The former director of diversity retention at Liberty University, who quit to protest what he considers President Jerry L. Falwell Jr.'s racist and oppressive leadership, has created an “LUnderground railroad” to raise money for employees of color who want to leave but can’t afford to.
LeeQuan McLaurin wrote on the online campaign page that the goal is to provide $2,000 to at least 15 former Liberty employees to cover a month of basic expenses — “a month where they can focus their efforts on searching for a workplace that will provide a safe, supportive environment where they can thrive” as people of color “and leave behind a toxic, unhealthy workplace that never did.”
Falwell declined to comment Tuesday on the LUnderground Railroad effort, the most recent example of the growing backlash against his incendiary social-media posts and controversial political stances. A campus spokesman referred questions to the president’s apology on Monday for tweeting an image that was widely condemned as racist.
In the post, which Falwell has since deleted, he wrote that he objected to the mandate by Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph S. Northam, that people wear masks to protect the public from Covid-19. If he had to wear one, Falwell indicated, he’d design one featuring an image pulled from the governor’s medical-school yearbook page showing a student in blackface standing next to another dressed as a Klansman.
Falwell said that after listening to African American leaders at Liberty and to alumni, he realized the hurt he had caused.
“I understand that by tweeting an image to remind all of the governor’s racist past I actually refreshed the trauma that image had caused and offended some by using the image to make a political point,” he tweeted.
The apology did little to appease Falwell’s critics, who say they are tired of having to defend his actions and worried about employee and student morale at one of the world’s largest Christian universities. Falwell’s decision in March to welcome students back to the Lynchburg campus amid the worsening pandemic, when other campuses were asking students to go home, deepened the rifts with Northam.
In an interview Tuesday, McLaurin, a 2015 graduate of Liberty, said he’s worked in three offices there and that microaggressions are common. He said a supervisor in a student-advising office advised one of McLaurin’s colleagues not to get his hair styled in dreadlocks “because it doesn’t look professional.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the “LUnderground Railroad” GoFundMe page had raised more than $5,300 toward its $30,000 goal. McLaurin said he’s heard from many employees who want to leave but are afraid they won’t be able to support their families, given Lynchburg’s shortage of available housing and high poverty rates.
Liberty, a private evangelical college, is a major employer in Lynchburg. It has around 46,000 undergraduates and an enrollment of more than 100,000 when online students are included.
“What weighs most heavily on me is not that I don’t have a job — I know God will provide for me — but hearing colleagues tear up because they want to leave, but they can’t afford to,” McLaurin said.
As director of diversity retention, he was a staff member in Liberty’s Office of Equity and Inclusion, and oversaw efforts to keep minority and other underrepresented students enrolled. He said that between 2007 and 2018, Liberty’s residential undergraduate African American population dropped from 10 percent to 4 percent. A Liberty spokesman declined to confirm or refute those figures.
Among the employees who have left recently is Keyvon Scott, a 2019 Liberty graduate who had been working as an admissions counselor for the university’s sprawling online program.
“The mask was just the tipping point,” he said on Tuesday. “As an admissions officer, I’m supposed to be promoting Liberty, especially when an African American calls and asks about diversity.” Scott, who said he was often the only African American person in his classes, said he could no longer do that.
Scott said some people lashed out at him for leaving and not sticking around and fighting back. “The thing is, I had to leave,” he said. “That’s how I take a stand.”
A third African American employee, Christopher A. House, resigned from his online-teaching position with Liberty last month, saying in an opinion piece in Religion News Service that, as a black man and Pentecostal pastor, he was horrified by Falwell’s tweet.
On Friday, another African American administrator, Thomas Starchia, associate director in the Office of Spiritual Development, announced his resignation “with a heavy, frustrated yet peaceful heart.”
Meanwhile, protests were spreading well beyond the campus. A group of 35 African American pastors, ministry leaders, and former athletes who graduated from Liberty University sent Falwell a letter saying that “Because of your callous rhetoric, we can no longer in good faith encourage students to attend our alma mater or accept athletic scholarships.”
More than 37,000 people signed the letter, which circulated on Change.org. It urged Falwell “to stop this infantile behavior and lead our alma mater with dignity as your father did.” Jerry Falwell Sr., who founded the university in 1971, “wasn’t perfect, but he was humble enough to confess ungracious and unbiblical comments, and apologize when he was wrong,” they wrote.
McLaurin explained his motives for submitting his June 2 letter of resignation, effective July 2, on his GoFundMe page.
“No one at LU understands what it is like to be a black man working at a conservative, evangelical, predominantly white institution, and to then be faced with constant instances of racism (big and small alike), as you’re also fighting to change campus culture, while simultaneously hearing of yet another one of our brothers or sisters who have been murdered, and will not see justice, AND on top of all of that to deal with our own institutional issues only to have my hands completely tied,” he wrote.
Jerry Prevo, chairman of Liberty’s Board of Trustees, said the board met with Falwell last week to discuss his recent tweets and that the executive committee is satisfied with his response to the furor the tweets caused.
“We understand these images have been hurtful for a number of our friends to see,” Prevo said. “We also know him and know him not to be a racist. Nor do we believe that he has been running Liberty University in a way that discriminates against African Americans.”
Prevo outlined the steps the university was taking to diversify its campus and then doubled down on the criticism Falwell has been lobbing at Northam over his response to the Covid-19 crisis. Those include, he said, “excessive regulations on higher education” that are particularly hurtful to lower-income and minority people.
