The third-annual Stop The Hate vigil begins at 7 p.m. today at the King Memorial Commons.

If the weather does not cooperate, the location will be at the Center for United Campus Ministries.

Campus Ministries organized the event.

Extra Resources

E-mail this article E-mail this page to a friend

Printer-friendly version Printer-Friendly Version

“We want to think that hate-related violence always happens to someone else, somewhere else,” said the Rev. Wendy Witt, pastor at the center for United Campus Ministries. “Recent events in our country and our world have shown us that hate and its related violence can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime.”

This vigil is a national campaign created in response to the hate crimes committed against Matthew Shepard and James Byrd in 1998.

During 2000, law enforcement reported 8,063 bias-motivated criminal incidents to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Web site, www.fbi.gov. The incidents involved a total of 9,430 offenses, 9,924 victims and 7,530 known distinguishable offenders.

Nineteen hate crime victims were murdered as a result of their killers’ prejudice. Ten of those homicides involved racial bias, six were attributed to a bias against an ethnicity or national origin, two were driven by bias against a sexual orientation and one resulted from a religious bias.

Hate crimes have been defined by the FBI as, “a criminal offense against a person, property or society, which is motivated, in whole or in part, by an offender’s bias against race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or ethnicity/national origin.”

In 1998, Byrd, an African-American man, was lured into the back of a pickup truck by two white men and was tied up and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. Shepard encountered two men in a bar who eventually took him to a desolate area, beat him, tied him to a fence and left him to die because of his sexual orientation.

Later that year, in response to the crimes, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Interfaith Alliance organized “Stop the Hate,” a national campaign for healing in the midst of hate violence, according to the fellowship’s Web site, www.forusa.org.

Since it was first started in 1998, the Stop the Hate vigils have become anxiously awaited events for students and community members in an effort to pay tribute to the victims of hate violence, and maybe find a way to stop the ignorance within their own communities that causes such crimes.

One student is anxious for the vigil because she wants to witness the openness and help remember the memories of Shepard and Byrd.

“I am looking forward to the vigil because I think it is important for people to come together and understand that being different is not a bad thing,” said Jennifer Jordan, a junior criminal justice major.

DeKalb resident Jenessa Vellos sees the vigil an important opportunity to educate those who may not be aware of the consequences of hate crimes.

“I think it is important that people, especially college students, are made aware of the different things that make up a town,” she said. “There are no cookie-cutter people. We are all different, and I think it’s time we stopped trying to erase the differences and begin to embrace the differences.”