al. point out that, as a result of immigration, "non-Hispanic whites made up 90 ...