Read the city of Athens Minority Relations Panel's final report -don't worry, it's only four pages -but when you've put it down, spend 10 minutes on the Web and search Terris Ross.
Readers of the report couldn't be blamed for thinking the only time there'd ever been racial uneasiness in Athens was in the early hours of June 4, 2004, when white police officers broke up a fight between black bar-goers outside Evolution, 19 S. Court St. Later, dozens of Ohio University students and Athens residents crammed into a late-summer Athens City Council meeting and asked for an investigation. So yes, Athens chartered a Minority Relations panel to, among other things, look at race relations between minority and police groups
but, no, its report doesn't even mention Ross's name.
Ross was shot dead in his car at the University Commons apartment complex more than a year ago. The killer is still at large. In the months since then, black students have staged demonstrations and passed out leaflets asking why authorities haven't caught Ross's killer. They've never gotten a satisfactory answer.
Athens County Prosecutor C. David Warren first said the description given by Ross's friend Nyerre Mays, who was with him that night and was wounded by the shooter, narrows it down to the population of the planet. Every time someone has followed up on the case, Warren's response is always the same: The investigation is ongoing, he says. We're working on it.
The police's lack of progress in the Ross case is almost certainly not because he was black. But it doesn't put people at ease in a lily-white town with no black cops, at a university with the third-lowest diversity of any Ohio public college, where the Web site disingenuously shows plenty of multicultural students and the campus newspaper routinely fails in covering minority issues or events. If there are racial tensions in Athens, The Post deserves a share of the blame.
When we first reported on the Ross killing, a moronic slip-up resulted in the names and photos being switched on our front page; we said Ross was Mays and vice versa. We've misidentified black fraternities, and we misspelled Ross's daughter's name in our spring story. We reported incorrectly the early facts of the Evolution arrest. Different editors made the mistakes at different times, and we've run a correction for each one, but each mistake eroded our credibility a little further.
On May 14, 2003, Tara Beverly, a black OU journalism major, wrote in a letter to the editor: I am so ashamed to think that The Post represents my university. It is poorly written and is not sensitive to or considerate of the readers. I am personally offended by the carelessness and sloppiness of the stories that were covered.
I am too. We're trying our damndest to ensure these things never happen again.
So the Minority Relations Panel's flimsy report is perplexing. It accounts for none of these things in assessing Athens' racial state of affairs. Maybe the panel members realized they'd be opening a Pandora's box if they'd actually looked more deeply at the situation. Maybe they thought it'd be better if Athens just continued as it perpetually has: uncomfortable for minorities, but never their home long enough for them to change it. People might get fed up with its provincialism, says the town orthodoxy, but they'll be gone soon. This won't do. If OU diversity is ever to increase, Athens can no longer have this mentality.
Whatever the reason, the panel's work is unfinished. Everyone in Athens must push past the taboos and start talking. Four pages aren't good enough.
-Philip Ewing is The Post's managing editor. Send him an e-mail at philip.ewing@ohiou.edu. 17
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